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.
Scientists have dreamed of putting solar panels in outer space since the late 1960s and have known that space-based solar power was technologically feasible since the 1970s. But the true race for space-based solar has only just begun, driven by the intensifying need to produce more electricity to meet rapidly growing energy demand. As more of the world becomes electrified, big data and AI become omnipresent, and decarbonization deadlines draw closer, innovative energy solutions are needed more than ever. As a result, space-based solar power is finally ready for its day in the sun.ย
Space-based solar power (SBSP), a long-envisioned technology, is gaining momentum as a crucial solution to meet growing energy demands and achieve decarbonization targets.
This technology offers significant benefits, including 24/7 high-intensity sunlight collection, potential for substantial reductions in land-based renewable energy and battery storage needs, and lower overall energy system costs.
Despite its promise, space-based solar power faces challenges in financing long-term infrastructure projects, with startups increasingly relying on government contracts to scale the technology.
Scientists have dreamed of putting solar panels in outer space since the late 1960s and have known that space-based solar power was technologically feasible since the 1970s. But the true race for space-based solar has only just begun, driven by the intensifying need to produce more electricity to meet rapidly growing energy demand. As more of the world becomes electrified, big data and AI become omnipresent, and decarbonization deadlines draw closer, innovative energy solutions are needed more than ever. As a result, space-based solar power is finally ready for its day in the sun.ย
This nascent technology employs enormous satellites to collect high-intensity sunlight and beam it down to Earth, either through microwaves or lasers. A receptor on Earth receives that energy and converts it into electricity to be fed into the grid. This energy would be dispatchable, as satellites would have gargantuan range and could flexibly beam energy to where the demand is greatest.
The production potential of space-based solar power is enormous. Because the panels are situated beyond clouds and the atmosphere, and are not impacted by the rotation of the earth, they receive high levels of unadulterated sunlight 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As a result, these systems are capable of producing a potentially game-changing amount of clean energy.
According to calculations by researchers from Kingโs College London, space-based solar power could reduce Europeโs need for land-based renewable energy by as much as 80 percent, and reduce battery-based energy storage needs by more than two-thirds. The kicker? It would reduce the cost of Europeโs energy system by as much as 15 percent. The researchers found that the associated savings in terms โenergy generation, storage and network infrastructure costsโ would save an estimated 35.9 billion euros (41.7 U.S. Dollars) per year.
The higher energy density of space-based solar means that energy systems would need far fewer costly resources. Such a system โrequires orders of magnitude fewer critical minerals to provide the same continuous power as a terrestrial solution with large-scale energy storage,โ reads a recent article from the World Economic Forum. โThis offers a more sustainable path, alleviating the strain on resources that the International Energy Agency (IEA) has identified as a key challenge,โ the report continues.
Critically, these systems would also require far, far less land than Earthbound solar farms. Not only would we be outsourcing solar panels to outer space, the receptors that receive the solar energy here on Earth would be relatively small and mostly transparent, meaning that they would be well-suited to mixed-use spaces. This would alleviate intensifying issues of land scarcity faced by utility-scale renewable energies.
As the considerable benefits of space-based solar gain more attention, investment in their development has ramped up considerably. Labs in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Japan, Europe, and other locations around the globe are all accelerating their research programs to advance space-based solar power, and high-profile private investors are now joining the trend as well. Big tech bigwig Baiju Bhatt, a co-founder of Robin Hood, launched the space solar startup called Aetherflux last year.
But space-based solar power still faces some key hurdles before it can be scaled for commercial use. The most significant of these, according to the World Economic Forum, is the way that private finance is structured around early-stage startups and not long-term infrastructure projects. While space-based solar power will be a big money saver in the long term, it will not provide quick or necessarily predictable returns on investment.
For this reason, startups are looking to government contracts to get space-based solar power off the ground. “We think that the military customer is large enough โ and for lack of better word, difficult enough โ of a customer that if we can serve, we can build a constellation and we can be at scale, Christian Garcia, managing partner at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, one of Aetherfluxโs backers, told CNBC. โAnd at that point, we will have dropped the cost of the technology such that we can expand into other customers.”
In Episode #177 of The Climate Realism Show, The Heartland Instituteโs Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely also tackle the Crazy Climate News of the Week, including a misleading Bloomberg chart that โclimate denialists canโt ignore,โ how arson, not โclimate change,โ caused the Pacific Palisades fire, why the predicted increase in EF5 tornadoes never materialized, and how inhalers are now being targeted by climate activists.
In September 2025, no hurricanes made landfall in the United States โ the first time thatโs happened in a decade. Whatโs going on with this yearโs hurricane season? We ask WeatherBELL Analyticsโ Joe Bastardi, one of Americaโs best hurricane forecasters, to share his insights.
In Episode #177 of The Climate Realism Show, The Heartland Instituteโs Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely also tackle the Crazy Climate News of the Week, including a misleading Bloomberg chart that โclimate denialists canโt ignore,โ how arson, not โclimate change,โ caused the Pacific Palisades fire, why the predicted increase in EF5 tornadoes never materialized, and how inhalers are now being targeted by climate activists.
Tune in LIVE at 1 p.m. ET on YouTube, Rumble, and X, and join us in the live chat.
As summarized in Earthโs Energy Imbalance part II the theory of response to radiative forcing from CO2 is most simply explained using an idealized, 1-D atmospheric profile.
In my effort to produce the series called โEarthโs Energy Imbalance, parts 1-3โ I left open a couple of ideas that simply became loose threads for another time. That time has arrived, partially because of a recent publication that caught my attention.
Background
As summarized in Earthโs Energy Imbalance part II the theory of response to radiative forcing from CO2 is most simply explained using an idealized, 1-D atmospheric profile. This explanation is shown in Figure 1, and for purposes of background its explanation is this:
With a fixed Te and fixed gradient (Lapse rate ฮ) surface temperature then becomes; Ts = Te + ฮZe. In this simple model only changes in Ze matter. Now the argument takes the following path.
An increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere makes the atmosphere more opaque to outgoing infrared radiation from the surface. Thus, to have a CO2-doubled atmosphere equally transparent above Ze to enable escape of the average photon, Ze must reside higher in the atmosphere. A doubling of CO2 makes the more opaque atmosphere equally transparent above at Ze+150m. However, the invariant gradient of 6.5K/km means the temperature at Ze+150m is lower by about 1K, and according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law this amounts to a reduction in outgoing radiation by about 4W/m2 (236.3 = ฯ 2544). There is an energy imbalance that warms the entire atmosphere and surface.
This is an analysis dependent entirely on a temperature profile with an invariant temperature gradient. Let me just say as an aside, that sometimes a very simple and valid explanation is pertinent to an imagined problem; but the imagined problem is different than the problem of pertinence. I think we are facing such a situation here.
Nonetheless, elements of this same 1-D thinking are pervasive in the climate debate.[1] I donโt want to speak for Dr. Spencer, and perhaps heโd elaborate on this topic, but in a comment I made in โEarthโs Energy Imbalance, part II an Addendumโ I mentioned something heโd written on a listserve elsewhere:
โโฆRoy Spencer has said that when it comes to climate change, the problem doesnโt realy [sic] involve โweatherโ but is largely a matter of radiative transport surface to space, which is why 1-d models work about as well as global climate models. I agree, but only to a point. I think convection, and advection from tropics to poles are also important, but not even included on the list of feedbacks. Lindzen has lately been emphasizing that poleward transport processes are very important. The whole question is so complicated that it is bound to generate strong disagreement โฆ.โ
Because of the focus on 1-D geometry, an important question to explore is โWhat does an atmospheric profile, a 1-D column, tell us about heat transport surface to space?โ
The short answer is that it tells us nothing definitive until it is augmented with other information. The reason for this is that any number of processes can arrive at the same atmospheric profile. The forward problem, going from processes to profile, arrives at a unique answer. The inverse problem, going from an observed profile back to the processes producing it is not unique, but rather infinitely degenerate. This is the same problem I identified as fatal to a published paper arguing for CO2 having no effect on atmospheric temperature.
Each small parcel, letโs say each kilogram, of the atmosphere has a current temperature. This temperature is a reflection of its specific internal energy.[2] Taking a Lagrangian point of view, changes to specific internal energy result from integrated inputs over time of heat added to the parcel through external sources like radiation and internal sources like latent heat or dissipation of kinetic energy, less the work the parcel performed against its environment over its path from a point of origin to the present location.[3] This represents an enormous amount of information. It explains the enthusiasm for the 1-D model, radiative-convective equilibrium (RCE), and the preponderance of feedback analysis based on it.
What about RCE?
Though I find the concept of equilibrium dubious, the transport of heat to space by combined radiation and convection we will call RCE as does Caballero and Merlis. The only place I have ever observed the invariant 6.5 K/km lapse rate, which the simple model of greenhouse warming needs, is among the models in MODTRAN.[4] MODTRAN is an excellent learning tool for exploring how atmospheric structure affects the transport of thermal IR radiation. It is a reasonable calculator of thermal IR within certain limitations. It can, for example, show that a doubling of CO2 produces the immediate decrease in outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) of 3.7 W/m2 at the tropopause, which in turn requires an increase of about 1C in surface temperature to restore OLR to its previous value assuming no water vapor feedback.
The limitation of most concern here is that the implementation available to us does not allow building a custom deck of atmospheric structure. Instead we are limited to using a fixed set of atmospheric models with a few adjustments for clouds. All of these models involve a long segment of temperatures at a fixed, constant lapse rate near 6.5 K/km. Changing the surface temperature of a model, changes the entire vertical column by this same adjustment. Thus, MODTRAN enforces an invariant lapse rate, and one model, the U.S Standard Atmosphere of 1976, presents a constant lapse rate of 6.5 K/km all the way from surface to space. It is the embodiment of the simple model of climate warming under discussion here.
The various models that MODTRAN makes available are all fictions. The U.S Standard Atmosphere of 1976, for example, began as the NACA Standard Atmosphere in 1922. It was not meant as a tool for weather and climate, but to provide input into operational and engineering problems of aeronautics. By the 1950s problems of aeronautics broadened into problems of astronautics. This combined with growing understanding of the upper atmosphere initiated a series of updates starting in 1953 to eventually become the U.S Standard Atmosphere of 1976. I donโt know the precise origin of MODTRANโs other models, but they all originated apparently out of engineering needs in weaponry and instrumentation; not weather and climate. Nonetheless, mission creep has allowed these to enter weather and climate. As an example, the U.S Standard Atmosphere of 1976, provides weighting (contribution functions) on the GOES-R baseline imager.[5]
As a consequence of not being able to design a model atmosphere, using MODTRAN as a calculator of greenhouse effect presents an inconsistency. The specified temperature profile canโt be sustained by radiative transport alone as Figure 2a shows. Other mechanisms implicitly fill the gap, and we can hardly imagine how these operate, or how they impact the story of changing CO2, without other information. Figure 2b shows that the temperatures profiles in MODTRAN demand that heat actually be supplied as advection from lower latitudes if, for example, the subarctic winter model is to have real meaning.
Our understanding of feedbacks in RCE, as reference [1] states, really only clearly involves the โRโ part and โCโ becomes conjecture.
Figure 2a and 2b.
An occasional contributor to threads on WUWT has taken an interesting, and in my view clever, approach to the โCโ part of RCE. I donโt wish to speak for, or identify, this correspondent, but they might volunteer to provide a link to their work, making it visible to readers. In lieu of that, Iโll summarize what I view as pertinent.
Figure 2 implies that radiative transport grows kind-of linearly as the other, unspecified means of transport diminish with altitude. Assuming that the other transport is entirely heat transported vertically from the local surface to space through material motion, a total transport equation from the Schwarzschild equation plus a convective contribution is then written in a parameterized form. A term such as ฮป = Aโ(1 + Bx), with A and B as constants, represents a characteristic length for radiation absorption/emission โ greater by a factor (1+AB)/A at the tropopause (x=1) than at the surface. This ฮป factor multiplies the Schwarzschild transport terms. A term such as ฮบ = C โ (1 โ Dx) multiplied by temperature gradient, describes the decline with height of convected (sensible plus latent) heat.[6] The numerical solution is via a variational method.
The approach is not without some limitations. First, it makes no allowance for advected heat. Second, it uses a linear gradational gray atmosphere model; whereas the real atmosphere differs from this because water vapor is so concentrated near the surface. Third, it makes no explicit allowance for the work done against the surrounding atmosphere in vertical motion, although I suspect that this third shortcoming is mitigated to some extent by choice of C and D. Nevertheless, despite these shortcomings, a couple of pertinent conclusions arise.
First, the 1-D RCE model produces not a constant lapse rate, but one varying systematically from surface to space. As the correspondent says โWhile lapse rate variations with altitude might seem testable, actual plots appear visually linear and suggest otherwise.โ
Second, small perturbations to ฮป, k, and surface temperature produce sensitivity values lower than what one would surmise by using MODTRAN and the invariable lapse rate as a calculator.
Interesting!
What about Radiative/Advective Equilibrium (RAE)?
Once again we are not necessarily speaking of equilibrium, but rather just heat transport by radiation and advection. The Caballero and Merlis paperโs focus is on this issue. This paper describes the construction and testing of a very simple model of the north polar heat transfer. The authors say that warming of the poles in response to global forcing is not fully understood and that this
โโฆmotivates interest in developing a minimal model of RAE that robustly captures
the basic physics of high-latitude climate, as a counterpart to single-column RCE for lower latitudesโฆโ
Note, in particular, an implied dichotomy here between an RAE model for polar regions and an RCE model for lower latitudes. Iโll make some comments about this dichotomy later, but for now I will focus on a critique of the content of the paper.
In order to fully model heat transport, one would need a simultaneous solution to several differential equations. The principle one is a statement of the First Law of Thermodynamics. Letโs state this in English rather than mathematics.
We are interested in changes in internal energy of a parcel of air, which comes about through
a summation of 1) radiative transport (Schwarzschild), plus 2) bulk material transport (3-D dot product of material velocity and temperature gradient), plus 3) a diffusion term to smooth the stark temperature gradients (frontal features) that bulk transport alone produces, and finally 4) heat sources and sinks.
There are several challenges to an effort based on this complex set of partial differential equations. First, the least onerous problem is there being a dominating effect on vertical mass transport of the parcel working against the surrounding atmosphere. This suggests that two different but related temperatures are involved; absolute temperature for category 1 and potential temperature for categories 2 and 3.
Second, the more difficult problem is the need for a 3-D velocity. This means that one cannot produce a First Law statement of an RAE model from just a vertical sounding. One requires a reasonable solution over a 3-D domain. This problem is recursive, drawing in progressively larger regions, and soon one is faced with the prospect of a global climate model run innumerable times to fully populate a sort of factorial experiment with results.
What the authors sought instead was a very simple model that captures the essence of energy transport in the Arctic, but which can provide large numbers of simulations with modest resources and good fidelity.
The simple way to accomplish this was to produce a latitude limited model with a single boundary at the arctic/midlatitudes transition, and employing only an energy balance equation. In effect, the Arctic is represented by a single vertical column. The single boundary condition could be made constant in order to perform numerical experiments on internal processes in the Arctic, or manipulated to perform numerical experiments on factors external to the Arctic. The article goes on to establish validity of the model by comparison with reanalysis and global climate model results. Finally conclusions regarding how various forcings and perturbations expected in the future will affect Arctic climate. Those interested in details can consult the open source paper for details.
I am not endorsing the product that resulted. The authorsโ goal was to explore Arctic climate change by the usual forcings: change to surface heat, change to CO2 concentration, change to specific humidity, with the advective forcing added as something new. My hope was different. I hoped to see advective heat transfer added as a global feedback in its own right. Mine wasnโt met.
The dichotomy of RAE and RCE based on latitude specific boundaries is not consistent with this hope. Figure 3 shows why.
Figure 3. Heat surpluses/deficits on average over a year on Earth and the implied advective heat transport that a steady climate then requires. [7]
It is obvious that with a surplus of energy input to the tropics and deficit at the poles, RCE alone without advection would lead to increasing tropical temperatures and declining polar temperature. Advection is a global phenomenon, and figuring how it will change with CO2 additions seems pertinent.
My second concern is with limiting analyses to a latitude range, justified by the authors by reference to other work showing โฆ
โโฆthat while the poles respond strongly to forcing applied in lower latitudes, the opposite is not true: midlatitude temperatures are, to a first approximation, unaffected by polar forcingโฆ.โ
Figure 4 shows a sounding from Dallas-Fort Worth. A Texan I heard once said, โThey ainโt nothinโ between Texas and the North Pole, but a barbโ waar fence.โ The relevance of this statement to Figure 4 should be obvious. Flows of fluid, air and seawater, into polar regions have to be mass balanced by flows in the opposite direction. Figure 4 shows the consequence of such a flow. Surface temperature in Figure 4 is -17C and from the dew point values the mixing ratio is less than 0.8g/Kg decreasing upward. Normal values of mixing ratio at this season are two to four times higher. Polar air mass has produced significant effects far south of this putative subarctic/midlatitude boundary.
Figure 4.
The so-called surface radiator fin
Caballero and Merlis identify a significant polar cooling mechanism that they say depends on an atmospheric profile like that in Figure 4. A cold surface with a temperature inversion and dry air above it can radiate freely to space because the atmospheric window of IR thermal radiation is open. The atmosphere can exchange energy through both radiation and diffusion with the nearby surface, and the surface, which approximates a blackbody, then radiates to space efficiently through the window.
Never mind that this isnโt what fins do or how they work [8], this same mechanism or some small variation of it works globally. In fact, even if the temperature inversion is not initially present, the presence of dry air and a wide-open atmospheric IR window will produce it. Figure 5 shows a late summer example at Santa Teresa, New Mexico; a locality and situation similar to whatย I presented in this essay. Overnight there has been a systematic cooling of the air column below 730mb and development of an inversion because of the presence of the radiating ground below โ the mixing ratio isnโt even especially dry, being around 10-12 g/Kg near surface.
Figure 5
While Figure 4 showed an unusually severe example of the southward flow, Figure 6 shows that shallow domes of polar air flow during winter deep into the tropics. These not only absorb heat along the way, but because of their relatively dry surface air, they also open the atmospheric window to IR radiation directly to space.[9]
Figure 6. Two instances of mobile polar highs penetrating deep into the tropics. I modified this only slightly from the original by shading land areas to make the paths of travel more clear.
Finally to place these into a clearer heat transport context, Figure 7 shows a numerical simulation of Rayleigh-Benard convection which is the prototype model of natural convection. The lower boundary is heated. The upper boundary cooled.
Note that the fluid motion in this instance involves not a smooth, regular overturning of the fluid, but rather consists of discrete blobs of fluid โ red ones rising and blue ones sinking. The appearance of blobs versus smooth overturn is a function of the Rayleigh number which in this example is Ra=108, which is far above the onset of fluid overturn.
In the context of the midlatitudes atmosphere, the blue blobs are mobile polar highs gliding equatorward along the Earthโs surface. The red blobs are the warm counterflow of air/moisture travelling poleward in slant convection or some other mechanism that lofts and bulldozes air to higher latitudes. The mobile polar highs take relatively cool air that can absorb some heat and moisture in the midlatitudes and even into the tropics, but more importantly they take with them dry surface air that presents an open IR window in places where one doesnโt otherwise exist.
Figure 7. Numerical simulation of Rayleigh Benard convection. Image from Lappa, Marcello. (2019). On the Nature of Fluid-dynamics. Uploaded to Researchgate by Marcello Lappa.
Conclusions
The effort of Caballero and Merlis, which initiated this essay, failed to produce what I had hoped primarily because their goal was, as usual, demonstrating how CO2 can make the polar regions warmer. Because of this they stopped short of a worthy goal. That goal is to quantify how the resulting warmer polar regions will take heat from the surface to space because a warmer surface radiates more heat via the Stefan-Boltzmann feedback and does so in the driest portions of the atmosphere with a wider atmospheric window.
Advection not only moves heat over the Earthโs surface to where it can travel more easily from surface to space, but the very dry air in the counterflow of cA and cP masses that polar regions produce open the atmospheric window to space along journeys to warmer regions. Global advection deserves more attention than it has received to date.
References and Notes
1-Caballero and Merlis, Polar Feedbacks in Clear-Sky RadiativeโAdvective Equilibrium from an Airmass Transformation Perspective, Journal of Climate, V 38, p. 3399, 15 JULY 2025
This paper begins thusly, which was my motivation for this current essay.
โThe concept of radiativeโconvective equilibrium (RCE) and its embodiment in a single-column model (Manabe and Strickler 1964; Manabe and Wetherald 1967) are the foundation of our understanding and quantification of climate sensitivity.โ
2-internal energy equals heat capacity at constant volume times temperature plus some arbitrary reference value. Heat capacity is a function of temperature as more degrees of freedom become available at higher temperature, thus more ways a molecule has to store energy.
3-focussing on the parcel of atmosphere as our thermodynamic system, the sign convention of mechanical engineering is that heat added to the parcel is positive (thus heat subtracted is negative), while work the parcel does on its environment is positive. Writing the First Law of Thermodynamics as an equation in small quantities; ฮดU = ฮดQ โ ฮดW; where U is internal energy. Physicists and chemists more generally reverse the sign convention for work.
4-The version I use is available at University of Chicago. I know of only one other version which seems to have all the same limitations.
5-Timothy J. Schmit, et al, 2017, A Closer Look at the ABI on the GOES-R Series, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 01 Apr 2017, p. 681-698.
6-Heat transport by moving fluid is always represented mathematically by a term something like a dot product (vector inner product) between the vectors of fluid velocity and temperature gradient. Thus, the convection as a parameterized velocity (k term) and vertical temperature gradient is appropriate in this 1-d RCE formulation. However, the presence of positive work output of a parcel as it rises suggests that potential temperature is more appropriate.
In a 3-d model the horizontal advection of heat at any height would involve a term like VยทโT; where V is the horizontal velocity vector, โ is the horizontal gradient operator (Grad of div, grad, curl fame) and the middle dot represents the horizontal dot-product. The vertical component typically uses omega as the velocity unit.
7-Adam Showman, J. Y-K. Cho, Kristen Menou, 2009, Atmospheric Circulation of Exoplanets, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45884771; see for example equations 5a through 5e. Note that 5e has the advective/convective terms separated with the convective term written in terms of omega (vertical velocity in pressure coordinates). Omega is much smaller than the horizontal components, and to try to find it through observations by using 5c renders it mostly in error.
8-โRadiating finsโ work simply by providing a low conductance path for heat into a broad region where the heat can be disposed of by fluid convection. The typical fin geometry makes a poor true emitter of radiation because each fin has a large view of others at the same temperature.
9-Leroux, M, 1993, The Mobile Polar High a new concept explaining present mechanisms of meridional air-mass and energy exchanges and global propagation of palaeoclimatic changes, Global Planet Change, 7 69-93
I asked for some meat on the bones of Kemi Badenochโs pledge to scrap Net Zero.
Well, Claire Coutinho has just supplied it!
Her speech starts at 34 minutes in:
Hats off to her, as she comes up with a few home truths and admits the errors by made by Tory governments.
There are two key promises:
1) Scrap the Carbon Tax
2) Scrap ROC subsidies
I have been arguing for these for years.
Together she says these will cut electricity bills by 20%, worth about ยฃ16 billion a year.
There is one part where she misleads about Reform policy though. She claims that Reform promise to lower bills by ยฃ1000 per family, even though average electricity bills are less!
Reformโs savings however are based on the overall cost to the public of high electricity prices, not just electricity bills themselves. Their costings are based on John Constableโs calculations, which show an overall cost of ยฃ25 billion a year.
Domestic users, of course, only use about a third of total electricity, so only a third of that ยฃ25 billion is added to household bills. But the public ultimately the whole of that ยฃ25 billion one way or another, whether through higher taxes, higher prices in shops, lower wages or lost jobs.
In reality, both the Tories and Reform are on the same page with this. It is a pity Coutinho resorted to this cheap shot.
Given the stance of the Conservative Environment Network, there may be battles ahead in the Tory party!
When the Australian government set up a โSenate select committee to investigate misinformation and disinformation in climate science and energyโ, I didnโt find out until a few hours before the deadline for submissions from the general public. Things were made a little more complicated by the fact that I was travelling overseas at the time, with only a mobile phone to prepare a submission on.
When the Australian government set up a โSenate select committee to investigate misinformation and disinformation in climate science and energyโ, I didnโt find out until a few hours before the deadline for submissions from the general public. Things were made a little more complicated by the fact that I was travelling overseas at the time, with only a mobile phone to prepare a submission on.
It was a reasonable assumption that the government was not going to let any submission from the public sway them away from their position that anything that even questioned climate โscienceโ was just misinformation or disinformation. So in a sense, sending in a submission was a waste of effort. On the other hand, if they didnโt receive submissions that challenged their position, then they would obviously claim that they were justified when they subsequently brought in legislation banning climate โmisinformationโ โ which surely is their objective (or something like that). I therefore felt that it was important that I send in a submission, and hopefully many others have too.
The submission had to refer to a specific clause or clauses in the terms of reference, but apart from that there were few restrictions.
I have now been advised that my submission has been received, but goodness knows whether anyone in government will actually read it. Anyway, this is it:
โ โ โ
I refer to The Senate Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy, and specifically to the terms of reference item (a) the prevalence of [] misinformation and disinformation related to climate change [];
My name is Michael Jonas, I live at Exeter, NSW, my qualification is an MA in Mathematics at Oxford University UK, and I have spent much time over the last few decades investigating climate science from a mathematical perspective. Please note that this is very relevant because (i) climate models are a mathematical construct, and (ii) science is founded on mathematics (it is a well-known maxim in science that if the maths is wrong then the science is wrong).
I have particular expertise and interest in computer modelling, having been involved in the design and development of computer models before the IPCC was created.
My main points:
โ Scepticism based on maths or science is routinely dismissed as misinformation. โ This avoids scrutiny where scrutiny is needed. โ Everything should be treated on its merits in open and free discussion.
Misinformation
Scepticism about climate change is routinely classlfied as misinformation by those who promote the mainstream position on climate change. This very conveniently gets them out of having to justify their position in an open and free discussion. The foundations of their position are shaky (see below) and would be exposed in an open discussion. As the US Supreme Court judge, Louis Brandeis, said about exactly this kind of situation in 1913, โsunlight is said to be the best of disinfectantsโ.
The simple fact is that a lot of the misinformation about climate change comes from its proponents.
Climate models
As I said above, these are a mathematical construct, so are within my area of expertise. I have examined aspects of the climate models and have documented in a published paper how they are mathematically invalid โ their structure is the structure used in the short term calculations of weather models, but mathematically this structure cannot work for the climate. A totally different structure is needed for the longer term nature of climate. The paper is titled โGeneral circulation models cannot predict climateโ and is accessible at
This study draws on Chaos Theory to investigate the ability of a General Circulation Model to predict climate. The conclusion is that a General Circulation Modelโs grid-level physical processes and parameterisations cannot predict climate beyond maybe a few weeks. [] The longer the timescale is, the less relevant the grid-level physical processes and parameterisations in a General Circulation Model become. [] A General Circulation Model calculates weather at each time step and this is then amalgamated into a final prediction of climate. This process is back to front. A realistic long term climate model would calculate climate and then weather would be deduced from the climate.
Clouds
Another area that I investigated was the overall behaviour of clouds. The question that I asked myself was: in which part of climate physics are the climate models most likely to be most wrong? The answer was in the behaviour of clouds. Mathematical analysis of the data showed that cloud behaviour was not dependent on CO2, whereas the IPCC reports and the climate models that they are based on all showed cloud behaviour being dependent on CO2. This makes an enormous difference to the modelsโ outcomes, because about half of all the modelsโ predicted warming comes from clouds and is attributed to CO2. If instead, as I found, cloud behaviour is independent of CO2, then the predicted warming from CO2 is halved and becomes quite benign. Nothing to worry about at all
My paper is titled โClouds independently appear to have as much or greater effect than man-made CO2 on radiative forcingโ. It is accessible at
The patterns of behaviour of clouds, both for cloud area and cloud optical thickness, are studied over the period of available data, 1983 to 2017. There was a decrease in cloud cover over the study period, while global surface temperatures increased. The patterns of clouds and temperature indicate that the cloud cover decrease could not have been caused by the increased surface temperature. [] The climate models, which have zero or negative cloud impact on radiative forcing independently from CO2, need to take this into account in order to avoid over-estimating the influence of CO2.
Summary
I find it quite distressing that ideas stemming from genuine mathematical and scientific analyses that cast doubt on the mainstream climate message are routinely dismissed as misinformation, when much of the mainstream climate message could itself quite reasonably be classified as misinformation.
What we need to do to rectify the situation is to stop using the term โmisinformationโ and instead to have an open and free discussion about all aspects of the climate.
If we can do this, I am confident that we will find that climate change is far less of a threat than it is thought to be, and is actually quite benign.
After the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2015, the World Bank declared a perilous โnew course,โ vowing to lead the way on green financing.
Today, it funnels 44% of its funds โ $42.6 billion annually โ into climate projects, siphoning resources from the worldโs most desperate needs.
As its largest shareholder, the United States cannot continue to ignore this climate fixation.
At Mondayโs World Bank Annual Meeting, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent must demand that it explicitly scrap its wasteful climate targets โ and redirect its attention to its true objective.
But as the climate-change narrative took hold, poverty was implausibly linked to 100-year temperature changes.
The World Bank, misrepresenting one of its own thoughtful reports, claimed in 2015 that without climate action more than 100 million additional people might be poor in 2030.
Ironically, that report found that a renewed focus on prosperity could lift almost a billion people out of poverty, but climate action would have virtually no impact by 2030.
As well-meaning as this may be, it is dangerous sophistry.
Tackling poverty through nutrition, health and education can quickly help hundreds of millions of people live better lives at low cost.
Tackling poverty through climate action will do next to nothing โ yet climate policy costs easily run into the trillions, while harming the worldโs poor by driving up costs of fertilizer and energy.
Rigorous research shows that dollar for dollar, core development investments โ like improving maternal health, advancing e-learning or enhancing agricultural yields โ deliver much greater and faster benefits than climate spending.
The World Bankโs own client surveys show people in poorer nations rank climate change near the bottom of their concerns.
Raiding development funds for climate initiatives isnโt just misguided but an affront to human suffering.
Developing nations today need cheap, reliable power to industrialize, create jobs and thrive โ just as rich countries did a century ago, and China did over recent decades.
Most of Africa remains quite poor with little access to energy beyond wood and hydro power. The average poor African uses as much fossil fuel in a year as an American uses in less than 9 days.
The World Bank aims to connect 300 million more Africans to electricity by 2030 through its Mission 300 initiative โ a worthy goal thatโs being sabotaged by its fixation on renewables.
The bankโs energy access plans signed with 29 countries are โprioritizingโ solar and wind, while tiptoeing around fossil fuels.
Whatโs more the Rockefeller Foundation, the bankโs Mission 300 partner, touts renewables as the โmost cost-effective and rapid route to prosperity.โ
This is fantasy: While solar and wind can be cheaper than fossil fuels when the sun is shining and the wind blowing,ย it is infinitely costlyย when thereโs no sun and wind.
Reliable power requires extensive backup that drives costs up significantly.
Thatโs why rich countries, despite their green rhetoric, still get more than three-quarters of their energy from fossil fuels.
While African leaders will politely speak green to Rockefeller Foundation and the World Bank, their actions speak more loudly.
Last year, Africa added five kilowatt-hours of electricity for each person from solar and wind โ but added almost five times more from fossil fuels, because theyโre cheaper and more reliable.
Across all energy use (not just electricity), Africa increased its solar and wind consumption a bit, but increased its fossil fuel consumption 22 times more.
He is right to push reforms, including a tech-neutral energy policy that prioritizes affordability.
But the United States should go further and demonstrate bold leadership by insisting that the World Bank scrap its ring-fenced funds for climate.
Scarce funds should go toward tackling poverty head-on, not to trendy green goals.
Climate change demands action, but not at povertyโs expense.
Rich governments should invest in long-overdue R&D for breakthrough green technologies โ affordable, reliable alternatives that everyone, rich and poor, will adopt.
The World Bankโs decade-long detour into climate activism is not saving the planet.
Instead, itโs abandoning the poor โ and has influenced other development organizations to do the same.
It is high time for this giant to be pushed back on course.
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford Universityโs Hoover Institution, and author of โFalse Alarmโ and โBest Things First.โ
It appears to be the season for the reverse ferret, the software update, the narrative whiplash. Call it what you will, but everyone seems to be at it. Boris Johnson said he went far too fast with Net Zero, Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride announced with a straight face that formerly Big-Spending-High-Tax-Tories will cut public spending by ยฃ47 billion, and Keir Starmer, of all people, explained sententiously that immigration has got out of hand. I was in the audience of a literary festival in Greece last week when Rory Stewart said we had been living in an โextraordinarily deluded ageโ.
It appears to be the season for the reverse ferret, the software update, the narrative whiplash. Call it what you will, but everyone seems to be at it. Boris Johnson said he went far too fast with Net Zero, Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride announced with a straight face that formerly Big-Spending-High-Tax-Tories will cut public spending by ยฃ47 billion, and Keir Starmer, of all people, explained sententiously that immigration has got out of hand. I was in the audience of a literary festival in Greece last week when Rory Stewart said we had been living in an โextraordinarily deluded ageโ. He called himself โone of the guilty menโ involved in attempting to export liberal democracy and the rule of law to an uninterested world. The assembled audience listened agog as Florence of Arabia dismantled the past few decades of deluded foreign and overseas aid policy. As Captain Alberto Bertorelli used to say in โAllo โAllo: โWhata-mistaka-to-maka.โ
It is astonishing to contemplate such things. How were these apparently clever, well-meaning folk duped?
Did they know they were wrong?
When did they know they were wrong?
How long did they keep it up?
Do they plan to make amends?
Could the same happen to us?
William Wordsworth had the measure of things when he wrote:
For by superior energies; more strict
Affiance in each other; faith more firm
In their unhallowed principles; the bad
Have fairly earned a victory oโer the weak,
The vacillating, inconsistent good.
Sometimes such narrative whiplash from unhallowed principles can happen in a heartbeat and no-one remains to defend what was once trumpeted by the thinking class. Who butย Ed Daveyย still insists ladies can have willies?
Now that the NetZero Banking Alliance hasย folded, how quickly will other corporate support for green issues just melt away?
Whether motivated by ambition, delusion or cowardice, what are we long-time sceptics and โvacillating, inconsistent goodโ to make of those who recently admitted to colossal, global errors of judgement?
For those of us who are of a religious disposition, we can reach for Luke 15:7: โI tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who do not need to repent.โ However much they may grate, if influential people such as Rory Stewart realise, dangerously belatedly, the error of their ways, then we can all rejoice.
However: itโs still outrageously annoying.
From the small scale scarring of a field close to my home with a disgusting solar farm, to the one million-plus dead in the Middle East after decades of Western intervention, the children maimed with gender hormones, and immigration and welfare dependency causing British cities to once again resemble slums, these newly unfashionable ideologies have not been without consequence.
And on a lesser scale, it is intensely annoying for we regular folk who realised at the time such ideologies were perilously bogus. We who marched against the Iraq War, who thought the hockey stick graph a bit dicey, who knew โgender affirming careโ was child abuse, find ourselves wailing like Cassandra, the accurate prophetess whom no-one believed:
No, no, the torment!
Once more, the hideous pain of a true seer.
In response to former Labour party supporter Matthew Syedโs dopey realisation that the stateโs โwild move to the Leftโ is a dangerous thing, Peter Hitchens manages to maintain his dignity, writing: โI was specifically and in detail, explaining and enumerating this 20-plus years ago. I didnโt see you around. Is it possible you were a footsoldier in Blairโs Army then?โ
However tempting it is to yell with Cassandra-like frustration: โI told you so, why werenโt you listening?!,โ we might instead attempt to ensure the closed mindsets that made such idiotic ideologies stick do not again deaden the bien pensant class.
As society moves forward, let us not repeat the folly of beingย certainย about the ideas that come next. When this โAge of Delusionโ finally passes, letโs avoid making similar catastrophic mistakes because we are sure we are right, convinced weโre โon the right side of historyโ or too cowardly to voice dissent and follow where the evidence leads. As new ideologies begin to coalesce, we mustnโt fear putting them under rigorous scrutiny.
Are we absolutely sure reducing immigration is always a good thing?
What about collapsing birthrates?
Will fracking and North Sea oil definitely solve our energy problems?
Is talk around ethno-nationalism going to lead us down dark paths?
What views will we seek to deny in 20 yearsโ time?
Letโs not sanctify incoming new ideas just because the Overton Window has shifted and all our favourite podcasters agree.
The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai puts it best in The Place Where We Are Right:
From the place where we are right Flowers will never grow In the spring.
The place where we are right Is hard and trampled Like a yard.
But doubts and loves Dig up the world Like a mole, a plough.
And a whisper will be heard in the place Where the ruined House once stood.
With every new wind farm, with every new solar plant, the security of supply becomes more fragile, as long as reliable, controllable power plants continue to be shut down. The Federal Network Agency expects that all hard coal and lignite-fired power plants will be taken off the grid by 2031.
Even though the global temperature increased by 0.14 degrees Celsius in September compared to August, the cooling trend remains intact. The American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sees a cool LA NINA approaching in the Pacific Ocean this winter, which will also lead to a decline in global temperatures.
The security of supply of electricity in Germany will no longer be guaranteed in the future
With every new wind farm, with every new solar plant, the security of supply becomes more fragile, as long as reliable, controllable power plants continue to be shut down. The Federal Network Agency expects that all hard coal and lignite-fired power plants will be taken off the grid by 2031.
Then, in times of calm โ after all, a third of the annual hours โ and a lack of solar radiation in winter, the supply of electricity in Germany is no longer guaranteed. Since the federal government is tirelessly adhering to the unchecked expansion of renewable energies and the financial burden on coal-fired power plants due to rising CO2 prices, a collapse of security of supply in Germany by 2030 is foreseeable.
This is because coal-fired power plant operators will no longer be able to operate their plants economically with an expected CO2 price of 120 โฌ/t CO2. (Security of Supply Report, p. 20).
Even the Federal Network Agency, led by the Green Party member Klaus Mรผller, states in its security of supply report: “Security of supply in Germany is guaranteed if additional controllable capacities from 22,400 MW (target scenario) to 35,500 MW (delayed energy transition) are built by 2035”. As early as 2030, there will be a shortage of 17,000 to 21,000 MW. That is 40 gas-fired power plants by 2030 and a total of 70 gas-fired power plants by 2035.
These gas-fired power plants can never be built in the next 5 years.
There are essentially three manufacturers of gas turbines worldwide: Siemens Energy (24% market share), GE Vernova (25%) and Mitsubishi (22%), which serve over 70% of the market. These manufacturers are fully booked until 2030. The necessary German 70 gas-fired power plants are therefore not yet included in the planning of the gas turbine manufacturers (see source Bloomberg below).
There are two main reasons for this explosive development. On the one hand, 50 gas-fired power plants will be built in the USA by 2028 alone to reliably serve the massive demand for the new data centers to be built.
On the other hand, there is a growing need for gas-fired power plants in developing countries to satisfy their hunger for energy. Vietnam alone wants to build 22 gas-fired power plants with 22,000 MW by 2030.
The prices for gas turbines have now tripled. At best, Germany could divert gas turbines from developing countries with even higher prices.
This then means that Vietnam, Indonesia or Pakistan will resort to coal.
Nothing is gained for total emissions if Germany replaces its coal-fired power plants with gas-fired power plants. But who expects a realistic, well-thought-out energy policy in Germany?
While other nations cover their economic growth with gas-fired power plants, the German government only wants to secure the wrong path of the energy transition with extremely high costs. To finance this, the Merz government wants to fall back on the proposal of former Federal Minister Habeck and levy a special levy on electricity of up to 2 โฌct/kWh. For a 2-person household, this is 80 โฌ per year, for the manufacturing industry this levy is another disadvantage in global competition.
The Federal Network Agency is planning another push to destroy German industry
In its recently published security of supply report, the Federal Network Agency has already indicated that it will continue to pursue the old Habeck plan, according to which industry will become a stopgap for the failed energy policy by urging it to produce when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
The energy-intensive industry thought that this absurd plan had been shelved with the departure of the Greens from the federal cabinet. But the Green string-pullers in the higher federal authorities, here Klaus Mรผller as head of the Federal Network Agency, are setting the direction.
In the summary of the report (p.7), it is stated that security of supply can only be achieved if electricity demand is made more flexible.
He threatens: “A lack of flexibility can further increase the need for additional controllable capacities such as power plants to ensure security of supply.”
Mรผller and the Federal Network Agency are working unabated under the AgNES project (Consultation Procedure for the Determination of General Grid Charges) to punish the 560 companies in Germany that produce at full capacity around the clock, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, if they take electricity evenly from the grid and favour it if they design their production according to wind and weather.
These companies in the chemical, metal, paper, glass and food industries have so far received a so-called baseload discount because of their uniform utilisation of the network. This rebate of a total of โฌ1.42 billion, which is now to be abolished, is of existential importance for the basic materials industry.
This is especially true if, as is foreseeable, grid costs will rise massively due to the grid expansion for the energy transition: by โฌ7ct/kWh for industry and โฌ20 (!) โฌct/kWh for private households. These figures were recently calculated by the Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne. This would destroy the remaining industry and cash in on private households with an electricity price increase of more than 50%.
Copper or glass production, but also data centers, cannot be operated in stop-and-go operation.
Around a third of the electricity in the metalworking industry is consumed for the operation of environmental protection systems alone, i.e. the exhaust gas purification and wastewater plants.
Should the electrostatic precipitators be switched off when the sun is not shining?
The Federal Network Agency has now recognized the weakness of its absurd planning and is now coming up with the idea that industrial companies could install batteries to make the fluctuating current more even.
So: because politicians have allowed reliable power plants to be destroyed and solar and wind power plants, which are exempt from any grid financing costs, only supply unreliable electricity, does an industrial company have to invest hundreds of millions of euros in batteries in order to build its own reliable power supply?
As the head of Kali- und Salz aptly said in an interview with the FAZ: “On the capital market, we are asked from time to time whether we are mad because we produce in Germany”. The madness is called German energy policy, which is carried out to the bitter end by Robert Habeck’s green paladins.
The Federal Network Agency is a subordinate authority of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. How long does Economics Minister Katharina Reiche want to look at how Mr. Mรผller can place further coffin nails to destroy German industry?
How long can the Chancellor look the other way when German industry is sacrificed on the green altar of the energy transition under his chancellorship?
10 years of the Paris Agreement โ the consumption of coal, oil and gas is rising unchecked
worldwide Just in time for the climate conference in Brazil, the Stockholm Environment Institute draws a sobering balance: Outside Germany and Europe, hardly any country is keeping the promises in the Paris Agreement.
Of the 195 signatory states, only 15 had reported on the set date of 10 February 2025.
After a grace period in September, just 70 of the states did.
The interest of nations in climate policy no longer seems to be particularly high.
The truth that is frightening for the climate alarmists is that most countries reported a further increase in the use of coal, oil and gas. By 2030, the reports show a 30% increase in global coal use, a 25% increase in oil and a 40% increase in gas compared to 2015.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change hoped to reduce global CO2 emissions by 45% by 2030 compared to 2010, but now they are rising further (see chart with data from the Stockholm Institute).
The CO2 figures do not yet take into account the withdrawal of the USA from the Paris Climate Agreement.
India will emit 25% more CO2 this decade, as 70% of its electricity comes from coal. China will also continue to grow until 2030. The new 5-year plan still has hundreds of coal-fired power plants in the pipeline.
Two comments should be made on the graphic.
I have added the German emissions to the chart of the Stockholm Institute.
The IPCC’s 1.5 degree curve is based on climate models that erroneously assume that 100% of the warming of the last 150 years is due to the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. Over the last 20 years, the greenhouse effect of CO2 has caused at most 20% of the warming, 80% of which is due to increasing direct sunlight due to the decline in clouds. In this respect, the IPCC curves should be viewed with the greatest scepticism. According to the plans of the 195 nations, the world will consume 30% more oil and 60% more gas in 2050 than today and only 25% less coal than in 2020 (see chart below from the Stockholm Institute). German energy policy will not change this. Only the prosperity of the citizens in Germany will change.
Kathryn Porter mentioned claims that renewables were now supplying more electricity than coal on a worldwide basis.
As she pointed out, the claim originated with Ember, the renewable lobby outfit who claimed that Labourโs energy plans would reduce bills by ยฃ300! Hardly trustworthy then!
And quite why they are making their claim half way through the year, instead of waiting till the end, is highly suspicious.
Nevertheless, if you include hydro and burning trees in โrenewablesโ, renewable and coal generation have been neck and neck for a while:
BP Energy Review 2024
The trouble is that no reputable organisation classifies hydro in renewables.
Naturally the renewable lobby has jumped on these claims to pretend that the world is rapidly moving to wind and solar power โ one contact saw Justin Rowlatt making deceptive claims on the BBC News last night.
The reality is of course much different. Wind and solar only contributed 15% of the worldโs electricity last year, and it is unlikely to go much higher this year.
Justin Rowlatt claimed that the worldโs energy system is being transformed by โcheapโ solar power. That is an outright lie. Solarโs contribution rose from 5.6% in 2023 to 6.7% last year โ hardly transformative!
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