Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The data centres that operate both AI and cryptocurrency are already massively increasing electricity demand and investors are obviously expecting them to keep doing so — exponentially.
Meanwhile, the BRICS summit in Brazil last week — it stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — went in the opposite direction to the United States on climate change, committing to “intensify global efforts to contain global warming”.
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Let’s join the dots: America is pivoting back to fossil fuels and pulling out of renewable energy while the rest of the world continues to do the opposite, China is grappling with too much renewable energy while investors are bidding expectations to record highs for the new industries whose data centres are eating the world’s electricity.
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In his Independence Day speech, Trump declared: “Coal is back. You can’t use the word ‘coal’ unless you precede it by saying ‘clean beautiful coal.’”
China is also building coal-fired power stations, but only because it has to; the idea of saying “coal is back” and calling it clean and beautiful at the same time as more than one hundred people were dying in a Texas flood is insane.
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Xi now more important than Trump
The result of all this is that China — a ruthless autocracy — appears destined to take global leadership from the US, in trade, the means of producing energy and, possibly, in “soft power”, or moral leadership, as the US withdraws from foreign aid and multilateralism.
If China is “grappling with too much renewable energy”, why do they “have to” build any coal plants? Is it because the renewables China built are useless for meeting China’s energy needs? Sadly Kohler didn’t expand on this point, let us know why he thinks new coal plants are necessary in an environment of excess renewable capacity.
Of course, we already know renewables are not fit for purpose. Researchers commissioned by Google admitted no known renewable technology could solve the world’s energy needs, way back in 2014. They even considered hypothetical radical improvements to current technology such as self-erecting wind turbines and still came up short.
Journalist Alan Kohler got one thing right – Australia’s current leadership possibly does think President Xi Jinping is more important than President Trump.Aussie Prime Minister Albanese is on his second trip to China right now, but has yet to meet with President Trump even once. China even has a nickname for Aussie Prime Minister Albanese, they call him “Handsome Boy“.
The narrative that says relative sea level changes are driven by variations in atmospheric CO2 concentrations has taken another hit.
Before relative sea level (RSL) declined to its present position over the last millennium, Africa’s Atlantic coast RSL ranged anywhere from 0.8 to 4 meters higher than today between 5000 and 1700 years ago (Vacchi et al., 2025).
This Mid- to Late-Holocene RSL highstand was “mainly controlled by the deglaciation history” − meltwater contributions from Earth’s ice sheets and glaciers. Because the climate was so much warmer than today at that time, there was significantly less water locked up on land as ice.
The Antarctic Thermal Optimum “simulated melt of the western Antarctic ice sheet until 2.0 ka BP.” Consequently, sea levels were still ≥ 1 meter higher than present during the Roman Warm Period
“Between -15°N and -0°…data indicate RSL reached its maximal elevation above the present sea level in the late Holocene (~2.0 to ~1.7 ka BP).”
The politicians have used the pseudoscience and malinformation campaigns to sell their “green energy” schemes on the promises of affordability and job creation. When carbon-based energy like gasoline or natural gas outcompete wind or solar in the marketplace, they fall back on the old excuse that Big Oil gets too many government subsidies for “green energy” to compete. Meanwhile, activist legal groups use the court system to punitively pursue Big Oil and electricity producers for all sorts of novel legal theories of liability, reflected in the #ExxonKnew social media campaign and other activist strategies to hold large corporations accountable for the climate.
Public demonstration on the street against global warming and pollution. Group of multiethnic people making protest about climate change and plastic problems in the oceans
The fearmongering about man-made global warming has failed, and the movement is dying.
It’s implausible, impractical, and the opposite of urgent. The theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has proven to hold little importance for the citizens of the world, and now that Donald Trump has reascended to the White House and targeted green energy boondoggles for elimination, the world has started to take his lead. Perhaps the UN hasn’t noticed, but the Trump effect is real and has given cover for leaders across the globe to quietly back away from the insane spending required to make green energy remotely comparable to conventional combustion-based energy production.
This process has also revealed a truth as the tide goes back out: Nobody believes the fundamental premise of global warming anyway, despite the decades of panic fomented by globalists, totalitarians, and grifters hoping to cash in.
We may very well be witnessing the death of the green panic as a meaningful societal and political movement.
The People Never Bought the Theory
In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway described the process of going bankrupt: Gradually, and then suddenly. The same description holds for the death of the climate narratives. Ever since then-Sen. Al Gore (D-TN) brought up the concept of global warming at the U.S. Senate hearing in 1988, it has been marked by myth-making more than science. To commemorate this “birthday”—the hearing was held on July 23, 1988—the CO2 Coalition recounted the story of how it came to be:
This first hearing was convened by former Senator Timothy E. Wirth, along with a young Senator from Tennessee named Al Gore. It was no coincidence that the hearing was held on this date.
“We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer,” explained Senator Wirth. “So, we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it. What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room.”
That hearing began a nearly 40-year run of unimpeded misinformation linking carbon dioxide to unusual and unprecedented warming.
Consensus science replaced the scientific method.
Censorship of contrary evidence was nearly complete.
No debate was allowed because the science was settled.
Born of a PR stunt and backing by a few fringe scientists, the theory then morphed into a driving principle of the professional Left. Massive pseudoscience campaigns emerged to support the spurious claims of impending planetary doom in the media, which has incentivized politicians to adopt punitive and confiscatory public policies. The voters routinely ranked climate change near the bottom of their priorities in public opinion surveys, but that didn’t matter to the power- and money-hungry politicians and bureaucrats.
The history of public climate policy from that point on has involved ever increasing spending by federal and state governments, ever tighter industrial regulations, and “investments” in financially foolhardy projects—remember Obama’s failure with Solyndra?
Fast forward to 2019, a banner year for climate hysteria. In February, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced the Green New Deal, a deliberate throwback to another massive federal spending boondoggle. And then in September, the teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg addressed the UN Climate Action Summit, accusing world leaders of stealing her future and saying we could only ever add 420 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere before we start seeing “chain reactions beyond human control.” She gave us 8 ½ years from that point.
The murals of St. Greta started popping up in blue cities almost immediately, representing the high-water mark for the movement.
Media outlets, corporate board rooms, and Big Philanthropy ramped up their all-out campaigns. ZeroHedge reported that media stories about climate change skyrocketed in 2019 and beyond.
Green Energy and Climate Lawsuits Expand the Grift
The politicians have used the pseudoscience and malinformation campaigns to sell their “green energy” schemes on the promises of affordability and job creation. When carbon-based energy like gasoline or natural gas outcompete wind or solar in the marketplace, they fall back on the old excuse that Big Oil gets too many government subsidies for “green energy” to compete. Meanwhile, activist legal groups use the court system to punitively pursue Big Oil and electricity producers for all sorts of novel legal theories of liability, reflected in the #ExxonKnew social media campaign and other activist strategies to hold large corporations accountable for the climate.
None of these baseline assumptions hold water. But they do share a common feature: Extensive funding via leftist dark money. From the foundations funding the pseudoscience and media campaigns, to the leftist legal megafirms filing nuisance lawsuits, the resources thrown at this know no limit. Billionaire Tom Steyer went so far as to buy his way into the Democratic National Committee and use his position to add the climate change plank to the party platform in 2016.
These campaigns use their expansive resources to impede progress in every aspect of the energy sector. From protests to shut down pipelines, to lawsuits against fracking, to overregulating the expansion of America’s electrical grid, vast wealth has been expended on loud but unpopular campaigns to hinder our energy sector, vital for a life in modern America that even most environmentalists don’t want to give up. After all, how could they foment all those protests without the rare earth elements that run their social media accounts on their cell phones?
Americans have gotten increasingly sick of all of it.
Panic Only Works for So Long
No matter how much money the professional Left spends to buy access to media, corporate policies, and party platforms, they have failed to move the needle among a sufficient segment of the voting populace. The more they’ve failed, the more outlandish their claims of doom. UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres expressed this frustration when he declared in a 2023 speech that the world had surpassed global warming and had officially (from his telling) entered the era of “global boiling.”
The needle stubbornly continued to fail to move.
That needle probably noticed all the failing narratives around global warming when it decided to stay stuck in neutral. I’ve documented the collapsing narratives surrounding bee populations that have failed to decline, polar ice caps that stubbornly refuse to shrink, the idea that natural sources don’t affect atmospheric CO2 concentrations, the myth of increasing numbers of more intense weather events, and many more.
As the narratives collapse, the public panic continues to refuse to take hold. Meanwhile, the demand for more and more electricity continues to grow across residential and commercial sectors. Especially considering the rapid growth and development of the artificial intelligence sector, power demands have ramped up significantly as we begin the second quarter of the 21st century.
And as that demand grows, it becomes more obvious by the day: Green energy cannot sustain the current demand, never mind a near-term future of massive server farms, a renewed focus on domestic manufacturing, and growing residential populations.
The Iberian Nightmare—the nationwide blackout in both Spain and Portugal—proved this on April 28. Less than two weeks after boasting that they had reached 100% renewable energy on their electrical grid, Spain experienced a 100% blackout, which caused a cascading effect in Portugal as well. The rest of Europe was spared from a similar fate only by automated systems kicking in to protect France from the power surge.
“Renewable” energy fails because it cannot provide the baseline power load required by residential and industrial uses. Depending on wind and solar can never provide consistent, steady production on a stable frequency. Battery storage comes with a host of problems that don’t appear to have solutions. And since dams are out of favor with fish biologists, we can’t include hydroelectric in our suite of renewable options. (Apparently ornithologists and marine biologists are cool with wind, though.) Anyway, voters see through the cognitive dissonance and contradictory messages by conservationists about the supposedly environmentally friendly sources of electricity and have largely rejected the nonsensical premise.
One industry report suggests over half of North America faces the risk of blackouts in the next decade due to skyrocketing demand and the retirement of gas and coal power plants. So, independent of the funding issues with the new administration, state power regulators have retreated from their zeal to achieve net-zero goals (net-zero carbon emissions) in favor of reliable power supply.
This, along with a host of other failures in green energy and predictions of doom that have never come true, have forced even some Democrats to start backing away from their net-zero plans. Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently took note of this, and gave the reason:
Cost and reliability is what voters really care about when it comes to energy. Given four choices of their energy policy priorities in a 2024 YouGov climate issues survey, 37% of voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them. Another 36% said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Meanwhile, just 19% thought that the effect of their energy consumption on the climate was most important.
They also see through the promises that wind and solar are free, or at least cheap. The land footprint of wind and solar farms is far larger than that of a nuclear or coal plant; the materials used in turbines, blades, and panels often cannot be recycled or safely disposed of; and the infrastructure—especially the amount of reinforced concrete in wind turbine bases—can create a so-called carbon footprint larger than that of conventional power plants.
For many reasons, the Trump administration has pulled back on the government’s commitments to the green movement. In place of massive subsidies for failing green energy projects, Trump and his team have refocused the federal government on reliability and energy independence. These issues resonate with voters in the 21st century who see the AI revolution currently underway and who realize that America’s aging energy grid needs massive upgrades—upgrades that have been held back for decades by overregulation by bureaucrats.
As this new focus on energy independence progresses, government grants have dried up, causing green stocks to tank. The rest of corporate America has quickly followed suit. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that annual shareholder reports have gone silent on climate issues:
American Airlines highlighted its focus on “ambitious climate goals” in a report last year.
In a similar filing a few weeks ago, that phrase was gone.
The airline is among a wave of companies across industries tweaking—sometimes overhauling—what they say about their sustainability and climate efforts in proxy statements, an investor filing released every year ahead of a business’s annual shareholder meeting.
The writing is on the wall. State governments, corporations, and stock markets are all following the lead of the Trump administration’s more rational, America First approach to energy. The purveyors of climate panic haven’t realized it yet, but the billions poured into this movement by Big Philanthropy haven’t made a dent in public opinion. Public policy is poised to make an about face, cheered on by a majority of voters. People just don’t buy the faulty premises of the supposed problem, or the purported solutions to it.
In short, we are witnessing the end of the green panic and the dawn of a new age of energy and environmental rationalism.
ONCE upon a time, in a little village tucked between the green hills and silver streams of a prosperous land, there lived a practical and respected man named Barnabas. He was a businessman – not flashy, not loud – but the kind who believed in steady hands and reliable tools. His widget factory, modest in size but vital to the village, produced widgets – those small, everyday marvels that powered life quietly behind the scenes.
ONCE upon a time, in a little village tucked between the green hills and silver streams of a prosperous land, there lived a practical and respected man named Barnabas. He was a businessman – not flashy, not loud – but the kind who believed in steady hands and reliable tools. His widget factory, modest in size but vital to the village, produced widgets – those small, everyday marvels that powered life quietly behind the scenes.
His success depended not just on machines or plans but on his three dependable workers: Oli, Gus, and Cole. Oli was swift, always humming with energy. Gus was clean and light, always ready to help. Cole was strong and steady doing the heavy lifting, though he sometimes left dusty soot on the floor. Together, they were a formidable trio. They never missed a day of work. They showed up early, stayed late, and never said no when Barnabas asked them to stay overtime. Their work was seamless, their rhythm perfect. They were the beating heart of the factory.
And life in the village was smooth. Widgets were cheap and plentiful. Bakers baked, blacksmiths smithed, and teachers taught – powered by widgets that no one ever questioned. No one, that is, until Vin and Saul arrived.
One warm spring morning, just as Barnabas was tallying his orders, two new faces appeared at the gate. They were cheerful and glowing – Saul, with hair like golden rays and a tunic of sun-coloured silk, and Vin, with eyes that danced like leaves in the wind and a habit of whistling in the breeze.
‘We’ve heard of your factory,’ Saul said with a broad sunny smile.
‘We’d like to offer our services,’ Vin added, breezily tipping his hat.
Barnabas raised an eyebrow. ‘And what do you do?’
‘We’re workers, just like Oli, Gus, and Cole,’ said Saul. ‘Only cheaper. Much cheaper.’
Vin grinned. ‘And we’re good for the village. We don’t leave stains or smells.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ Barnabas said cautiously. ‘But tell me – can I count on you? What hours do you keep?’
Saul looked toward the sky. ‘Well, I can only work when the sun is out. Clouds and nighttime are my bane.’
‘And I,’ said Vin with a carefree twirl, ‘work when the wind blows. If the air is still, I rest.’
Barnabas blinked. ‘So… sometimes you show up, sometimes you don’t?’
‘It’s not up to us,’ Saul shrugged. ‘We go with the Weather Gods, Sun and Wind.’
‘I see.’
‘Still,’ said Vin and Saul together, ‘everyone wants to be seen hiring us, for people like the Sun and the Wind, our elements.’
Barnabas rubbed his chin. ‘But how can I run a factory if I can’t count on you to be there? What do I tell my old workers – Oli, Gus, and Cole? That they must sit idle until you decide not to show up or to leave when you feel the weather changing, and then rush into the factory to do the work?’
Before the new recruits could answer, Villen, the village head, strode into the courtyard. A large man with an even larger presence, Villen was never far from his solemn courtiers and advisors, especially Augur, his chief advisor. His rich robe was stitched with symbols of the Sun and the Wind, and he always spoke with a voice that seemed to echo with stern authority.
‘I see you’ve met Vin and Saul,’ Villen said, his tone firm and final.
Barnabas nodded. ‘I have. I was just explaining that while they seem well-meaning, they don’t fit the rhythm of my factory.’
Villen raised a brow. ‘Barnabas, this is a new era. The council has spoken. Our village must keep up with the times. Vin and Saul represent the future. They are clean, they mean well, and they offer their services cheap, helping all of us in the village.’
‘But they can’t guarantee when they’ll work,’ Barnabas pointed out with some exasperation.
‘Yes, but we can resolve that in the future when we will store their powers of the Wind and the Sun’ Villen said with finality. ‘For now, you will hire them. It’s not optional.’
‘And what about Oli, Gus, and Cole?’
‘They’ll stay – but as backups. You’ll keep them on call. They will step in whenever Vin and Saul… step out. That’s fair, isn’t it?’
Barnabas felt a tight knot form in his stomach. ‘So, I must pay my reliable workers overtime to be available for the moments when the unreliable ones vanish?’
‘That’s a small price for saving the village,’ Villen said, and ‘And stop calling them unreliable!’ He ominously added ‘Barnaby, you must know the risks that this village faces from Weather Gods if we don’t stop Oli, Gus and Cole from retiring soon. Haven’t you heard my court advisor’s counsel on the future of our village? Did you not hear Augur, who spelt out the fate of this village, cursed as it is by the likes of Oli, Gus and Cole who breathe out noxious fumes into our air as they work in your factory?’
And with that, Villen left, together with Augur and his entourage of advisors behind him.
So began a new chapter in the widget factory’s life. Saul and Vin were now officially on the payroll. On sunny, breezy days, they arrived with fanfare and enthusiasm. On cloudy days, Vin would sometimes show up alone. On windless evenings, neither Saul nor Vin would be seen at all.
When that happened, the factory would grind to a halt – until frantic messages summoned Oli, Gus, and Cole, who rushed in from their rest days to get things moving again. But now, overtime pay was the norm. Production became chaotic. Schedules were scrapped.
And the villagers began to notice.
‘Why are widgets so expensive now?’ asked the baker.
‘I can barely heat my forge,’ muttered the blacksmith.
‘The school had to cancel the field trip,’ sighed the teacher. ‘Not enough widget-power for the cart.’
The villagers approached Villen, who stood in court with his Augur, dark-browed with glowering eyes.
‘We’re suffering,’ they told him. ‘Things used to work. Why did you change them?’
‘These are growing pains,’ Villen replied. ‘We must listen to our Augur, to save our village. Vin and Saul will save us from the vengeance of the Weather Gods.’
‘But we can’t survive in the meantime,’ someone shouted.
Back at the factory, Barnabas sat in his office, staring at the numbers. Losses were mounting. Orders were delayed. Morale was low.
Oli, Gus, and Cole came in one evening.
‘We’ve worked for you since the beginning,’ said Oli.
‘We never missed a shift,’ said Gus.
‘We kept this place alive,’ said Cole, his hands black with sweat and soot.
Barnabas looked up, weariness in his eyes. ‘I know. And I’m grateful. But the village has changed. Villen and Augur have spoken. I’m being forced to pretend that part-time dreamers can replace full-time doers.’
Cole stepped forward. ‘You can’t build a factory on sometimes work.’
Barnabas nodded but said nothing.
And so it was that the factory struggled on in that little village. The villagers still needed widgets, but now they came at a premium. And quietly, in whispers over cold tea and dim lanterns, people began to remember the days when things simply worked.
‘Wasn’t it better when Oli, Gus, and Cole ran the show?’ they’d ask.
‘Didn’t we have more widgets then, and cheaper too?’
And some, though afraid to say it too loudly, began to wonder aloud:
‘Why did we ever let Vin and Saul into the factory at all?’
As months passed, the price of widgets rose even higher. In homes once warmed with ease, fires burned out early. In kitchens that once simmered with stew and laughter, pots stood cold. The forge at the smithy was silent. Bakers baked only by sunlight, when Saul felt like showing up. And the school’s doors closed early each afternoon for lack of widget-power.
Barnabas, his once-proud factory now a pale shadow of its former self, found himself on the brink of collapse. He was paying Oli, Gus, and Cole to linger in waiting rooms, ready to leap into action whenever Saul or Vin drifted away on their weather-tied whims. They could no longer rely on schedules – only on chance. But chance was no basis for Barnabas’ factory.
The factory teetered. Orders dried up. The regular workers were laid off. Entire shipments were returned undelivered.
And all the while, Villen and his dark-eyed Augur spoke in lofty tones.
‘You must have faith,’ Villen intoned to the hungry villagers. ‘The age of Saul and Vin is inevitable. It is the will of the elements.’
‘Have patience,’ murmured the Augur. ‘The spirits of Sky, Sun and Wind are fickle, but soon they will align.’
But no one was listening anymore. The people had grown cold – literally and otherwise. Their clothes were patched, their eyes tired. Children cried at night from the cold. The old no longer stirred from their beds.
Then, came the Widget Winter.
That season, Saul barely showed his shining face. Clouds cloaked the village. And the winds? Still as a painting. For weeks, Vin did not so much as rustle a leaf.
Without them, and without fair warning, the factory could not run. Oli, Gus, and Cole were summoned late, exhausted from endless disruptions, bitter from being treated as second-class workers. Even their formidable shoulders began to sag.
And finally, one grey morning, Barnabas posted a sign on the factory gates: ‘Widget Production Suspended Until Further Notice.’
The news spread like wildfire through the frozen silence.
That night, the villagers gathered in the square, clutching lanterns and pitchforks, faces lit with fury. And for the first time, they did not come to plead.
They came to demand.
‘We are starving,’ cried the butcher.
‘My baby shivers through the night,’ wept a young mother.
‘Our fields lie frozen,’ roared a farmer. ‘Our tools rust. And you, Villen, and your whispering Augur sit in warm rooms, telling us to wait on the wind?’
Villen stepped onto his ornate balcony, flanked by his guards. ‘This is disorder,’ he shouted. ‘You are ungrateful for the progress I have brought!’
But the villagers had had enough. They surged past his guards, who, already cold and underfed themselves, dropped their spears rather than strike their kin.
Villen turned to flee, his robes flapping like banners in retreat. Augur vanished into the woods, muttering prophecies that no one cared to hear anymore.
And so, Villen, Augur and the village council were chased out of the village for good, never to be seen again.
The village sat in silence that night, huddled around their few remaining fires, unsure of what to do next.
Then, at dawn, a man stood before them.
He was not flamboyant. He wore no robes stitched with symbols, carried no scrolls of prophecy. His name was Knut. He had once been a smith’s apprentice, known for his fairness, his clear eyes, and his habit of listening before he spoke.
‘I do not promise miracles,’ said Knut. ‘But I have reason which fears none.’
He turned to Barnabas and said, ‘You will no longer be forced to hire Saul and Vin. They are welcome to offer their labour if they wish, but only under the same rules as Oli, Gus, and Cole.’
Barnabas blinked, unsure he’d heard correctly. ‘You mean… the choice is mine again?’
‘Yes,’ Knut nodded. ‘The choice is yours. And the responsibility too.’
Vin and Saul were summoned. They stood in the square looking radiant as ever, but their smiles were nervous now.
‘You may stay in this village,’ Knut said to them. ‘We bear you no malice. But no one shall be compelled to hire you.’
‘Can we still work in the factory?’ Saul asked.
Barnabas stepped forward. ‘If you can commit to scheduled hours – rain or shine, wind or calm – you are welcome.’
Vin scratched his head. ‘We don’t really do schedules.’
‘Then perhaps the factory is not for you,’ Barnabas replied gently. ‘But you are still welcome here, as guests, and perhaps in time, your talents may be put to use in other ways – where reliability is not so vital.’
And with that, the old order was restored. Oli, Gus, and Cole returned to the factory floor, sleeves rolled up and ready. Orders came in. The forge roared again. The baker’s oven glowed warmly. The school lit its lanterns long into the afternoon.
The price of widgets fell. The air of dread lifted.
The villagers began to smile again.
Vin could be seen lounging in the meadow, occasionally turning windmills and grinding the corn. Saul spent his days tending gardens and drying fruit in the sun. They were peaceful and no longer burdened with pretending to be what they were not.
As for Knut, he became known not for grand speeches, but for quiet wisdom and practical decisions.
Under his guidance, the village returned not to the past, but to peace and stability. And in time, it grew – not on slogans or whims, but on the simple rhythm of reliable work, earned trust, and freedom of choice. Villagers contracted with each other to their mutual benefit and traded far and wide. Knut was known for his light touch in administering justice, keeping the roads and bridges in good order, and having few necessary edicts for his villagers.
So ends the tale of the Widget Factory, the rise and fall of Villen, and the lesson learned by all who lived there:
A village survives not on the fashion of the age, but on the reliability of the things that keep it warm, fed, and alive.
And they all lived, if not forever, at least wisely and warmly and freely, ever after.
The Daily Caller (TDC) posted an article, titled “Turns Out Americans Really Don’t Care About Climate Change After All,” which reviewed CNN coverage of a recent Gallup poll showing that most Americans are not very worried about climate change, even amid the push from climate alarmists to attribute the deadly Texas floods to climate change. The Daily Caller is correct that flooding is not unprecedented, and that this trend in concern about climate change has held for quite some time.
The Daily Caller (TDC) posted an article, titled “Turns Out Americans Really Don’t Care About Climate Change After All,” which reviewed CNN coverage of a recent Gallup poll showing that most Americans are not very worried about climate change, even amid the push from climate alarmists to attribute the deadly Texas floods to climate change. The Daily Caller is correct that flooding is not unprecedented, and that this trend in concern about climate change has held for quite some time.
TDC describes how CNN’s senior data reporter, Harry Enten, expressed quite a bit of concern about a new Gallup poll on climate change and natural disasters. The poll itself found that the percentage of Americans “greatly worried” about climate change has declined by six percentage points since 2020, down to just 40 percent. TDC explains that the new poll “emerged as many liberals, including Democrat members of Congress, have attempted to blame climate change and President Donald Trump for the devastating flood in Central Texas.”
Enten said that “climate activists have not successfully made the case to the American people,” which indeed appears to be the case, since the polling shows the percent of people who are worried about climate change has not changed since 2000. Enten says this is “despite all of these horrible weather events,” but it seems Americans know that every instance of bad weather cannot be attributed to climate change. As Climate Realism has pointed out numerous times, real-world data shows extreme weather across the board is not increasing in frequency or intensity. However, due to the massive coverage of most any severe weather event by mass media and instant video by citizens and storm chasers alike, there’s a false perception that severe weather has increased. Further, improvements in Doppler radar technology and communication systems (cell phones for example) have made it easier to detect and report severe weather events compared to just 30 years ago. This enhanced capability leads to a higher frequency of warnings and reports, creating the impression of increased activity, according to the UND Scholarly Commons.
The 21st century is by far the best time to be alive in terms of survivability from natural disasters. Over just the last 100 years, human deaths attributed to weather related disasters around the world have declined by over 99 percent. (See figure below)
Notably, the Gallup polls also showed that only 27 percent of Democrats believed their homes would be impacted by climate change. This is remarkable considering the sheer quantity of alarmist messaging from mainstream media, government officials, and entertainment media and activists over the past decades. Governments, activists and media have probably poured billions of dollars into spreading climate alarmist messaging, only to see concern drop.
These results are not surprising. There were signs that public concern was dropping, in 2024 a Monmouth University survey asked Americans if they saw climate change as a “very serious” issue, and those numbers also indicated that fewer people were concerned, compared to levels of concern in 2020. In that study, there exists a very sharp decline among people in the 18–34-year-old range, people who grew up with some of the most intense public propaganda in school and media. Their level of concern dropped by 17 points between just 2021 and 2024.
TDC also rightly calls out the media’s attempts to attribute the deadly Texas floods to climate change, stating simply that deadly flooding is not unprecedented in the U.S., and “some of the worst floods in the U.S. happened over a century ago.” This is true, and likewise flooding was not unknown to the Guadalupe River, which data show has seen fewer and smaller extremes in flooding compared to previous decades.
This was good, succinct coverage of recent Gallup polling and connection to the alarmism surrounding the tragic Texas flooding events from this summer from The Daily Caller. Kudos to them from Climate Realism, and hopefully more outlets write reasoned and data-based coverage like it going forward, as fewer Americans have patience for alarmist propaganda.
Wyoming marked a historic milestone with the ceremonial opening of the Brook Mine near Ranchester—the first rare earth element (REE) mine in the United States in 70 years, and the first new coal mine in the state in nearly five decades. The event, attended by federal and state officials as well as local residents, underscores Wyoming’s growing role in the supply of critical minerals for modern technology and energy systems.
On July 11, 2025, Wyoming marked a historic milestone with the ceremonial opening of the Brook Mine near Ranchester—the first rare earth element (REE) mine in the United States in 70 years, and the first new coal mine in the state in nearly five decades. The event, attended by federal and state officials as well as local residents, underscores Wyoming’s growing role in the supply of critical minerals for modern technology and energy systems.
The significance of this occasion was not lost on attendees. U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright emphasized the pervasiveness of rare earth elements in daily life, stating,
“Anything in your life that has a button… all of those things have rare earth elements playing a critical role.”
These elements are crucial for producing magnets, batteries, and electronics found in everything from smartphones to electric vehicles and military equipment.
Governor Mark Gordon praised the effort and what it represents for Wyoming’s economic future, declaring, “This is a new era for Wyoming and the nation.” U.S. Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, along with Representative Harriet Hageman, also attended the opening, as did former U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, now a board member of Ramaco Resources, the company behind the project.
The Brook Mine stands out for its unique geology. The rare earths here are not found in traditional hard rock but are embedded in soft coal seams, described as material that
“you can hold it in your hand, and it just starts to crumble.”
This means the mine is expected to avoid the radioactive tailings associated with most hard rock rare earth operations, a detail highlighted by both officials and Ramaco executives.
Estimates suggest that the Brook deposit contains about 1.7 million tons of rare earth oxides, positioning Wyoming as a potential key domestic source for these strategically vital materials. Mining has already begun in the Monarch coal seam, with Ramaco’s CEO announcing that a pilot plant for processing rare earth elements should be operational “late this summer or early fall.”
The opening comes at a time when the United States is seeking to reduce dependence on foreign sources—especially China, which currently refines more than 80 percent of global rare earths. As Secretary Wright put it,
“For over 70 years, the United States has relied almost entirely on foreign sources… That dependence is vulnerability.”
Leaders at the event repeatedly framed the project as critical to both national security and energy independence.
Economic expectations are running high. Officials spoke of new high-wage jobs, rural prosperity, and the potential for Wyoming to lead the nation in rare earth production. Ramaco has already received grants and recognition from both federal and state authorities, highlighting broad support for the project’s ambitions. The ceremony was marked by speeches, a tour of the site, and an optimistic vision for Wyoming’s economic and technological future.
In the words of Gov. Gordon,
“This is the dawn of a new era in American energy and national security.”
The project’s backers hope the Brook Mine will inspire further investment and innovation in the domestic rare earth supply chain—ensuring that Wyoming, and the nation, are at the forefront of the next wave of technological advancement.
As the first trucks rolled away with freshly mined material, the sense of history was palpable. The Brook Mine’s opening not only reestablishes Wyoming’s reputation as a mining leader but positions it at the cutting edge of American resource development. For supporters and onlookers alike, this day represented a proud moment in the ongoing story of American ingenuity and resilience.
The Met Office were given a right of reply to this GB News story. Instead of actually responding to the specific points raised, they merely regurgitated their Press Release:
The Met Office were given a right of reply to this GB News story. Instead of actually responding to the specific points raised, they merely regurgitated their Press Release:
However, according to the Met Office, the UK has warmed by 0.25C per decade since the 1980s, with the past three years among the five warmest on record.
Last year saw the warmest spring, the warmest May, and the wettest winter half-year in over 250 years, the report says.
It also states that days with temperatures 10°C above average have quadrupled since the 1960s, and months of double-average rainfall have risen by 50 per cent.
.
They could, of course, added that the wettest year was in 1872!
Their waffle about higher temperatures is meaningless without the corresponding data on extreme cold days.
Worst of all is the fact that they still make claims of extreme rainfall against a baseline of 1961-90. This is what the Press Release stated:
“the number of months where counties are recording monthly rainfall totals of at least twice the 1991-2020 monthly average has increased by over 50% compared to the number in 1961-1990”
They know full well that 1961-90 was a much drier interlude compared with both what preceded it and also what followed it.
They have all the data back into the 19thC, so why don’t they show the long term trends? Is it because it would not tell the story they want to tell?
The long-term monthly data for the England & Wales Precipitation Series, for example, shows absolutely no evidence to support the Met Office’s claims:
KNMI Climate Explorer
The KNMI chart only runs to 2021, but since then the wettest month was 177.5mm in October 2023. Nothing, in other words, that alters the trends shown.
The North Pacific Index (NPI) is computed from the area-weighted sea level air pressure (SLP) over the region 30°N-65°N and 160°E-140°W. It measures interannual to multidecadal variations in Pacific atmospheric circulation. As explained in Trenberth and Hurrel, the winter Aleutian low pressure system moves on a decadal time scale and changes the climate and sea surface temperature (SST) along western North America and in the Northern Central Pacific.
The North Pacific Index (NPI) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)
The North Pacific Index (NPI) is computed from the area-weighted sea level air pressure (SLP) over the region 30°N-65°N and 160°E-140°W. It measures interannual to multidecadal variations in Pacific atmospheric circulation. As explained in Trenberth and Hurrel, the winter Aleutian low pressure system moves on a decadal time scale and changes the climate and sea surface temperature (SST) along western North America and in the Northern Central Pacific. These changes are closely related to the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation), which describes the same multidecadal weather and SST pattern in the same region but is calculated with SSTs using a different statistical method. Other oscillations that describe this pattern or something similar are the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) and the North Pacific Oscillation (NPO).
The NPI and PDO are compared in figures 1 and 2. They are different, but since they describe the same weather pattern, we will discuss them together in this post. The North Pacific SST changes tend to follow sea level air pressure changes by one to two months (Trenberth & Hurrel, 1994). Shifts in either the NPI or PDO cause major changes in the migration patterns of many fish species, as well as many weather and environmental patterns in northern Asia and in North America (Ebbesmeyer, et al., 1990) and (Lluch-Belda, et al., 1989).
Figure 1. NPI (gray) and PDO (blue) averaged over the whole year. A positive PDO Index (up) indicates warm SSTs on the west coast of North America and a lower average sea level air pressure over the NPI region. Note higher NPI SLP is a negative NP Index, which is counterintuitive.
As figure 1 shows, the two indices tend to track one another when the NPI SLP scale is inverted. A higher NPI area SLP is called a negative NPI, lower SLP is positive. A positive PDO Index (up on the graph) and lower average SLP over the NPI region indicates warmer SSTs off the west coast of North America and an El Niño pattern in the tropics. A negative PDO and higher NPI SLP indicates cooler temperatures on the west coast of North America and warmer SSTs in the central northern Pacific (see figure 3). Negative PDO values and higher SLP correspond to a La Niña pattern in the tropics. Figure 2 is the same as figure 1, except it only includes the winter months. Winter is when most weather events occur and it is also when the meridional transport of energy to the polar regions is maximal. Since most heat transport is via mid-latitude storms, the NPI and PDO effects in winter are more easily seen.
Figure 2. Same as figure 1 except the winter months only. In winter the correlation is visually better. The larger NPI SLP range in winter is due to winter storm activity. Note the scale change for the NPI SLP from figure 1.
Figure 2 shows that the two oscillations visually correlate better in the winter months. Of the Pacific oscillations, NPI shows the best correlation to HadCRUT5, with the PDO not far behind, and both are closely related to ENSO (aka the ONI). In fact, all the Pacific Oscillations are closely related to one another. Some of them may be teleconnections, or channels, for distributing the energy flux generated by ENSO.
Figure 3 shows the NPI region and compares the positive and negative PDO to the high and low NPI SLP. The positive PDO and a positive NPI (low NPI region SLP) indicate the same SST pattern. According to Trenberth and Hurrell, the sluggish response of the large mid-latitude NPI region of the North Pacific to changes in ocean forcing effectively serves as a low-pass filter and causes this region to show long-term changes in Pacific climate.
Figure 3. Illustrations of the strongly positive and negative PDO SST patterns and the analogous low NPI SLP and high NPI SLP SST patterns. The yellow ovals mark the approximate NPI SLP measurement region from 30°N to 65°N and 160°E to 140°W. Notice how both are linked to the ENSO region at the equator. After NOAA and SCI.
The Pacific is the world’s largest ocean, and one would think these oscillations would have a huge influence on the HadCRUT5 global mean surface temperature (GMST), but it isn’t seen in the PDO itself. The data used to create the PDO has the global climate signal removed by subtracting the global mean SST from each point prior to the analysis (Zhang, et al., 1997) & (Hare, 1996). This is done because the leading PC (principal component) of the raw PDO is very heavily correlated (0.7) with the global mean SST (Zhang, et al., 1997). So, the correlation is there, we just don’t see it in the PDO. This removal is not done to the NPI, which is probably why it is more strongly correlated to HadCRUT5.
As we saw in the last post, the mean total Pacific SST only correlates with HadCRUT5 in the middle 20th century. In particular, it has a poor correlation in recent decades when we have the best data. Whether this is because HadCRUT5 is flawed, or the Pacific is unrelated to recent global warming is an open question.
The Pacific Oscillations (see the list of the top 10 in table 2 here) impact global climate, especially around the Pacific Ocean, but do not correlate well with HadCRUT5. This is odd, especially considering the Atlantic Oscillations correlate better, see figure 1 here.
Characteristics of the NPI and PDO
While Trenberth and Hurrel named and described the NPI in 1994, the very similar PDO was not named until 1996 when Steven Hare suggested the name. It was later more fully described by Yuan Zhang, Nathan Mantua, Steven Hare, and colleagues in 1997 and 2002. A more detailed history of the frantic “race to describe” the well-known North Pacific weather pattern during the 1990s is given in Mantua and Hare (2002). The best early statistical descriptions of the formal PDO used today are by Zhang, et al. (1997) and Hare (1996).
A weak mirror image of the anomalies illustrated in figure 3 occurs across the South Pacific and will be discussed in a later post on the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation or the Tripole Index (TPI). Overall, the PDO’s spatial pattern resembles that of ENSO, also discussed in a later post. The largest distinction between the PDO and ENSO are their timescales. While ENSO is primarily an interannual phenomenon, the PDO is decadal to multidecadal in scale. Thus, relatively long data records are needed to define and understand the PDO (Deser, NCAR, 2015, link).
Periodic multidecadal changes in the North Pacific climate were first recognized by studying patterns in salmon, sardine, and anchovy populations and other environmental factors along western North America and the Japanese east coast (Hare, 1996), (Lluch-Belda, et al., 1989), and (Ebbesmeyer, et al., 1990). Steven Hare recognized the connection between the environmental and fishing patterns in the North Pacific and the patterns in Pacific SSTs (sea surface temperatures) in 1996 while working on his PhD thesis and named the oscillation the “Pacific Decadal Oscillation” or PDO. We have established that the NPI is very similar climatically to the PDO, so in the rest of this post we will only refer to the PDO, but we mean both.
Figure 4 shows the ERSST v5 PDO further into the past. The PDO climate and environmental shifts that are well recognized are shown with solid lines and one that is sometimes mentioned in the literature and sometimes overlooked is shown with a dashed line. These climate and environmental shifts are most easily seen in fishing records, for example, after the 1947 shift shown in the PDO in figure 4, the salmon crop in Alaska dropped between 33% and 64%. In the same area, it increased 208% to 252% after the 1977 step change (Mantua N. J., et al., 1997).
Salmon fishing is just one Pacific environmental variable that changes with the PDO. Curtis Ebbesmeyer and his colleagues document 40 environmental variables that changed in a coordinated fashion at the 1977 climate shift (Ebbesmeyer, et al., 1990).
The best data for determining the PDO index is after 1950 and from 1950 to today the largest and most dramatic feature is the 1976-77 shift (Zhang, et al., 1997). Data from 1900 to 1950 is decent and both the 1926 and 1947 features are well established. The data prior to 1900 is not very good and that is probably why the apparent shift in 1898 is not discussed more often.
Figure 4. The ERSST v5 PDO index. The orange curve is a 9-year smoothed version that is intended to remove the underlying ENSO signal and bring out the long-term trend. The PDO climate shifts are marked.
Figure 5 shows that the PDO can signal a significant change in global climate, but not always. The two exceptions are in the 19th century and since 1997. The climate shift in 1926 signaled a period of rising temperature, the 1947 shift signaled a period of cooling, and the 1977 shift a period of warming. The shift in 1997 seems to have no global warming effect.
Figure 5. A comparison of the ERSST v5 PDO to the ERSST v5 AMO and the HadCRUT5 GMST detrended. The major climate shifts are noted in the plot.
If one assumes that the global mean SST is mostly due to CO2, then this effect needs to be removed, as is done in the PDO calculation. If we assume that global circulation patterns, like the PDO are contributing to global warming, then removing the global mean SST is a mistake. Since we don’t know whether either assumption is correct, we should consider both results. The global mean is not removed from the NPI, and it still shows a good correlation to the PDO. The NPI does not drop as dramatically as the PDO in recent years, see figures 1 and 2.
Discussion
The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is not directly based on trends in the average SST of a region like the AMO is, and the inputs to the calculation have the global mean SST removed, so it is less likely to reflect GMST. Trenberth and Shea recommend that the global mean SST be removed from the AMO region SSTs rather than detrend them with a least squares line, but I do not since it assumes that global trends are due to CO2, when that may not be the case.
The PDO/NPI reflect the pattern of SSTs and wind patterns across the Northern Pacific as shown in figure 3. Which pattern exists, positive or negative, has a large impact on fishing and many other environmental factors in the Pacific region, the northwestern U.S., and off the east coast of Japan. Thus, the wind/ocean circulation patterns, along with SST, radically affect the Pacific environment.
According to Franco Biondi and colleagues’ tree-ring chronology created using trees in Southern California and Baja, the PDO extends back at least to 1661. Their chronology clearly shows the climate shifts in 1947 and 1977 and has a prominent bi-decadal oscillation (Biondi, et al., 2001). The most significant oscillations in their reconstruction were in 1750, 1905, and 1947. These are all dates of significant global cooling. If the PDO has had the global mean SST removed and it still strongly identifies global climatic events, does this mean it helped cause them? Seems logical.
It is common to hear the “consensus” say that circulation patterns don’t matter regarding global warming because all they do is move thermal energy around Earth’s surface and it is only the radiation in and out of the climate system that matters. Well, global warming is not climate, and climate is not global warming, especially when we all know that oceans limit Earth’s mean surface temperature to less than ~30°C (Sud, Walker, & Lau, 1999). Further, the climate system provides energy storage capacity that varies, it also uses some of the energy to power storms, which transport energy from one location to another. For more on Earth’s natural thermostat and “global” warming’s impact on humans see here, and the references therein.
The Northern Pacific environment appears to be largely controlled by circulation patterns and only secondarily by global average warming and cooling. Circulation patterns matter, it is possible that the Pacific significantly affects global warming and cooling and not the other way around. Both conclusions are possible and reasonable. Attempts to remove the CO2 portion of warming by removing global average SST from indices are invalid because we cannot assume that all global warming over multidecadal periods of time is due to CO2.
A Word about the Pacific Oscillations in general
As discussed in my last Climate Oscillations post, The Pacific Mean SST, the Pacific Climate Oscillations are an enigma. They are a very important influence on climate and the environment in the Pacific itself, the Americas, and all of eastern Asia and Australia, but they do not correlate very well with the leading surface temperature records. This is only partially by design. The leading estimates of surface mean temperature are HadCRUT5 and BEST. Figure 6 compares them.
Figure 6. A graph comparing the HadCRUT5 (gray) and BEST (blue) annual averaged temperature records. Both are plotted relative to their 1961-1990 means. The orange line is a five-year moving average of BEST.
It is clear that the HadCRUT5 (gray) and BEST (blue) reconstructions are nearly identical, yet they do not compare very well to any of the Pacific Ocean Oscillations or to the warming trend of the Pacific Ocean, which covers 33% of Earth’s surface and clearly influences weather over at least half the globe. In recent decades HadCRUT5 and BEST do compare well to the AMO, but the AMO has been in a warming trend relative to the rest of the world since the 1970s (see figure 1 here). For these reasons, it is not clear if the Pacific is telling the most accurate story about global warming or HadCRUT5/BEST are. The accuracy of both HadCRUT5 and BEST is in doubt. In any case, we will continue to discuss the remaining important climate oscillations, most of these are in the Pacific.
The UK Met Office recently declared an average daily maximum temperature of 22.3°C for June 2025 at Lowestoft: Monkton Avenue. But there is no weather station at Lowestoft and hasn’t been since 2010. Over the last 15 years, the temperature measurements published in the Met Office’s Historic Station Database have been invented, or rather estimated according to the State meteorologist with figures from “well-correlated related neighbouring stations”.
The UK Met Office recently declared an average daily maximum temperature of 22.3°C for June 2025 at Lowestoft: Monkton Avenue. But there is no weather station at Lowestoft and hasn’t been since 2010. Over the last 15 years, the temperature measurements published in the Met Office’s Historic Station Database have been invented, or rather estimated according to the State meteorologist with figures from “well-correlated related neighbouring stations”. This explanation might be more plausible if the Met Office could actually name the stations, presumably a simple task with the vital scientific input data readily to hand. Alas, it seems not. A number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for the identity of these well-correlated stations near Lowestoft and other non-existent stations have been denied by the Met Office quoting “vexatious” grounds. It has concluded that the “public interest factors in favour of not responding to the requests outweighed the public interest factors in favour of responding to the requests”.
The FOI requests have been made by citizen super sleuth Ray Sanders who is engaged on a detailed scientific study of the Met Office’s nationwide temperature measuring network and climate average databases. His requests for help in this work are simple and, in addition to seeking how data is inputted into non-existent weather stations – 103 at the last count – he asked why a national record of 40.3°C on July 19th, 2022 at RAF Waddington is to be found in the CEDA archives, but was not claimed at the time. Great play was made of the record 40.3°C declared at nearby RAF Coningsby on the same day, although later disclosures have shown it was a 60-second spike as three Typhoon jets were attempting to land. Sanders is not asking for anything complicated that might involve considerable work on the part of the Met Office. He is merely seeking information that should be easily obtained within the records of the Met Office.
The ‘vexatious/public interest’ suggestion is the latest dog ate my homework excuse offered by the Met Office to avoid identifying the so-called well-correlated neighbouring stations. Earlier this year, it told Sanders that the information was not actually held by the Met Office. It was claimed that “the specific stations used in regressive analysis each month are not an output from the process”. Needless to say, that nonsense failed to satisfy Sanders and you can read here details of his recent FOI requests and the Met Office’s lengthy reply.
The Met Office’s inability to produce this information will inevitably lead to speculation that the data is being invented, possibly with a political motive in mind to promote Net Zero. To head off such damaging conclusions being drawn, the State-funded Met Office needs to stop hiding behind “vexatious” excuses and treat these reasonable requests with the attention and respect they deserve. As Sanders notes, it is impossible to rationally justify any climate average figures without knowing what the relevant inputs were. If these well-correlated stations are unknown or no details retained, “then you have no proof whatsoever of the accuracy of the outputs” – outputs, it might additionally be noted, that should be removed when they are being used to promote the Net Zero fantasy.
It is hardly vexatious or not in the public interest to identify the stations currently supplying data for Lowestoft. In fact, Sanders went out of his way to explain that he was solely concerned with the details of which stations’ data are currently being used. “Obviously, as this is an ongoing process these stations must be known”, he writes. Similar inquiries have also been made about Scole, Manby, Fontmell Magna, Nairn Druim, Bodiam and Aberdaron weather stations. Answers to all of these came back none. In a long, detailed and legalistic explanation arguing why the Met Office should not provide the information, it was claimed that the “public interest test arguments were upheld”.
Sanders’ view is an obvious one – “It would have been much simpler and less expensive to actually answer my questions than go to all this rigmarole to not answer… In early August they will produce such figures for Lowestoft, Nairn Druim and Paisley (all long closed) but they will not be able to produce details of the stations used to compile such ‘data’ – does anyone really believe that? Why do they allow readings they know to be wrong to be archived? If the Met Office cannot (or will not) produce evidence to support their claims why should anyone believe them?”.
Interest in the temperature measuring activities of the Met Office has grown over the last year following revelations published in the Daily Sceptic that nearly 80% of its 380 sites are poorly located. As a result, they are subject to unnatural temperature corruptions that lead to classification ratings that come with possible ‘uncertainties’ between 2°C and 5°C. Not to exaggerate, many sites seem to measure everything except the natural ambient air temperature. Further work from Dr Eric Huxter has shown that many of the ‘extremes’ and ‘records’ claimed recently by the Met Office are due to suspicious heat spikes in junk sites picked up by recently introduced electronic devices. In addition to his work describing the lamentable state of many temperature sites, Ray Sanders has also discovered the massive estimations made for over 100 non-existent stations. Mainstream media has been slow to pick up on this story since it leads to the obvious opening of a Pandora’s Box and a questioning of the Met Office’s role in promoting a made-up climate crisis that requires an unnecessary Net Zero solution.
But with the fantasy nature of Net Zero coming to the fore, this is starting to change. The walls are slowly crumbling. On July 3rd, the distinguished science writer Matt Ridley noted in the Telegraph that the 34.7°C recorded two days before in London’s St James’s Park might have something to do with that weather station being a low reliability Class 5 site with an error rating up to 5°C. “So yes, the heat is indeed partly man-made – but not necessarily in the way the Met Office means,” he observed.
Ridley goes on to note that the Met Office seems increasingly bored by its day job of forecasting the weather, “so it likes to lecture us about climate change”. In his view it has been “embarrassingly duped by activists”. He gives the example of its continued use of the de-bunked RCP8.5 ‘business-as-usual’ scenario to make future apocalyptic predictions that summers in less than 50 years could be up to 6°C warmer and 60% drier. In his view, the Met Office is “deliberately seeking extreme predictions to scare people and so get media attention”.
Recent revelations might suggest that it is none too fussy in how it goes about achieving these desperate ends.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X
On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) stated that he “can’t prove it” but believes that the fossil fuel industry is trying to get the Trump administration to undercut weather forecasting because “They know that when people talk about the weather and give weather warnings, they’re going to talk about climate change now.”
Guest “Just when you thought Democrats couldn’t get any dumber” by David Middleton
Whitehouse: ‘I Can’t Prove It’, But I Think Fossil Fuel Industry Getting Trump to Undercut Weather Forecasting
By Ian Hanchett 10 Jul 2025
On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) stated that he “can’t prove it” but believes that the fossil fuel industry is trying to get the Trump administration to undercut weather forecasting because “They know that when people talk about the weather and give weather warnings, they’re going to talk about climate change now.”
How can a person become this stupid? Does this total fracking moron not realize that accurate weather forecasts are critically important to oil & gas operations, particularly offshore operations?
Well, it appears that it is very easy to be this STUPID when you’re Sheldon Whitehouse. Stupid, corrupt, vindictive and, did I mention stupid?
Climate Policy Enemies List
Whitehouse has delivered more than 200 speeches on the Senate floor dedicated to climate change and other environmentalist topics. 9 He has accused some in the energy industry of acting like “thugs” who “own the joint” (meaning the U.S. Congress), and has declared government officials who oppose him to be “stooges” of the energy industry. 9
In a May 2015 opinion piece in the Washington Post, Whitehouse advocated a federal lawsuit against the energy industry using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. 4 Originally designed for and used in criminal cases to prosecute the mafia, RICO has a civil-lawsuit component that has since been applied to corporate targets such as cigarette manufacturers. Whitehouse admitted he did not “have enough information” to know whether “racketeering activity” had actually occurred with the energy industry, but speculated the civil discovery in a RICO lawsuit might uncover the evidence. 4 In March 2016, then-U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced she had referred Whitehouse’s RICO concern to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). 10
In July 2016, two months after the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands sent a subpoena demanding private internal research records, communications, and donor information to libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Whitehouse led a group of 19 U.S. Senate Democrats in a two-day series of floor speeches denouncing CEI and many other free-market think tanks, with Whitehouse saying the research organizations were part of a “filthy thing in our democracy.” The Senate campaign was aimed at passage of a Congressional resolution that would have called on the non-profit groups to cooperate with “active or future investigations” of their climate-policy positions that might be launched against them by federal or state law enforcement officials. 11
The CEI president responded, saying Whitehouse had become the “new Sen. Joe McCarthy,” and that it “is unhealthy for democracy and abusive when members of Congress create an enemies list based on policy positions.” 11 A joint letter sent to all of the Democratic Senators from 22 targeted think tanks stated: “Your threat is clear: There is a heavy and inconvenient cost to disagreeing with you. Calls for debate will be met with political retribution. That’s called tyranny. And, we reject it.” 5
Whitehouse demanded a more-serious pursuit of a RICO case in 2018 and complained that Democrats still “haven’t done the basic due diligence prosecutors do putting an org chart together against a criminal enterprise.” 12
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