Day: January 28, 2025

Start the Week as You Mean to Go On

Start the Week is a programme on BBC Radio 4 which, as its name suggests, is broadcast at 9am on Mondays. This week’s edition is titled “Climate Crisis: truth, lies and compromise”. Its contents are summed up in the programme blurb on the BBC website.

Climate Scepticism

By Mark Hodgson

Just stop propaganda

Start the Week is a programme on BBC Radio 4 which, as its name suggests, is broadcast at 9am on Mondays. This week’s edition is titled “Climate Crisis: truth, lies and compromise”. Its contents are summed up in the programme blurb on the BBC website. They fall into three parts. First, there’s a section on a play written by Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy about the drama surrounding the Kyoto Protocol – which the BBC website breathlessly describes as “one of COP’s greatest successes”. I should have known that the BBC would find its way to this, since the Guardian has already, rather predictably, featured it at least four times: 15th June 2024; 25th June 2024 ; 29th November 2024; 25th January 2025.

The second part is a hook to plug Mike Berners-Lee’s latest book, “A Climate of Truth”. The final part also offers a book plug, this time for “In the Shetland Way: Community and Climate Crisis on my Father’s Islands” by Marianne Brown. As regular readers will know, I’m keenly interested in the whole story story of the Viking Energy Wind Farm on Shetland Mainland.

I don’t propose to dwell on the first part of the programme about the Kyoto play, because it was the later discussions that really irritated me. If you’re interested in the play, you can listen to the BBC programme podcast (the link is above). Having said that, the introduction by Adam Rutherford is probably worth transcribing, since it displays the BBC’s bias from the off, so here goes:

Adam Rutherford (AR): Well the science is settled, more or less, and has been for a while – we are in the midst of the climate crisis. [Well, we all know that’s how the BBC sees it, anyway. No dissent allowed]. But the arguments still rage, and we’re paralysed by political disagreement. We will “drill, baby drill” said President Trump in his inaugural speech last week, and then he took the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. Mike Berners-Lee thinks it should be called the poly-crisis, not the climate crisis, as the world faces a multitude of problems from plastic pollution to biodiversity loss, from food insecurity to a tidal wave of political dishonesty. His new book “A Climate of Truth” asks what will it take for us to do better? One answer may come in the form of renewable energy, but in her book, “The Shetland Way”, Marianne Brown looks at how a major wind farm has caused deep disagreement in the community, tearing families and friends apart…. [Then he starts the programme proper with the Kyoto play. At five minutes 30 seconds there was a problem with a microphone, so Adam Rutherford moved the discussion to the others].

AR: I’m going to ask Mike, so we are up to COP29, 30 will be, I think it’s Brazil later this year, but I get a sense from you and your work that you feel pretty cynical about the levels of agreement and their efficacy.

MB-L: Well, we have to stand back and look at 29 COPs now, and whilst that process has been going on, every year greenhouse gas emissions have been getting, going up and up, so in other words we’re accelerating into the problem and, if you put a, you know, a line through the graph of carbon emissions, a line for COP1, you know, you won’t find any trace of any evidence at all that that curve has noticed, er, has noticed that those COPs have been taking place. So, what I thought was so powerful about the play was just this, er, dramatisation of the flat-out sabotage that went on in COP3. It’s exactly, that sabotage has been going on through 29 COPs now, and it’s the reason why we’re accelerating into the problem still, so it’s quite a difficult watch in a way, but very powerful.

AR: And Marianne, just to bring it back to the very local level, because this is about inter-governmental, you know, countries arguing about these things, but, but that sense of the, the, the subterfuge that’s going on in the room is something that you’ve experienced in the Shetlands [sic] in discussing this major wind farm.

MB: Erm, I don’t know about subterfuge, I mean, I think, er, in Shetland there was, there was kind of, my sense was people kind of did want, it was rooted in similar concerns and similar desire for er, new, something new and good for Shetland. It’s just that, er people had different ideas about what that would be. So, some people thought they needed a massive onshore wind farm and some people really strongly felt that it was too big and in the wrong place. And in the end nobody got what they wanted.

AR: Did you see parallels in those discussions with, with what was happening in Kyoto in the play?

MB: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think actually probably the most comparable thing is the local media up in Shetland because it really, from my perspective, looked like people kinda shouting at each other over a parapet, you know, using opinion pieces in the local press. And it’s a really great local press, I should stress. They’ve got a really thriving, wonderful local press. And it was serving a good point, but yeah, absolutely, it felt, like opposition, just shouting at each other. There wasn’t really any space for conciliation. At that point the discussion reverted to the Kyoto play. At 17 minutes, they move on].

AR: Well, we’ll come to discuss the effectiveness of that Agreement [Kyoto] in just a minute, but Marianne, I want to talk about your book, The Shetland Way, because that’s a global agreement (I’m sort of doing air quotes there) but in Shetland, in your story, you’ve got a very tight-knit community – community is everything on Shetland – the agreement was not forthcoming when it came to this major wind farm.

MB: Yeah, erm, so, so my connection to that story er is very personal. So, my dad is from Shetland, but I didn’t, I wasn’t very close to my dad, I didn’t really grow up with him. My parents split when I was very little, erm, and it was only when he died that, erm, I went up to Shetland and ended up getting stuck there cos of lockdown. I had intended to go for his funeral, and be there for a couple of weeks. I ended up being there for seven months, erm, stuck in his house he’d built on his ancestral croft and just outside the front door there’s a ruin where his grandparents had lived. Across the road from that is a house his dad had built where my dad had grown up, and from the kitchen window you can pretty much see the grave? where are a lot of them are buried. So I was kind of like intensely in this space where oh my gosh there are like Browns everywhere. I can’t escape from the Browns, erm, and then I realised towards the end of my stay there that from the periphery of the croft you could see hills where there’s gonna be this huge dramatic change, and that was going to be an onshore wind farm, which was pitched to be the biggest onshore wind farm in the whole of Britain. And this was gonna be transformational for the islands and it was also transformational for me, because I was like, I had been a journalist involved in the environment, erm, covering environmental issues for years and suddenly, and you know normally I’m like yeah, let’s build wind farms. But then I was just thinking oh my gosh, actually I feel really connected to this landscape now and I, there was a new story emerging, for me it was like, what do I really feel about this landscape, and I really want to understand more about it. So then I kind of went on a journey, thinking right, I wanna, I want to speak to people and understand how they connect to this place, how this story emerged, because it was a really fascinating story this windfarm. It had been pitched twenty years ago as, erm, as a community-owned wind farm. There would be, it was basically a plan to replace oil revenues, because they’d had this great deal in the seventies…

AR: Pitched by whom?

MB: So, erm, some key players, erm, in the Council, politicians, business people, in Shetland folk were already involved in the emerging wind industry, so very canny people….

AR: Shetland’s got this long, long history of association with, of, of energy production…oil, whale blubber….

MB: Absolutely. It’s fascinating, for such a small population in the extreme north of Britain, it’s been really central to energy exploitation for, for Britain, er so in the seventies the Coincil managed to broker this really great deal while the good – it was a deal that changed Shetland, erm, where they basically managed to keep a fraction of the revenues from oil and gas in the isles, and that really transformed the economy. So they, obviously the coffers were going down and, erm, they wanted to maintain this level of wealth, so it’s like what’s the next thing we can do, it’s literally blowing in their faces, you know, this wind, you know, it’s the windiest place in Britain, so let’s do something about it. So they’re like let’s build this massive project – it had to be massive because it’s only a little population, 23,000 people. So they had to build an interconnector, and for that to happen it had to be vast, so this project was gonna service 500,000 people, er 500,000 households, I should say. But there’s only 10,000 households in Shetland, so the vast majority of this is going to be exported. So that’s an issue in itself, but initially it was pitched as the community-owned thing. But over the, over the years, you know, a very vocal sizeable group of folk were like, actually no we don’t want this, we don’t agree with this, erm, it’s in the wrong place, erm, it’s too big, and their disruption derailed the plans, so it ended up being SSE majority owned.

AR: So it’s a very complex disagreement and I know that wind farms and wind turbines, the presence of them is often controversial anyway, as eyesores, the various environmental effects that they have, but there was more to it on Shetland as well. Part of it was the debate about whether the peat that they were building them on was a carbon sink or how that worked, so what were the levels of disagreement?

MB: Oh, so many, erm, unfortunately you probably don’t have time for me to talk about them all. But, but, yeah, peat was a really clear one, erm, I mean, the actual project itself was built on degraded peat, erm, so there was an argument for restoring that peatland, but yeah, of course peat, degraded peat can be a carbon emitter because it’s not storing that peat in the ground…

AR: Otherwise peat is a big carbon sink…

MB: Exactly, exactly, and that’s why we’ve got to look after them, but it’s also at risk from climate change, because it dries out the peat and then it cannot hold the water in. So, yeah that was a huge big thing, but there was also the threat to wildlife, wildlife is so important up in Shetland. You know, we’re seeing species extinction as Mike points out in his book, it’s part of the poly crisis, erm, and in Shetland it’s still a kinda, a home for so many species that haven’t, that are still surviving in the little pockets, erm, and it’s like well we need to protect this. It’s so important to Shetland, so what will the effect of the wind turbines be? Will they, like, slice into the flight paths of these really iconic birds and other creatures, you know.

AR: The rain geese.

MB: Yeah, so can I, will you forgive me if I try and do my rain goose impression?

AR: I would love you to:

MB: OK, right, so prepare yourselves, it kinda goes, erm [impression], and that wasn’t an angry chicken, that was me trying to be a red-throated diver, yeah.

AR: Well, I’ll take it on trust that that was accurate, but the arguments that wind turbines, erm, are very damaging to birds, bats and various other flying creatures, that’s a long-standing argument but it was specific, not just for their flight paths, but also for their nesting grounds…

MB: Yeah, their nesting grounds are really important, and red-throated divers, they’re such amazing beautiful birds, and what I really wanted to do was talking about their story as well, was just, try and understand how the landscape and connection to place isn’t just one view. It’s kinda like, like a kaleidoscope you’re turning around, it’s a million things all at once, and it’s changing all the time, but everything’s still connected, so that’s kinda what, what I was using the rain goose for, erm, so the rain goose is really important culturally in Shetland because it’s associated with changes in the weather and there’s a phrase which, oh, I’m gonna try and remember what it is, oh my God, erm….it’s to do with the call and it’s either going to be a downpour, or it’s either gonna be light rain and either you can stay on land or you’ve, you can go out to sea and it’s all to do with that. So that kinda connects actually with how dangerous the land, the land was not that long ago, you know, in the mist you might fall off a cliff, or end up being drowned in a peat bog and these symbols in the landscape are important.

AR: In the complexities of the arguments – because you talk about how families and friends were, were, driven apart, and maybe those rifts will never heal is part of the implication – but, but it’s not binary, it’s not NIMBYism necessarily, there are so many factors involved. How do, I mean, how do the arguments unfold?

MB: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I think from my impression, I wasn’t there, but from piecing together afterwards and talking to people, it was really erm, in sort of 2008 a few years after the initial plans had been put into place that a group of people, a big group of people, they’re called Sustainable Shetland, so they were the main opposition group, they said no we don’t want this, we feel like we haven’t been listened to, and this was a really key theme throughout the book. It was listening, which is really interesting because that’s a lot of what your play talks about as well, Joe. Erm, so it’s, they really felt they hadn’t been consulted, so they were like, nah, and they said they disagreed with the planning process, so they took, erm, they took the Ministers to Court. And that was initially upheld, so there was a big delay in how the project went on, and then eventually it went to appeal, and then it ended up….

AR: But it did happen.

MB: Of course, yes, yeah, the wind farm is operating right now. It went online in the autumn and I went up there and saw the turbines turning away.

AR: Joe, you look like you had something to say.

Joe Murphy [one of the Kyoto playwrights]: I’m not suggesting that what I’m about to ask will solve the particular problem of the Shetland Islands, but I do sometimes wonder if one of the, erm, problems with wind turbines, which I love aesthetically, is that everywhere they are, they’re the same white wind turbine. White, big, huge. And I wonder if part of the community decisions that you’re talking about could be to, to change the colour of them, to design them. Would that be something that would shift the dial slightly?

MB: Er, I don’t think so, I think – I don’t want to speak for everyone in Shetland, obviously – but I think it’s I think the visual aspects are really an interesting question, and I think that it would be a different conversation if we could see the carbon emissions, you know, if carbon emissions were bright pink, and we saw the stuff that was like pumping out of SUVs and pumping out of planesand going into our children’s lungs [digression, it’s CO2, not carbon, and it won’t do any harm to your children’s lungs – though I concede that other things pumping out of SUVs and planes might do so] I don’t think we’d be so fixated on what the wind turbines look like. But, there’s also an aspect of looking at a turbine and, you know, and seeing what you feel, so it’s like, if you look at a turbine and you think this is exporting all the energy, all the profits away from me, this is like an imposition in my landscape, I hate it, I don’t want it here, erm, you know, that’s an obvious connection. But if you see it, and you’re like, I own it, that I get the direct benefits from this, I have control over this, I have agency, it’s a different conversation.

[Digression. I am aware that Marianne Brown interviewed many Shetland people as part of the process of writing her book – certainly more than I have spoken to – but I can’t help feeling, based on my own conversations, that her final comments above completely miss the point].

AR: There’s a technological aspect to this as well, though, because we, you’ve described how we’ve reached the point where the turbines are generating much more energy than is useful for the local environment, but it can’t be stored, it’s, it exceeds exportation, and so the government [no, actually it’s the poor long-suffering taxpayers – the government doesn’t have it’s own money] is now paying them to turn them off, which feels like a Kyoto-style absurdity, because the tech just doesn’t exist.

[Digression – imagine a world in which BBC Verify investigated the billions of pounds being paid to turbine companies in constraints payments. Imagine a world in which the BBC thought to ask whether SSE might have jumped the gun with Viking Energy, in the knowledge that it would make loads of money out of constraints payments because it knew full well that the grid wouldn’t be able to cope with the electricity from Viking from August 2024. Just a thought].

MB: Well, that’s really interesting, as well, like, er, constraints payments, they’re called, erm I was reading a report by an organisation called Regen? And they were saying actually the vast majority of constraint payments go to gas power plants to produce more in order to balance the grid. So we’re not hearing that story, and you talk about the right-wing press Mike, a lot and truth, obviously, the truth is a lot more complicated than wind farms receiving benefits to switch off. The truth is the, the electricity network needs to be functioning properly, also needs renewable energy [er, it doesn’t need renewable energy], and in order for it to catch up, it’s go to pay wind farms to turn up. It’s also got to pay gas plants to produce more, so….

[Imagine a world in which a BBC interviewer interjected at that point to explain that the owners of gas generators are paid to run them inefficiently because they are relegated to a subservient role on the grid – behind unreliable renewables, with the consequence that not only do we pay wind farms to switch off but gas power plants also cost more than necessary. This isn’t a bug, or a glitch, it’s a feature of a grid which incorporates increasing volumes of unreliable renewable energy. One can dream. Instead:]

AR: Mike, are there technological solutions to this, can we develop storage devices, batteries, that will mean that we don’t, when the wind’s not blowing, it’s all good.

MB-L: Yup. The good news about the whole of the climate crisis and the rest of the wider poly crisis is that from a technical perspective it’s challenging, but we can deal with all of that. It turns out not to be the technology that’s the problem. I mean, you know, what I love about your book, Marianne, is – one of the things I love about it – is the way that you unpick, you know, all the detail and complexity that’s required to make a high quality decision, erm, around, around all this. It’s such a different way of making decisions from the way, you know, the way we’re classically talking about the climate crisis.

[Note, he hasn’t answered the question].

AR: Before we get onto the tech, which is a big part of the conversation with you Mike, I just wanna ask Marianne where, where it stands in Shetland right now. It’s operating, it’s generating energy, how’s the community?

MB: How’s the community? Well, I haven’t been up there, erm, for a while but, I mean, in speaking to the, the journalists up there who’ve been interviewing me, I think the importance of this book is that it’s starting a conversation again, and because I don’t take a side in it it’s quite, it’s been encouraging that this might be something that, you know can be a positive point of er discussion.

AR: OK. Well, Mike, you’re the scientist, the climate scientist and have been all of your life [sic]. Climate of Truth is your book, erm, you’ve just mentioned that the, the technology exists. We are not in a, in a point of time where the climate crisis [do they get paid extra for inserting the words “climate crisis” at every opportunity?] just cannot be dealt with because we don’t know how to?

MB-L: No, there are still some little gaps for complete clean energy transition, but it’s not the technology that’s the bottleneck at all. So, I’ve been working away on, on climate for, erm, probably 20 years I guess, so full time on it, and you know, we’ve been going round this circle of the scientists screaming, you know, talking ever more loudly about how much trouble we’re in and how serious it is and how urgent it is, and the politicians, you know, broadly speaking, erm, you know, continuing not to take much notice [sic]. If you look at climate, at emissions curve, it’s just going up and up and up as if we had never noticed, if humans had never noticed a climate crisis, so what I don’t want do is get to my kind of death bed saying well I’ve spent my life, you know, er, just, just going round in circles on this, or you know, and I don’t want to, I don’t want to be saying well, I told you so. So, we have, if we’re gonna start getting anywhere, then we have to face the fact that we’re not getting anywhere. It’s not that, erm, you know Antonio Guterres and the UN said, you know, er er, we’re making progress but not fast enough. Actually, the facts are against him. We’re not making progress. We are, every year we’re making the world worse by a larger amount than the year before.

[That last is a good point, but he still hasn’t answered the question about how technology solves this for us].

AR: OK, so before, before we get to what you argue are the real problems, just briefly can you tell us what the technological fixes are that, that could dig us out of this crisis if we got our act together.

[Credit to Adam Rutherford for noticing that the question hasn’t been answered and sticking to it].

MB-L: OK, so the first thing that we don’t talk about enough is we need to use less energy at the global level [oh, does that mean that there isn’t a technological fix?]. Er, then, when we’re doing that, we need to constrain the fossil fuel coming out of the ground. The climate doesn’t care actually how many wind turbines we have, what the climate cares about [er, the climate isn’t a sentient being, it doesn’t care about anything at all. Shouldn’t a climate scientist know that?] is how little fossil fuel we’re burning, and the wind turbines on their own don’t leave the fossil fuel in the ground, so we need a constraint on fossil fuel usage. And actually – and extraction – and that’s what the climate COPs have so far failed to deliver, and the reason we don’t have a carbon price or a constraint on fossul fuel is because the very powerful fossil fuel er lobby understands erm that er we’ll allow policy-makers more less to say and do anything they like as long as it won’t constrain the fossil fuel coming out of the ground.

[Did you notice? He still hasn’t answered the question. And it seems to have worked. Adam Rutherford is side-tracked in his next question].

AR: Just unpick this idea that the more renewables, the more wind turbines, that we have, that doesn’t have an effect on keeping fossil fuels in the ground. This is Jeevens Paradox.

MB-L: Jevens Paradox, yeah. So, the dynamics of growth when you and I explore this in some depth in the book are that when you add, er, a new energy source, you know, you create, er, you create a rise in energy demand and you create, as we become more efficient with things, we also tend to do more of it at an even faster rate than we become efficient at it. So, unless you constrain the actual environmental impact, erm, what you find is that the dynamics of growth are, things like wind turbines, we just have them as well as the fossil fuel. So at the moment we’re growing our, we’re growing our renewable capacity, but we’re also growing our fossil fuel extraction at the same time and that’s not good for the planet.

[I still haven’t heard what the technological soultion is].

AR: You’re asking people to radically change their lifestyles, you’re asking governments to behave in entirely different ways. And, I, you know, and most right-thinking people don’t doubt that the climate crisis is real and is indeed an emergency [cheers, Adam, that’s me on the naught step, then], but you have to have some sort of notion of human nature to say that we can, that we are capable of changing our lifestyles in significant ways.

MB-L: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, erm, so my book is about saying well we’re not getting anywhere so we have, if we want to understand what it will take to get somewhere, we have to stand right back from the problem. We have to see it in new ways from the ways we’re classically looking at it. And we have to dig right underneath the surface, right down through the layers of the reasons behind the reasons why we’re not getting anywhere. Learn from our failure, join up all different parts of the issue and see where that takes us to. And, you know, the big picture is that we’ve arrived in this era – some people call it the Anthropocene – in which it’s suddenly humans that are the big powerful force, erm, on affecting the ecosystem. And yet everything about how we do life, how we do economics, how we run our politics, how we make our decisions, all of that has been honed in a previous era in which the world was a robust place – robust compared to anything we could do to it – so it’s unsurprising that we need to do some, some re-engineering of how we do life. It’s a deep and fundamental change. We have to see that.

[Did he actually say anything there? I’m still waiting for the technological solution].

AR [who definitely seems to have given up on trying to get an answer]: It struck me that this is a core theme in the disagreements in Joe’s play in Kyoto, particularly the argument between America and China, where the Chines – then a developing nation – were saying you’re asking us to not have the joys that you’ve enjoyed for the last 200 years, and not have economic progress as a result of that.

JM: Absolutely right. You know, China was saying, you’ve become a super-power because of fossil fuels and now you’re saying that we can’t have that chance, that’s insane. And you can understand that there is a certain logic within that….

[At which point I also gave up. Nobody will criticise China; I don’t know why. It seems that only the developed world has to change its ways. We were promised a technological solution that would make it OK, but instead I was told that we have to use less energy. The technological solution wasn’t forthcoming, despite numerous attempts by Adam Rutherford to elicit it. I have a lot of time for Adam Rutherford. I even have one of his books on my book shelves. But I ended that programme (or as much of it as I could be bothered to listen to) wondering why he did this. Yet another BBC climate crisis piece of propaganda that really enlightened us not one jot. I also hoped for a deeper exploration of the Viking Energy debacle on Shetland, but I didn’t get that either. Not many marks out of ten, I’m afraid].

New Findings Show No Decline in the Strength of the Gulf Stream Since the 1960s

Most people have seen or are aware of the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow and its story of disruption to the Atlantic Gulf Stream causing catastrophic weather in the Northern Hemisphere. Climate alarmists out to impoverish the world with their command-and-control Net Zero fantasies have been dining out on the scare ever since.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

Most people have seen or are aware of the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow and its story of disruption to the Atlantic Gulf Stream causing catastrophic weather in the Northern Hemisphere. Climate alarmists out to impoverish the world with their command-and-control Net Zero fantasies have been dining out on the scare ever since. In July 2023, Georgina Rannard of the BBC reported that “scientists say” a weakened Gulf Stream, which is a major part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), could collapse by 2025. Such is the rush to induce mass climate psychosis, mainstream media might not find the time, or have the inclination, to report new findings from a group of scientists that found the overall strength of the AMOC has shown no decline since the 1960s.

Published by Nature this month, the scientists state they came to their conclusion after examining heat transfers between the sea and the atmosphere. Between 26.5°N and 50°N it was found that heat transfers over decadal and centennial timescales were “strongly linked” to AMOC-driven northward heat transfers. At 26.5°N the AMOC has not weakened from 1963 to 2017, “although substantial variability exists at all latitudes”. Most of the alarmist copy comes from examining proxies such as sea surface temperature anomalies, but the scientists note that these records “are not long enough to differentiate between low-frequency variability and long-term trends”. Alarmist copy is often little more than opinions based on short-term variability. Junk science, in other words, of the highest order.

This point is borne out by other scientific work that fails to get a mention in the legacy media. In August last year a group of scientists highlighted that alarm over the collapsing Gulf Stream was contingent on unreliable climate models, and any collapse could occur from now to infinity. In other words, nobody knows, not least because the uncertainties are too large “to predict tipping times of major Earth system components from historical data”. Meanwhile, a group of scientists working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently discovered that the huge flow of tropical water that powers through the Florida Straits and is a key component of the Gulf Stream has remained “remarkably stable” for over 40 years.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is all-in on the Gulf Stream scare forecasting claim that it is “very likely” that the entire AMOC will weaken in the near future. But this view was challenged in a 2023 paper published by the Royal Society. The authors found that climate models that are stuck with an assumption that humans can and do control the AMOC have been wrong for decades. Neither past nor current models are successful in representing actual AMOC observational data. They go on to add: “If it is not possible to reconcile climate models and observations of the AMOC in the historical period, then we believe the statement about future confidence about AMOC evolution should be revised. Low confidence in the past should mean lower confidence in the future.”

Much of the world’s climate is caused by a transfer of heat from the tropics towards the poles. The AMOC is thought to account for around 20-30% of the global meridional heat transfer to the higher latitudes in the atmosphere and the ocean. The evidence that the recent tiny increases in temperature that might or might not be attributed to humans will cause the huge AMOC to collapse is almost non-existent. Over the last 120,000 years we know there have been at least 24 times that temperatures in Greenland have suddenly risen by up to 15°C within a few decades. The natural forces of nature ensure the climate always changes and there is little humans can do to alter it.

Not that such thoughts would have troubled most of the British MPs that debated the insane – some might say evil – Climate and Nature Bill that failed to make progress last Friday in Parliament. This bill sought to reduce hydrocarbon use in the UK by about 90% in around a decade – a disaster that would have led to almost certain societal collapse and a return to brutal primitivism. In the line of duty, your correspondent was forced to watch over three hours of a ‘debate’ that would have shamed a sixth form full of Gretas. Almost every scare imaginable was on display without a scintilla of evidence presented to back them up. The entire clown show could keep any investigating and debunking journalist gainfully employed for months.

But of course to take the validity of these claims seriously is to slightly miss the point. They are the product of opinions and rigged climate models but it does not matter that they are mostly risible nonsense. The most important thing is that they are believed. They are broadcast to push a political agenda – to scare and brainwash. The science is ‘settled’ and beyond debate. Questioning the Ministry of Truth dogma is unacceptable because the future of the planet and generations to come poses an existential risk. That is why the BBC publishes rubbish ‘climate change’ stories about sightings of bumblebees in winter when the temperature in Scotland briefly rises to 10°C (popping out briefly for a wee, according to Britannica). That is why many people believe that the Gulf Stream will collapse the day after tomorrow.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Al Gore’s ‘Climate Reality Project’ claims: ‘Super Cold? Thank the Climate Crisis’ – ‘As counter intuitive as it may seem…Arctic warming appears to be’ altering ‘polar jet stream…sending bitterly cold Arctic air diving unusually far south’

Despite the overall trend of warming winters, cold weather and snow can (and does) still happen as the globe continues to warm – as we’ve seen just this week and sometimes in areas not accustomed to it.

In fact, as counter intuitive as it may seem, rapid warming in the Arctic, a result of global warming, may be partially responsible for some unusual cold outbreaks.

From Climate Depot

By Marc Morano

https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/super-cold-thank-climate-crisis

Excerpt:

Despite the overall trend of warming winters, cold weather and snow can (and does) still happen as the globe continues to warm – as we’ve seen just this week and sometimes in areas not accustomed to it.

In fact, as counter intuitive as it may seem, rapid warming in the Arctic, a result of global warming, may be partially responsible for some unusual cold outbreaks.

Arctic warming is believed to be having an impact on the polar jet stream – that band of typically strong winds some 30,000 feet above ground level where jets usually fly. The jet stream impacts the movement of storm systems and serves as the boundary between warm and cold air masses around the globe.

Arctic warming appears to be creating a slower and wavier polar jet stream that occasionally sends bitterly cold Arctic air diving unusually far south into usually mild places like along the US Gulf Coast.

So rather than the unusual cold in some places being proof that global warming isn’t happening, it’s actually just another example for how human-induced warming is wreaking havoc with Earth’s ocean-atmosphere system.

#

The Climate Reality Project: “Just this week, much of the United States saw dangerously frigid temperatures and a historic snowstorm blanketed places like Houston, New Orleans, and the Florida panhandle.

As counter intuitive as it may seem, rapid warming in the Arctic, a result of global warming, may be partially responsible for some unusual cold outbreaks.

Arctic warming is believed to be having an impact on the polar jet stream – that band of typically strong winds some 30,000 feet above ground level where jets usually fly. The jet stream impacts the movement of storm systems and serves as the boundary between warm and cold air masses around the globe.

Arctic warming appears to be creating a slower and wavier polar jet stream that occasionally sends bitterly cold Arctic air diving unusually far south into usually mild places like along the US Gulf Coast.”

Like clockwork
Global warming caused Florida’s snow pic.twitter.com/HRHDz95nmg

— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) January 23, 2025

Brian, let me explain something to you.

This cold air outbreak and snowstorm has absolutely nothing to do with human-caused climate change. In a warmer world, there would be less events like this because you need a healthy supply of Arctic air, which according to global… https://t.co/zMhoqgpxVX

— Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) January 22, 2025

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-dnt=”true” align=”center”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Listen here son. <br><br>I have learned some meteorology — I get my degree in it in 15 weeks. <br><br>And, what you said is incorrect. <br><br>Let&#39;s unpack it all here. . . <br><br>, . . .<br><br>The hypothesis of “jet stream weirding”… <a href=”https://t.co/B0LuuAiBd6″>https://t.co/B0LuuAiBd6</a&gt; <a href=”https://t.co/T2kxQ0hxfq”>pic.twitter.com/T2kxQ0hxfq</a></p>&mdash; Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) <a href=”https://twitter.com/ChrisMartzWX/status/1882453107998851379?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>January 23, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

The latest climate saga is that the recent Gulf Coast snowstorm and Arctic outbreak impacting the central and eastern United States occurred, not of climate warming, but of it.

This is a load of nonsense scientifically and makes no sense… pic.twitter.com/TNWHJBC7iw

— Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) January 26, 2025

The Week after Trump 2.0: EU suddenly realizes they have too many Green rules

Trump has only been President for a week, and already policies on the far side of the world are shifting. Just like that, the European Union has realized they might have too many green regulations.

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Trump has only been President for a week, and already policies on the far side of the world are shifting. Just like that, the European Union has realized they might have too many green regulations.

It’s only a “leaked draft” of a five year economic plan  — but the favored hyperbolic term du jour “unprecedented” now applies to deregulation, not climate change:  ““This Commission will deliver an unprecedented simplification effort…”. And apparently, next months unprecedented effort is just the first round of simplifications.

The draft document says they need to adapt to “new realities” — like possibly that the US economy is about to unshackle itself from the Net Zero ball-and-chain-fantasy and eclipse the EU.

EU’s new economic vision is speaking to Green Deal critics

A draft document shows Brussels putting deregulation before decarbonization.

Zia Weise, Politico

BRUSSELS — The European Union’s new economic “compass” has a north star the burgeoning movement to revoke stringent green rules will love.

A leaked draft of the European Commission’s competitiveness compass — an economic doctrine to guide the EU executive’s work for the coming five years — points toward widespread deregulation targeting the European Green Deal in particular.

Naturally, the EU will “stay the course” on its climate targets (that’s what they all say, as they back away). But the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk demanded a “full and critical” review of the EU’s Green Deal last week and laid the cards out about as bluntly as anyone could:

“If we go bankrupt no-one will care about the world’s environment any more,” Tusk said, calling for an honest, full and “very critical review of all regulations, including those arising from the Green Deal”.

Tusk wants any review to identify and change EU laws that may lead to higher energy prices. “There is, for example, the issue of ETS 2 in front of us,” he said, singling out the separate trading system covering emissions from road transport and heating fuels, which is scheduled to launch in 2027. — EU must be honest about Green Deal  — The Argus

Unthinkably, Tusk even appeared to suggest that the Green Deal had caused high energy prices:

He called for a “review of all legal acts including those under the Green Deal” and for “courage to change those rules that might result in prohibitively high energy prices,” attacking, in particular, a carbon fee on fossil fuels used to heat homes and power cars coming into force in 2027.  — Politico

France is also asking the EU to delay the corporate sustainability rules. The French “far-right” (sensible) Jordan Bardella wants to “tear down the European Green Deal”. He is urging conservative parties to work together to kill off the Green Deal altogether.

In the end Trump may kill Green movements all over the world, not by invading, but through free speech, capitalism and competition. That’s why they hate him so much. The whole levitating fantasy of global weather control could only be maintained if every other western nation kept up the Cosplay game.

Hat tip to Tallbloke.

How To Rescind the Endangerment Finding in a Way That Will Stick

As discussed in my previous post, one of President Trump’s first-day Executive Orders — the one entitled “Unleashing American Energy” — directed a reconsideration of EPA’s so-called “Endangerment Finding” (EF) of 2009. The EF is the EPA regulatory action where it claimed to determine that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” qualify as “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act because they are a “danger to public health and welfare.” President Trump’s January 20 EO directs that EPA, within 30 days, submit “recommendations to the Director of OMB on the legality and continuing applicability of the Administrator’s findings.”

From Manhattan Contrarian

By Francis Menton

As discussed in my previous post, one of President Trump’s first-day Executive Orders — the one entitled “Unleashing American Energy” — directed a reconsideration of EPA’s so-called “Endangerment Finding” (EF) of 2009. The EF is the EPA regulatory action where it claimed to determine that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” qualify as “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act because they are a “danger to public health and welfare.” President Trump’s January 20 EO directs that EPA, within 30 days, submit “recommendations to the Director of OMB on the legality and continuing applicability of the Administrator’s findings.”

Since the EF is the foundation underlying all the Biden-era regulations restricting and suppressing fossil fuels, you can be sure that any attempt to eliminate it will be met with a full-bore litigation attack from the forces of the crazy left. Can the EF really be rescinded in a way that will stand up to these attacks?

Absolutely, it can. Let me address a few of the issues.

Massachusetts v. EPA

This is the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision that held that EPA was required to make a determination as to the status of CO2 and other greenhouse gases as “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act. Here is a link to the Supreme Court’s opinion. Some commenters have suggested that Mass v. EPA must be reversed before the EF can be undone.

I disagree. I’m not saying that Mass v. EPA is a model of clarity, and there is some language in it that would suggest the opposite. However, I think that the language at the very end of Justice Stevens’s majority opinion is the holding:

We need not and do not reach the question whether on remand EPA must make an endangerment finding, or whether policy concerns can inform EPAís actions in the event that it makes such a finding. . .. We hold only that EPA must ground its reasons for action or inaction in the statute.

Thus Mass v. EPA did not determine that CO2 was a “pollutant” as defined in Section 202 of the Clean Air Act, but only directed EPA to determine whether it was or was not. Thus a new well-reasoned determination by EPA that CO2 and the other GHGs are not pollutants would not violate that case.

West Virginia v. EPA

The other important Supreme Court decision bearing on the EF is West Virginia v. EPA, the 2022 decision where the Supreme Court held that EPA’s Clean Power Plan was beyond its regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act. The basis for the Court’s decision was what it called the Major Questions Doctrine, by which it held that a “transformative expansion” of EPA’s regulatory power would require a clear direction from Congress, which had not been given.

In 2024, despite West Virginia v. EPA, and without any further clear direction from Congress, EPA went ahead and finalized two gigantic new regulations to restrict use of fossil fuels, one regarding power plants and the other regarding automobiles. They essentially decided to dare the Supreme Court to try to stop them (much like Biden with his repeated efforts to forgive student loans).

West Virginia v. EPA did not explicitly overrule Massachusetts v. EPA, but the two are fundamentally in tension. The big difference is that the Court that decided Massachusetts v. EPA has since been largely transformed in personnel. Of the nine justices on the Court in 2007, only three remain — Roberts, Thomas and Alito — and all of them dissented in Mass v. EPA. The five justices in the majority plus Scalia have been replaced by three conservatives (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett) and three liberals.

On today’s Court, I think it highly likely that a majority will uphold a well-reasoned rescission of the EF, and will not think it necessary to overrule Mass v. EPA.

Substance of the rescinding determination

Three main points need to be made in an EPA regulatory action rescinding the EF: (1) Empirical evidence accumulated since the original EF invalidates the finding and makes it impossible to conclude that CO2 and other GHGs constitute a “danger” as required by the statute; (2) due to huge increases since 2009 in CO2 and other GHG emissions outside the U.S. and thus outside the ability of EPA to regulate, no regulations promulgated by EPA could have any meaningful impact on the overall atmospheric concentrations of the gases, and (3) efforts by EPA to control the climate by restricting CO2 and other GHGs, by contrast, would almost certainly have drastic adverse effects on public health and welfare by, for example, destabilizing the electrical grid and causing blackouts, driving up the cost of electricity or mobility, bringing about massive battery fires and explosions, and lots of other such things.

Only the first of these three points deals with the “science” of whether GHGs do or do not cause any significant global warming. Most important is that this argument needs to be written carefully to not take on more than needs to be taken on. To rescind the EF, EPA does not need to contend that GHGs will not or cannot cause any global warming. Rather, they can put the burden of proof on the other side to show that GHGs emitted under EPA’s regulatory jurisdiction will inevitably cause dangerous warming. EPA need only conclude that there is no sufficient proof of that.

Framed in that way, this is not a complicated or difficult task. There are hundreds of scientific papers in the peer reviewed literature since 2009 accumulating empirical evidence that the dangers predicted 15 years ago have not happened. For example:

  • There have been no upward trends in hurricanes, droughts, floods, tornadoes, wild fires, or other dangerous weather events.
  • Sea level has not risen beyond the slow rate of rise over the prior century.
  • Sea ice has not declined as predicted. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have not meaningfully changed.

EPA can just create lists of dozens or hundreds of such scientific papers, and perhaps add a quote of a line or two from the abstract for each.

Points (2) and (3) are actually more important to the rescission than the point about the science of atmospheric warming. Trying to replace the fossil fuel energy system with something untried and untested actually does pose many real and immediate dangers — far more real, immediate, and dangerous than anything that might result from a hypothetical warming of a degree or two a hundred years from now. California is only up to about 30-40% of its electricity from wind and solar and yet has suffered multiple instances of rolling blackouts. The extent of these blackouts has been relatively small only because California has the ability to import fossil-fuel-generated power from neighboring states like Arizona and Nevada. If EPA eliminates that safety valve by banning fossil fuel power plants in all the states, the blackouts will become lengthy and catastrophic. Similarly, batteries are proposed as the backup for intermittency of wind and solar generation. California and New York have both begun building massive battery farms to serve this role, although neither state has yet reached nearly 1% of the battery capacity, they would need to back up a predominantly wind/solar generation system. But even with that small amount of batteries, both have suffered massive and explosive fires at their battery facilities. California had such a fire just last week at the facility known as Moss Landing in Monterey County. This was the fourth large fire at the Moss Landing facility over the past few years.

I actually have a high degree of confidence that a reconsideration of the EF will be successful. Likely, that will sweep away all of the restrictions on fossil fuels that have been put in place via regulation during the Biden years. One more thing: Once CO2 and GHGs are declared to no longer by “pollutants,” all of the billions of dollars of government grants under the Inflation Reduction Act to “reduce GHG pollution” can be suspended and never spent.

UPDATE, January 27, 2025:

Some commenters raise the issue of whether something in the Inflation Reduction Act of August 2022 may have changed the playing field. I don’t think so. The summary of the reason is that the IRA does not amend Section 202 of the Clean Air Act, let alone even attempt to provide the clear direction from Congress necessary under West Virginia v. EPA to enable EPA to transform the economy by severely restricting CO2 (let alone other GHGs).

Here is the text of the IRA from the Congressional website. You need to go all the way to the end, in Sections 60101 to 60108, to find the language that people are talking about. These sections of the IRA add new sections 132, et seq., to the Clean Air Act, which new sections provide funding and grants (aggregating in the tens of billions of dollars) for various sorts of “greenhouse gas” reduction programs. The language in question appears in a definition of the term “greenhouse gas,” which is repeated word for word in each of the sections:

“GREENHOUSE GAS. — The term ‘greenhouse gas’ means the air pollutants carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, per fluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.”

Thus they have, in a definition, applied the word “pollutant” to the six gases. But here’s what they did not do:

  • They did not repeal or modify in any way Section 202(a)(1) of the Clean Air Act. That section does not give EPA blanket authority to regulate any and all substances that may get the label “pollutant,” but only “any air pollutant . . . which in [the Administrator’s] judgment cause [sic], or contribute [sic] to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” Thus, the statute remains such that there must be an endangerment finding to support regulation at least of CO2 (the other five gases have different issues).
  • They did not make any legislative finding that any of the six gases, and particularly CO2, causes or may be anticipated to cause any danger to human health and welfare. (This is a much bigger deal than you might think, because all kinds of legislative findings are used to make completely false determinations that the courts then will not second-guess.)

Also, note that the IRA was a so-called “reconciliation” bill that was able to clear the Senate with only 51 votes (one of which was a tie-breaker from VP Harris) only because it was not allowed to contain anything but financial and budgetary provisions. Thus an amendment to the Clean Air Act to give EPA explicit new authority to regulate the six GHGs would clearly have been non-germane and not allowed into the statute.

Our excellent commenter Beta Blocker points to an article from the Environmental Law Reporter from 2023 titled “The Clean Air Act Amendments of 2022: Clean Air, Climate Change, and the Inflation Reduction Act,” by Greg Dotson and Dustin Maghamfar (D&M). In the article, D&M take the position that the sections of the IRA that amended the Clean Air Act “to make explicit that GHGs are air pollutants and that reducing them is a core objective of the Act.” In my opinion, that is D&M engaging in wishful thinking and attempting to create a record, not found in the statute, to try to “Trump-proof” the EF.

Note that a footnote on the first page of the article identifies Dotson and Maghamfar respectively as having been the Chief Counsels to the Senate and House Committees that developed the language of the Clean Air Act amendments included in the IRA. In other words, they are giving their partisan version of something they were trying to sneak through in the IRA which the rules of reconciliation specifically did not allow to be included.

Finally, there is no way that these definitions of the term “greenhouse gas” constitute the kind of “clear direction” from Congress for EPA to engage in “transformational change” of the economy, that would be required for EPA to suppress the use of fossil fuels in the economy.

So, I say to Messrs. Dotson and Maghamfar, good try, but the odds of your sneaky gambit succeeding in saving the EF are slim to none.

The 1998 Boxing Day Storm

There have been attempts to compare Storm Eowyn with the Boxing Day Storm of 1998.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

There have been attempts to compare Storm Eowyn with the Boxing Day Storm of 1998.

Such comparisons are absurd, as the STV News Archive reported a few years ago:

Do you remember the great Boxing Day storm of 1998?

A powerful storm struck Scotland on December 26, 1998 causing widespread damage across the country.

As it hit Ireland, forecasters at the time said it was the most rapid pressure drop ever recorded.

The storm named ‘Hurricane Stephen’ developed quickly and tracked rapidly northeast on the morning of the 26th.

By midnight it was over north east Scotland. Strathclyde Fire and Rescue took over 700 emergency calls.

Large parts of Scotland lost access to electricity, with some supplies not restored until the New Year.

Six electricity companies in Great Britain declared a systems emergency as a result of the damage.

Winds hit around 110mph at Prestwick Airport with speeds of 93mph recorded in Glasgow where a large part of St Stephen’s Church’s spire in Bath Street came crashing down.

The reactors at Hunterston B nuclear power station were also shut down when power was lost.

Severe winds and sea spray had disabled all four power lines to the site. The nuclear power station was forced to declare an emergency.

https://archive.news.stv.tv/archive/1433940-do-you-remember-the-great-boxing-day-storm-of-1998.html

The storm had already brought 110 mph winds to N Ireland. The highest gusts there last week were 92 mph at Killowen.

As for Scotland, the Met Office reported gusts of over 100 mph in places and apart from the 100 mph measured on a hilltop, nowhere got anywhere near 90 mph during Eowyn.

But the interesting thing is the statement made by the Met Office shortly after the Boxing Day storm to the inquiry into electricity supply interruptions:

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/ofgem-publications/47826/2553-boxstorm.pdf

So according to the Met Office at the time, storms like Boxing Day were likely to occur every four years on average somewhere or other in Britain, common events in other words.

Ironically the Met Office also stated that the probability of such storms would double in future!

What used to be a run of the mill event now appears to be a rarity!

When a Forecast Flops: Post-Hoc Rationalization in Climate Science

This misalignment extends to his forecasts. Mann and his team predicted an “extremely active” hurricane season, with a most likely estimate of 33 named storms. Instead, the season produced just 18—or 19 if we generously include a borderline case. For perspective, this falls well below Mann’s projected range of 27–39 storms. Not exactly the “record-shattering” season anticipated.

space view of the American Ian hurricane in Florida state of United States showing the effects of climate change on cities of America. 3D illustration.

From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

Michael E. Mann’s Forecast Fiasco

But only today did I become aware of his own post-mortem analysis. Mann’s reflection on the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season provides a fascinating case study in how climate forecasts go astray—and how their authors work to reframe misses as meaningful contributions. While the piece starts by heralding an “active, destructive, and deadly” hurricane season, its true focus is a far less successful story: the failure of Mann’s own predictions to match reality.

The Setup: Bold Forecasts, But a Lackluster Outcome

Mann opens with dramatic language about “unprecedented” hurricanes and their links to warming oceans. His piece asserts that human-caused warming is driving stronger storms, citing rapid intensification in specific cases like Hurricane Milton (which reached 185 mph winds) and even speculating about the need for a hypothetical “Category 6” classification.

Indeed Milton nearly breached the threshold of 192 mph sustained winds argued by one recent study to constitute a whole new “category six” caliber of hurricanes that has emerged in an era of unprecedented ocean warmth. A separate study estimated that the deadly flooding in the southeastern U.S. from hurricane Helene was increased by 50% by human-caused warming.

https://michaelmann.net/content/reflections-2024-atlantic-hurricane-season

However, these claims about stronger hurricanes don’t align with the latest findings from the IPCC. The 6th Assessment Report (AR6) explicitly states that evidence for long-term trends in hurricane frequency and intensity is inconclusive, with no detectable increase in global cyclone frequency and mixed regional trends. While short-term variability may yield extreme seasons, the broader picture contradicts Mann’s insistence that climate change is creating reliably stronger storms. His narrative relies on cherry-picking extreme cases rather than examining the full record.

,Page-90_-from-IPCC_AR6_WGI_Chapter12highlightHerunterladen

This misalignment extends to his forecasts. Mann and his team predicted an “extremely active” hurricane season, with a most likely estimate of 33 named storms. Instead, the season produced just 18—or 19 if we generously include a borderline case. For perspective, this falls well below Mann’s projected range of 27–39 storms. Not exactly the “record-shattering” season anticipated.

The Excuses: Blame the Variables, Ignore the Model

Rather than owning the shortcomings of their forecasts, Mann and his colleagues turn to a familiar playbook: citing unpredictable variables to explain their miss. They blame the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO)—a well-known atmospheric cycle—for suppressing storm formation during the crucial July and August peak. Saharan dust outbreaks are also invoked as a contributing factor.

So there’s no real discrepancy when it comes to the latter half of the season. It was basically as active as predicted. The puzzle is why July and August were so quiet despite clearly favorable seasonal large-scale climate conditions. This is where one runs into complications with intraseasonal variability. Of particular relevance is the so-called Madden-Julian oscillation or simply “MJO” to its friends. The MJO is a roughly 40-50 day oscillation in the tropical atmospheric circulation which influences the location of convection, which shifts east and west over the course of a single 40-50 day cycle. When the center of convection coincides with the tropical Atlantic, conditions are more favorable for tropical cyclogenesis.

https://michaelmann.net/content/reflections-2024-atlantic-hurricane-season

While these factors undoubtedly play a role, they are hardly “unknowns.” Both phenomena have long been recognized as influential in tropical weather. Shouldn’t a sophisticated statistical model, touted as one of the “most accurate,” account for such routine variability? Mann’s reliance on these explanations reads less as scientific insight and more as retroactive justification.

Alternative Models: When One Forecast Fails, Pivot to Another

In a curious twist, Mann highlights an alternative model that predicted 19.9 storms—a remarkably close match to the observed total. Yet he admits that this model is generally less reliable than the one that failed spectacularly. Touting the success of a secondary, less accurate framework seems like an exercise in hedging bets rather than improving the science. If your “backup” prediction worked better, why not use it as the primary model going forward? This sleight-of-hand raises more questions than it answers.

There is one other noteworthy detail here. Our group makes an alternative forecast in which tropical sea surface temperature (SST) in the main development region (MDR) is replaced with what we call “relative SST”, defined as the difference between MDR SST and the average SST throughout the entire tropics, which some researchers have argued might be a better predictor of Atlantic hurricane activity. While our previous analyses have found that this alternative model yields less skillful predictions, it is notable that this year it yielded a much more accurate prediction of 19.9 +/- 4.5 total named storms that was remarkably close to the seasonal total.

Stronger Hurricanes? Not So Fast

A particularly bold claim in Mann’s reflection is that human-caused warming is directly responsible for the rapid intensification and increased destructiveness of storms. He points to Milton and Helene as evidence, even citing studies that argue for the necessity of a new “Category 6” hurricane classification.

However, this narrative overlooks the IPCC’s cautious stance on the issue. The IPCC AR6 finds only low confidence in detectable increases in hurricane intensity globally. While there is moderate confidence in increased peak wind speeds for a subset of tropical cyclones, these trends are not consistently observed across all ocean basins. Moreover, the number of global cyclones has either decreased or remained flat. Mann’s narrative about a world of ever-stronger storms is more rhetorical than rigorously scientific.

Here is the reality of Tropical Cyclone trends from Roger Pielke Jr, and Ryan Maue

“We have identified considerable interannual variability in the frequency of global hurricane landfalls; but within the resolution of the available data, our evidence does not support the presence of significant long-period global or individual basin linear trends for minor, major, or total hurricanes within the period(s) covered by the available quality data.”

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/just-the-facts-on-global-hurricanes

Broader Implications: Science or Spin?

Mann’s post inadvertently highlights a key issue in climate science: the gap between predictive confidence and observed outcomes. When forecasts fail, climate scientists often claim the climate system is no longer behaving predictably—implying their models are still right, just incapable of adapting to a “changing system.” This raises a critical question: If the system is behaving unpredictably, how can forecasts demand such unwavering trust, let alone justify sweeping climate policies?

Mann’s reflection ends with an ominous flourish: “There could well be far more unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse.” While such warnings are useful for grabbing headlines, they risk undermining public confidence when paired with unfulfilled predictions. If we’re not sure what to expect, how can anyone claim certainty about the impacts of climate change? This is less science and more speculative storytelling.

Final Thoughts: Missed Marks and Moving Goalposts

The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season wasn’t the catastrophe Mann’s models forecasted. While the storms that did form were destructive, the season as a whole fell far short of expectations. This raises a critical issue: When predictions fail, should we be refining models or doubling down on fear-driven narratives?

Mann’s reflections suggest the latter approach. His insistence that missed forecasts still “teach us important lessons” sidesteps the more obvious conclusion: overconfidence in flawed models does more harm than good. Rather than admitting these forecasts have limits, he suggests the rules of the climate system itself may be changing. It’s a convenient excuse but an unconvincing one.

For climate science to have any credibility, it needs to grapple honestly with its uncertainties—not reframe every miss as proof of an unknowable, ever-shifting reality. Until then, one can’t help but see this as another chapter in the growing credibility crisis of climate forecasting.

Carbon Capture a Waste of Money, Says Octopus Boss

Greg Jackson, boss of Octopus, thinks Miliband’s £22 billion bung is a waste of money, and should be spent building more wind farms instead.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Miliband’s £22bn carbon capture spree is a waste of money, warns Octopus boss

The Green Blob is arguing amongst itself about carbon capture, reports the Telegraph.

Greg Jackson, boss of Octopus, thinks Miliband’s £22 billion bung is a waste of money, and should be spent building more wind farms instead.

He said: “Some of the stuff we’re doing on climate or in energy at the moment is the equivalent of trying to defend the abacus industry once calculators had been invented.

“I don’t think there are any examples in the power sector globally of cost-effective carbon capture and storage.

“We’d be better off spending any money that we’re putting into that on building out more renewable generation in more locations.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/26/milibands-22bn-carbon-capture-spree-is-a-waste-of-money

Talk about pots and kettles! Wind mills are hardly the height of technology. But Jackson is of course right that carbon capture is still unproven and will inevitably be a waste of money.

But Jackson did not seem to realise the irony when he commented that it was competition rather than subsidies that should be driving the UK’s energy transition.

Does he not know that subsidies for renewable energy have cost close to £100 billion already, and will continue to rise?

Germany May Need Standby Coal Plants for Longer Than Planned

Germany may have to rely on standby coal-fired power generation longer than previously expected, to keep its power system stable and power prices from spikes when renewable output is low.

RWE wind park near mine Garzweiler with plant Niederaussem in Rheinisches Kohlerevier , Germany, on Wednesday , August 11, 2021. Photographer: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg

From OilPrice.com

By Charles Kennedy

Germany may have to rely on standby coal-fired power generation longer than previously expected, to keep its power system stable and power prices from spikes when renewable output is low.

The German plans to build new natural gas-fired power plants are behind schedule while the reserve margins on the system have shrunk since Europe’s biggest economy shut down its last nuclear power plant in 2023.

Without alternatives for backup generation to secure power supply at peak demand and low wind speeds, coal plants could be needed into the 2030s, too, Christoph Mueller, chief executive at German grid operator Amprion GmbH, told Bloomberg in an interview published on Wednesday.

“Some of these plants currently only have an operating perspective until 2026, the vast majority until 2031,” Mueller said, referring to the coal plants on standby.

“We should do a proper analysis now in case we need these power plants for longer,” the executive added.

Germany needs to soon move to award tenders for new natural gas capacity that would replace coal plants if Europe’s biggest economy is to meet its target to phase out coal in power generation by the end of the decade, German energy giant Uniper said last year.

Germany, which in 2023 closed all its remaining nuclear power plants – is now seeking to balance the generation and transmission systems with new gas power plants. But deadlines and timelines are being missed, and a new government is expected after the snap elections in late February.

The country has also decided to accelerate the coal phase-out to 2030, from an earlier planned date of 2038, but Germany has reactivated some mothballed coal-fired power plants during the past few winters after Russian natural gas supply ceased.

At the end of last year, Germany’s power prices spiked as the so-called power margin, the available electricity supply to meet demand, sunk as low wind speeds and colder weather were straining the power system.

Earlier this month, Germany’s coal importers lobby, VDKi, said that coal plants remain a pillar of German power generation during times of low wind speeds.

“Modern hard coal-fired power plants are an important backbone of the German electricity grid,” VDKi CEO Alexander Bethe said in a statement.

“In order to provide sufficient controllable power plants for security of supply, it is therefore necessary to introduce a technology-open, competitive centralised CAPACITY MARKET as soon as possible,” Bethe added.

Trump Truth Bombs ‘Green’ Energy (Five EOs)

“Trump’s executive order bomb, followed by Congressional action to limit funds from the IRA and IIJA, promise to gut, or profoundly reshape, the U.S. green energy movement. January 2025 may begin a long decline for green energy and a return to sensible energy policy.”

From Master Resource

By Steve Goreham 

“Trump’s executive order bomb, followed by Congressional action to limit funds from the IRA and IIJA, promise to gut, or profoundly reshape, the U.S. green energy movement. January 2025 may begin a long decline for green energy and a return to sensible energy policy.”

President Trump has long been a supporter of traditional, consumer-driven energy. During his campaign, he spoke negatively about electric vehicles, wind, and other renewable energy sources. But in his first day in office, the new president began a historic shift in US energy policy, away from “green” energy and back to hydrocarbon energy.

On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed five wide-ranging executive orders that radically change United States energy and climate policy. These actions restore efforts to promote coal, natural gas, oil, hydropower, nuclear, and biofuels, while curtailing support for wind and electric vehicles. The Trump executive orders also rescinded orders issued by President Biden and closed federal departments established to promote climate change policies and green energy.

The executive order regarding “offshore wind” and “wind projects” immediately impacted the world wind industry. The US government owns all land from three miles to 200 miles offshore, so wind companies require a federal lease to build offshore systems. The order withdrew “all areas within the Offshore Continental Shelf” from wind leasing. The order also requires that the new Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, “conduct a comprehensive review” to determine the necessity for “terminating or amending any existing wind energy leases” and to submit a report to the President. The order also put a hold on the Lava Ridge Wind Project in Idaho, pending a review by the Secretary of the Interior, a project which was approved by the Biden Administration in December.

Wind energy markets were shocked by Trump’s order. The stock price of Orsted, a Danish wind system supplier, dropped 17% to its lowest price in seven years. Orsted proposed to build Sunrise Wind, the largest planned US offshore wind system, to be located southeast of New York City. The company immediately took a $1.69 billion impairment charge on US wind projects.

Wind suppliers RWE of Germany, Equinor of Norway, Renovaveis of Portugal, and Vestas of Denmark also suffered stock price declines. Italy’s Prysmian announced that it would abandon a plan to build a plant in the US to make cables for offshore wind systems.

Wind energy plans for several states have been crippled. California planned to install 25 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2045, with initial projects at Morro Bay and Humbolt Bay, but these plans are on hold for at least the next four years. Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia are constructing or planning east coast offshore systems, but these programs will be reviewed, limited, or halted if not yet started.

The “Unleashing American Energy (UAE)” executive order calls for elimination of the “electric vehicle (EV) mandate” to promote consumer choice and access to gasoline-powered automobiles. It’s true that we have no formal EV mandate, but 22 states have zero-emissions vehicle laws or executive orders prohibiting sales of gasoline cars by a future date, typically 2035. On March 20 of last year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued updated emissions standards that would force auto manufacturers to sell an increasing number of EVs, rising from about 8% last year to about 56% of new light vehicle purchases by 2032.

The Trump orders also call for termination of state emissions waivers “that function to limit sales of gasoline powered automobiles.” The 1970 Clean Air Act established the federal government as responsible for regulating pollution, except where a waiver is granted by the EPA to a state.  For years, California has set emissions standards, receiving EPA waivers to do so, with other states following California’s lead. The orders seek to terminate these waivers to California and restore emissions control to the EPA. Earlier this month, California withdrew their request for a waiver for regulations to electrify heavy trucks and locomotives because it appeared that Trump’s EPA would not grant that request.

The order also calls for the “elimination of unfair subsidies and other ill-conceived government-imposed market distortions that favor EVs.” This probably refers to coming efforts to eliminate the $7500 tax credit on new EV sales and also efforts to eliminate the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards issued by the Department of Transportation, which force auto manufacturers to sell a larger share of EVs.

The US economy today includes several green energy industries which probably would not exist without the vast array of federal and state subsidies and tax credits. Wind, solar, EV charging, carbon dioxide (CO2) capture, and green hydrogen receive a limitless stream of subsidies and tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), both of which were passed during the Biden Presidency. The CATO institute estimates that renewable energy will receive about $80 billion in federal funds during fiscal year 2025.

During his campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to eliminate the money flow from these two acts, and his first-day executive orders reflect this. The UAE order calls for “termination of the Green New Deal,” and a halt to the disbursement of funds from the IRA and IIJA. President Trump will probably need to pass Congressional legislation to permanently reduce the flow of IRA and IIJA funds.

Wind and solar systems are intermittent, use 100 times the land area, and require at least double the transmission infrastructure compared to traditional coal, gas, or nuclear power plants. Few utilities would build wind and solar systems if not for the fear of human-caused global warming. But the new executive orders make it clear that the US will no longer pursue efforts to “mitigate” climate change.

In the executive order titled “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements,” the President directs the US Ambassador to the United Nations, nominee Elise Stefanik, to notify the UN in writing that the US withdraws from the Paris Climate Agreement, effective immediately. The order also states that the US will immediately cease financial payments under the Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The orders direct executive branch officials to cancel at least five Biden executive orders on climate change, and to disband the Climate Change Support Office, the American Climate Corps, and The Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases. The orders also call for the EPA to review the 2009 Endangerment Finding for “continuing applicability.” That finding concluded that carbon dioxide endangered US citizens and is the basis for regulating CO2 emissions in the US.

The Trump actions also seek to boost the development of hydrocarbon energy in the spirit of “drill, baby, drill.” Key actions include re-opening the licensing of liquified natural gas terminals, opening federal lands for onshore and offshore oil and gas production, reopening Alaska lands for energy production, and reducing efficiency regulations on dishwashers, stoves, and furnaces. The President also declared a national energy emergency to speed the deployment of pipelines and other energy infrastructure. The Trump EPA and Department of Energy will roll back regulations on oil and gas to expand US production.

Trump’s executive order bomb, followed by Congressional action to limit funds from the IRA and IIJA, promise to gut, or profoundly reshape, the U.S. green energy movement. January 2025 may begin a long decline for green energy and a return to sensible energy policy.

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Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and author of the bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure. His previous posts at MasterResource can be found here.