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.
What a profoundly ignorant article.
Do we affect the climate? Of course we do. Cutting down trees impacts water cycles. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions also likely affect the climate, though since the CO2 band in the atmosphere is already saturated, adding more CO2 likely has limited impact.
“… What people mean when they say they don’t believe human-induced climate change … they fear what dealing with it might mean for them personally …”
Climate change scepticism isn’t real
To deny the existence of global warming, or its human causes, is an untenable position to take and hard to believe, argues Alex Stevensson
…
What people mean when they say they don’t believe human-induced climate change is real is actually that they fear what dealing with it might mean for them personally, and that they would rather do nothing.
If you own a few classic cars, work for a petrochemicals company, enjoy travelling to Asia twice a year, gorge on steaks twice a week, or any number of other scenarios, this is not an unreasonable reaction: “If I can convince myself, and at least some people around me, that this problem doesn’t exist, I might just be able to live out the rest of my life in blissful ignorance.”
This logic could probably work for most of us – and certainly for someone as elderly as Mr Trump. But sometimes ignorance isn’t bliss. Sometimes it’s nothing short of deliberate sabotage of the future.
Do we affect the climate? Of course we do. Cutting down trees impacts water cycles. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions also likely affect the climate, though since the CO2 band in the atmosphere is already saturated, adding more CO2 likely has limited impact.
But this isn’t the only viewpoint in the climate skeptic community. If Alex Stevensson had bothered to do some research, he might have discovered there is a range of views, from people like myself who think CO2 has almost no effect, to people who fully accept IPCC predictions of global warming, but question the economic calculations of estimated impacts.
Had Alex made an effort, he would have learned that far from being dangerously warm, the world is currently locked in one of the coldest periods of the Late Cenozoic Ice Age, that permanent polar ice is not the normal state of Earth’s historical climate, and that life thrived in past warm periods.
Alex might have even learned even if the world warms, there is no evidence that warmer conditions hurt nature. He might have learned that our monkey ancestors first emerged in the fossil record during one of the warmest periods of the last hundred million years, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when global temperatures were 5-8C hotter than today. Far from being harmed by such warmth, our monkey ancestors colonised much of the planet, feasting on the abundance the extreme warmth of the PETM provided, spreading across Eurasia and Northern Europe, only retreating when the return of colder conditions drover them from their their new homes. If a monkey ancestor with a brain the size of a matchbox could thrive in much warmer conditions than today, we humans could certainly cope.
Most of all, if Alex had bothered to do his job as a reporter and get out and talk to people, rather than wasting his reader’s time by airing his nonsensical personal prejudices, he would have learned the real fakes are those who push unfounded fear, uncertainty and doubt, that the climate fear mongers are no different to the Covid fear mongers, who damaged our national economies and our children’s mental health with months or in some cases years of completely unnecessary enforced social isolation at home.
The article summarizes the study by Frans J. Schrijver titled “Historical CO2 Levels in periods of global Greening” which NTZ’s author Kenneth Richard posted here.
The Report24 article questions the traditional measurements of CO2 values from ice cores, which suggest levels of about 280 ppm (parts per million) for the early Holocene (10,000 years ago).
The recent study by Schrijver argues that the Earth was significantly greener 10,000 years ago, with a forest area over 50 percent higher than today. To enable such growth, CO2 levels at least equivalent to today’s level of approximately 420 ppm would have been necessary. This is justified using the Mitscherlich Law, which describes the relationship between CO2 fertilization and plant growth.
It is claimed that the Earth itself has quadrupled its natural CO2 emissions since 1750 (from 166 to 210 gigatonnes of carbon per year). In comparison, the human contribution is said to be tiny, increasing from 0 to 11 gigatonnes.
The article concludes that the idea of low historical CO2 levels and a dramatic, human-caused increase is untenable. The Earth was already green in early times and CO2 levels were high, with practically no human influence.
Capitalism’s unrestrained access to political influence, land and labour is starting to cannibalise the very consumer market it requires to exist, writes Yuki Lindley.
WITH OUR SOCIAL MEDIA feeds flooded with images of death and destruction — whether from the live-streamed genocide in Gaza or the urgent warnings from scientists about ecological collapse and the crossing of planetary tipping points — it is becoming more apparent to those who have long been shielded from the true costs of Western “civilisation” that all is not well with Western liberalism.
This harsh reality has never been hidden from the global majority; those whose ancestors were colonised, enslaved and subjected to genocide by the brutal march of modernity, liberalism and global capitalism.
However, with a cult-like leader in the Oval Office who openly embraces fascism, the facade of Western exceptionalism is beginning to crumble. Now that the capitalist class has over-exploited the lands and people of countries in the periphery (poorer, often formerly colonised nations), the driving force of exploitation is coming from the core (those in wealthy, industrialised nations).
Capitalism has historically relied on the exploitation of formally colonised nations at the periphery – international laws and economic systems designed by powerful colonial states entrench poverty, in order to maintain a supply of cheap labour, and raw materials to sustain the prosperity of those in the core.
However, with ecological collapse unable to be contained within national borders, and the exhaustion of the natural resources in the periphery, those dynamics are starting to be felt in the core. With increasing austerity measures, labour precarity, the privatisation of public services and the destruction of our planetary home, the exploitation upon which capitalism was built, is boomeranging back upon ordinary people living in wealthy nations, no longer seeing an endless curve of prosperity for their futures.
Western liberalism emerged to provide political and philosophical justifications for the newly emerging social order that capitalism was creating. Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, and Jeremy Bentham helped shape the ideological framework within which capitalism could expand, unrestrained to colonise new lands and people in its search for cheap labour, and endless expanses of lands from which to extract wealth.
Through a narrative of individual freedom, private ownership of property, reason and a drive for endless progress and economic productivity, enlightenment thinkers heralded in the age of Western liberalism, which was then spread throughout the world through a brutal regime of colonisation. When Spanish colonisers stole vast quantities of Andean and Mesoamerican gold and silver from the Americas, this enormous wealth circulated throughout European financial centres to fund banking and credit systems, which allowed for the rapid expansion of a global market system, giving rise to early financial capitalism.
Enlightenment thinkers seeking to escape the dark ages of religious dogmatism determined that rationality was the highest form of human evolution, and conveniently saw in themselves – the wealthy, educated Western European man – the pinnacle of this process, the modern man. This of course entailed that everyone else fell somewhere behind them in the scale of human evolution, not just women of course (who were too emotional to be rational), but all the other races, who were unfortunately falling behind in evolutionary terms, thus, the burden fell upon the white man to go forth and civilise them, such that they could be brought into the modern age of reason.
Known as the white man’s burden, this civilising mission spread white terror and genocide across the globe, with historians estimating that at its peak, Western European powers (and their settler colonies) dominated around 85 per cent of the world’s territory, representing the consolidation of the Western, global, capitalist order. The fact that large numbers of these evolutionarily backwards people would die out was seen as natural, and if they were helped along in their extinguishment by the well-oiled machinery of genocidal colonial practices, well, that was just helping nature along in a process of ensuring the survival of the fittest (which also meant the whitest).
Thus, Western colonisation spread liberalism throughout the globe, ushering in a new dawn of globalised capitalism, which developed along racialised lines. New global structures were developed by powerful, colonial states, to entrench their advantage through economic and international legal systems, often at the expense of formerly colonised nations, which were left reeling from the trauma, and destruction of their societies, peoples and lands. Of course, these legal frameworks were always applied unevenly, with powerful nations largely ignoring their own rules when it conflicted with their economic or political interests.
As Henry Reynolds points out, the British colonisation of Australia was illegal under international law as it existed in the late 18th century. It was clear that the lands were inhabited, thus, it could not lawfully be claimed as terra nullius (a land without people), and as such, sovereignty could only be acquired through treaty or a declaration of war, neither of which the British chose to do.
Paradoxically, during this time of colonial terrorism throughout the globe, there was a flourishing of a human rights-based discourse in Western Europe, which proudly proclaimed that all men were equal and born with inalienable rights. Of course, in reality, only a minority of the population (Western European men) could be recognised as being a man, and thus, with rights worthy of protection. This transparent hypocrisy within the Western cannon, was apparent to all those existing at the margins, unable to be recognised as part of mankind; however, the powerful and articulate critiques of the colonised, were rendered unintelligible to many in the West, because they could not see them as equally human, and thus these critiques were sidelined, allowing the hubris of Western liberalism to march on.
Now that actually-existing-capitalism (as opposed to the economic theory), with its unrestrained access to political influence, indigenous lands, and slave labour, has passed its zenith, it is starting to cannibalise the very things it requires to exist; a stable planetary system, the unpaid social labour of care giving, and a politically stable, market of consumers. A frightening new era of techo-facists is heralding in the dusk of a dying empire, long past its peak of economic prosperity and dominance, left clinging desperately to its military might as its last remaining source of power.
Corporate power, having long embedded itself into our public institutions, has discarded any facade of separation and is brazenly stepping forward to reveal itself as the true ruler of liberal democracies. The techno-facists in the White House have little regard for those they deem superfluous to capitalism; they believe that through digital mass-surveillance, their control over the flows of information (through platform monopolisation), and their control over state security apparatuses to suppress dissent, they will be able to usher in a new dawn of AI-powered efficiency and progress.
Of course, there is nothing new about these worldviews — they are the product of Western liberalism and its foundational disregard for certain lives, in the brutal quest for progress and profit.
Gaza is where the mask of Western liberalism has fallen to reveal its true face — one which has never been hidden to the global majority. Western liberalism was built upon the genocides of many of the world’s truly democratic, anti-authoritarian civilisations, showing one face to those it deems human, and another to those whose lives it deems ungrievable.
The true face of Western liberalism, if we’re forced to contend with its material history, is one of racialised and gendered domination, which saw the lands and bodies of Indigenous peoples as merely a resource from which to extract endless wealth, and rendered the unpaid labour of women invisible.
It believed in rational modern man’s ability to understand the natural world, in order to dominate it; a hubris the natural world is on track to deliver a crushing blow to. The West has long seen itself as above the laws it has helped create, but there are older laws, those of the land, well understood by Indigenous peoples, which care not for the demands of Western exceptionalism; for there are some laws which cannot be circumvented by powerful men, and the consequences of those laws are coming for us all.
Yuki Lindley is a student of philosophy of race, colonisation and Indigenous sovereignty.
So what do they do? Instead of having the guts to admit they got everything wrong, they try to keep hope alive by promoting fantasies of impending climate breakdown.
The only places where ecological breakdown is happening are the kind of vicious totalitarian tyrannies whose governmental systems these climate thinkers appear to prefer – but almost never want to experience first hand for themselves.
The UK Met Office’s excuses for its invented temperature data from non-existent stations get more fanciful by the day. Explanation after explanation fails to live up to rigorous examination, with statutory Freedom of Information (FOI) requests leading to frequent rewriting and new things to believe before breakfast. Data from non-existent stations are obtained from well-correlated neighbouring stations (WCNS) the Met Office told us, but there were no well-correlated neighbouring stations at Lowestoft, which had itself been closed since 2010.
The UK Met Office’s excuses for its invented temperature data from non-existent stations get more fanciful by the day. Explanation after explanation fails to live up to rigorous examination, with statutory Freedom of Information (FOI) requests leading to frequent rewriting and new things to believe before breakfast. Data from non-existent stations are obtained from well-correlated neighbouring stations (WCNS) the Met Office told us, but there were no well-correlated neighbouring stations at Lowestoft, which had itself been closed since 2010. Via a new FOI, the Daily Sceptic sought details about these invisible WCNSs at Lowestoft and has been told, “We do not use well-correlated neighbours in this case.”
Well we kind of knew that all along, due to the fact that citizen sleuth Ray Sanders couldn’t find any in the first place. For closed stations on its historic station database the new FOI explanation is: “We used the gridded value from the closest grid point from our version-controlled UK climate data set HADUK-Grid.” The suspicious might note that the HADUK-Grid uses WCNS data derived from the Met Office’s Integrated Data Archive System (MIDAS) in modelling infill data for closed stations. This is said to address gaps caused by stations opening or closing, “ensuring consistent national coverage for monitoring and research”.
In effect the Met Office is no further along in its explanations. It is simply excusing its inability to justify its invented numbers at Lowestoft by passing the buck to a computer programme that uses the ‘well-correlated neighbouring stations’ that it is unable to identify.
The Met Office is not completely stupid. When doubts arose about the figures at Lowestoft and two other closed stations at Nairn and Paisley, it hastily withdrew large chunks of data relating to the periods when the stations did not exist. But it was obvious that this could lead to questions being asked about misleading data cascading through the entire Met Office temperature database. Using the data that have had to be withdrawn from public view as WCNS input would have quickly corrupted estimates elsewhere and required a major cleaning of vast amounts of related data. What if all of the data were found at some point to be corrupted by dubious figures that could no longer be shown to the public? Invented data from invented data is hardly a good look, even in science, media and academic circles desperate for ‘highest evah’ official figures to boost the Net Zero fantasy. Happily, this will not be necessary since the publicly available historic database now states:
The purpose of this webpage is to provide a sample of historical station data across the UK for general interest. It is not used for formal climate monitoring.
What a relief. Curiously, a check from a few weeks back on the Wayback Machine shows the same page but without this particular notification. Also missing from the past edition is a note that the stations shown comprise “only a small fraction of the full UK climate network”. The remainder would be the data and statistics for other unpublicised stations “and associated charges” that can be obtained from the Met Office’s Customer Centre. Meanwhile on the latest page, five stations are now admitted to have been closed, namely Lowestoft, Paisley, Nairn, Southampton and Ringway.
This is not the first time that the Met Office has had to hastily rewrite explanations on its publicly available temperature databases. Earlier Ray Sanders investigations revealed that more than a third – 103 of 302 – stations listed with individual coordinates and elevations and supplying long-term averages did not exist. As a result, the Met Office changed the name of the database called ‘UK climate averages’ to ‘Location-specific long-term averages’. The original suggestion that selecting a climate station can provide a 30-year average from 1991-2020 – a claim available to view on Wayback – was replaced with the explanation that this page “is designed to display locations that provide even geographical coverage of the UK, but it is not reflective of every weather station that has existed or the current Met Office observation network”.
Of course, those with a cynical mind jumped to the conclusion that the Met Office solved its problem of inventing data from invented stations by suggesting that the data now arose from “locations” which may or may not bear any relation to stations that once existed or indeed exist today. Enter Science Feedback into the fray with a feeble ‘fact-check’ last December that found the reports by Ray Sanders and his Tallbloke Talkshop blog along with the Daily Sceptic were “misleading”. The average data presented by the Met Office for specific weather stations that have closed are not “fabricated”, it concluded: “They are estimated using [wait for it] well-correlated neighbouring stations.”
At the time the WCNS argument started to fall apart. Sanders noted that the Cawood station in Yorkshire was a pristine Class 1 site designated by the World Meteorological Organisation as providing uncorrupted data over a large area going back to 1959. But no rolling 30-year average for Cawood is provided. Instead the Met Office flags data for five other sites between two and 27 miles distant. Unlike Cawood, all of these have average data despite the fact that four no longer exist and the fifth, High Mowthorpe, is 27 miles away and at a 163 metres higher elevation. Quite why the Met Office should ignore an excellent set of readings from Cawood and rely on inventions and far distant temperature readings must remain a mystery. For Ray Sanders the term ‘smoke and mirrors’ came to mind.
And of course we hardly need reminding that pristine Class 1 sites are as rare as hen’s teeth in the Met Office’s near 400 temperature station nationwide network. A recent FOI from the Daily Sceptic revealed that over 80% of the stations, constituting the bedrock of all Met Office data and claims, were sited in junk Classes 4 and 5 with ‘uncertainties’ of 2°C and 5°C respectively. Over the course of 18 months the junk percentage had actually risen, while in the same period the number of Class 1 sites fell from 24 to 19.
The Met Office regularly ‘updates’ its explanations for how it compiles temperature data in the UK. As a service to readers we will attempt to keep abreast of all future changes. Watch this space.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
How often do the climate alarmists tell us that few glaciers still exist because of (imaginary) global warming and those that remain are rapidly melting away? Not surprisingly, the alarmists, particularly those from the media and vested interest groups, always point to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) computer model projections, referring to one in particular–the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP8.5.)
UN is sounding alarms about glaciers, and media is amplifying as usual.
Climate emergency:2025 declared international year of glaciers, UN News
Climate change is shrinking glaciers faster than ever, AP
Glaciers Are Melting Twice as Fast as Predicted and We’re Not Ready, Science News Today
1st glacier declared dead from climate change seen in before and after images, Live Science
Nearly 40% of the world’s glaciers are already doomed, CNN
Nearly Half of Earth’s Glaciers Are Already Doomed, Even Without Future Warming, SciTechDaily
World’s Melting Glaciers Threaten Food and Water Supply for 2 Billion People, Carbon Brief
Glaciers on the Brink: UN Calls for Bold Action, Climate Fact Checks
This short video puts this alarm into perspective. Additional detail is provided by Dr. John Happs in his article Glaciers And Ice Sheets: Here Today And Here Tomorrow. Dr. Happs comments on many glaciers around the world, this post has only some excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
How often do the climate alarmists tell us that few glaciers still exist because of (imaginary) global warming and those that remain are rapidly melting away? Not surprisingly, the alarmists, particularly those from the media and vested interest groups, always point to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) computer model projections, referring to one in particular–the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP8.5.)
Even the political/ideological IPCC has sensibly branded RCP8.5 as “Highly Unlikely”
So, what are the glacier numbers?
There are more than 200,000 alpine/valley (land-based) glaciers and many others stemming from the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland.
Glaciers have advanced, retreated and halted many times over the last 400,000 years being influenced not only by temperature but also by other factors, such as wind, precipitation, altitude, latitude, aspect, topography and slope angle.
Global temperature is often promoted, usually by naïve climate alarmists, as the only important input into glacier formation, growth and retreat yet, in very dry parts of Antarctica, where low temperatures are seemingly ideal for glacier growth, the small amount of net annual precipitation results in glaciers growing very slowly, or even diminishing in size.
Glaciers can also be influenced by sublimation or the transition of a substance directly from the solid to the gas phase. Glaciers can experience this process resulting in the “evaporation” of ice, exacerbated by wind action. Sublimation can be seen in the way that ice cubes left in the freezer will shrink over time.
More than 18,000 glaciers have been identified across 50 World Heritage sites but this represents less than 10% of the Earth’s glaciated area. The media, climate activists and vested interest groups like to argue that all glaciers are receding because global temperature is increasing. Not surprisingly, many glaciers have been retreating since we emerged from the Little Ice Age (1250-1850), a time when many farms and houses across Scandinavia were destroyed by advancing glaciers between the 14th and 19th centuries.
We might expect that glaciers and ice sheets would recede after the Little Ice Age yet we know that glaciers in many parts of the world are advancing, with glaciers growing in the Alps, North America, Patagonia, Antarctica, Alaska, the Himalayas, China, Iceland, Greenland, New Zealand, Norway, Antarctica and Greenland.
Where glaciers reach the sea, the media, and some tour guides, like to promote the dramatic calving-glacier image as pointing to (imaginary) global warming but fail to point out (perhaps they don’t know) that a calving glacier is the sign of an advancing inland glacier and certainly not one that is about to disappear.
In his silly, but influential, 2005 movie “An Inconvenient Truth” Al Gore said:
“Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”
“The speed and consequences of Himalayan glacial retreat have been grossly exaggerated by the media and environmental activists.”
A significant proportion of Himalayan glaciers are advancing. In fact, 58% of glaciers examined in the westerly Karakoram range, a chain of snowy peaks along the border of India, Pakistan and China, were stable or advancing with annual snowfall increasing. A study of Himalayan glaciers, published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate reported that cooler summers are failing to melt winter snows, which are themselves becoming more frequent, resulting in advancing glaciers. Source: Live Science
GLACIERS/ICE SHEETS IN ANTARCTICA
The Antarctic ice sheet is the world’s largest mass of ice covering around 14 million sq. km.
Ice sheets can be described as glaciers that cover very large areas and the most obvious examples are found in Greenland and Antarctica where around two-thirds of the Earth’s fresh water is stored.
Alarming reports that the Antarctic ice sheet is rapidly melting misrepresent the science of a very complex situation. Antarctica has been ice-covered for at least 30 million years. The ice sheet holds over 26 million gigatonnes of water (a gigatonne is a billion metric tons). If it were to melt completely, sea levels would rise 60 metres. Such a change is many millennia in the future, if it happens at all, although climate alarmists will always claim that such a response is just around the corner because of (imaginary) global warming.
Modest ice loss is normal in Antarctica. Each year in summer, more than 2,000 gigatonnes of ice is discharged in the form of melt and icebergs, while snowfall additions keep the ice mass in equilibrium.
Summary
So it is a familiar story. A complex naturally fluctuating situation, in this case glaciers, is abused by activists to claim support for their agenda. I have a lot of respect for glaciologists; it is a deep, complex subject, and the field work is incredibly challenging. And since “glacial” describes any process where any movement is imperceptible, I can understand their excitement over something happening all of a sudden.
But I do not applaud those pandering to the global warming/climate change crowd. They seem not to realize they debase their own field of study by making exaggerated claims and by “jumping the shark.” Meanwhile real scientists are doing the heavy lifting and showing restraint and wisdom about the limitations of their knowledge.
In Al Jazeera’s article, “World’s ‘fossil fuel obsession’ threatens billions of lives: Amnesty,” reporter Jillian Kestler-D’Amours repeats Amnesty International’s (AI) claim that fossil fuels are “a major source of human rights violations” and an “existential threat” to billions of people. This is patently false. Data clearly demonstrate the development and use of fossil fuels over the past century have saved lives, powered prosperity, and improved the human condition around the world.
In Al Jazeera’s article, “World’s ‘fossil fuel obsession’ threatens billions of lives: Amnesty,” reporter Jillian Kestler-D’Amours repeats Amnesty International’s (AI) claim that fossil fuels are “a major source of human rights violations” and an “existential threat” to billions of people. This is patently false. Data clearly demonstrate the development and use of fossil fuels over the past century have saved lives, powered prosperity, and improved the human condition around the world.
Al Jazeera quotes AI’s Secretary General, Agnes Callamard, who declared “[the] age of fossil fuels must end now” because fossil fuel use is “endangering billions of lives.”
Far from threatening billions of lives, fossil fuels have saved billions of lives and made it possible to feed and house the world’s eight billion people, a prospect unimaginable just a century ago.
Coal, oil, and natural gas have powered the greatest improvements in living standards, health, and life expectancy in human history. Before their widespread use, the average human lifespan hovered around 30 years. Today, thanks to affordable energy, global life expectancy exceeds 70 years.
Fossil fuels made that possible by providing the energy for clean water, reliable food production, modern medicine, and transport.
What AI and Al Jazeera omit is the fact that every aspect of modern life, from hospitals to housing, depends on fossil-fuel-derived materials and products. Crude oil derivatives are used to create thousands of essential goods—fertilizers, plastics, lubricants, clothing, and most remarkably, life-saving pharmaceuticals. Petroleum feedstocks are used to synthesize aspirin, ibuprofen, penicillin, and many chemotherapy drugs. These are not pollutants; they are products that keep humanity alive. The U.S. Department of Energy put together an informational flyer that says:
Petrochemicals derived from oil and natural gas make the manufacturing of over 6,000 everyday products and high-tech devices possible. Major petrochemicals—including ethylene, propylene, acetylene, benzene, and toluene, as well as natural gas constituents like methane, propane, and ethane—are the feedstock chemicals for the production of many of the items we use and depend on every day.
…
Modern life relies on the availability of these products that are made in the United States and across the globe. We zero in on some of these common household and commercial products below.
If fossil fuels were the “existential threat” Al Jazeera claims, the past century of unprecedented human progress would be inexplicable. Since 1750, global GDP has grown by more than 3,000 percent seen in Figure 1A, and extreme poverty has plummeted from more than 80 percent of humanity in 1800 to less than 10 percent in 2017, seen in Figure 1B.
This global transformation to our modern society coincided precisely with global fossil fuel consumption, seen in Figure 2 below:
Moreover, AI’s and Al Jazeera’s attempt to link fossil fuels to global mortality from weather events is factually false. As Climate at a Glance: Deaths from Extreme Weather documents, climate-related deaths have declined by more than 95 percent over the past century, even as CO₂ levels rose. Fossil fuels didn’t increase danger, they enabled resilience. Modern energy powers emergency response systems, builds seawalls, and provides heating, air conditioning, protecting billions from heat and cold alike, and refrigeration, preventing spoilage that in the past lead to millions of deaths from food poisoning and hunger.
Likewise, Climate at a Glance: Temperature-Related Deathsshows that cold kills far more people than heat—nearly 10 times as many globally. Modest warming, aided by cheap energy for heating and cooling, has reduced net temperature-related mortality. That’s the opposite of Amnesty’s claim that fossil fuels are killing people.
Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) reports undercut Al Jazeera’s claims. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report finds no clear trend of worsening extreme weather—including hurricanes, floods, or droughts. The supposed “climate crisis” invoked by Amnesty rests on computer model projections, not observational data.
Amnesty’s statement that fossil fuel infrastructure “is a major source of human rights violations” is not evidence; it’s advocacy. While the group highlights alleged pollution and indigenous rights disputes, it ignores the far greater human rights benefits of affordable energy. Nations that use more fossil fuels enjoy higher education rates, lower infant mortality, cleaner drinking water, and longer life spans. The correlation is consistent and overwhelming.
Amnesty’s demand that “the age of fossil fuel must end now” would, if taken literally, plunge billions into poverty and premature death. Even The Washington Post admits that without fossil fuels, economic production would collapse, electricity would become unreliable, and global food output would plummet. The humanitarian catastrophe would be immediate and catastrophic. As they say, “If fossil fuel production were stopped tomorrow, the world would quickly grind to a halt.”
The irony is that Amnesty International’s own advocacyrelies on fossil fuels. Every activist flown to the COP30 summit in Brazil, every smartphone used to record protests, every banner and microphone—all exist thanks to petroleum-based materials and energy. By parroting Amnesty’s talking points without skepticism, Al Jazeera trades journalism for advocacy. Contrary to the premise of Al Jazeera’s story, fossil fuels remain the foundation of modern civilization and will continue to be so until scalable, reliable, relatively inexpensive alternatives emerge.
The data clearly demonstrate that as fossil fuel use has expanded, global health has improved, lifespans have grown, infant mortality, starvation, and hunger have dramatically declined, and prosperity has reached previously unimagined levels, delivering to billions of people previously relegated to impoverished lives, everyday conveniences that kings and rulers just a century ago could not have imagined. If there’s an “obsession” here, it’s not humanity’s with energy—it’s the media’s obsession with climate alarmism.
Let’s get something straight: this new study entitled Equatorial Atlantic mid-depth warming indicates Atlantic meridional overturning circulation slowdown, hot off the Nature presses and already getting the full catastrophe-trending treatment, claims that mysterious “mid-depth warming” in the equatorial Atlantic—between 1,000 and 2,000 meters down—is the long-sought “fingerprint” proving that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has been slowing since the 1990s.
Let’s get something straight: this new study entitled Equatorial Atlantic mid-depth warming indicates Atlantic meridional overturning circulation slowdown,hot off the Nature presses and already getting the full catastrophe-trending treatment, claims that mysterious “mid-depth warming” in the equatorial Atlantic—between 1,000 and 2,000 meters down—is the long-sought “fingerprint” proving that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has been slowing since the 1990s.
According to the authors, this subsurface warming is more “reliable” than surface measurements, cleaner than the noise-soaked sea surface temperatures everyone’s been arguing about for years, and—conveniently—it fits right into the climate alarm narrative that the AMOC is heading for catastrophic collapse. If you buy this story, you’re supposed to panic now, because the collapse might already be underway, the tipping point looms, and we’re all headed for Day After Tomorrow ice-age-in-a-week horror.
There’s just one problem: the whole edifice is built on model outputs, selective data interpretation, circular reasoning, and a studied refusal to acknowledge that the AMOC might be doing just fine.
Let’s start with the foundation. The authors run the MIT General Circulation Model (MITgcm) using forcing data pulled from CMIP6 climate model simulations under a quadrupled CO₂ scenario—because apparently we needed more hypotheticals stacked on hypotheticals. Of course, there’s not enough fossil fuels on the planet to lead to a quadrupled CO₂ level, but pay no attention to the man behind the curtain …
Then they impose abrupt changes in wind stress, sea surface temperature, and sea surface salinity, taken straight from models that already assume an AMOC slowdown, and—surprise!—the model dutifully spits out a slowdown and equatorial warming. It’s the scientific equivalent of asking a parrot to repeat what you just taught it, then claiming the parrot discovered language.
The “experiments” (BUOY, BUOY-NA, SSS-NA) are all variations on a theme: fiddle with surface forcing, watch the model respond in pre-cooked ways, then cherry-pick the results that support the thesis. Want mid-depth warming? Easy—force in North Atlantic freshening (which the CMIP6 models already baked in as part of their AMOC-weakening scenarios), sit back, and let “baroclinic Kelvin waves” do the propagation magic. It’s not an independent test of the hypothesis; it’s a self-fulfilling simulation.
The study’s logic runs in a perfect circle.
Step one: assume the CMIP6 models (which all project AMOC weakening under CO₂ forcing) are correct.
Step two: use those same models’ outputs as forcing for your ocean model.
Step three: when your ocean model shows equatorial warming, declare that this warming is the “fingerprint” of AMOC slowdown.
Step four: find warming in the observational data.
Step five: conclude the AMOC must be slowing because you found the “fingerprint.”
At no point do they test whether the warming could be driven by anything other than AMOC changes—such as, oh, I don’t know, local wind patterns, El Niño teleconnections, subsurface advection from other basins, or the natural variability that the equatorial Atlantic is famous for.
The authors triumphantly point to warming trends in gridded datasets (WOA, Argo, IAP, Ishii, EN4) showing 0.14°C of mid-depth warming from 1960 to 2020. Sounds impressive until you realize: (1) pre-1980 subsurface data in the equatorial Atlantic is sparse, riddled with gaps, and heavily interpolated; (2) Argo floats only started coverage in 2004, so the “robust” trend is mostly a post-millennial artifact; and (3) the “signal-to-noise” ratio they’re so proud of is high precisely because mid-depth waters have high thermal inertia—meaning the warming could be a slow, cumulative response to anything, not necessarily AMOC changes.
Moreover, the study conveniently ignores a major new findingpublished just this year in Nature: an independent reconstruction using air-sea heat flux data concluded that the AMOC has not declined over the past 60 years and is more stable than previously thought. That study, from Woods Hole, directly contradicts the premise here and suggests that relying on SST proxies (the very thing this new study is trying to replace) was always the problem—not because the AMOC is weakening, but because SSTs are lousy proxies in the first place.
Yes, baroclinic Kelvin waves are real, and yes, they can propagate warming signals from the subpolar North Atlantic down the western boundary and across the equator. The authors make a big deal about “rapid adjustment” and “dynamical signals,” invoking vertical mode decomposition and wave speeds to lend scientific gravitas. But here’s what they don’t tell you: the equatorial Atlantic is also subject to wind-driven upwelling, Atlantic Niño/Niña variability, off-equatorial Rossby wave adjustments from the northwestern tropical Atlantic (not the subpolar regions), and teleconnections from the Pacific. Multiple studies have shown that equatorial Atlantic warming is more consistently linked to local and regional processes—especially wind stress curl anomalies associated with the Atlantic Meridional Mode—than to remote AMOC forcing.
The fact that their passive tracer experiment (BUOY-NA-passive) shows minimal mid-depth warming from mean circulation alone doesn’t rule out these other mechanisms—it just means their model setup didn’t include them.
The authors claim the warming “emerged” from natural variability around 2001, with a signal-to-noise ratio exceeding their arbitrary threshold of 4 (99.9% confidence). But “time of emergence” is a model-dependent metric that depends entirely on how you define “signal” and “noise.” They define signal as the linear trend and noise as detrended variability—which guarantees that any long-term drift, regardless of cause, will eventually “emerge.” It’s a statistical trick that makes any monotonic change look significant if you wait long enough.
The study buries or ignores inconvenient facts. For instance:
The subpolar North Atlantic “cold blob” (the supposed surface fingerprint of AMOC slowdown) has been highly variable and even disappeared in recent years.
Direct AMOC measurements from the RAPID array show large interannual variability with no clear long-term trend since 2004.
Multiple lines of evidence (including paleo-proxies and modern reanalysis) suggest the AMOC has been relatively stable over the instrumental period, with most of the “weakening” claims based on noisy, short-term SST datasets.
This isn’t dispassionate science. It’s model-driven alarmism dressed up in the language of “fingerprints” and “dynamical mechanisms.” The authors want you to believe that a few tenths of a degree of subsurface warming—detectable only after heroic interpolation and smoothing of sparse data—is the smoking gun for an AMOC on the brink. They invoke “tipping points,” cite scary projections of 2 Sv decline since the 1950s, and darkly hint that we’re already past the point of no return.
But the data don’t support it, the models are unreliable, and the alternative explanations are everywhere if you’re willing to look. The equatorial Atlantic warms for lots of reasons—most of them having nothing to do with the AMOC. This study cherry-picks one mechanism, builds an entire edifice on model outputs that assume what they’re trying to prove, and then declares victory because gridded datasets (with all their uncertainties) show a trend.
If you want to monitor the AMOC, measure it directly. Don’t use proxy tea-leaves from a noisy, complex region, filtered through biased models, and call it a “superior fingerprint.” This is climate science at its worst: models all the way down, confirmation bias all the way up, and a conclusion tailor-made for the next round of climate crisis headlines. The AMOC is probably fine. The real collapse is in scientific skepticism.
Seems like as the climate alarmism grift collapses, the claims get more outrageous. Meanwhile, here’s the situation in the real world …
My very best to everyone,
w.
PS—As is my wont, I ask that when you comment you quote the EXACT WORDS you are discussing. I can defend my words. I can’t defend your interpretation of my words. Thanks.
When New York passed its utopian Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act back in 2019, it set mandatory targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from the state’s energy consumption. But none of the mandates were scheduled to take effect prior to 2030. The earliest mandates were: 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030, and 40% overall reduction in GHG emissions by the same year.
When New York passed its utopian Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act back in 2019, it set mandatory targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from the state’s energy consumption. But none of the mandates were scheduled to take effect prior to 2030. The earliest mandates were: 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030, and 40% overall reduction in GHG emissions by the same year. (Still more ambitious mandates were also set for 2040, followed by a “net zero” mandate for 2050.). These dates all seemed so terribly far away — plenty of time for somebody to invent some new gizmos in the off chance that new technology might be needed to hit the goal.
Our legislators, innumerate to a person, had bought into the fantasy — peddled by lightweight academics like Mark Jacobson and Robert Howarth, and by grifting promoters like the American Wind Energy Association and investment bank Lazard — that wind and solar were now the cheapest way to make electricity. To abolish the evil fossil fuels, all that was needed was some political will.
The legislators definitely did not pay the slightest attention to the Manhattan Contrarian. Beginning in 2016, and consistently from then until the CLCPA was enacted in mid-2019, this site published one clear warning after another that the costs of a wind/solar energy system that would work full time would inevitably be a large multiple of those claimed by the promoters. If you want to entertain yourself for a while on this subject, you might be interested in my series “How Much Do The Green Energy Crusaders Plan To Increase Your Cost Of Electricity?” Part I (August16, 2016), Part II (August 20, 2016), and Part III (November 29, 2018). Well, I tried.
There actually was one other important deadline in the CLCPA, which was not a deadline for emissions reductions themselves, but rather a deadline for the state Department of Environmental Conservation to publish regulations to direct how the mandated emissions reductions would be achieved. The text from the CLCPA setting this deadline was codified in Section 75-0109 of the state’s Environmental Conservation Law. It states that DEC “shall . . . promulgate rules and regulations to ensure compliance with the statewide emissions reductions limits.” The deadline to promulgate these regulations was January 1, 2024.
January 1, 2024 came and went, and then another year went by, and still no regulations, nor any indication of when or whether they would be forthcoming. A reasonable inference would be that Kathy Hochul (who had taken over as Governor in 2021), or more likely some people on her staff, had figured out that this was not going to work. But they also knew that saying that out loud would be political suicide. Thus, silence.
By March of this year, the environmental zealots had had enough. In that month, a collection of environmental groups — Citizens Action of New York, People United for Sustainable Housing Buffalo, Sierra Club, and We Act for Environmental Justice — filed what we call an “Article 78” proceeding in the state Supreme Court of [Ulster] Albany County, to compel the DEC to comply with the statute and issue the regulations. (Article 78 is a part of the state procedural statute that provides for lawsuits to compel state agencies to comply with the law.). The case was assigned to Justice Julian Schreibman (who normally sits in Ulster County).
The Attorney General’s August 11 letter submission is truly a remarkable document. Basically, it states that the emissions-reduction mandates of the CLCPA are “infeasible,” and it asks the court to refrain from enforcing the mandate to issue regulations on the ground that because the emissions reductions are infeasible the regulations to compel them to happen would cause “damage to the public interest.” As a little background, the letter frequently refers to the state’s draft “Energy Plan,” which was issued on July 25, and which I covered here at Manhattan Contrarian in a post on August 11 titled “New York’s Official Energy Plan Is No Plan,” where I called the Energy Plan “hundreds of pages of fluff.”
Here are a few excerpts from the state’s August 11 letter for your enjoyment:
The draft [Energy Plan] itself shows that a 40% greenhouse gas reduction from 1990 levels by 2030 is infeasible under the Climate Act’s accounting methodology and unaffordable for consumers. . . . [W]hile New York’s current policies and additional action would be expected to raise economywide costs for the state energy system in 2040 by less than 10%, the two net zero scenarios the Board considered raise energy-system costs by at least 35% in 2040, which is $42 billion in additional costs for that year alone. . . . In sum, under even the most aggressive scenario the State Energy Planning Board considered—one that by 2040 would lead to an added $42 billion in annual energy costs—New York would not meet the Climate Act’s 2030 goal. While the draft plan shows that ambitious progress under the Climate Act is achievable, the 2030 goal itself is not practically feasible due to costs consumers simply cannot bear.
So they have actually calculated that the attempt to reach “net zero” emissions on the statutorily-mandated schedule will cost consumers an extra $42 billion per year by 2040. They don’t give us numbers for other years, but presumably other years would be comparable. So figure, $42 billion per year. Let’s say that that is slightly different from wind and solar being “cheaper” than our existing fossil fuel infrastructure.
Frankly, I think that the $42 billion per year is a very low-ball estimate. But for today, I will take it.
The state’s August 11 letter essentially advocates that the deadlines should be allowed to slip while we implement these policies more slowly. What the letter does not mention is whether the total cost of this transition will be reduced in any way by stretching it out or, alternatively, whether the cost will be equal or more if spread over a longer period of time. I can’t think of any reason why spreading the cost over a longer period of time would reduce the total cost. And thus, if the cost is “infeasible” for consumers, it will be equally infeasible if stretched out.
Justice Schreibman was extremely unimpressed by the very weak argument made by the state. From the court’s opinion (page 8):
Faced with this [statutory] mandate, DEC does not have the discretion to say no or to decide that it has the authority to choose not to follow the express legislative direction at issue. Under our system of separation of powers, upon concluding, based on its subject-matter expertise, that achieving the goals of the Climate Act might be “infeasible” for the reasons stated, the DEC had just two options. One, it could issue compliant regulations anyway, and let the chips fall where they may for the State’s political actors. Or, two, it could raise its concerns to the Legislature. . . .
The court’s decision gives the state until February 6 to issue the regulations. The reason for the three month window is that the state Legislature will not come back into session until January, and thus the option to ask the Legislature to reconsider is kept open.
But what is the exit strategy? Will they soon start spending $42 billion per year on a crash emissions reduction program that still will clearly be insufficient to meet the ridiculous mandates of the CLCPA? Or will they ask the state Legislature to revise the statute? The second option will bring a huge outcry from the dominant progressive group in the Legislature and their environmentalist backers, all of whom are convinced (without ever having done serious analysis) that wind and solar are cheaper than fossil fuels and only corrupt influence from oil and gas interests is preventing the energy transition.
Maybe they postpone the deadlines for a year or two. But when the year or two is up, the problem will be back bigger than ever.
There is no graceful exit strategy. The CLCPA will inevitably be abandoned. Exactly when or how, I don’t know, but it will happen.
Kathryn Porter has posted up the transcript of her speech this week to the Institute of Power Engineers:
The shape of today’s power grid
In the past 25 years we’ve been racing to build more renewables. We now have 32 GW of wind and almost 20 GW of solar. This is backed up by 32 GW of gas generation, and another 12 GW of nuclear and biomass, just under 5 GW of hydro and pumped storage, and just under 7 GW of batteries.
Current interconnector capacity is 8.8 GW, but imports can’t be relied on if continental systems face the same weather pattern, causing corresponding stress events….with the exception of France and Norway our connected markets both share similar weather to us and are following a similar wind-led energy strategy.
France relies on an aging nuclear fleet and has a more temperature sensitive grid than us – during cold spells, we often export to France rather than import from it. And Norway is going off the idea of exporting electricity altogether since it has seen increases in power prices and power price volatility. Some in the Norwegian parliament want to cancel the interconnectors it has with Britain and Germany.
So we have roughly 64 GW of dependable firm capacity against 48 GW of peak winter demand.
Of course, no form of generation is 100% available so even if a technology is firm and dispatchable, it will still have maintenance outages and the occasional unplanned trip. This is accounted for through de-rating factors, and after applying these adjustments the current amount of available firm capacity is 50.5 GW, which gives a spare margin of just 2.5 GW based on firm power.
In reality there is generally some contribution from wind, but this can be very low – on several occasions this year, the actual output of the installed 32 GW was below 1 GW and at times as low as 200 MW (which, amusingly is Grok’s estimate of the amount we could generate if everyone in the UK blew very hard into all the wind turbines!)
“Firm power equivalent to over a quarter of current winter peak demand could be off the grid in the next few years. And there is no concrete plan to replace it”
Despite higher amounts of wind on the system, in 2025 wind output is down, not just in Britain, but across Europe. Solar of course contributes nothing to the winter peaks which are always at night. After the sun sets. A depressing number of people still need this explaining to them!
NESO, Ofgem, DESNZ and just about anyone with an opinion on this says we need to hang on to all of that 32 GW of gas to keep the lights on, on those cold still winter days when demand is higher and renewable output low to non-existent.
So it’s pretty unfortunate that a third of the fleet was built in the 1990s and is getting a bit long in the tooth. My analysis shows that it’s not in fact 10 GW of gas capacity that’s nearing retirement, but 12 GW.
We may gain a couple of GW of smaller units, particularly open cycle turbines, and 3.2 GW of new nuclear at Hinkley Point is expected to open in the early 2030s, but by then almost 5 GW of AGRs will have closed. The net retirement risk is therefore about 12 GW of firm, dispatchable capacity in the late 2020s and early 2030s.
Let me repeat that – firm power equivalent to over a quarter of current winter peak demand could be off the grid in the next few years. And there is no concrete plan to replace it.
Not only are we sleep walking into a capacity crisis, we’re trying to make it worse. The Government wants to decarbonise everything, and as it’s now widely accepted that hydrogen will play a minimal role, and many, including the Climate Change Committee are sceptical about the role carbon capture will play.
This means electrification is seen as the primary route to decarbonising heating, transport and whatever industry we have left. Indeed de-industrialisation, in power grid terms, is something of a blessing in disguise, taking some pressure off tight margins.
The Government also wants to AI data centres to be built in Britain, having designated them as critical national infrastructure – that could add another 6 GW of demand by 2030 according to recent Government analysis.
So in this presentation, I will go through the scale of the CCGT-retirement challenge; why the winter risk and demand control issues escalate; how this plays out in different demand-scenarios (status quo, electrification only, AI only, electrification + AI) to 2030; and finally to offer commentary on why technological solutions such as hydrogen or CCS are unlikely to scale in time, and why grid and equipment lead-times are a serious obstacle.
As Kathryn points out, we are already close to the bone, where firm capacity is concerned:
Gas Power – 32 GW
Nuclear/Biomass – 12 GW
Hydro/Pumped – 5 GW
Batteries – 7 GW
A total of 56 GW, facing peak winter demand of 48 GW. That capacity cannot be guaranteed 24/7, so 50 GW is more realistic. Moreover that 7 GW of batteries, plus 2.7 GW of pumped storage can only supply for an hour or so – enough to meet peak demand, but worthless for longer periods.
As a result, we are already totally dependent on imported power, at the times when wind power cannot meet demand.
But the real value of Kathryn’s analysis is that she has identified how much gas power capacity we could potentially lose in the next few years. Not only is 12 GW at risk of closure by 2030, but another 6 GW could go by 2035.
As she notes, much of our CCGT fleet was built in the “dash for gas” in the 1990s. Older plants are naturally more at risk from outages, higher maintenance downtime and reduced flexibility to ramp up and down.
The Peterhead CCGT built in 2000, she says, had unplanned downtime in the last 12 months of 2800 hours – that is equivalent to 116 days!
One particular issue concerns the stress on turbine of continual ramping up and down. Not only do these problems reduce the reliability of CCGT plants to step up when needed, the increasing maintenance costs will eventually make older plants unviable.
Replacing these older plants is not a simple matter, even if the political will was there, which it plainly is not. There are 8-year lead times for gas turbines in the world market, whilst grid connections here can take a decade.
Worse still, who is going to invest in a CCGT, when the government intends to slap punitive carbon taxes on it and ultimately ban it completely. Kathryn notes:
New CCGT investment is subject to market risk – if investors believe policy is moving away from gas because of net-zero trajectories, they may be reluctant to commit – indeed, Langage and South Humber have 15 year refurbishment contracts under the capacity market for 2028-29 onwards but appear not to have taken the final investment decision – delivery seems unlikely.
Langage and South Humber have capacity market contracts for 905 MW and 700 MW respectively. As these are refurbishments, they are not “new” capacity and will leave a big hole if not executed.
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