Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The United Nations’ climate confab (COP 29) in Azerbaijan, of all places, will convene less than a week after America’s presidential election. It will be pretty glum gathering if Donald Trump returns to the White House. The jet-setting climate bureaucrats may be putting on a brave face claiming that “global climate action” isn’t dependent on who sits in the White House, but it’s easy to believe that they are already having nightmares. What would Trump’s election do to the global climate agenda?
The United Nations’ climate confab (COP 29) in Azerbaijan, of all places, will convene less than a week after America’s presidential election. It will be pretty glum gathering if Donald Trump returns to the White House. The jet-setting climate bureaucrats may be putting on a brave face claiming that “global climate action” isn’t dependent on who sits in the White House, but it’s easy to believe that they are already having nightmares. What would Trump’s election do to the global climate agenda?
The Heartland Institute’s H. Sterling Burnett, Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken and Jim Lakely discuss on Episode #127 of The Climate Realism Show.We will also cover the Crazy Climate News of the week. Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET on Friday, September 20 and ask your questions of the panel in the chat.
The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction in GHG emissions and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050. It includes an interim 2030 reduction target of a 40% reduction by 2030.
I frequently collaborate with Richard Ellenbogen regarding issues related to the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act). This post describes his recent blog article The Math Does Not Support New York’s Climate Plan published at the Empire Center for Public Policy. He explains why the numbers show that the Climate Act implementation plan is doomed to failure based on his experience adopting renewable and lower-emission combustion technologies in his home and business. This post condenses his findings and publicizes his work.
Overview and Background
The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction in GHG emissions and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050. It includes an interim 2030 reduction target of a 40% reduction by 2030. Two targets address the electric sector: 70% of the electricity must come from renewable energy by 2030 and all electricity must be generated by “zero-emissions” resources by 2040. The Climate Action Council (CAC) was responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlined how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.” The Integration Analysis prepared by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and its consultants quantifies the impact of the electrification strategies. That material was used to develop the Draft Scoping Plan outline of strategies. After a year-long review, the Scoping Plan was finalized at the end of 2022. Since then, the State has been trying to implement the Scoping Plan recommendations through regulations, proceedings, and legislation.
Introduction
Ellenbogen introduces the problem:
I have been analyzing the numbers coming out of Albany regarding the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), New York’s plan to drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels, for over five years now.
I am not anti-renewable and I am not a climate denier. What I am is an engineer that lives by numbers. The numbers underpinning the CLCPA—namely the belief that New York can replace most of its natural gas-fired electricity generation with renewables in the next six or even nine years—are a fantasy.
New York is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, prohibiting or frustrating viable solutions that could reduce emissions.
Instead, New York is relying on older, less efficient power plants, in hopes that wind and solar—built in more rural areas or offshore—can someday replace them.
Even if New York were to build the wind, solar and battery backup necessary to keep the lights on without fossil fuels, the storage requirements, either onsite or grid-based, would be cost-prohibitive.
State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli in July described “inadequate planning, monitoring and assessment of risks and challenges” by state energy officials. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Greener Than The Grid
In the next section of the article, Ellenbogen describes his manufacturing business and the steps he has taken to reduce energy use at his facility. His company, Allied Converters, manufactures food packaging for large bakeries and supermarket chains. The machinery is thermally intensive and uses large amounts of electricity.
In 2002 he “installed the first microturbine-based Combined Heat and Power (CHP) system in the Con Ed service area.” This approach generates electricity by burning natural gas. Waste heat is recovered “to heat the building in the winter, or to be sent to absorption chillers to cool the building in the summer.” This approach allows him to recover 70 to 75 percent of the energy content of the fuel.
He compares his efficiency to the grid:
Most of downstate’s electricity comes from burning natural gas. New York’s single-cycle gas generating plants are in the neighborhood of 30 to 35 percent efficient. Newer combined-cycle plants are in the range of 55 to 60 percent efficient. For both, about 7 percent of energy produced is lost as heat in the transmission lines, a loss we avoid by generating electricity onsite.
Contrast that with New York’s plan to replace gas and oil furnaces at homes and businesses with electric heat pumps, which will—at least for the foreseeable future—require more electricity generation from fossil fuels, farther away from where the electricity is needed (and therefore more line losses).
In 2007 he installed the first commercial-scale solar array in New Rochelle. His article describes the tribulations related to being an early adopter with the planning agency and the utility. Later that year he added a “Reactive Power Mitigation System and in conjunction with the onsite generation, reduced load on the utility by 80 percent. To top it off he collects data on all the electric parameters in the building.
This massive amount of data, along with my training as an electrical engineer, has formed my frame of reference regarding the CLCPA. Renewable generation has a place in the energy mix but it cannot be used as the backbone of the utility system. Renewables are a tool and when you misuse a tool, bad things will happen. When you need a hammer, you don’t use a screwdriver, but that is essentially what the state is trying to do with renewables.
Energy System Model
His facility is a template for a pragmatic energy system:
The factory is a microcosm of NY’s energy system. It has a fossil fuel-based high efficiency generator to provide baseline load which it supplements with a solar array. The balance of the energy is dispatched by the utility when we need more.
All told, the factory’s carbon footprint is 30 to 40 percent smaller than it would be otherwise. Additionally, our utility bill, including the cost of natural gas, is less than half of what it would have been if we hadn’t added the energy systems. We have not only reduced our carbon emissions but we have also saved money through reduced energy usage and the associated expenses, about $1 million over the past 17 years. Our savings have been relatively higher during recent years as the business has grown and we have used more energy. Contrast that with current bills for other utility customers that are rising at an increasing rate.
The New York grid relies on nuclear, fossil, and hydro resources for most of its load, wind and solar to supplement the other resources, and imports the rest. The grid load varies more than the factory. As a result, resources are called for varying loads depending on their operating characteristics and costs. Ellenbogen describes current reliability issues.
The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), the independent nonprofit organization that operates the electric grid and oversees the state’s wholesale electricity market, has been warning about potential blackouts due to closing existing fossil-fuel generators before new generators come online.
A 2019 plan by the state Department of Environmental Conservation to close smaller “peaker” power plants risked causing rolling blackouts on hot days as soon as 2025, before NYISO officials pushed back and kept some of the plants open.
As NYISO officials warned earlier this summer, reliability margins—the cushions in each region that ensure there’s enough electricity to meet demand at all times—“are also observed to be narrowing across the grid in New York, which poses significant challenges for the electric system over the next ten years.”
The reality is that the issue is going to extend well past 2033 and the energy shortages will get worse as gas plants aren’t replaced.
Future Model
Ellenbogen describes what would be needed at his factory if he were to rely only on solar and not use natural gas. Note that wind is not a practical source at his location.
To generate the same amount of electric energy that we currently use, we would need a solar array six times the size of what we currently have. Below is a photo of the 25,000+ square foot roof of the factory with the 50,000 watt (50 KW) solar array on it. (The factory is 55,000 square feet across two floors).
Figure 1: Ellenbogen factory, with its 50 KW rooftop solar array, in New Rochelle, NY
We could fit an additional 50 KW array on our roof for a total of 100 KW. However, we would need a roof three times the size of what we currently have to house a large enough solar array to generate the amount of electrical energy that we currently use. That doesn’t include the heat generated by the CHP system.
If we switched to heat pumps, we would need at least an additional 300 KW of solar arrays to support the building’s thermal load. So in total we would need 12 times the panels—on a roof six times the size.
Beyond the enormous additional costs needed to build a system of that magnitude, we don’t have the physical space or the roof area to remotely come close to supporting a system of that size.
The Model Storage Problem
The Climate Act insists on a zero-emissions mandate so that fossil-fired generators cannot be used to support intermittent wind and solar. This leads to the enormous challenge of storage.
Because of the looming plight of New York utility system, my team and I have been looking for ways to supply the building during a power failure. We first looked at a backup generator but Con Ed wanted $140,000 to run a larger gas line to our building. That being cost-prohibitive, we have been looking at a new type of energy storage that does not have the deficiencies of lithium-ion batteries.
The newer storage, using supercapacitors, has a comparable cost to lithium-ion, will last 25 to 40 years instead of the eight to 10 years of lithium-ion, and it will not go into a state of thermal runaway and burn at 2600 degrees Fahrenheit as occasionally happens with lithium-ion batteries. It will fit in a space the size of a sea container and it can be charged at night from our CHP system and on weekends from our solar array. With an energy storage system of 720 to 900 KWh in conjunction with the CHP system and the solar array, we could operate 100 percent free of the utility with a carbon footprint 10 percent lower than what we have now.
However, the Climate Act prohibits the use of the natural gas fired micro turbine currently in use. That means more storage would be required.
We would have to install nearly sixty times the amount of energy storage as what we currently need for backup purposes—at sixty times the price–to ensure that the panel’s energy was available at night or for extended periods during the winter months. That storage would occupy a volume approximately equivalent to that of fifty large sea containers—for my factory alone.
When the example for his factory is considered relative to the State the lunacy of the Scoping Plan becomes clear.
NYSERDA, the state’s energy agency, in late 2022 said “complete replacement” of fossil fuel plants with solar and wind generation would require 2,400 gigawatt-hours of storage to get the state through lulls when wind isn’t blowing and output from solar panels is low. At $567 per kilowatt-hour, the recent average cost of new non-residential energy storage, that works out to more than $1.3 trillion in new costs, or about $68,000 per New Yorker.
Summing Up
Ellenbogen describes his misgivings about the Climate Act.
Unlike New York’s plan that is relying on resources that either don’t exist, don’t exist at scale, are prohibitively expensive to install, are opposed by the residents near the sites, double utility costs, and as a result cannot be installed in any reasonable time frame so that they are not reducing GHG emissions, the technologies that we have used to achieve our carbon reductions are just the opposite. My neighbors are unaware of what we have onsite. The only thing that is visible is the solar array on the roof that can be seen with aerial photos or from a distance from the new high rises that have been built.
The technologies we used existed 20 years ago, reduce GHG emissions, are cost-effective, reduce line losses, reduce transmission and distribution costs, save money for the end user and the utility simultaneously, and can be implemented now in densely populated areas eliminating the need for multi-billion dollar transmission lines.
This conclusion wasn’t derived from what I like or don’t like, or about what I want or don’t want, and unlike the Climate Act, it is not based upon emotion. It is based upon tens of millions of data points that definitively say that if NY State keeps proceeding on this path, it will be a calamity for the state. If the Comptroller or others in state government wonder why the Climate Action Council never did a financial analysis of the Climate Act that they forced upon the state, with the assistance of unknowing legislators, it is because the costs are so ridiculously high that if the number was actually publicized, it would be political suicide.
Richard Ellenbogen was an early adopter of renewable and lower-emission combustion technology, deploying them at both his home and his business in Westchester County. Ellenbogen, a Cornell-trained electrical engineer, explains below how his personal experience led him to become one of the leading critics of the cost and feasibility of New York’s ambitious energy policy.
Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated.
Six days after this November’s presidential election, the annual United Nations climate change talks will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan. Unlike the election, no one is holding their breath. Baku will be the twenty-ninth in the series. Climate change regularly draws gatherings of world leaders like no other. When the U.S. president shows up, everyone who is anyone turns up, too. These events often represent milestones in the upward ascent of global climate action. In the beginning, there was the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, attended by President George H. W. Bush.
Britain shows why net zero would be a disaster for the U.S.
Six days after this November’s presidential election, the annual United Nations climate change talks will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan. Unlike the election, no one is holding their breath. Baku will be the twenty-ninth in the series. Climate change regularly draws gatherings of world leaders like no other. When the U.S. president shows up, everyone who is anyone turns up, too. These events often represent milestones in the upward ascent of global climate action. In the beginning, there was the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, attended by President George H. W. Bush. Then came the Kyoto Protocol, with President Bill Clinton shrewdly sending Vice President Al Gore to Japan. The 2009 Copenhagen climate summit (attended by President Barack Obama) is memory-holed; that’s when China, along with India, Brazil, and South Africa, vetoed a binding climate treaty, redeemed by the 2015 Paris climate agreement (President Obama again).
Yet the only year that matters for climate realism is 2006, the year of the great cross-over, when China’s emissions of carbon dioxide overtook those of the United States. This helps explain why China wielded its veto three years later at the Copenhagen climate summit. By 2019, America’s carbon dioxide emissions had fallen by 875 million metric tons from their 2005 peak. Over the same period, China’s rose by 3,511 million metric tons. Twelve years of falling American carbon dioxide emissions were erased by three years of rising Chinese emissions.
This leads to a reality check about America’s climate policy as practiced by Presidents Obama and Joe Biden. In terms of the amount of human-induced carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere, what America does or does not do is of decreasing significance. The emissions math nullifies the claim of solipsistic climate activists that unless the U.S. drives its emissions towards zero, various forms of climate catastrophe will be visited on Americans. But here’s the rub: even though America’s emissions account for a rapidly declining proportion of global emissions, the negative economic impact of climate policy on the U.S. economy, on jobs, and on Americans’ standard of living is growing.
The U.S. could learn from the example of Britain, the poster child of climate leadership. It was the world’s first major economy to adopt binding emissions reduction targets when parliament passed the Climate Change Act in 2008. Initially, the Act required an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. In 2019, the target was raised to 100 percent by 2050, a target that the Biden administration also adopted in 2021. As in the U.S., the prime target for decarbonization is electricity generation, to be achieved in Britain through a mix of cap-and-trade, huge subsidies for wind and solar power funded by consumer levies rather than by the taxpayer, and anti-coal regulations, a strategy also adopted by the Obama and Biden administrations.
As a laboratory for net zero, Britain’s experiment with renewable energy provides unambiguous evidence that wind and solar increase the cost of electricity. Although the cost of coal and natural gas used in Britain’s power stations was flat between 2009 and 2020, residential electricity rates in Britain soared by 67 percent, to 17.9p (23.4¢) per kilowatt hour (kwh) – 75 percent more than the average 13.5¢ per kwh American household paid in 2020. These increases were driven by a near-tripling of environmental and social levies and increased spending on the infrastructure needed to connect far-flung wind farms to where people actually live and work.
Forcing electricity customers to pay for the extra grid infrastructure and the costs of covering for the intermittency of renewables when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow can make renewables stupendously profitable for investors. Over the period 2009 to 2020, Britain’s Big Six energy companies received an average price of £112.81 ($147.78) per megawatt-hour (MWh) from their renewables portfolio – twice the average £56.22 ($73.65) price per MWh from their coal- and gas-fired power stations. Breathtakingly high renewable profits meant that in one year (2017), renewables’ £54.93 ($71.96) profit per MWh was higher than the £52.47 ($68.74) average price per MWh that the Big Six earned from their thermal power stations.
Aggressive use of carbon taxes to penalize fossil fuel power generation and force coal off the grid (“powering past coal”) saw the Big Six incur £1,603m ($2,100m) in losses and write-downs on their coal and gas power stations in 2014. Over-rewarding renewables led to over-investment in renewables and nearly zero investment in new power stations needed to keep the lights on. In 2009, Britain had 18.6 gigawatts (GW) of non-intermittent (i.e., reliable) generating capacity for every 1 GW of intermittent (i.e., unreliable) wind and solar. Eleven years later, that had fallen to 1.7 GW of non-intermittent capacity for every 1 GW of wind and solar, a dangerous level that will worsen unless and until Britain abandons net zero.
To try and address wind and solar intermittency, the previous government created a capacity market so that power stations get paid for making their capacity available on demand. Capacity markets turn out to be an astonishingly expensive way of generating electricity. In 2020, electricity consumers paid an average of £224.31($293.85) per MWh to German-owned Uniper for electricity from its coal-fired power stations. This illustrates one reason why a renewables-heavy grid produces more expensive electricity. It requires having two parallel generating systems – intermittent renewables and firm backup. This is reflected in the deteriorating capital efficiency of Britain’s grid. Between 2009 and 2020, each GW of generating capacity produced 28.5 percent less electricity than it had eleven years earlier because of the influx of wind and solar capacity.
Producing less energy with more capital is the essential fact of the energy transition. This reverses the economic growth paradigm since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Improved capital productivity – getting more from less – alongside higher labor productivity and product innovation is a key driver of long-term economic growth. In capitalist economies, capital, just like labor and other inputs, is a real cost. Yet the metric commonly used to compare renewables and non-intermittent power stations, the Levelized Cost of Electricity, excludes the negative impact of adding more renewables on the capital efficiency of the whole system – one reason why claims about renewables being cost-competitive should be treated with a pinch of salt.
Having more renewables not only pushes up costs but also has the countervailing effect of degrading the value of the electricity they generate. Because renewables have no fuel input costs, on days when there’s lots of wind or sun, wholesale electricity prices trend towards zero. The way wholesale electricity markets work is that all generators supplying electricity into the grid at the same time get the same wholesale price. The effect of renewables on electricity prices is to kill new investment in conventional capacity.
For this reason, Britain’s decision to power past coal left the country dangerously ill-prepared when Vladimir Putin began to squeeze the price of natural gas ahead of his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That year, the average price paid by power stations for natural gas was more than five times higher than it had been two years earlier and 72 percent higher than the cost of coal, pitching Britain into its first energy crisis since the 1970s.
The Obama administration also waged war on coal with environmental regulations. America escaped a similar fate as Britain for one reason only. In 2008, the price of natural gas for power generation had reached $9.26 per thousand cubic feet (tcf); in 2012, it had fallen to $3.54 per tcf. This had nothing to do with Obama’s foresight and was entirely due to fracking and the shale revolution. Despite this fall, coal remains the cheapest source of fuel for power generation. In addition to being cheaper, coal does not require specialized pipeline and storage infrastructure, unlike natural gas. For these reasons, coal is the energy source of choice across the Global South, including China, which has a coal-based economy.
Although American coal consumption peaked in 2005, China’s coal consumption had already surpassed that of the United States by 1985. Since its 2005 peak, U.S. annual coal consumption has fallen by 500 million tons – and China’s has risen by 1,245 million tons. The coal America did not burn, China is burning instead. For every one ton of coal that America stopped burning, China burnt an additional two-and-a-half tons.
n terms of policy, China is energy realism on steroids. Its bureaucrats are even having second thoughts about renewable energy. Writing in the Financial Times in July, contemporary historian Adam Tooze sees a “worrying” gap between the pace of China’s investment in renewable energy in recent years and its plans for the future. “Whereas China’s solar and wind industry installed almost 300 GW of new capacity in 2023, its National Energy Agency envisions a future build-out of barely more than 100 GW a year.” One reason for the slowdown, Tooze suggests, is that China’s energy bureaucrats point to the need for “more smoothly operating pricing systems to make a renewable system reliable.” If true, it would show that China’s communist bureaucrats have a surer grasp of the damaging economics of wind and solar energy than their Western counterparts.
The current architecture of the UN climate process was designed around China’s demands. Its veto of a climate treaty with a legally binding emissions target at the Copenhagen climate conference led the Obama administration to enshrine the Sinatra doctrine of climate action in the 2015 Paris climate agreement: the signatories would do it their way. China’s nationally determined commitment under the agreement has the goal of achieving “carbon neutrality” before 2060. The evidence to date shows that China does whatever advances China’s economic and, ultimately its geopolitical interests. That is a lesson for America’s political leaders: if the United States wants to prevail in the geopolitical contest with China, it, too, needs to drop the Biden-Harris goal of net zero and embrace energy realism.
An eternal thanks goes to Bruce Wells and the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. His fascinating look back at major industry events of the last 150 years is both educational and inspirational. It is upon the backs of our ancestors that we enjoy today’s high-energy civilization.
An eternal thanks goes to Bruce Wells and the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. His fascinating look back at major industry events of the last 150 years is both educational and inspirational. It is upon the backs of our ancestors that we enjoy today’s high-energy civilization.
“Petroleum history provides a context for understanding modern energy challenges,” the Society explains.
AOGHS preserves U.S. petroleum history, which provides an important context for understanding the modern energy industry. This history, which began in August 1859 with the first commercial U.S. well in Pennsylvania, can help make informed decisions about meeting future energy needs. AOGHS offers education resources, including links to community oil and gas museums, county historical societies, libraries, and others dedicated to material preservation. Please join our effort.
The latest edition covers September in Oil & Gas History News, Vol. 5, No. 9 (September 18, 2024).
“Welcome to September’s back-to-school review of petroleum history milestones, which begins with updated summaries of the 1908 founding of General Motors; a second test of nuclear “fracking” in 1969; the Bartlesville, Oklahoma, incorporation of Cities Services in 1910; and the 1926 reincorporation of the future Texaco.
Our featured image illustrates the evolution of self-measuring gasoline pumps, which began in 1885 as kerosene dispensers. Also featured are the first oil discoveries in five states: Utah (1948), Mississippi (1930), Louisiana (1901), Texas (1866), and Pennsylvania — the 1859 oil discovery that launched America’s petroleum industry.
Highlights for Oil & Gas History News, Vol. 5, No. 9 (September 18, 2024) follow:
September 16, 1908 – Carriage Maker becomes General Motors
The co-owner of America’s largest manufacturer of horse-drawn carriages, William Durant, founded General Motors Holding Company in Flint, Michigan. The Durant-Dort Carriage Company, after taking control of Buick Motor Company, acquired Olds Motor Works of Detroit…MORE
September 10, 1969 – Second Nuclear Fracturing Test
Scientists detonated a 40-kiloton nuclear device in a natural gas well eight miles southeast of present-day Parachute, Colorado. Project Rulison was the second of three reservoir stimulation tests of Operation Plowshare to study the use of nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes…MORE
September 2, 1910 – Cities Service Company incorporates
Henry Doherty organized the Cities Service Company as a public utility holding company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Doherty acquired natural gas distribution companies and producing properties in Oklahoma and Kansas, where a Cities Service subsidiary in 1915 discovered the 34-square-mile El Dorado oilfield…MORE
August 26, 1926 – Future Texaco expands
After years of growth thanks to oilfield discoveries at Spindletop and Sour Lake, the Texas Corporation reincorporated in Delaware, acquiring the outstanding stock of the Texas Company of Beaumont, which was dissolved by the next year…MORE
Energy Education
Early gasoline pump designs with dials were followed by calibrated glass cylinders by 1925. Meter pumps using a small glass dome with a turbine inside replaced the measuring cylinder as pumps continued to evolve. Illustration courtesy Popular Science, September 1955.
Gasoline pumps began with a small device for easily dispensing kerosene. On September 5, 1885, S.F. (Sylvanus Freelove) Bowser sold his first newly invented kerosene pump to the owner of a grocery store in Fort Wayne, Indiana. With the pump popular at Jake Gumper’s store, Bowser formed the S.F. Bowser & Company and began designing outdoor gasoline pumps. The company expanded and by 1905 added a hose attachment for dispensing gas directly into an automobile fuel tank. The S.F. Bowser Self-Measuring Gasoline Storage Pump soon became known to motorists as a “filling station” as more design innovations followed.
The photo above shows the headline of SciTechDaily: Earth’s Last Frontier Burns: Record-Breaking Heat Strikes Antarctica in Winter. Elsewhere, The Economic Times weighed in with Antarctica’s record heat wave: A threat to global sea levels and ice integrity, while CNN blared ‘Astonishing’ Antarctica heat wave sends temperatures 50 degrees above normal.
A variety of mainstream media outlets claim Antarctica is burning up, registering unusually hot temperatures due to climate change, citing a recent study as the source for their stories. The stories misrepresent the study’s findings and the science. The peer reviewed paper that the headlines reference clearly states that a short-term weather event was the cause, not climate change. Also, contrary to media’s claims, there was no “heat wave,” since the official meteorological criteria for calling this event a heat wave was not met.
First, let’s refute the obvious. As is clear in the photo with the SciTechDaily headline above, nothing was burning in Antarctica despite the claim of a “continent afire.”
SciTechDaily says this:
In March 2022, the most intense heat wave ever recorded on Earth hit Antarctica, just as organisms in the southern region braced themselves for the long, harsh winter ahead. The extreme weather raised temperatures in parts of Antarctica to more than 70°F above average, melting glaciers and snow even in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, one of the planet’s coldest and driest regions.
A heat wave is a period of unusually hot weather that typically lasts two or more days. To be considered a heat wave, the temperatures have to be outside the historical averages for a given area.
While there were in fact less cold than normal temperatures in Antarctica during a one-day weather event, the temperature only briefly went above freezing, so there was no measurable melting. The practice of applying a “heat wave” label to such an event is erroneous.
The paper the media referred as the source of their alarming headlines says, “Record high temperatures were documented in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, on 18 March 2022, exceeding average temperatures for that day by nearly 30°C.”
Further, the data they provide in the form of figure 1 shows the temperature in several location in Antarctica:
Figure 1 (a) Map of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica and (b) the location of meteorological stations where air temperature was recorded at Lake Bonney, Lake Hoare, Lake Fryxell, the Friis Hills, and Lake Vanda. March 2022 temperature spikes circled in red by A. Watts. Source article: Response of a Terrestrial Polar Ecosystem to the March 2022 Antarctic Weather Anomaly
As you can see in the temperature graphs on the right side of the figure (b) in March 2022, there were some brief spikes in temperature for one day (circled in red), where the freezing temperature of 0°C (32°F) was approached or exceeded. After that, temperatures immediately returned to normal for the area.
So in the context of NOAA’s heat wave definition above, the two-day minimum criteria were not met so referring to the brief temperature spike as a “heat wave” was erroneous or fake news.
The peer reviewed paper said the cause of the event was, “[a]n atmospheric river caused extreme weather in the Antarctic Dry Valleys in March 2022 with temperatures 25°C above average conditions.” Even the title of the peer reviewed paper, “Response of a Terrestrial Polar Ecosystem to the March 2022 Antarctic Weather Anomaly,” and calls it a weather anomaly.
A single day weather event, that briefly caused temperatures to go above normal doesn’t meet the meteorological definition of a heat wave, or a signal of climate change since it is not indicative of a long term 30-year trend of temperatures on the continent.
Despite these scientific facts, the mainstream media outlets reporting the event described it variously as “[a] threat to global sea levels and ice integrity,” an “astonishing heat wave,” and a “burning continent of Antarctica” in the eyes of the media.
The level of exaggeration, to use CNN’s word, is astonishing.
The “news reporting” on this study and the weather anomaly it discussed is all too typical of the effort by media organizations to blame every weather event that falls even slightly outside the norm for no matter how brief a period of time as caused by climate change – even when the underlying research makes no such connection. Weather is not climate. They operate on completely different time scales.
This sort of reporting is unprofessional, a disgusting disservice to the public who the media is supposed to inform, not mislead and indoctrinate.
The United Nation’s World Health Organizationis at it again, pushing Climate Change as the root of all evil:
Here’s the claim:
“The number of cholera deaths reported globally last year increased by 71 percent from deaths in 2022, while the number of reported cases rose 13 percent. Much of the increase was driven by conflict and climate change, the W.H.O. report said.” [ NY Times ]
Let’s see the stats:
And where did these cholera outbreaks occur 2023?
I have added in the country names for all nations experiencing more than 100 cholera deaths. [For comparison., New York City alone had over 100 pedestrian fatalities in 2023.]
[One oddity is Afghanistan—reported by WHO to have had well over 200,000 cholera cases, and only 101 deaths.]
“In 2023, very large outbreaks, >10 000 suspected and confirmed cases per country, were reported by 9 countries on 3 continents (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Haiti, Malawi, Mozambique, Somalia and Zimbabwe).”
“Conflict, climate change, limited investment in development and population displacement due to emerging and re-emerging risks all contributed to the rise in the number of cholera outbreaks. This trend reflects a lack of long-term development investment, particularly in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). Cholera outbreaks indicate that the sustainable development goals for WASH are not on track to meet the 2030 objectives, despite the United Nations General Assembly’s recognition in 2010 that access to safe drinking-water and sanitation is a fundamental human right.”
“The surge of cases in southern Africa that began in 2022 continued into 2023, with Malawi’s outbreak expanding (32 530), while Mozambique (39 101), South Africa (1478), Zambia (4531), and Zimbabwe (14 148) all reported the highest number of cases in ≥5 years. It is notable that, with some significant sub-national exceptions, the outbreaks occurred in stable areas not affected by conflict. Long-term investment in climate change-resilient WASH systems could significantly reduce the risk of recurring outbreaks in these areas.”
The entire 14-page WHO report only makes mention of climate change as a general talking point the two times quoted above. What WHO means when it says “climate change” is bad weather conditions – there has been no change in local or regional climates – mostly too much rain causing flooding – which is a common in Eastern Africa.
Cholera is caused by “People living in places with unsafe drinking water, poor sanitation, and inadequate hygiene are at highest risk of cholera.” “Cholera is an infection of the intestines caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae.“ “People usually get cholera from drinking water or eating food that contains traces of poop from someone with cholera. The disease can spread quickly in areas where sewage and drinking water aren’t adequately treated. … Cholera is not likely to spread from person to person or from casual contact with someone with cholera.” [ CDC ]
In plain English, when human waste (feces) gets into the drinking water supply, cholera can and does break out. Cholera is not (normally) spread person-to-person like diseases like the flu or colds.
And, it is true that when underdeveloped countries experience floods, it can overwhelm both their sanitation infrastructure (human waste management) and their drinking water infrastructure. Unfortunately, in many areas, there simply is NO proper sanitation and NO clean drinking water supply. Lacking such infrastructure means the people are using dug latrines and hand-dug water wells or collecting water from streams and lakes.
The NY Times article makes the claim: “Cholera’s spread in southern Africa has been propelled by catastrophic weather events, including both floods and droughts.” The reference for this is another earlier NY Times article which supplies no evidence for the claim, only this: “The devastation is linked to increasingly ferocious storms, a shortage of vaccines, and poor water and sewer infrastructure, public health experts said.”
And in that we have two of the true major contributors to cholera outbreaks:
1. Poor or non-existent clean drinking water and inadequate or non-existent sewage infrastructure
The third major contributor is population displacement due to conflict, which pushes people into refugee camps and already crowded cities.
The not-in-evidence “ferocious storms” have not affected the broad area of our world map above showing cholera outbreaks. The 2023 North African Monsoon (.pptx file) was ‘above average’ but not catastrophically so, just bit wetter. The 2024 African monsoon has not been particularly wet in most areas:
The map of cholera outbreaks itself is some small evidence against the “caused by climate change” claim. Haiti occupies 1/3 of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, the other 2/3 of the island is the country of the Dominican Republic. Haiti has a major cholera outbreak, while the Dominican Republic has none. They share the island, its weather and its climate. Haiti however is far poorer, has basically no operating central governance and tends towards lawlessness, especially in the cities. The Dominican Republic is likewise poor but not as poor as Haiti. They have an operating democracy and more-or-less dependable, if flawed, civil service.
Sudan, a generally very dry nation, is one of the worst hit countries, with a very high Case Fatality Rate. Sudan sees floods in the monsoon season, regular as clockwork, and this can be seen in the African Monsoon image above – with a broad swath of higher precipitation across the middle of the country.
“Flooding is an annual challenge in Sudan in August and September. Around that time each year, monsoon rains pour into the Ethiopian Highlands and flow down to the Blue Nile and White Nile. As the rivers wind their way north through Sudan and South Sudan, floodwaters often swamp riverside communities.”
“The annual flooding happened again in 2024. But this time, heavy rains also fell in the north of the country, fueling destructive flash floods in areas less accustomed to receiving so much runoff.” [ source ]
Armed conflict has severely impacted the country’s economy and ability to respond to humanitarian needs – this means limited health services such as vaccinations and limited or no repairs to sewage and clean water infrastructure.
In the end, here is why Sudan floods in the monsoon season:
The flow of the Victoria Nile – the Upper Nile, southern end of the Nile Rivers – is mainly controlled by dams in Uganda (shown in white on the left-hand map) and the GERD Dam in Ethiopia. Almost literally all of the rain that falls in the annual monsoon west of the Horn of Africa flows into the Sudan, a country torn in two by civil war.
Poverty — at all scales from personal, familial, national, and regional – makes these areas prone to cholera outbreaks when adverse weather strikes or conflict forces people to flee their homes.
Bottom Line:
Cholera Outbreaks are not caused by Climate Change. There is no evidence of climates changing in the areas of cholera outbreaks.
Cholera is cause by the presence of Vibrio cholerae, a bacterium, in drinking water supplies (sometimes in food made with tainted water or foods washed in tainted water). This is caused by the contamination of drinking water with human feces. The contamination of drinking water with human feces (thus the bacterium) is a result of poor or nonexistent safe drinking water and sewage handling infrastructure (infrastructure coined by the U.N. WHO as WASH).
Any disruption of civil society in areas that lack adequate safe clean drinking water and proper sewage handling infrastructure can lead to cholera outbreaks: including weather (floods, severe droughts) — armed conflict (or even the threat of armed conflict), breakdown of normal civil governance.
All of that has been compounded by an international shortage of cholera vaccines and difficulties delivering and administering those vaccines in areas affected by cholera.
# # # # #
Author’s Comment:
As usual, the United Nations’ World Health Organization uses climate crisis language as demanded by the enforced UN narrative that all bad things are caused by Climate Change. Any weather that is unwanted is claimed to be evidence of Climate Change – even normal weather for the region involved.
Weather, expected or rare, is not Climate Change. If the Sudan or other normally arid regions of Africa were to become, over a couple of decades, rain forests or some other major shift in Köppen climate type, that would be climate and environmental change. Even then, that change would not cause cholera – cholera is not caused by climate type.
The U.N. and all of its related agencies are major purveyors of Climate Crisis Propaganda, feeding fuel to the fire spread by the U.S.’s National Public Radio, the UK’s BBC, and Australia’s ABC and several international climate propaganda news cabals.
Weather is not climate, diseases are neither caused or spread by climate change.
New research involving a comparative analysis of satellite (CERES) observations of absorbed solar radiation (ASR) and CO2 radiative forcing modeling finds CO2 may have contributed just 0.09°C to the 0.52°C temperature increase from 2000 to 2023.
New research involving a comparative analysis of satellite (CERES) observations of absorbed solar radiation (ASR) and CO2 radiative forcing modeling finds CO2 may have contributed just 0.09°C to the 0.52°C temperature increase from 2000 to 2023.
The rising ASR trend is instead the primary (0.39°C of 0.52°C) cause of the 21st century warming, and it is solely responsible for the high temperatures achieved during the second half of 2023.
Thus, it can be said that “carbon dioxide has an insignificant impact on annual and monthly temperature changes.”
How can carbon dioxide, which has been portrayed as a dangerous pollutant threatening the very existence of humankind, be considered even remotely beneficial? Sadly, such a question can be expected from people – children and adults – who have been fed irrational fears in place of well-established science that shows CO2 to be an irreplaceable food for plants and necessary for all life.
How can carbon dioxide, which has been portrayed as a dangerous pollutant threatening the very existence of humankind, be considered even remotely beneficial? Sadly, such a question can be expected from people – children and adults – who have been fed irrational fears in place of well-established science that shows CO2 to be an irreplaceable food for plants and necessary for all life.
Even some who recognize CO2 as sustenance consider increasing atmospheric concentrations of the gas to be potentially catastrophic, a view devoid of scientific basis and inimical to the fortunes of malnourished millions.
Corn, or maize, is foundational—along with rice, wheat, soyabean—to global food security, serving as a critical source of nourishment for both humans and livestock. Over the past few decades, increases in atmospheric CO2 from industrial emissions have tracked with notable boosts in corn yields.
Between 1900 and 2024, the national corn yield in the U.S. rose to 183 bushels per acre (bu/A) from just 28 bushels. During the same period, atmospheric CO2 increased from 295 parts per million (ppm) to 419 ppm. Worldwide, corn yield rose from a mere 29 bu/A in 1961 to 86 bu/A in 2021.
This phenomenon is not merely coincidental; it is deeply rooted in the physiological characteristics of corn as a C4 category plant. C4 plants like corn – so named for the number of carbon atoms in their photosynthetic product — possess unique biochemical pathways that make their photosynthesis particularly efficient under high concentrations of CO2 and elevated temperatures. Such plants employ a mechanism that concentrates CO2 in specialized structures called bundle sheath cells.
Higher CO2 levels also improve water-use efficiency in corn, which is particularly beneficial where water supplies are limited or during droughts. This efficiency translates into enhanced growth rates and potentially greater yields. In fact, researchers say that “less water will be required for corn under a high-CO2 environment in the future than at present.”
Augmented corn yields driven by increased atmospheric CO2 have had profound effects worldwide, contributing to an agricultural boom that bolstered farm incomes and enhanced food security across diverse regions. Countries like the U.S. with significant corn production have experienced elevated export revenues, strengthening national economies and their positions in the global market.
But this remarkable impact of elevated CO2 is not just limited to C4 crops like corn. C3 plants, such as wheat, rice, potatoes, and soybeans, all rely on an enzyme called rubisco for carbon fixation. Rubisco’s efficiency improves significantly with higher CO2 concentrations because it reduces the enzyme’s tendency to bind with oxygen—a process known as photorespiration that limits productivity.
Consequently, elevated atmospheric CO2 often results in enhanced photosynthesis and biomass accumulation in C3 species, although to a lesser extent than with C4 plants. This is why rice and wheat yields can increase by up to 20-30% under elevated CO2 conditions. We have witnessed this in yield increases across most C3 food crops.
Notably, greenhouse farming—agronomy practiced inside a translucent tent to retain the sun’s warmth—often uses CO2 concentrations artificially increased to more than twice ambient levels to enhance growth.
The relationship between rising atmospheric CO2 and crop yields is clearly a positive one. So, ignore fearmongering media headlines about toxic human CO2 emissions. You, your family and the industries that support our society have greened the planet with daily emissions of carbon dioxide, making food more plentiful and affordable for those grappling with poverty and everybody else.
This commentary was first published at California Globe on September 18, 2024.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research and Science Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, U.K., and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, U.K.
It was always the Posterchild Catastrophe of Doomsters, but two new studies suggest Easter Island might be (mostly) a story of remarkable human achievement instead.
It was always the Posterchild Catastrophe of Doomsters, but two new studies suggest Easter Island might be (mostly) a story of remarkable human achievement instead.
In environmentalist legends, Easter Island was The Ecocide: they built nearly 1,000 giant stone statues but stupidly chopped down all its trees, and died in horrible wars. It was the sorry tale of ecological collapse and deforestation that we could tell small children at bedtime. After the last trees were sliced and diced, a catastrophe of horrors surely followed as the population of 15,000 people ran out of food and no one could make a boat to escape. Obsidian flakes across the island were interpreted as weapons of war and one anthropologist claimed there was a huge civil war that ended in the battle of 1680. Environmental hell on Earth was here…
But new research on the genomes of some islanders suggests that the population was probably small all along. When the Europeans arrived there were only about 3,000 people, and a genetic analysis suggests there are no signs of a recent collapse in the population. Another study of the fields suggests they made some very sophisticated gardens, improving the soil with rocks, can you believe, but they only ever had fields big enough to sustain about 4,000 people, which fits with the gene analysis. And the obsidian fragments were probably domestic tools.
Adding to this tale of remarkable survival, apparently the inhabitants somehow managed to get to South America and collect some native Indian genes which they brought back. These survived on for another 15 to 20 generations.
So it may be that an isolated island of only 3,000 people was capable of feeding itself sustainably, somehow making huge statues, and also sailing 3,700 kilometres to South America and then finding their way back again. We can imagine a wayward sailor somehow finding South America, but not perhaps on return, an island barely 24 kilometers wide in the vast Pacific. (And maybe, wonders Jo, whether some South Americans just managed a one way trip? How would we know? — On that score, the authors of the Nature paper say they can’t tell genetically, but there is archaeological evidence and oral history of trans-Pacific contact from Polynesia right across to South America and back).
Famed Polynesian island did not succumb to ‘ecological suicide,’ new evidence reveals
Most recently Carl Lipo, an archaeologist at Binghamton University, and his team used satellite imagery and machine learning to map the island’s rock gardens, a method of spreading rocks to improve soil productivity. In a paper in Science Advances in July, they concluded Rapa Nui’s agriculture was far less extensive, and its population smaller, than the “ecocide” theory had proposed. Although the ancient Rapanui did cut down most of the island’s trees, the deforestation did not trigger a cultural or population crisis, they say. “Their ability to adapt was successful,” Atallah Leiva says.
While it is true that the small island — which is just 63 square miles (164 square kilometers), or slightly smaller than Washington, D.C. — has poor soil quality and limited freshwater resources, researchers have discovered that the story of the Rapanui is one of survival in challenging ecological conditions.
One method the Rapanui used to enhance the island’s volcanic soil was “lithic mulching,” or rock gardening, in which pieces of rock were added to cultivation areas to boost productivity. The rock gardens generated better airflow in the soil, helping mediate temperature swings and maintaining nutrients — including nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium — in the soil.
Yet another paper suggests that the banal truth of the deforestation was not because humans chopped them all down, but because the first settlers bought some rats which chewed through every last nut and seedling. Imagine being able to build and move 80 ton stone statues, but not being able to make a rat-proof enclosure to save your last tree?
What really happened to the trees
More recently, a picture has emerged of a prehistoric population that was both successful and lived sustainably on the island up until European contact. It is generally agreed that Rapa Nui, once covered in large palm trees, was rapidly deforested soon after its initial colonization around A.D. 1200. Although microbotanical evidence, such as pollen analysis, suggests the palm forest disappeared quickly, the human population may only have been partially to blame.
The earliest Polynesian colonizers brought with them another culprit, namely the Polynesian rat. It seems likely that rats ate both palm nuts and sapling trees, preventing the forests from growing back. But despite this deforestation, my own research on the diet of the prehistoric Rapanui found they consumed more seafood and were more sophisticated and adaptable farmers than previously thought.
The bottom line is that the genetic analysis only has about 15 samples from remains of Islanders of the 1800s and while the rock garden analysis used field trips they also relied on some satellites and AI, so no one really knows for sure. The catastrophist environmentalist story almost certainly ran away with itself, but there is an element of indigenous sainthood working the other way too:
“Working with Indigenous groups, we face so many tropes and outdated narratives that people keep perpetuating—even scientists,” says Kathrin Nägele of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who wrote an accompanying commentary for Nature. “I hope this … ancient DNA [study] puts the last nail in the coffin of this [collapse] narrative.”
Most likely the Rapanui were remarkable survivors who were just as capable of screwing things up as any of us. Hopefully scientists will figure out what really happened, instead of beating us over the head with their favorite ideology.
In it, he details how the real disaster came, not by the hand of the Easter Islanders, but from the slave traders, whalers and colonists:
This tiny patch of land was discovered by European explorers more than three hundred years ago amidst the vast space that is the South Pacific Ocean. Its civilisation attained a level of social complexity that gave rise to one of the most advanced cultures and technological feats of Neolithic societies anywhere in the world. Easter Island’s stone-working skills and proficiency were far superior to any other Polynesian culture, as was its unique writing system. This most extraordinary society developed, flourished and persisted for perhaps more than one thousand years – before it collapsed and became all but extinct.
While the theory of ecocide has become almost paradigmatic in environmental circles, a dark and gory secret hangs over the premise of Easter Island’s self destruction: an actual genocide terminated Rapa Nui’s indigenous populace and its culture. Diamond ignores, or neglects to address the true reasons behind Rapa Nui’s collapse. Other researchers have no doubt that its people, their culture and its environment were destroyed to all intents and purposes by European slave-traders, whalers and colonists – and not by themselves! After all, the cruelty and systematic kidnapping by European slave-merchants, the near-extermination of the Island’s indigenous population and the deliberate destruction of the island’s environment has been regarded as “one of the most hideous atrocities committed by white men in the South Seas” (Métraux, 1957:38), “perhaps the most dreadful piece of genocide in Polynesian history” (Bellwood, 1978:363).
Moreno-Mayar, J.V., Sousa da Mota, B., Higham, T. et al. Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience and pre-European contact with the Americas. Nature633, 389–397 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07881-4
Benny Peiser (2005) From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of “Rapa Nui”,Energy & Environment, Vol. 16, No. 3/4, SPECIAL ISSUE: “Institutions, Progress, Affluence, Technology and the Environment” (2005), pp. 513-539 (27 pages)
In 2020, Dr. Matthew Wielicki, then still an Associate Professor in the Department of Geology at the University of Alabama, noticed a great deal of anxiety in his students. On the one hand, this was understandable, as the world was just entering the Covid crisis and there was a lot of ignorance and fear about the disease in society at large. However, the anxiety that Wielicki noticed among his students had another cause – fear of climate change and the climate crisis. “And they really were convinced that the planet was going to end in a decade or in 12 years or whatever the clock somewhere in New York on the side of a building said,” says Wielicki. There were female students who were on the verge of tears, saying that even though they came from large families, they didn’t want to have children because of the climate crisis.
In 2020, Dr. Matthew Wielicki, then still an Associate Professor in the Department of Geology at the University of Alabama, noticed a great deal of anxiety in his students. On the one hand, this was understandable, as the world was just entering the Covid crisis and there was a lot of ignorance and fear about the disease in society at large. However, the anxiety that Wielicki noticed among his students had another cause – fear of climate change and the climate crisis. “And they really were convinced that the planet was going to end in a decade or in 12 years or whatever the clock somewhere in New York on the side of a building said,” says Wielicki. There were female students who were on the verge of tears, saying that even though they came from large families, they didn’t want to have children because of the climate crisis. “They just couldn’t imagine bringing a child into a world that’s going to end at some point because there’d be too much CO2 in the atmosphere,” Wielicki recalls. He admits that, as a father of two, it was very heartbreaking to hear. “I couldn’t believe that the field that I was in, earth science, geology, was essentially tricking young students into believing that there was a crisis so big that it should be the number one thing that they think about when they’re planning the rest of their life, and whether or not they should have a family,” he says.
Climate crisis science: models predict the future
This is why Wielicki himself took a detailed look at climate-related issues and started explaining them to his students, as well as talking about them publicly on social media. For young people, the problem is that climate is only discussed in terms of crisis and disaster. For example: what should a young person think when he hears the world’s political leaders like UN Secretary-General António Guterres claim that humanity is on the highway to climate hell? Wielicki says there is little reason to blame the young who attack artworks with tomato soup or glue themselves to the pavement when they hear this. They’re passionate, and the constant proclamation of climate crisis and doom tells them that this is the right thing to do. They are also told that the same climate hell hypothesis is supported by ‘science’. But the problem is that the actual scientific evidence does not support the catastrophe we are being told is happening.
The trouble with today’s climate science, says Wielicki, is that it relies primarily on predictions of the future or climate models. There are different models, some of which we can clearly see have been proven wrong to date, i.e., they predicted too much warming. Wielicki points out that any model is only as good as the assumptions which it is based upon. “We can tweak these models to give us essentially any result we want. I always tell people, that look, all models are wrong, but some are useful. I think models are useful for sure, but never will a model outweigh the observable data,” Wielicki explains. “You cannot convince me that the environment is in a crisis or an emergency until you show that to me in three metrics – severe weather occurrences, the cost in insurance and loss of life. We have not seen any increase in any of them,” Wielicki says.
According to Wielicki, since 1880 the average temperature of the Earth has risen by 1.2-1.5 degrees, based on various measurements. What impact has this had on society? “If you look at that data, it’s very difficult to find any metric which would define the state of the planet as a crisis or an emergency or a catastrophe or anywhere near collapse – yet these are words that are used a lot in the media,” Wielicki says, adding that even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn’t actually use such words in its reports.
Fewer deaths due to weather
Wielicki cites the example of extreme weather events, which are constantly talked about as one of the inevitable consequences of climate change. In reality, we are not seeing an increase in extreme weather events or the associated increase in social damage. According to Wielicki, over the last quarter of a century, since around 2000, the number of natural disasters has decreased. At the same time, however, mankind has been spewing record levels of CO2 into the Earth’s atmosphere, mainly as a result of China’s rapid industrialisation. Since mainstream climate science sees CO2, especially the human emissions of the gas, as the main cause of climate damage, which should also bring us extreme weather events, there is an immediate and obvious contradiction there, but this is not being discussed or taken into account.
Secondly, Wielicki gives a simple example of how the number of people who have died as a result of bad weather and natural disasters has changed over the last 100 years. “We’ve reduced the deaths associated with weather-related disasters by 96% or 98%,” he notes. On the one hand, this may show that the number of extreme weather events has decreased somewhat, but on the other hand, it certainly shows that humanity is better able to cope with such disasters. The role of cheap and available energy in this coping, i.e., fossil fuels, should not be underestimated either. Stronger buildings, the ability to move people quickly away from the storm areas, the provision of effective material help or, for example, medical aid to the affected areas, etc. – all this can be achieved if you have the resource of energy to do it.
So, according to Wielicki, the data show that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have gone up somewhat over the last century or so, and that the planet as a whole has warmed a little, but not that we are heading for a catastrophe. “There’s no other metric that would argue that society is somehow being harmed right now by the 1.5°C or whatever degrees of warming we’ve had since 1880,” Wielicki says.
“We need to be resilient”
As a geologist, Wielicki undoubtedly has a better-than-average understanding of how our planet has evolved in the first place, and how its climate has been in a constant state of flux. Today’s climate science, however, links climate change primarily to the increasing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, especially its anthropogenic component. Scientists who doubt or dispute this are labelled climate deniers. Wielicki points out that we know very well from Earth’s relatively recent history that major climate changes, such as the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 950-1250) or the subsequent Little Ice Age (ca. 14th to mid-19th century, precise timing depending on the location), occurred without any significant change in the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere. “If there’s anything that I argue, it’s that we need to be resilient. We should stop pretending that if we changed or lowered our emissions the climate would stop changing. That’s the true denial of climate right there,” Wielicki says. “What we need to accept is that regardless of the CO2 in the atmosphere, we are going to have climate change and those shifts could occur over timescales of decades or centuries, and we should be prepared. And being prepared means we need access to cheap, reliable energy,” he adds.
But the world is moving in the opposite direction under the leadership of today’s political leaders. One of the main objectives is to fight CO2 emissions and to do so by phasing out fossil fuels, among other measures. However, according to Wielicki, the planners have not quite thought everything through. First of all, wind and solar power are unreliable substitutes because they can only be produced when the conditions are right, i.e., when the wind blows and the sun shines. In addition, they need constant support from the taxpayer, because when they can be produced, i.e., sold as energy to the grid, the price of electricity on the market will be low since there is a lot of it at that particular time. So in order for investors to build up these capacities, they need price guarantees from governments or taxpayer support. And on top of that, you still need to additionally build up controllable capacity to ensure that electricity is always available.
Wielicki also says that we need to understand that fossil fuels are not just liquids that we put in our cars at the petrol station but are essential to many aspects of our lives. “About four billion people on the planet are being fed off of agricultural crops that are being fertilised with synthetic fertilizers that are being created from fossil fuels. So you can’t just look at one side of a picture,” Wielicki explains, adding that the increases in atmospheric CO2 levels have actually also increased yields.
In addition, Wielicki says, it is worth thinking that we need to replace many of today’s fossil-fuel-based materials in everyday use, such as plastics, lubricants, oils, chemicals, etc., with new ones if we really want to phase out fossil fuels. “We have to ask what are the benefits that fossil fuels have given the society? And then let’s weigh that against the possible detrimental effects that these climate models argue will happen, but haven’t happened in the observable data yet,” he says.
The rise of the new green colonialism
Programmed into this whole Western orientation towards CO2 reduction, Wielicki says, is hypocrisy on several levels. For a start, it’s worth recognising that by reducing CO2 emissions in Europe or North America, we have effectively decided that we do not produce the goods we need here, but will produce them elsewhere in the world. “We pat ourselves on the back and say: look, we’ve lowered our CO2 emissions by this much! But all we’ve done is essentially offshored that industry to China and India, They do it dirtier. They have no regard for things like environmental policy. And so the global CO2 is going up faster than ever,” Wielicki notes.
While the big Asian countries are ramping up the use of coal to satisfy their energy appetite, many African countries don’t have a similar option. According to Wielicki, this is directly linked to the UN’s policy of not wanting these countries to increase their use of fossil fuels. This means, for example, that farm work that is done elsewhere by tractor still has to be done by many Africans with their hands. A large proportion of Africans also have little or no access to electricity. Food is cooked indoors on open fires, burning dung and wood.
The resulting smoke leads to respiratory illnesses and many people die as a result. All this could be easily avoided, according to Wielicki, by giving them access to propane bottles and gas cookers. “It might make them breathe easier at night. It might make their health better. But it’s going to increase the atmospheric CO2, and that is something we can’t have. These poor people must suffer and live in poverty because we need to save the planet. It’s so hypocritical,” Wielicki says.
What’s more, according to Wielicki, our hypocrisy lies in the fact that at the same time, we want to mine the minerals we need for our own energy transition, such as cobalt, in that very same Africa. “We’re switching to very mineral and energy intensive technologies like solar panels and electric vehicles. And we’re taking all of these raw materials from Africa,” he says. “I think this is going to be, probably, the legacy of this green revolution. I call it the new green colonialism. It’s unfortunately going to keep hundreds of millions of poor people in developing nations in poverty for decades longer than they ever needed to be,” Wielicki adds.
Climate change as a game of money and power
Various examples like this suggest that it all is not being done to somehow increase human welfare and save the climate, but there are other reasons. According to Wielicki, this is illustrated by the fact that we are being offered ever more fantastic solutions to the climate crisis and global warming. For example, the Bill Gates-backed plan to cool the Earth through geoengineering, the idea of spraying sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and reflecting the Sun’s rays back into space before they reach the ground. What could go wrong?
Gates is also an early investor in other well-known ‘climate technologies’. One of these involves using large fans to try to capture CO2 from the air and then turn it into rock. This is an extraordinarily expensive operation, but in reality the profits of the billionaire venture capitalists who develop it and initially invested in it are paid for by ordinary citizens – the U.S. taxpayer is already subsidising the CO2 capture plants under construction to the tune of billions of dollars. Wielicki says it is comical to listen to Gates himself boast that because he pays for CO2 capture, it offsets the CO2 emissions of his own private jet flights.
“Can you imagine if you came home and you’re like: ‘I know sweetheart, I cheated on you but look: I bought into this cheating capture, so it doesn’t count. Because I paid this guy and he’s not going to cheat on his wife, and that allows me to cheat on you. So it’s all good.’ It’s so absolutely ridiculous,” Wielicki observes. He also points out that removing CO2 from the atmosphere in this way is a complete waste of money. “It’s like trying to empty the ocean one spoonful at a time. The amount that they’re capturing is so minuscule. And the amount that they’re spending to capture it – I mean, CO2 is the new gold, platinum, because of the cost of that. What a waste of money. Plant some trees,” Wielicki says.
According to Wielcki, money is a major factor pushing the ongoing ‘green revolution’. But most of the money that is being made is not actually in such CO2 capture technologies and similar projects. It is in energy and transport. “The energy sector is one of the largest sectors in any country’s economy. Transportation comes a close second a lot of times. Radically transitioning and reinventing the energy and transportation sectors has a huge amount of potential for money, for wealth,” Wielicki says.
In addition, governments can also raise tax revenue through climate policies. This in turn means, says Wielicki, that, alongside money, a key driver behind these processes is the empowerment of governments, whether through additional taxation or simply by increasing control over people’s lives. “There is no process in the economy, including your bodily processes of just breathing and eating and breaking wind, unfortunately, that doesn’t produce a greenhouse gas,” Wielicki notes. While normally most people would oppose a government plan to interfere more in their lives, now people are being swayed because it is supposedly about saving the planet. “This is the perfect tool for government to interject itself into people’s lives. What you buy, what you eat, what you drive, where you shop, the type of job you have, the type of furniture you buy, where you recreate,” Wielicki adds. The climate, he says, is like a front, a Trojan horse for building a system like socialism.
The politicisation of science
The collusion of money and power has also led to a situation in which climate scientists, irrespective of the actual data, are essentially being asked to tacitly acknowledge a climate crisis with catastrophic consequences. Failure to do so will have consequences – being labelled as a climate denier, loss of funding and jobs, etc. Such scientists are also no longer welcome to publish their work in respected scientific journals, which is also a major setback for their scientific careers. The funding of universities and research institutions as a whole could also be at risk if the basic positions everybody needs to take today on climate issues tend to be denied by someone within the institution.
Wielicki calls such a situation “politicisation of science”, whereby a manufactured consensus is created on a particular issue and all scientists are required to accept this consensus. Understandably, science, which is supposed to consist of the constant testing of different hypotheses and ideas, of arguing with each other, and of the pursuit of truth, becomes, in the course of such a process, unscientific, ideological or simply a matter of faith. On the other hand, creating such consensus is about the control of information, which allows the wider public to be offered a story that coincides with the aims of the powers that be. The reputations of scientists who disagree with this story or with the adopted consensus can be destroyed by declaring them to be disseminators of misinformation. “We saw that with Covid. That was a rapid politicisation of science. And we’re seeing it with climate change. Climate change has been a little bit more slow in moving into politicisation of science,” comments Wielicki, who has also been publicly smeared for his scientifically sound positions on climate.
Wielicki’s resignation from his job at the university is also directly linked to this politicisation of science. No one was directly driving him away, but in a situation where his own Chair and even the university President were receiving weekly emails and phone calls about his “unacceptable views on climate”, he saw no point in continuing – he would probably not have been given a tenured academic position anyway. In addition, he had long been averse to the so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies implemented by the U.S. universities, which means that more attention is paid to a student’s racial or ethnic origin than to their skills, knowledge, commitment and effort, with those classified as ‘minorities’ being given an advantage in access to studies. Criticism of this policy also made him apparently uncomfortable for the university.
One of Dr. Matthew Wielicki’s research topics has been the evolution of the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau. Here, Wielicki in Tibet during fieldwork with local children. Photo: matthewwielicki.com.
Although Wielicki comes from an academic family, grew up on campus and was destined to have a career like his parents, he says he has no regrets about leaving. He says that his true vocation as a researcher or teacher is to share information, and he can now do this even more successfully than before through the articles he publishes on his Substack Irrational Fear. He cites the example of how, in the past, he might have been happy if his published research had been cited 150 times, but now, thanks to social media sharing, some of his articles can be seen by 50,000 people in just a few hours.
Wielicki is also, of course, pleased that he was able to reassure his young students, to whom he started to explain climate change in a fact-based manner. “This is the first generation, these young 20 year-olds, who have essentially been told that the planet is going to end since they’ve been old enough to understand and read and write. This has been pounded into their heads. It must be just so exhausting to have been told that the planet’s going to end forever. What ambition do you have to sacrifice now and to do things that will ensure a better life for your future, like getting a good education or going to the gym and eating healthy? No, the planet’s going to end. Screw it. I’m just going to eat chips and play video games and wait for the planet to end,” Wielicki says, describing the potential predicament of many of these young people. “We’re robbing them of their ambitions,” he adds, noting that bringing a perspective that didn’t tell young people about the imminent demise of the planet was refreshing to them. “The idea that humans are like a parasite on the planet, that’s just not an idea that really tracks well with young people. They’re tired of that. They don’t believe that,” Wielicki says.
You must be logged in to post a comment.