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.
A recent article at the New York Post by Bjorn Lomborg, titled “Shrinking island, vanishing polar bears — the climate scare stories that turn out to be false,” points out that many of the harms the mainstream media claims climate change is supposed to be causing, for example, to polar bears, the Great Barrier Reef, and Pacific island nations, have not happened. This is true. None of the catastrophes that climate alarmists crow about have come to pass.
A recent article at the New York Post by Bjorn Lomborg, titled “Shrinking island, vanishing polar bears — the climate scare stories that turn out to be false,” points out that many of the harms the mainstream media claims climate change is supposed to be causing, for example, to polar bears, the Great Barrier Reef, and Pacific island nations, have not happened. This is true. None of the catastrophes that climate alarmists crow about have come to pass.
Lomborg writes that two major themes can be seen in the last 20 years of climate change coverage from government and media: “stubborn unwillingness by campaigners to acknowledge any inconvenient science, and ever-shifting favorite stories, first elevated and then dropped by the wayside.”
He says the one constant throughout those shifting stories is “a fixation on scaring the public, which has in turn shaped bad climate policies.”
This is true; illustrated nicely by the shifting narratives surrounding global greening in particular. Years ago, the dominant narrative was that desertification, or the deaths of lush ecosystems, was our future due to climate change. This was presented as a looming catastrophe in the media and in schools. Now that decades of data show the reverse is happening, that leaf coverage is actually expanding over time amid modest warming, the alarmists say the greening is dangerous, as covered in detail in thisClimate Realism post.
Lomborg explores a variety of examples illustrative of climate crisis stories that are false, and sometimes abandoned or downplayed as they have falsified by data that has emerged over time. One case study Lomborg discusses is the polar bear craze.
He writes that “after years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible for them to ignore a mountain of evidence showing that the global polar bear population has increased substantially from around 12,000 in the 1960s to around 26,000 in the present day.”
The alarmist media has tried to claim that melting sea ice is causing more polar bear encounters and aggression towards humans. However, the simpler explanation is that there are so many more bears than there used to be, and also more human beings in areas where bears naturally live. This is another attempt for media to spin a positive (bear populations recovering from previous overhunting) into a negative.
The second false alarm case study that Lomborg discusses is the missing decline of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and other coral reefs.
Lomborg recalls that “scientists predicted the reef would be decimated by 2022,” and “The Guardian even published an obituary.” He points out that the GBR has more coral cover right now in 2024 than at any point in time since recordkeeping began in 1985.
“The good news gets a fraction of the coverage that the scare stories did,” Lomborg writes.
Climate at a Glance and Climate Realism have repeatedly had to debunk false claims made in the media that the GBR and other barrier reefs are declining, so Lomborg’s point is accurate. It is rare that the media hypes any good news the way it does bad news about various ecosystems such as the GBR, a embarrassing admission from them after they spent decades catastrophizing about it. Even when they do begrudgingly report the record coral extent and data trends, both globally and in the GBR, they can’t help but try to warn that they still might suddenly reverse course and die off.
Lomborg’s also refutes claims that islands like Tuvalu are sinking below the waves because of rising sea levels. He points out that “almost all atoll islands are increasing in size,” which the New York Times (NYT) only just decided to share with their readership earlier this year, who, if they only relied the NYT for their knowledge of the issue, up to that point had likely been under the impression that the opposite was true.
“While rising sea levels do erode land, additional sand from old coral is washed up on low-lying shores,” Lomborg explains, and “studies have long shown this accretion is stronger than climate-caused erosion, meaning the land area of Tuvalu is increasing.”
It’s not just that; scientists have known for decades that atoll islands uniquely change with changing sea levels, scientists from over a hundred years ago such as Charles Darwin proposed that reef-based islands grow upwards towards the light even as sea levels change. In 2010, multiple studies reported that Tuvalu and other islands were actually growing. Eight of the nine coral atolls in Tuvalu have grown, and 75 percent of the nation’s smaller islands have also grown.
It is heartening when major news publications like the New York Post publish work done by Lomborg and other climate realists, who bravely insist on relying on available real-world data in the face of an onslaught of stories and reports referencing scary climate model scenarios. No doubt the Post will get some hate mail for it, but it is a sign of a good news organization dedicated to serving its reader’s interests by following the facts where ever they lead, even on controversial topics, to publish the truth, however unalarming, rather than hyperbole and lies.
This is the text of a talk I gave at an American Institute for Economic Research Bastiat Society of Houston Meeting on September 26, 2024.
The IPCC, or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, AR6 report and the so-called “climate consensus” cabal hide and suppress many inconvenient truths that run counter to their hypothesis that man-made climate change is dangerous. I will list and discuss some examples in this post, more are explained in our recent book, The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC: An Analysis of AR6.
But first, some personal examples of the suppression of non-consensus ideas.
Two papers rejected for political reasons
Figure 1. Two of my invited papers that passed review and were later rejected by higher authorities.
Both of the papers illustrated in figure 1 were invited, both passed peer-review and/or editorial review, but they were ultimately rejected by people higher in the respective organizations, just before the scheduled publication date, and with no valid reason given. I took this as a clear sign that both rejections were purely political. After all, any technical reasons for rejection should have been voiced during the review process.
The PETM paper was invited by the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists or RMAG. They intended to publish the paper in their online publication called The Outcrop. Articles for The Outcrop are reviewed by the staff and editors, but not in a formal way as academic journal articles are.
The paper’s rejection was not for technical reasons but was blatantly political and after months of work by the editor, another RMAG staffer, and by me. The rejection was a board decision, done at the at the last minute, and without explanation or justification, except to point out that I am not a “trained climatologist” and I’m a “blogger.” Thus, it was pretty clear that the paper was rejected not because of any problems with it, but because of who I was.
When I complained, the board sent the paper to yet another reviewer; after the paper had already been reviewed and accepted. The additional reviewer was sent an early draft and not the final version. In a conference call he pointed out several flaws that I knew were not in in the final version causing much confusion, until I realized he had the wrong version of the paper.
Thus, the board either did not see the final version when reversing the decision of the editor and the peer-reviewers or sent, either deliberately or by accident, their extra reviewer the wrong version. I explained all this, but it was rejected anyway without reconsideration or even a look at the final draft. Thus, it was clearly a political decision based on the conclusions of the paper, the fact that I am not a trained climatologist, and I’m a blogger. The paper now appears on my blog and has been one of my most popular posts.
The second invited, but ultimately rejected, paper was written for the Creative Society at their request. They specifically wanted me to write a paper on climate shifts, such as those that occurred about 1925, 1947, 1976, and 1997. They asked me to present it in an online interview on October 10th, 2022. The interview was recorded and when I asked when it would be posted online, they said they would have to get back to me. They never did, so I posted the paper on my blog. I was never given a reason why it was not posted online by the Creative Society.
The discussion on climate shifts was interesting, since they believed that they might be related to periodic changes in Earth’s mantle.
A Paper that caused an editor to resign
Figure 2. A very reasonable paper by Roy Spencer and William Braswell that caused the editor who published it to resign.
Wolfgang Wagner, then editor-in-chief of the journal Remote Sensing, resigned over a perfectly reasonable, but counter to the “consensus” paper, by Roy Spencer and William Braswell in 2011. Spencer and Braswell presented solid observations and facts, and their critics presented only model results.
The debate between the two sides is complex, and mostly over the sign and magnitude of feedbacks to greenhouse gas (mainly CO2) warming. This is how science is supposed to work. When an editor proclaims from on high that one well supported opinion is wrong and the other is correct, without proper discussion and debate, it is politics not science.
Two papers that caused the editors to be fired
Figure 3. Two of Prof. Richard Lindzen’s papers that caused the editors that accepted them to be fired. The paper on the right is Lindzen’s landmark first paper on the Iris Effect.
Willie Soon and Dick Lindzen report that two editors were fired for publishing two of Lindzen’s papers. The first, published in 1990, lays out Lindzen’s objections to the idea that a man-made enhanced greenhouse effect could be the dominant reason behind current warming, the paper is quite reasonable and certainly not a reason to fire anyone. The paper warns that more definitive evidence of the potential dangers of man-made global warming must be found before drastic actions, like eliminating fossil fuels, are taken. He reminds us that climate model results are not evidence, they are conjectures. Lindzen’s paper is still viable today since definitive evidence and examples of man-made climate change dangers have not been found, even 34 years later. This is well illustrated in Table 12.12 of AR6 WGI on page 1856, shown a little later in this post.
The second is Lindzen’s landmark first paper on the Iris Effect on the right side of figure 3. Now, more than 23 years later, the Iris Effect is widely accepted and when incorporated into climate models it moves model results closer to observations. Certainly, accepting such a landmark paper is no reason to fire anyone.
One must remember that Albert Einstein’s first PhD thesis was rejected. Years later, he submitted a series of papers to Max Planck at the Annalen der Physik journal, and one of them was accepted as his thesis and he finally got his PhD. Planck published Einstein’s new thesis and several other papers, without formal peer-review and Einstein’s reputation was made. Max Planck said that publishing risky papers is important, it is far worse to reject a possibly groundbreaking work. The peer-review process can, and often does, suppress truly innovative work. Papers are sometimes rejected simply because they are novel and opposed to the “consensus” opinion.
Today the Iris Effect is discussed in detail in the IPCC reports, although often without mentioning Lindzen’s name, and a search using Google Scholar shows seven published papers since the original paper was published in 2001. Five of them were published after 2015, and the most recent in 2022. This major discovery was reported in a journal that fired the editor for publishing it, and now the discovery is well established science. I could find no evidence that the professors who rejected Einstein’s thesis were fired.
The Retraction of the Alimonti paper
Figure 4. An excellent paper that is supported by Chapter 12 in AR6 was retracted by SpringerNature without any reason except “concerns were raised…”
In what Roger Pielke Jr. calls the most egregious failure of modern scientific publishing this perfectly fine paper by Gianluca Alimonti and his colleagues was retracted due to pressure from the “consensus” and the mainstream media. Pielke Jr. believes that the retraction was based solely on the following sentence from the paper:
“In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”
Which is simply the same thing that AR6 WGI says in their Table 12.12 shown in figure 5. The SpringerNature retraction notice contained no substantive issues with the paper, it just says “concerns were raised…” For more details see here.
AR6 and Extreme Weather
Figure 5. Table 12.12 in AR6 WGI. The colored boxes show the climate changes that have emerged from climate noise to date. Only a few very benign climate changes have been observed. Most, including flooding, sea level rise, drought, and cyclones, have not.
Here we see part of the previously mentioned Table 12.12, from AR6, Chapter 12, page 1856. The right-hand column of the table shows detected “climate change impact drivers” that can be seen today or in Earth’s recent history, that is since ~1750 or later. The IPCC defines climate change impact drivers or “CIDs” as physical climate system conditions that affect an element of society or ecosystems. Human caused CIDs can be detrimental, beneficial, neutral, or a mixture of each across regions of the Earth.
That is, a particular change in climate can be beneficial in one part of the world and detrimental in another. This is obvious, but often ignored by the climate establishment which tends to only consider the negative impacts of climate change. A climate change impact driver is defined as a change that has exceeded a signal to noise ratio of one. It occurs above a defined level of random change, the so-called “Noise level.” Thus, the definition of climate change is statistical. It takes time to tell whether a particular change is real on climate time scales. Roger Pielke Jr. and his colleagues found that even if a particular change occurred, we could not be sure it was real climate change for over 100 years. It would take that long just to gather the necessary data to show the change had emerged from the noise.
As the legend shows, orange means a decrease and blue means an increase, a white box means no change is detected above the noise level. The tropical cyclone box is white, likewise the boxes for wind speed, drought, flooding, precipitation, wildfires, landslides, ocean acidity, and sea level rise are white, meaning no significant change is detected.
An increase in incidents of extreme heat is detected, but the footnote limits this to some tropical and mid-latitude regions, so even an increase in extreme heat events is not apparent globally. There is a decrease in cold spells and an increase in mean air temperature in most regions. Likewise, there is a decrease in permafrost, in lake and river ice, and an increase in mean ocean temperature. So, if the scientists only found these obvious changes, that are largely benign, why do the politicians act like the world is coming to an end? This is what we must ask ourselves. I guess they didn’t expect anyone to read all the way to page 1856.
Cyclones and Extreme Weather
From AR6 WGI, Chapter 11, (written by scientists), on page 1583-1585.
“… there is low confidence in observed long-term (40 years or more) trends in TC [tropical cyclone] intensity, frequency, and duration, and any observed trends in phenomena such as tornadoes and hail; … it is likely that the global frequency of TCs will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged, … there is low confidence in projections of small-scale phenomena such as tornadoes and hail storms; and there is medium confidence that there will be a reduced frequency and a poleward shift of mid-latitude cyclones due to future anthropogenic climate change.”
From the AR6 WGI Summary for Policymakers (written by politicians), on page 8
“Human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since AR5.”
Ideas that go against the consensus can get editors fired. They can also be suppressed by mindless bureaucrats who haven’t read them, even after the peer-reviewers have approved them. Sometimes, politicians can change what the scientists have written to achieve political ends. This happens in every IPCC report. Each report has a political section up front called the Summary for Policymakers. This summary is written by politicians for politicians, it is distinct from the rest of the report which is written by the scientists who did the work and does not say the same thing.
The top quote above describes the scientific findings. They have low confidence that any trend exists in tropical cyclone intensity, frequency, or duration over the past 40 years. They also expect the global frequency of cyclones to decrease or remain the same in the future, although they believe the most intense storms will increase in some places, but not globally. They have medium confidence that there will be a reduced frequency of mid-latitude cyclones due to anthropogenic climate change.
How is this presented in the Summary for Policymakers, written by politicians? They say evidence of observed changes in extreme weather, and the attribution of these changes to human influence, has strengthened since AR5. Who do you believe? The scientists or the politicians? You can’t believe both.
The IPCC and Al Gore like to tell us that higher temperatures will lead to stormier weather. Research by many climate scientists, including Zhongwei Yan, Phil Jones, Anders Moberg, Susana Costas, Philippe Sorrel, and many others dispute this idea. As the planet warms the equator-to-pole temperature gradient decreases since tropical temperatures barely change. A smaller equator-to-pole temperature gradient provides less power for storms.
Earth’s atmosphere is like a heat engine. It is powered from below and as the heat moves through the atmosphere it does work just as the steam moving through a locomotive does work on its way to the smokestack. The work it does is our weather. When the gradient is steep, as in the Little Ice Age, it does more work, and the world is stormier.
Leon Barry tells us that most heat is moved from the tropics to the poles by mid-latitude storms, if there is less heat to move, there are fewer and less severe storms. Zhongwei Yan tells us that extreme weather has decreased since the 19th century, especially in the winter months. Work by Roger Pielke Jr. and Bjorn Lomborg confirm this trend. On longer time scales, we see that storminess has greatly decreased since the Little Ice Age, which is labeled “LIA” in the figure in the slide.
What about Sea Level Rise?
Figure 7. Various global sea level reconstructions and their rate of rise since 1900. See here for references.
We are constantly told that the rate of global mean sea level or GMSL rise is accelerating. Is it? How definitive is the evidence? If it is accelerating, why? Is the acceleration dangerous?
We will remember from a previous slide that AR6 concludes that any recent change in the rate of sea level rise is not above the noise in the measurements. In fact, a change in the rate of sea level rise is not expected to be detected globally before the end of the 21st century, except possibly using the extreme, and unlikely, RCP 8.5 scenario (paywalled, try here or here to get the full text).
The usual assumption is that it is rising mostly because of man-made global warming and the resulting melting of glaciers and the polar icecaps. Is this true? Maybe not.
Dangendorf, et al. (the green sea level record in the graph) find a persistent acceleration in GMSL since the 1960s and demonstrate that this is ~76% associated with sea-level changes in the Indo-Pacific and South Atlantic. They also show that the initiation of this recent acceleration in sea level rise is tightly linked to changes in Southern Hemispheric westerly winds. Thus, much of the change in the rate of sea level rise in the 1960s is linked to changes in regional atmospheric circulation, not melting glaciers.
In absolute elevation, sea level is not the same in every ocean basin, this is due to the shape of the ocean basins, the individual ocean basin temperature, and in the strength and direction of the prevailing winds over the basin. Thus, the acceleration of sea level change in each ocean basin is different, the global mean sea level is a combination of all the changes in each basin and just reporting (or discussing) global changes in sea level masks a lot of complexity.
Global sea level is not global at all, it is largely a rise in sea level in specific regions. It is interesting that no acceleration is detected in the eastern Pacific or in the Arctic Ocean, and deceleration is detected in the Southern Ocean. Thus, the regions that should be most affected by melting ice, the Arctic and the Southern Ocean, show no acceleration in the rate of rise since 1960.
You will notice that there is a cyclical acceleration and deceleration in these records with a period of about 65 years. It is most easily seen in the blue Jevrejeva record and in the green Dangendorf record. We are now in the upswing of the rate of sea level rise that began between 1970 and 1990. We are currently about halfway through a cycle (near the peak) that is expected to end around 2050.
The AR6 model of warming since the Little Ice Age
Figure 8. The AR6 WGI illustration of the impact of various forces on the warming since the Little Ice Age.
This is a graphic showing the IPCC modeled components of global warming since 1750, just after the end of the worst part of the Little Ice Age. Their models say that the Sun’s variability had essentially no impact on global warming, or perhaps a very small negative impact. They claim volcanoes have a slightly larger negative impact on global warming, so all the warming is due to human activities in their model. This might be correct, but who knows? The alternative idea that nature caused some of the warming is still entirely possible and should be investigated, not ignored.
Recent Solar Activity
Figure 9. Plot of several solar cycle proxies since the worst time in the Little Ice Age. Number of sunspot groups from Hoyt and Schatten (black line), Usoskin (red), and Svalgaard and Schatten (blue). After Usoskin, 2017, A History of Solar Activity, Living Reviews in Solar Physics.
This graph compares various solar activity reconstructions from sunspot observations. Sunspots are considered a good proxy for solar output, with high sunspot counts equating to higher solar radiation output. Grand solar minima, such as the identified Maunder and Dalton Minimums are readily recognized, since the amplitude of the Schwabe 11-year solar cycle is very reduced in these times. Grand Solar Maxima, such as the Modern Solar Maximum from about 1930 to around 2010 are harder to see. These are periods when the smoothed sunspot number remains above 50 for two solar cycles or longer. The Modern Solar Maximum lasted about 80 years and was centered in 1970 according to Ilya Usoskin. This is the longest Solar Maximum since 1,200BC, 3,200 years ago, according to solar proxies. Solar Maxima do not have an instantaneous effect since the change in solar output is small and they work by accumulating excess thermal energy in the climate system, especially in the oceans. Very little energy escapes directly to space from the oceans, it must first be transferred to the atmosphere and carried to a location and altitude where it can escape to space.
Modern Solar Maximum
Figure 10. A comparison of the sunspot records to the HadCRUT4 global average surface temperature record.
Here we compare the same sunspot records to the HadCRUT4 surface temperature anomaly. We notice the late 19th century temperature decline as solar activity decreases to a minimum around 1910. Then they begin to rise rapidly until the 1940s, and ultimately fall until about 1976 as solar activity drops a bit during the 1960s and early 1970s. Then temperatures begin to rise again in the 1980s and 1990s, only to stall in the 2000s, prior to the 2016 super El Niño. The Modern Solar Maximum is now over, so some reduced rate of warming or even cooling in the next few decades is to be expected if solar variations make a difference.
Discussion
Censorship is an ugly thing. It has happened to presidential candidates and to scientists. It has happened to me. Censorship for any reason, other than to protect children from age-inappropriate images and text, is both unscientific and wrong. The main job of any scientist is to challenge accepted ideas with data and analysis, science is incompatible with censorship.
We constantly hear from the news media that human-caused climate change is dangerous now or that we are seeing signs that serious climate change disasters are imminent. Yet, the only observed so-called dangers are that the world is a little warmer and CO2 has increased in the atmosphere. These obvious changes have simply made the world a greener and better place. All the supposed “dangers” are projected into the future by climate models, and the climate models have been shown to be inaccurate.
Warming occurs mostly in the higher latitudes, temperatures in the tropics barely change and are limited to about 30°C by evaporation and the resulting deep convection of warm humid air that forms clouds. The transport of heat from the tropics to the poles acts as a heat engine that produces our weather, the more heat transported, the stormier it is. Thus, as the higher latitudes warm, aka “global warming,” less heat is transported to the poles, and fewer and less severe storms form in the mid-latitudes. All the data collected in the 20th century suggest that storminess is decreasing as the world warms, not increasing.
Sea level rise since 1900 is about 96% linear using all the common sea level rise records. The apparent acceleration seen since 1990 coincides with an upturn in the AMO and other ocean oscillations and is probably natural. Blaming it on human activities is premature, we won’t know for another 30 years, after the ocean oscillation turns negative.
The Sun is far more variable in its effect on climate than assumed by the IPCC and the climate consensus. Further these known variations in the Sun correlate very well with historical climate changes.
The bias in the U.N. climate change reports is mostly selection bias. They only choose papers that support their thesis that humans control the climate and ignore the abundant literature that shows nature, through cloud cover, ocean oscillations, and the Sun has a large effect, probably the dominant effect on our long-term climate. This censorship, by omission, radically misinforms the public.
Science is the well-established process for one person or one small group to show the world that their cherished beliefs are wrong. It only works in an open world with free speech and a free press. Censorship, suppression of speech, and consensus thinking are the enemies of science and truth.
Censorship and the suppression of free speech destroy innovation and human progress. In a world where the consensus rules and new ideas are suppressed, would a personal computer in every pocket and purse or a SpaceX Starlink exist? No, these were the vision of a few individuals under the leadership of Steven Jobs and Elon Musk respectively. Others would think the ideas were crazy, like Einstein’s thesis or Richard Lindzen’s Iris Effect hypothesis. The so-called “consensus” is the enemy of innovation and truth.
It’s grand final day in Australia, and awkwardly the State of Victoria risks a grid overload. A truckload of solar power will arrive at lunchtime that no one needs, and which has no place to go.
It’s grand final day in Australia, and awkwardly the State of Victoria risks a grid overload. A truckload of solar power will arrive at lunchtime that no one needs, and which has no place to go.
The largest single generator in Australia now is rooftop solar and it’s virtually uncontrollable. The geniuses running the national grid have subsidized solar panels and made electricity unaffordable at the same time, thus driving more householders into the arms of the solar industry.
So they’ve created an artificial market bubble — as all good communists do. We now have a 20 gigawatt capacity generator that mostly can’t be turned off, except by clouds or possibly Chinese cyberwarfare.
And where autumn and spring used to be the easy seasons, now Sunny spring days are diabolical too — hardly anyone needs their air conditioner or their heater at lunchtime, but solar watts are pouring in.
Again, the poor sods who built solar industrial parks (marked in red) have to curtail their production massively from 8am to 5pm. The red curve is supposed to look like the yellow curve. The missing red peak is wasted solar production.
As the yellow uncontrollable peak rises towards the black line (the total demand), the whole grid has a problem — more reliable cheap generators have to shut down to prevent the toxic excess electricity building up. Without the reliable generators, with their 500 ton turbines spinning at 3,000 revolutions per minute, (or 3,600 in the USA) the grid loses frequency stability, and spinning inertia, and the ability to cope when a cloud rolls over. The problem of excess solar at lunch time is also called The Duck Curve and has been known for years. It’s not like this snuck up and surprised anyone, yet here we are — courting disaster.
The ABC reported on this, but can’t bring itself to call this what is is — a “Solar Glut” dumped on the grid. Instead rooftop solar is a “juggernaut” and the grid faces a “low demand warning”, as if you personally are the problem, for not using enough electrons. Don’t blame the artificial pointless bubble of solar panels.
Rooftop solar output has reached such enormous levels that authorities have begun issuing warnings about their ability to keep the electricity system from being overloaded at times.
In an extraordinary first this week, the body that runs Australia’s biggest energy market said the supply of solar power in Victoria threatened to overwhelm demand for electricity from the grid amid mild, sunny conditions.
It said Friday’s oversupply of solar was so acute that demand for power from the grid would fall below a threshold critical for keeping the electricity system on an even keel.
Even the AEMO (the Australian Energy Market Operator) calls it a minimum system load notice – not a solar surge, or a renewable overload.
And despite the toxic excess of solar panels, and that we’ve known this day would come, in true Soviet fashion, we’re still installing as many as we can (see below). The trainwreck continues.
The relentless rise of solar PV in Australia.
That would stop dead in its tracks if householders had to pay fair costs for the frequency stability, the back up power, and the storage.
The solution, according to government experts, is not to have a real market and accurate prices, it’s to give more powers to some bureaucrats so they can order battery owners to discharge before lunch and be ready to soak up the dangerous excess at midday. The battery owners don’t like that, but like an anaconda, the government gradually tightens its grip until the free market is dead. The other “solution” is to add controllers to home solar panels so the government can switch them off (which is starting to happen in South Australia and Western Australia). Solar panels owners don’t like that either, but they were sold rainbows and fairy cakes that no one could deliver.
The communist quislings complain that the market is failing us and needs more governance. But the truth is, the overlords destroyed the free market long ago. The people want reliable electricity, and if they were allowed to choose reliable power over renewable energy, the problem would solve itself.
Meanwhile, grid managers surely pray for cloudy days. Soon, some bright spark is going to suggest cloud seeding for grid stability.
UPDATE: The grid demand fell to 1817MW in Victoria, and survived but prices spiked to minus $367 today during the low minimum solar belly of the duck.
While the Messinian Salinity Crisis and subsequent Zanclean Megaflood comprise one of the most incredible episodes in geologic history… So incredible that the uppermost stage of the Miocene epoch is named the Messinian and the lowermost stage of the Pliocene epoch is named the Zanclean… There was no MASS extinction associated with it.
So… Not only was it not a mass extinction.., It was an extinction from which there was a recovery. Why use the word “extinction” at all? Let’s go to the subject research paper:
Coral reef biodiversity
The cooling directly affected temperature-sensitive organisms such as the tropical reef-building z-corals and their associated faunas (reef fishes and sharks) and bryozoans, leading to local extinction of vast populations, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean (Fig. 1) (40). In addition, the decrease of water temperatures in the Mediterranean allowed boreal species to expand their distribution to the basin during the Messinian, while strongly thermophilic Tethyan relic species disappeared. Monegatti and Raffi (33) noted that the MSC caused regional mass disappearances of molluscs but only a limited number of actual extinctions and that the greatest Messinian extinctions took place in the Atlantic Ocean and were triggered by the TG22, TG20, TG14, and TG12 glacials during the MSC. In the Zanclean, the establishment of psychrospheric water masses in the Atlantic further exacerbated this impact (41). For example, the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) and the blue shark (Prionace glauca) first appeared globally at the Miocene/Pliocene boundary (42) and in the Mediterranean after the MSC (43).
The MSC played a crucial role in the local extinction of shallow-water z-coral reefs, but it was probably not the main driver (40, 44). Z-corals, as tropical reef corals, are highly sensitive to temperature.
When is an extinction not an extinction? When it’s a local extinction. The “limited number of actual extinctions” occurred in the Atlantic Ocean and were triggered by glacial episodes, not the MSC.
During the late Miocene, the Mediterranean Sea literally dried up and deposited a layer of halite and gypsum about a mile thick (Messinian salinity crisis). Then in the early Pliocene Epoch, the Mediterranean rapidly flooded (Zanclean megaflood), leading to the formation of the modern Mediterranean Sea. The Zanclean megaflood was a doozy. If Gavin Schmidt’s Silurian civilization had been thriving on the Messinian salt flats during the Late Miocene, the Zanclean megaflood would have wiped them out without a trace. The transition from the MSC to the Zanclean megaflood marks the transition from the Miocene to the Pliocene. It left a serious mark on the stratigraphic record.
Some reconstructions of the Zanclean megaflood suggest that sea level in the Mediterranean could have risen at a rate of 10 meters per day during the peak flow of water from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean basin.
The MSC caused the deposition of a thick layer of evaporites (salt, gypsum, anhydrite, etc.) across the Mediterranean basin:
Schematic cross-section of the Leviathan Basin (Bowman, 2011).
However, this is not an extinction story, much less a mass extinction story. We can chalk this up to a combination of good science and bad science journalism.
References
Bowman, Steven. (2011). “Regional seismic interpretation of the hydrocarbon prospectivity of offshore Syria”. GeoArabia. 16.
Konstantina Agiadi et al., Late Miocene transformation of Mediterranean Sea biodiversity. Sci. Adv. 10, eadp1134 (2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adp1134
Scientists have repeatedly reported a satellite-observed (CERES) cloud cover albedo decline that has led to an increase in solar radiation absorbed by the Earth’s oceans – a trend that explains the post-2000 temperature increase
Per a new study, the last 200 years of global warming are associated with cloud cover decline, and this decreasing cloud albedo can be linked to “the dominant roles of external forces – volcanic, solar, and oceanic – in their mutual influence after the LIA [Little Ice Age].”
Scientists have now formulated new 1500 to 2022 CE reconstruction of cloud cover over the Mediterranean region. The authors suggest their reconstruction of cloud cover may be representative of more than just this region, as it is a product of large scale processes that may “transcend geographical boundaries.” In other words, what happens in the Mediterranean region may well have global implications.
The reconstruction indicates the modern declining cloud cover trend may not only have been occurring since 2000, but, except for a brief increasing period from about 1945 to 1980 (that coincided with a global cooling trend), has been ongoing for over 200 years. The “turning point” years were 1815-1818, following the eruption of Mount Tambora. From that point on there has been a precipitous decline in cloud cover that departs from multi-decadal variability.
The authors suggest the “dominant” factors linked to the post-1800s include solar forcing, volcanic forcing, and the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO).
“Our study…indicating the dominant roles of external forces – volcanic, solar, and oceanic – in their mutual influence after the LIA”
“This combination of factors [AMO surging to a positive phase, a significant rise in solar forcing] likely contributed to a substantial decrease in cloud cover in the Mediterranean area.”
Interestingly, the authors also repeat the model-based assumption that the post-LIA rising temperatures could have been a contributing causal factor in the 1800s-to-present cloud cover decline. In other words, the warming led to cloud decline, and not the other way around. This assumption is odd, at best. It is well known warmer seawater adds more water to the air than cooling seawater. Which is why, for example, water vapor concentrations reach 35,000 ppm in the tropics, but less than 1,000 ppm at the poles.
Also, it is well known that warmer summers are cloudier than colder winters (see Malliard et al., 2021 and Abrahim et al., 2022 below, for example). Cloudier summers can be 10 to 15°C warmer than clearer-sky winters across the middle and high latitudes. In contrast, the modern warming trend of only tenths of a degree in recent decades could only produce negligible changes in clouds relative to these much larger seasonal temperature changes. Besides, a decline in cloud cover is the opposite of what occurs with warmer temperatures anyway.
Anthropogenic global warming apologists want to believe the observed decline cloud cover in recent decades is human caused. Thus, climate model inputs have been programmed to say warming from rising greenhouse gases leads to cloud decline, and cloud decline leads to more warming – a perpetual, runaway positive feedback.
Problematically, actual, real-world observations show warming leads to cloud increases, not decreases. Thus, neither warming nor rising greenhouse gases can explain the observed modern cloud decline.
And since declining cloud cover, a function of “unforced internal variabilty,” allows more solar radiation absorption at the surface, this can explain modern warming.
Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta struggled to defend his own lawsuit against ExxonMobil during a Tuesday appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta struggled to defend his own lawsuit against ExxonMobil during a Tuesday appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Bonta’s office filed suit against ExxonMobil on Monday, alleging that the corporation deceived the public about the efficacy of recycling plastics and specifically its “advanced recycling” program, which essentially breaks down old plastics into their molecular component parts that are then used to produce other products. During the interview, Bonta struggled to defend the merits of his lawsuit and was also called out by one of the program’s hosts for being hypocritical about jet fuel given that he seems to have flown into New York City for this week’s “Climate Week NYC” summit. (RELATED: Officials Told Biden’s EPA That Its Aggressive Green Power Plant Scheme Has Serious Flaws, Docs Show)
WATCH:
“They’re lying in different ways. They are saying that essentially, 100% of U.S. plastic could be recycled, and that was the myth they wanted to perpetuate,” Bonta said in response to questions from CNBC’s anchors.
After some more back and forth, Bonta continued to try to explain his lawsuit against ExxonMobil.
“Of all the plastics that ExxonMobil produces, from their product, only 1% goes into the advanced recycling process at all, and of that one percent, 92% becomes mostly transportation fuel,” Bonta said. “So the other 99% of what ExxonMobil produces in plastic and what the world produces in plastic, advanced recycling doesn’t touch.”
“But advanced recycling sounds like a better thing than nothing, than going into a landfill,” CNBC host Becky Quick interjected.
“They don’t get any credit for advanced recycling, turning things into jet fuel that’s emitted into the air or transportation fuel that becomes part of our …” Bonta fired back.
“So your point is we shouldn’t have jet fuel?” Quick said in response.
“My point is ExxonMobil shouldn’t lie. And they shouldn’t point to another lie —” Bonta said, before CNBC anchor Joe Kernen cut him off to point out the irony of Bonta railing against jet fuel after flying to New York City to partake in a climate summit attended by numerous business and political elites.
“You flew here though, right?” Kernen asked.
“We travel,” Bonta replied.
If Bonta flew roundtrip from Sacramento to New York City to appear at Climate Week, he would have flown approximately 5,000 miles and emitted about 2.26 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to calculations done on Sustainable Travel.
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Self-censoring is a real thing – that I refuse to engage in. Over the last year there has been a dramatic reduction in live hard coral cover at many reefs at the Great Barrier Reef, but this has not been documented in official statistics or in the official reporting that prefers the narrative of gradual and linear decline – whereas recent loss was dramatic at some reefs due to cyclones and at others due to bleaching.
Self-censoring is a real thing – that I refuse to engage in. Over the last year there has been a dramatic reduction in live hard coral cover at many reefs at the Great Barrier Reef, but this has not been documented in official statistics or in the official reporting that prefers the narrative of gradual and linear decline – whereas recent loss was dramatic at some reefs due to cyclones and at others due to bleaching.
Across the bay from where I live, at the coral reef fringing Wreck Beach, Great Keppel Island, for example, there is a lot of dead coral – so much. The coral is dead from the very dramatic bleaching last summer.
The patches of dead coral are almost exclusively Acropora spp., and of both plate and branching forms. The Porites spp. and other corals, if they bleached, they have most recovered and completely. And the fish – there are still so many, and they are so colourful.
I did take several photographs of a juvenile yellow boxfish (Ostracion cubicus) as it swam across dead coral now infested with dying algae. It is the case that after the corals went white, they became infested with green algae and after that, well the algae are now brown and everything quite dead. But there are still so many fish, and many of the fish are so colourful and seemingly obvious to the dead Acropora spp..
It will be interesting to see what happens next, whether there is recruitment – tiny new corals finding a foothold on the now dead plates – after the coral spawning that will be soon, usually just a few days after the full moon in November.
It is the case that nature tends to follow cycles and to know them we need to acknowledge death when it happens and look to see if new life follows.
Far back left is Jenn Mayes, and in foreground Jenn Marohasy, Marika and Ewa. Thanks for seeing the corals with me — dead and alive. And I will write about all the nudibranchs we found and photographed in a next blog post.
Some of my previous scribbles on last summer’s coral bleaching:
In 2001 the atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, proposed that human activity was impacting natural environmental conditions to the extent that we had effectively left the natural stable conditions of the Holocene and moved into a new interval that he named the Anthropocene. In response to this suggestion, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was established in 2009 on the initiative of Phil Gibbard (PLG: the then chair of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy; SQS). The remit of the Working Group was to examine the evidence for human induced climate change as reflected in the recent geological record, and to determine whether this was sufficiently compelling for a new stratigraphic unit to be included in the Geological Time Scale (GTS) and, if so, at what rank. The Working Group, initially led by Jan Zalasiewicz (JAZ) and latterly by Colin Waters (CW), deliberated for 15 years before finally submitting a report to the SQS in late October 2023.
[…]
Following standard ICS procedure, it was expected that there would be 30 days allotted for the discussion of the AWG proposal, to be followed by 30 days for voting. Because of a possible conflict of interest, JAZ and MAH recused themselves from the administration of the voting process (although both participated in the discussion), and the discussion and ballot were conducted by the 1st vice-chair Professor Liping Zhou (Beijing University: LPZ) and Professor Adele Bertini (University of Firenze: AB), and who ensured that the process adhered strictly to the rules of ICS. However, when the discussion period ended and the Secretary moved to call a vote, both JAZ and MAH objected saying that the discussion period had been of insufficient length and that additional information on the Anthropocene proposal had been excluded. This did not find favour with a substantial number of SQS members who were anxious to move forward to the ballot. In order to meet the request for more time, however, LPZ and AB agreed to extend the discussion period, which was initially expected to end in late December, until the end of January. Voting finally began on 4th February, in spite of further objections from JAZ and MAH based on their view that adequate time was not allowed for discussion. It ended on 4th March at which point the results were declared.
The outcome was a decisive rejection of the Anthropocene proposal: 4 votes in favour; 12 votes against; and 3 abstentions. Three members did not vote, including JAZ and MAH, who then began a campaign questioning the legitimacy of the vote on procedural grounds and alleged contravention the ICS statutes. It is important to stress that there was no question of impropriety against either LPZ or AB, both of whom acted with complete integrity throughout a difficult process and who carried out their duties fully in accordance with the statutory requirements of ICS. Nor can the integrity of the SQS membership be called into question. All who participated in the process are geological scientists of the highest calibre, from a range of countries, and with wide expertise in Quaternary stratigraphy and chronology. It is clear from the comments that were made during the course of the discussion period, that many were unconvinced by the arguments in the AWG proposal, and their misgivings are clearly reflected in the decisive nature of the voting outcome.
The vote of the SQS has been recognized as valid by the ICS Executive, and that recognition has been near unanimously supported (15 yes, 1 abstention, 1 conflict of interest) by the chairs of the seventeen IUGS subcommissions, who are the ICS voting members. Although their proposal has been decisively rejected, the AWG has performed an important service to the scientific community by assembling a wide body of data on human impacts on global systems, and this database will be an essential source of reference well into the future. Moreover, the Anthropocene as a concept will continue to be widely used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. As such, it will remain an invaluable descriptor in human-environment interactions. But it will not be recognised as a formal geological term but will more usefully be employed informally in future discussions of the anthropogenic impacts on Earth’s climatic and environmental systems.
The PNAS paper cited In the I effing love science article features this graphic:
“Temporal changes in anthropogenic fingerprints per year per 100 records detected from global geological archives for the last 7,700 y. (A) Full-range record from 2050 BCE (not shown before 2500 BCE due to no fingerprints). (B) Enlarged record from 1750 to 2010 CE. The light blue line and dashed line denote the maximum values before 1750 CE and between 1750 and the 1930s. Temporal changes in anthropogenic fingerprints per year are shown in SI Appendix, Fig. S7. The original proxy records for detecting fingerprints are provided in Dataset S02 ” Kuwae et al., 2024
OK… Anthropocene: 1940-1980 RIP.
Next?
Reference
Kuwae M, Yokoyama Y, Tims S, Froehlich M, Fifield LK, Aze T, Tsugeki N, Doi H, Saito Y. Toward defining the Anthropocene onset using a rapid increase in anthropogenic fingerprints in global geological archives. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Oct 8;121(41):e2313098121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2313098121. Epub 2024 Sep 23. PMID: 39312679.
The Heartland Institute’s H. Sterling Burnett, Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely will investigate on Episode #128 of The Climate Realism Show. We will also cover Hurricane Helene, who foolish it would be to have an electric car in the path of that storm, the United Kingdom depending on the same kinds of flawed temperature stations the US does, how climate change is not threatening your daily cup of coffee, and more.
It’s climate week in New York City, yet another expensive and carbon-intensive gathering of global chicken littles clucking about the end of the world. More than 6,000 attendees from more than 100 countries converged on the Big Apple to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly Meeting, all the better to coordinate efforts to stop climate change by taking your freedom and money. But is Climate Week losing its cache and are there cracks in support for achieving goals like Net Zero?
The Heartland Institute’s H. Sterling Burnett, Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely will investigate on Episode #128 of The Climate Realism Show. We will also cover Hurricane Helene, who foolish it would be to have an electric car in the path of that storm, the United Kingdom depending on the same kinds of flawed temperature stations the US does, how climate change is not threatening your daily cup of coffee, and more.
Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET so you can leave your questions and comments for the show in the chat.
The Penrose report sadly has missed a big opportunity to highlight to the public the obscene costs they are already incurring for Net Zero, and to propose radical changes while we still have a chance to pursue them.
The CPS is well known for challenging the left wing consensus, so it is doubly disappointing to see this report by John Penrose:
Press Release
As new government data shows that the UK has the most expensive industrial electricity prices in the world, four times those in the US and 46% above the International Energy Agency median, a new CPS report by John Penrose sets out how the UK can reduce the cost of its energy and find a cheaper route to Net Zero:
Despite international gas prices coming back down in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, British households are still struggling with high energy bills because of outdated regulations pushing up costs.
‘A Cheaper Route to Net Zero’ by John Penrose, former Conservative MP and minister, Competition Tsar, leading an independent review of UK competition policy, and co-chair of the Commission for Carbon Competitiveness’ argues that the current system is hostage to the volatile international price of gas, to our detriment, and that regulations dictating how energy firms should behave have become steadily more complicated, detailed, expensive and slow – adding to the cost of energy.
The paper sets out twenty recommendations which could be adopted by the new government to help bring energy bills down while still committing to decarbonisation.
The recommendations are broadly summarised as:
uncoupling energy bills from the price of gas
addressing the intermittency of renewable energy in the most cost-effective way
slashing the cost of energy transmission with measures like ‘local discounting’ for customers who agree to pylons or onshore wind turbines being built near them
cutting red tape and strengthening Ofgem’s commitment to competition
reforming the Energy Price Cap
levelling the playing field for UK manufacturers, including through the introduction of a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)
Penrose long ago signed up to the Net Zero dogma, so is surely the wrong person to write a report on how to cut Net Zero costs.
This new report ignores the elephant in the room. It is Net Zero policy which is responsible for high electricity prices. Fiddling around at the edges, as Penrose suggests, will not alter that fact.
Direct subsidies for renewables, along with the cost of standby capacity already cost £11.5 billion a year. Add on grid balancing costs, carbon tax and FITs, and this swells to at least £15 billion.
This is equivalent to £50/MWh, a fifth of retail prices.
To that can be added the £100 billion of grid upgrades planned over the next ten years, necessitated entirely by Net Zero considerations.
Penrose makes a big play of the fact that power prices have not fallen as sharply as gas prices since the peaks in 2022. He claims that this is the fault of our market system.
But the main factor has been the steady increase in renewable subsidies. Since 2019, these have risen by £3.6 billion, and will continue to rise in years to come.
There are other reasons why we have not seen the full effect of reduced gas prices in our bills.
Firstly the cost of gas power is artificially raised by carbon taxes. Secondly CCGT plants cannot run efficiently due to the intermittency imposed by wind and solar power, which effectively have priority access to the grid. If we used CCGT as a first resort, rather than a last, its cost would be much lower.
There is also the issue of coal to consider. Most EU countries still use plenty of coal for electricity generation – last year it accounted for 12%. This has helped to keep costs down at a time when gas is still dearer than it was before the Ukraine war.
Another factor is the mix of forward and spot buying on the market. The introduction of wind and solar power has led to the spot market being of much greater importance. This has brought much greater price volatility, and arguably higher prices overall. In an ideal world, electricity suppliers would source most of their power on the forward market, which CCGTs could provide at much lower prices as a result.
Perhaps the most ridiculous recommendation is the introduction of a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, ie an import tariff on Chinese wind turbines and solar panels. The idea the UK manufacturers could make them as cheap as China does is absurd. The end result would be higher electricity prices.
If Penrose is serious about cutting electricity bills, there are things that could be done straightaway, for instance:
Cutting carbon prices to zero – this would immediately reduce the cost of gas power, thus having an effect on wholesale prices which tend to be set by the price of gas.
Cutting Renewable Obligation prices
Cancelling all future CfD auctions – if renewables really are as cheap as claimed, they should be able to compete in the market without govt support.
The Penrose report sadly has missed a big opportunity to highlight to the public the obscene costs they are already incurring for Net Zero, and to propose radical changes while we still have a chance to pursue them. Worst of all, they have not told the public how much higher their bills will go in future to meet Miliband’s mad agenda.
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