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.
“… One eyewitness told the BBC that he believes an electrical fire was the cause. …”
COP30 climate talks evacuated after fire breaks out
Georgina Rannard and BBC climate team in Belém, Brazil
…
The talks were in the final hours of trying to agree on next steps to tackle climate but the fire has disrupted negotiations.
“It was climbing the walls and onto the ceiling. People were screaming,” Dr Harshita Umesh, who was giving a talk next to the place where they fire broke out, told BBC News.
“Then I ran, I think I tripped and fell.”
…
“People are pretty traumatised and shocked,” she added.
“There’s a huge panic, people have been running out of here, it’s a very dramatic moment… UN security guards are telling us to leave,” said BBC Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt.
“It looks actually as if they are beginning to get it under control but you can see huge columns of smoke rising up into the air through the hole that’s been burnt in the top of the conference centre.”
…
One eyewitness told the BBC that he believes an electrical fire was the cause.
The article doesn’t say it was a battery fire, but from the video in the BBC article above, it was a pretty impressive blaze for a simple electrical fault. Of course the intensity of the fire might have been caused by all the disposable single use petroleum based plastic used to construct the climate conference pavilion.
The UN seems determined the conference will continue, but with the conference almost at its end, no significant leaders in town, and many conference center evacuees likely relocating to the nearest wine bar to calm their nerves, there is a good chance a lot of people will pack up and go home early.
The Heartland Institute’s Jim Lakely, Sterling Burnett, and Linnea Lueken will be joined by special guests Craig Rucker of CFACT, who just got back from COP 30 in Brazil, and Tony Heller, one of the most-popular and influential climate realism communicators in America. We will also cover also cover some of the Crazy Climate News of the Week, including an exodus from EPA, what climate policy failure looks like in graph form, perhaps the cringiest moment in COP history, and Donald Trump’s call to have those who have pushed climate alarmism investigated.
The latest annual UN climate conference, COP 30, is coming to a close. Already a failure, the delegates of doom who gathered in Brazil decided that they needed a serious goal to cap off the conference. What did they come up with? Nothing less than the coming up with a concrete roadmap for the complete phase-out of fossil fuels. They might as well have agreed on drawing out a roadmap to Neverland, because that’s just as likely to be found as a future with zero use of fossil fuels.
The Heartland Institute’s Jim Lakely, Sterling Burnett, and Linnea Lueken will be joined by special guests Craig Rucker of CFACT, who just got back from COP 30 in Brazil, and Tony Heller, one of the most-popular and influential climate realism communicators in America. We will also cover also cover some of the Crazy Climate News of the Week, including an exodus from EPA, what climate policy failure looks like in graph form, perhaps the cringiest moment in COP history, and Donald Trump’s call to have those who have pushed climate alarmism investigated.
Now it is moving to politics. The New York Times recently reported. “After years of political consensus on the transition to cleaner energy, a ‘greenlash’ began bubbling up as prices rose and right-wing candidates gained ground.”
Dr. Benny Peiser of The Global Warming Policy Foundation has been following NetZero efforts for years, and he joins us as a special guest.
We will tackle this subject, as well as go over the Crazy Climate News of the Week. Tune in LIVE for the stream at 1 p.m. ET (noon CT) to watch the show and leave your own questions in the chat with host Anthony Watts, along with panelists H. Sterling Burnett and Linnea Lueken.
In COP30’s opening week in Belém, delegates keep repeating the same line: this is the “people-centered” and “implementation” COP. Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva insists that “climate change is no longer a threat of the future; it is a tragedy of the present,” and urges “yet another defeat to denialism.”
Those lines sound compassionate, but once you read the declarations and watch the sessions, “people-centered” and “truth” serve as a cover for a shift toward international institutions and their allies, from whom ordinary people are expected to pay and obey
The trillion-dollar cash machine
COP29 and COP30 produced the Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3T, a plan to scale climate finance to $1.3 trillion a year by 2035. The UNFCCC report frames this as expanding climate finance through grants and concessional instruments, routed through climate funds and development banks.
On November 14, at COP30’s High-Level Event of the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change, governments and UN agencies launched the Belém Declaration on Global Green Industrialization — a framework to recalibrate heavy industry, mining, and manufacturing around centrally coordinated decarbonization.
On November 13, at COP30’s Health and Climate Ministerial Meeting, the World Health Organization released the Belém Health Action Plan, outlining the adaptation of the health sector to climate change. In WHO-linked commentary on the plan, partners praise it for establishing “adaptation of the health sector to climate change as an international priority” and for calling for “holistic, cross-sectoral strategies” with “community engagement and participation as foundational to implementation.”
That is bureaucratic language for telling health systems to treat climate objectives as a central organizing principle, not just a risk factor to manage. Once climate adaptation for health is elevated to a cross-sector “international priority,” you’re talking about deep, long-term influence over health governance, budgets, and infrastructure — well beyond the targeted resilience investments local communities might actually choose.
Policing “truth” about climate policy
On November 12, during COP30’s High-Level Event of the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change at the Brazilian Pavilion, UNESCO and a group of governments launched the Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change. The declaration states that it is “concerned by the growing impact of disinformation, misinformation, [and] denialism” and warns that this poses a threat to “the global climate response and societal stability.” It calls on states to adopt legal frameworks and on digital platforms to modify their systems and algorithms to promote “healthy information environments” that align with the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement.
After years of seeing COVID and election “misinformation” rules turned on inconvenient — but ultimately vindicated — critics, it’s impossible to pretend this is anything but partisan. When the same cluster of activists and officials pushing new levies and mandates also claim the authority to decide what counts as “integrity” and “truth,” they’re not defending science. They’re building a shield around their agenda and putting dissent in the penalty box.
A better, genuinely people-centered alternative
A genuinely people-centered climate approach would begin with respect for national sovereignty and freedom of speech, rather than global tax schemes and algorithmic policing. It would allow countries to choose affordable, reliable energy that suits their circumstances, rather than enforcing one-size-fits-all timetables drafted in UN backrooms. It would focus on practical resilience — stronger grids, functioning water and sewer systems, drainage, seawalls, and early-warning networks — rather than endlessly elaborating new financial architectures.
And it would trust free people in free markets. Innovation, competition, and secure property rights have done more to lift people out of poverty and clean up the environment than any summit or conference. With days of negotiations still ahead, if COP30 in Belém is remembered as the “COP of truth,” it should be because citizens saw the truth: behind the rainforest backdrop and people-friendly branding, this process is concentrating power far from the people it claims to serve.
An article by Nadir Jeevanjee, a Research Physical Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), recently published in The Conversationand reprinted by Space.Com, suggests that climate models are being given a bad rap. It cites a recent Department of Energy report as using the complexity of climate models as the primary reason why these models cannot be trusted.
An article by Nadir Jeevanjee, a Research Physical Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), recently published in The Conversationand reprinted by Space.Com, suggests that climate models are being given a bad rap. It cites a recent Department of Energy report as using the complexity of climate models as the primary reason why these models cannot be trusted. The article protests, “But the history of climate science tells a different story”, because early climate models were instrumental in shaping our understanding of the Earth’s climate.
Okay, let’s revisit history—because those who can’t remember history correctly are destined to get it wrong.
First, we need to get one fact correct. The recent Department of Energy report did not simply cite the complexity of climate models as the primary reason they cannot be trusted. It goes into detail as to why current climate models cannot be trusted: namely, they cannot reproduce current conditions.
For example, models are not capable of determining the equilibrium climate sensitivity to increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. As shown in this graph from the DOE report, they tend to “run hot,” or overstate surface warming.
Global surface air temperature trends (°C/decade), 1979–2024, from various CMIP6 climate models (red, 30-model average in orange); and the average of three thermometer datasets (HadCRUT5, NOAA Global Temp, and Berkeley 1 deg.) and two reanalysis datasets (ERA5 and NCEP/NCAR R1) in blue. Data source: https://climexp.knmi.nl/start.cgi.
They also overstate warming of the tropical troposphere, and their simulation of stratospheric cooling is inconsistent.
With regards to the tropical troposphere, the excessive warming was noted as a problem in the first United States National Climate Assessment and has been noted in every Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report since. This problem has become more extreme over time—i.e., simulations from later models, despite decades of “improvements” costing billions of dollars, deviate farther from observations than earlier models—and its spatial extent now encompasses the entire globe.
But the article asserts that early climate model forecasts about global warming were correct decades before the forecasts could be evaluated. It concludes, “it is this track record of success that gives us confidence in interpreting the changes we’re seeing now, as well as predicting changes to come.” It then lists five forecasts the early models made that underscore how well even those early models could reproduce Earth’s climate.
Now, let’s give credit where credit is due, but let’s not reward models for getting the basics of climate correct. In other words, models should not be praised for figuring out that the Poles are cold and the Equator is warm. They should not be given credit for simulating the Hadley Cell circulation, or demonstrating that oceans have a moderating effect on climate, for examples. These basic premises of climate are obvious and must have been a product of the simulation; otherwise, the models would have been discarded before they were even published.
So, let’s test the article’s evaluation of the models.
Forecast number 1: early models correctly simulated surface global warming from increased carbon dioxide. Yes, but this was obvious long before the first models were created. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and thus the more of it added to the atmosphere, the higher surface temperature should rise. Way back in 1896, Svante Arrhennius (1859–1927) showed that an increase in carbon dioxide would increase global temperatures.
The question always has been, and still is, how much should the temperature rise from, say, a doubling of carbon dioxide?
Early models argued that the temperature rise would be between 2.0 and 3.5 degrees Celsius. These numbers are actually closer to reality than estimates provided by later model simulations, but they are still higher than data-driven estimates using historical and paleoclimate data.
Verdict? Early models would have been discarded if they had simulated cooling or no effect. That they simulated warming from increased greenhouse gases is no proof of their reliability.
Forecast number 2: the models predicted stratospheric cooling from adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This should also have been relatively obvious. If outgoing terrestrial radiation is being intercepted by more carbon dioxide at the surface, and some of it is radiated back to the surface, then less will reach the stratosphere and, consequently, the stratosphere should cool. Again, the question that demands an answer is, “How much cooling?”—and even current climate models cannot simulate this correctly or consistently.
Forecast number 3: Arctic amplification. The Conversation suggests that it was surprising that the early models accurately predicted that rising carbon dioxide concentrations would warm the Arctic more than the Tropics. But that was no surprise at all. Given a warming planet, the Arctic will warm faster than the Equator due to six factors.
Colder air warms more than warmer air from the same amount of energy input due to the derivative of the Stefan-Boltzmann Radiation Law.
Moist tropical air has a higher specific heat than dry polar air. (Specific heat is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of a substance by one degree Celsius.) This is because water vapor has a higher specific heat than dry air and warm, tropical air has more moisture than cold, polar air.
The change in albedo—or surface reflectance—is greater in the Arctic because of the melting of highly reflective ice and snow, uncovering darker soils and tundra.
Sea ice provides a layer of insulation between the unfrozen water beneath and the potentially much colder air above. Warming reduces the sea-ice coverage, which allows energy in the relatively warmer water to warm the air above it.
The lack of convection at the Poles keeps the warming closer to the surface. Unlike the tropics, where the atmosphere becomes unstable due to surface heating and rising air, the polar regions are not heated sufficiently to create rising air motions, and the creation of the Polar High inhibits vertical motion. Thus, the warmer air stays near the ground.
Finally, the evaporation of water stores energy as latent heat—that is, energy in the phase transition of water from liquid to gas—which then is transported poleward by global circulation. This latent energy is stored in equatorial regions and released as condensation occurs in higher latitudes, thereby transporting energy polewards.
Therefore, a greater warming of the Arctic was obvious to climatologists even before the first climate model was created. That models simulate it is no big feat.
Forecast number 4: land-ocean contrast. The article notes that the coupled atmosphere-ocean model “led to a slew of insights, including the observation that land generally warms more than ocean, by a factor of about 1.5.” While this may sound impressive to the uninitiated, climatologists have long known the moderating effect of the oceans, again due to their high specific heat.
Consider San Diego and Dallas, at about the same latitude of 33 degrees north. The annual temperature range in San Diego is about 8 degrees Celsius, while that in Dallas is about 22 degrees—a factor of almost three. Extending any transect to both coasts indicates that the annual temperature range—and the diurnal temperature range, for that matter—increases with distance from the coast.
To anyone who understands the Earth’s climate, the central Plains have a much greater temperature range than either coast, for example. So, why would this have been a novel finding back in 1979? Any competent climatologist would have known this, so it must have been a basic component of any climate model worth its salt at the time.
Forecast number 5: delayed warming of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. This issue arises from the supposedly novel fact that the Arctic has a greater warming signal than that of the Southern Ocean.
But why is that surprising? The change in albedo is not as great in Antarctica, since there is little land area exposed by melting snow and ice, while there is much in the Arctic. Sea ice dynamics differ considerably in the Southern Hemisphere, and the loss of sea ice isn’t as dramatic to warming Antarctica. Moreover, the Southern Ocean is bounded by a hemisphere of ocean, which has a moderating effect on the climate as mentioned earlier. Thus, important contributions to Arctic warming are not present in the Southern Ocean, and so we would have expected the Southern Ocean to be different from the Arctic.
The take-home message? If early climate models missed any of these supposed climate novelties, climate modeling wouldn’t have gotten off the ground. What early climate modeling showed was that the basics of climate could be replicated with simple mathematical approximations. But that’s the basics. The details are that climate is still very complex, and while the general patterns can be simulated accurately, specific details as to how climate varies spatially and how it is likely to change under various scenarios are still a far-off challenge.
The article concludes: “Climate models have their limitations, of course. For instance, they cannot predict regional climate change as well as people would like. But the fact that climate science, like any field, has significant unknowns should not blind us to what we do know.”
I agree, but I would also note that we were not blind to these facts before the advent of climate models. Syukuro Manabe deserves credit for demonstrating that the basics of climate can be reproduced with a rudimentary computer program run on early computers. But the fact remains that current model simulations still deviate significantly from real-world observations. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that early climatologists understood quite a bit about how the Earth’s climate works. Yes, there were climatologists before the climate modelers, and they knew an awful lot about the Earth’s climate.
David R. Legates, Ph.D. (Climatology), is retired Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware and Director of Research and Education for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.
The U.S. and Japan are shedding the paralysis of irrational climate policies with a strategic pact covering rare-earth minerals, critical components for semiconductors and next-generation nuclear reactors.
The U.S. and Japan are shedding the paralysis of irrational climate policies with a strategic pact covering rare-earth minerals, critical components for semiconductors and next-generation nuclear reactors.
Forged through the leadership of two no-nonsense politicians – President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi – the clear-eyed agreement abandons more than a decade of energy uncertainty that was marked by unpredictable supply chains, unrealistic net-zero pledges and overreliance on unreliable wind and solar energy. This rightly places energy and industrial strategy at the heart of protecting national sovereignty.
Facing the weaponization of supply chains by Beijing, which controls over 90% of processed rare earths, America’s deal with Japan makes priorities of access to materials and technology, strategic resilience and economic growth and leverages an existing $550 billion investment package between the two countries.
According to a White House fact sheet, Japan and various Japanese companies will invest up to $332 billion in U.S. energy infrastructure, including nuclear reactors, plus up to $50 billion in power equipment through deals involving both U.S. and Japanese companies. Japan reportedly is to have increased access to U.S. markets for technology sales and favorable tariff treatment.
These investments are not for more bird-slicing wind turbines or desert-smothering solar panels, but for practical, reliable electric-generating capability.
The U.S. is to spend $75 billion on data-center infrastructure from three Japanese companies: Mitsubishi Electric, for supply power station systems and equipment; TDK Corp., advanced electronic power components; and Fujikura, Ltd., optical fiber cables.
The U.S.-Japan agreement also includes a multi-year deal valued at over $100 million between Global Coal Sales Group and Tohoku Electric Power for American thermal coal. This is a rational decision by an advanced industrial nation to secure affordable, reliable electricity for its people. Coal remains an indispensable energy source for nations that refuse to sacrifice economic growth at the altar of “decarbonization” dogma.
The deal calls for a Japanese investment of up to $3 billion to construct an ammonia and urea fertilizer manufacturing facility in the United States and another $2 billion to construct a copper smelting and refining plant in the American West.
On the other side of the Pacific, Japan will bolster energy supplies by importing 66 million metric tons of U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) each year, making it the second-largest LNG buyer after China.
Still, Japan would be well served to add further to provisions of the deal – such as JERA Co.’s $1.5 billion stake in natural gas assets in Louisiana’s Haynesville shale deposits and Tokyo Gas’s purchase of Alaska LNG – which help to replace strategically risky Russian supplies that account for 9% of Japan’s gas needs.
As for nuclear power, Japan’s political cowardice following the Fukushima disaster in 2011 has left it with only 14 of the country’s 54 pre-accident nuclear reactors restarted. Japan needs to exorcise the Fukushima ghosts that have frozen policymakers for 14 years and reclaim its edge in a field now dominated by China, France, South Korea and Russia.
Fortunately for Japan and others, America’s Trump administration has bulldozed a path for vigorous development of resources by ditching the Paris Accord’s chains and axing funds for global climate polices that enforce energy poverty.
The U.S.-Japanese framework hammers home strategic resilience through partnerships with major firms like Mitsubishi and Toshiba embedding in American projects, engendering employment and trade and defying minimalist “green” delusions.
Both powers now stand armored against disruptions, their economies roaring on a bedrock of hydrocarbons and atomic might, proving that real strength comes from embracing what works, not cowering before fabricated crises.
What Washington and Tokyo have accomplished is more than a trade agreement. It is a declaration of independence from the climate catastrophism that has paralyzed rational policymaking for a generation. Other nations will follow. The tide is turning. Energy realism is ascendant.
Seventeen years after then-candidate Barack Obama promised skyrocketing electricity costs as a result of his campaign to bankrupt the coal industry, President Trump’s Energy Department announced it would provide $625 million to expand electric power generation fueled by coal.
Seventeen years after then-candidate Barack Obama promised skyrocketing electricity costs as a result of his campaign to bankrupt the coal industry, President Trump’s Energy Department announced it would provide $625 million to expand electric power generation fueled by coal.
As part of that commitment, Energy Secretary Chris Wright targeted $100 million for refurbishing and modernizing existing coal-fired power plants, with a focus on advanced wastewater management, fuel switching between coal and natural gas, and coal-natural gas co-firing systems.
While the enemies of carbon dioxide emissions wail and gnash their teeth at the continued use of coal-fired electricity, practical world leaders listened carefully to Obama’s words: abandoning coal would, at the least, triple the cost of already scarce electric power for their emerging factories, data centers, hospitals, and schools.
Then-Indonesian President Joko Widodo, for example, recognized in 2014 that his nation was blessed with abundant coal reserves and set about utilizing that affordable, available, high-energy resource as a springboard for Indonesia’s transformation into an industrialized, middle-income nation. Today, Indonesia’s fast-growing economy relies on coal for two-thirds of its electricity.
Widodo directed PLN, the state-owned utility, to sign long-term “take or pay” contracts to purchase electricity from domestic coal mines even if their output was not immediately needed. Mines were ordered to sell to PLN at below-market rates as part of what turned out to be a strategy that boosted Indonesia’s output to 57 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity by the end of Widodo’s second term in 2024 — a 250% increase during his 10 years in office.
Current Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, following in Widodo’s footsteps, wants his nation to achieve 8% annual growth, and the current 10-year plan calls for another 70 GW of capacity by 2035 — adding 70% to the current total. While Subianto is committed long-term to renewable energy, the practical pathway to rapid capacity growth remains with “black gold.”
President Widodo’s initiatives were financed largely via China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which was at its peak as he assumed office. China enabled fulfillment of his vision to build high-speed rail, factories, and even a new national capital city — all of which required massive increases in electric power.
The Chinese found the side benefits alone were well worth loading up Indonesia with debt — $45 billion in development finance over the last decade, including $9.3 billion in 2024. The money was concentrated on energy, mining, construction, transportation, and telecommunications. As of July, Chinese entities were planning or already building at least 17 generating units at nine coal-fired power plants across Indonesia.
One example of how China has benefited from its investment strategy is the cornering of the global nickel market. While Indonesia is by far the world’s largest source of nickel ore, Chinese entities today control at least 75% of its nickel refining capacity. In 2022, about 90% of Indonesia’s nickel exports went to China. Worse, Chinese contractors working in Indonesia have relied heavily on Chinese — rather than domestic Indonesian — labor and materials.
Officially, Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2021 pledged to stop financing coal-fired power plants, but any facility used to foster “green energy” is apparently exempt from that pledge. Still, Chinese money is backing 52 coal-fired power plants outside its borders — a pittance compared with the number it is building inside the Middle Kingdom.
By that standard, the U.S. could well justify using coal to power data centers, critical metals mining operations, and a host of other projects. Coal is a cheaper, faster way to boot new projects than waiting for nuclear permits and construction or relying on wind or solar for such sensitive operations that are already taxing both the grid and computing capacity.
Despite the rapid growth of Indonesia’s coal-to-electricity industry (much aided by the Chinese), China towers over the rest of the world in construction of new coal power capacity. China started the construction of another 95 GW in 2024 alone — 93% of the world total. At the same time, China is rapidly expanding its use of wind, solar, and hydropower.
What may seem strange to those outside China is that the nation is seemingly building far more capacity than it can even use, despite rising electricity demand. The Chinese were using only about 50% of their coal power generation capacity in 2024. But this means they can ramp up quickly to meet growing demands from AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies.
China remains by far the world’s leading producer, user, and importer of coal, accounting for over half of global production (at about 4.78 billion metric tons in 2024). India, another country seeking to rapidly increase its electric power generation capacity, is a distant second at 1.05 billion metric tons. Coal-fired power plants still provide three-quarters of India’s electricity.
Indonesia, in 2024, produced about 836 million metric tons of coal and is now the world’s largest thermal coal exporter, with exports supplying markets in China, India, Japan, and South Korea. Global South nations Australia and South Africa come in fifth and seventh (with the U.S. and Russia at fourth and sixth). Australia exports much of its coal production, while South Africa depends on coal for nearly 85% of its electricity and also profits from coal exports.
While U.S. coal production continued to shrink in 2024, that could turn around under Trump policies that favor an industry that built America’s infrastructure. Coal still employs 130,000 miners, technicians, engineers, and plant operators, and other 270,000 in sectors that rely on coal (including railroads and barge lines). With average salaries of about $90,000 a year, coal is the lifeblood of many of America’s small towns and rural communities.
Curiously, Russia is on the verge of becoming the odd man out in global coal markets, thanks in part to President Trump’s Ukraine-war-related sanctions and in part to China’s increasingly symbiotic relationship with Indonesia as both investor and importer. According to a new Kpler analysis, Russian producers may have to choose between low prices and negative margins or reductions in production to stay afloat.
With Russian coal cut off from most Western markets, it is increasingly held hostage to Chinese demand — and China is finding it cheaper to import coal from nearby Indonesia than from Russia’s own Far Eastern ports. Russia still exports coal to India and Turkey, but China remains its chief coal buyer — and China is becoming a fickle partner.
The Global South — led by China, India, and Indonesia — is being built by coal, and African nations with coal availability are also looking at man’s oldest, most trusted fuel to grow their economies.
These nations agree with President Obama that any other path would be financially prohibitive. And they agree with President Trump that ignoring coal’s ability to bolster economic growth and upgrade national security trumps imaginary dates for a global “climate catastrophe.”
A new study finds Earth’s bottom water temperatures (BWTs) have cooled by 2-3°C over the last 4.5 million years through to the pre-industrial era (1750).
A new study finds Earth’s bottom water temperatures (BWTs) have cooled by 2-3°C over the last 4.5 million years through to the pre-industrial era (1750).
Since 1750, however, global BWTs have not risen in a detectable way, nor have they exceeded the warmth achieved during the Medieval Warm Period (Gebbie and Huybers, 2019). The Pacific Ocean as a whole has continued to cool in the last centuries.
Regionally, today’s North Atlantic’s bottom water temperatures hover around 4°C – just as they did throughout the Late Holocene. The BWTs averaged ~5°C, or “slightly warmer than present-day,” during the last glacial, with anomalies reaching 10°C both 13 and 16 thousand years ago and about 7°C both 15 and 19 thousand years ago (Yasuhara et al., 2019).
These global and regional BWT reconstructions do not support the narrative that modern ocean temperatures are unprecedentedly warm due to human activity.
The aspirational climate finance target of $1.3 trillion annually by 2035 falls short of needs, with developing countries requiring $2.4 trillion by 2030, rising to $3.2 trillion by 2035, a new report shows.
The loss and damage fund established to help vulnerable countries has received only $788 million in pledges, a fraction of what nations like Bangladesh and Pacific islands require.
Current global climate finance flows total just $190 billion each year. Reaching the $1.3 trillion target would require a nearly sevenfold increase within a decade.
When world leaders gathered in Belém on November 10 for the annual climate summit (COP30), they faced what the host, Brazil, called the “COP of Implementation.” That phrase captures both aspiration and urgency. After decades of climate negotiations and 10 years since the landmark Paris Agreement was signed to limit global warming, the focus has shifted from promises to delivery, particularly in the area of finance. At the centre of discussions lies a number that sounds impressive yet falls troublingly short.
This aspirational target of $1.3 trillion each year represents a historic moment reached at last year’s summit. Developed countries have pledged $300 billion per year by 2035, known as the New Collective Quantified Goal, with the remainder expected from other sources, including emerging economies and private investors.
But a report released two days into the summit laid bare the gap between ambition and reality. Developing countries, excluding China, will require $2.4 trillion annually by 2030, rising to approximately $3.2 trillion by 2035, according to the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance (IHLEG) of the London School of Economics, as calculated in its fourth report, published on November 12. The difference between the agreed-upon target and actual necessity could not be clearer.
“Getting to the target is feasible, but it is not easy,” said Amar Bhattacharya, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the IHLEG report. That understatement masks an enormous undertaking. Current climate finance flows to Emerging Markets and Developing economies or EMDEs (excluding China) total roughly $190 billion in 2022, according to the IHLEG report. Reaching even the $1.3 trillion mark would require nearly a sevenfold increase within a decade. Reaching what is actually needed demands even more.
Can’t you see these climate activists are doing it tough?
$1.3 trillion divided by say a hundred thousand activists is only $13,000,000 / year / activist. Barely enough to cover the air miles climate activists clock up while campaigning against flying.
I think the referenced report is available here, though there appear to have been some last minute multi-hundred-billion-dollar adjustments to the numbers. The rest of the quoted article is mostly a long complaint about how slowly the money is being delivered.
COP30 unfolds in Belém, Brazil, amid the familiar spectacle of jet-setting elites lecturing on climate from air-conditioned halls.
This year’s darling? The “bioeconomy“— swapping fossil fuels for products derived from nature’s bounty: plants, forests, algae, microbes, and waste. Think biofuels for your F-150, bioplastics for packaging, industrial chemicals, even drugs from organic scraps. Proponents promise circular economies, emission slashes, rural job booms, and freedom from foreign oil barons and rare-earth tyrants.
It evokes Reagan-era optimism: American grit turning cornfields into energy independence. But this U.N.-fueled fantasy is big-government snake oil — crony subsidies inflating costs, ravaging ecosystems, and mocking true conservation. Conservatives have battled these mandates since the Paris debacle; the bioeconomy is their sequel, exporting our prosperity to Brazilian bureaucrats while squeezing U.S. families.
Crop-based biofuels exemplify the scam. EPA models paint corn ethanol as a low-carbon hero. Reality bites: Mandates surge demand, spurring farmers to raze prairies and forests. “Indirect land-use change” (ILUC) unleashes buried carbon, often doubling emissions over decades. A seminal 2008 Searchinger study confirmed U.S. ethanol rivals’ gasoline’s footprint when ILUC counts. The EU, green as it is, now phases out high-ILUC fuels to zero by 2030 under its Renewable Energy Directive.
The pain hits home. Biofuel diversions fueled the 2007-08 food crisis, spiking corn and soy prices 75%, per World Bank leaks. Families in flyover country — not speculators — paid dearly. That’s not security; it’s starvation politics from Washington.
Brazil’s RenovaBio, COP30’s showcase, fares worse. Since 2017, it trades credits for “lifecycle-low” biofuels, claiming transport emission wins. Lula’s team hypes it as a bioeconomy beacon. But peer reviews expose the rot: no ILUC accounting, enabling Amazon-chewing sugarcane sprawl. An IEA report slams weak fraud checks and deforestation risks as demand booms. Pre-COP exposés reveal land grabs and indigenous clashes — hardly the sustainable idyll being sold.
Wood pellets? “Renewable” power’s grim reaper. Labeled carbon-neutral, they ignore the math: Burning trees flood the air with CO₂ now, regrowth lagging for 40-100 years amid fires and blight. NPR probes show wood pellets are dirtier than coal in the short-term, poisoning rural air for subsidies. It’s not stewardship; it’s subsidized savagery.
Bioplastics follow suit. “Biodegradable” PLA from corn demands industrial infernos to dissolve — useless in landfills or oceans, where it festers like PET. It commandeers food acres, gums recycling, and yields zilch on waste, per Yale analyses. Feel-good fiction, not a fix.
“Sustainable” wastes? Crop residues cap at soil-safe levels to dodge erosion; overreach invites Dust Bowls 2.0. Used cooking oil? Scarce, scam-prone — importers fake “waste” from palm plantations for green gold.
Beyond ledgers, its values are at stake. Monocrops gut biodiversity — 80% species drops in Amazon hotspots, per global reports — eviscerating jaguars and habitats. Smallholders flee land rushes, igniting conflicts sans U.S.-style rights. Cronyism reigns: billions subsidize agra-giants; mandates crush independents; energy bills soar; innovation freezes. Climate impact? Negligible against fossils, sidelining nukes and gas.
Conservatives offer clarity: Free markets over edicts. Mandate tech-neutrality with ironclad lifecycle math — no ILUC dodges or neutrality nonsense. Axe high-risk feedstocks, EU-style. Champion audited wastes over crops. Electrify pragmatically — fleet EVs, not mandates — but gut permitting for modular reactors, fracked abundance, grid upgrades.
Unleash Iowa innovators and Texas drillers on equal footing. Energy dominance demands merit, not Brasília busybodies.
COP30’s bioeconomy is hemp-clad socialism: Slick pitches veiling pricier groceries, barren fields, and bogus cuts. As delegates toast in Belém, recall: Prosperity springs from unchained enterprise, not U.N. utopias. Spurn subsidies; seize reliable, cheap power for families and freedoms. America first — red, white, and verdant truth.
Melanie Collette is a CFACT Policy Analyst. She comes to CFACT (Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow) with a background in environmental/energy policy work, especially in combating the offshore wind turbine groups and green organizations in their plans for northeast construction of wind farms up and down the Atlantic coast.
COP30, the United Nations climate conference, is underway in Belem, Brazil. Thousands of representatives from all over the world have journeyed to discuss how to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to try to fight human-caused climate change. But ten years after the Paris Climate Agreement, the global consensus on climate change is crumbling.
COP30, the United Nations climate conference, is underway in Belem, Brazil. Thousands of representatives from all over the world have journeyed to discuss how to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to try to fight human-caused climate change. But ten years after the Paris Climate Agreement, the global consensus on climate change is crumbling.
COP30 is the thirtieth “conference of the parties.” The first took place in Berlin in 1995. At COP21 in Paris in 2015, more than 190 countries signed the Paris Climate Agreement, pledging to cut emissions and to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
About 50,000 people are attending COP30 from more than 190 nations. But key world leaders are not attending, including President Xi Jinping of China, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, and President Donald Trump of the United States. Climatism, the ideology pushing for a global transition to Net Zero energy, faces a rising tide of opposition across the world.
Two weeks before COP30, billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates posted a memo to COP30 on his website titled “Three Tough Truths About Climate.” In it he states that “Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization,” and also that “Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals … ” He also said that “Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.”
This is a remarkable change of position for Mr. Gates, who has spent billions in the fight against climate change over the last two decades. In 2021, he wrote a best-selling book titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. His shift of emphasis away from stopping emissions to solving real world problems is a move away from climate alarmism and toward common-sense policy.
President Trump called climate change “the greatest scam ever perpetrated on the world” in his address to the UN General Assembly in September. During the last 10 months, the Trump Administration has shut down permits for offshore wind, slashed subsidies for wind, solar, and electric vehicles, cut climate funding, and banned climate change rhetoric in government documents. The US is not sending delegates to COP30.
But in addition to the United States, opposition to Net Zero and Climatism is rising in other nations. Reform UK, the opposition party led by Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom, is now using the phrase “Net Stupid Zero.” Reform UK is now leading in some political polls.
Alternative für Deutschland, the number two political party in Germany, wants to tear down all wind turbines, calling them “windmills of shame.” Germany has more than 20,000 wind turbines installed, one of the highest densities in the world. Last month the Nationals party in Australia voted to abandon support for Net Zero. Nationals leader David Littleproud said, “We believe in reducing emissions, but not at any cost.” Just this week, Australia’s Liberal party also abandoned Net Zero and pledged to bring down energy prices instead. Australia, Germany, the UK, and other nations are struggling with escalating energy costs and no apparent benefit from Net Zero policies.
What have thirty UN climate conferences accomplished since 1995? The answer is “no measurable climate benefit.” Since 2000, the world has spent about $10 trillion on renewable energy, but hydrocarbons─ coal, natural gas, and oil─ still provided 87% of world energy in 2024 according to the Energy Institute.
Since 1965, global energy consumption has quadrupled and has accelerated since 2000. Every year the world adds about an additional UK worth of energy consumption. Except for the recession year of 2012 and the COVID-19-year of 2020, wind, solar, and other renewables failed to generate enough new energy to provide for the global increase in consumption, let alone replace hydrocarbons.
Last year, former US Secretary of State John Kerry said, “There shouldn’t be any more coal-fired power plants permitted anywhere in the world.” But global coal consumption continues to rise. Today, more than 6,500 coal-fired power plants operate across the world and another 1,000 are in planning or under construction. In 2024, coal provided 34% of the world’s electricity, the largest source of power.
Global energy consumption will continue to rise. The US has about 80 vehicles for every 100 people, but vehicle usage in Africa and India remains below 10 vehicles for every 100 people. Today, developed nations use up to 20 times as much plastic as poor nations on a per-person basis. Developing nations will continue to use more hydrocarbon fuels to enable their economies to grow.
As Mr. Gates has observed, poverty still characterizes many of the world’s people. Almost 700 million people do not have access to electricity and another two billion have blackouts or brownouts every other day. Over two billion people do not have access to clean water. Millions die each year from malaria, typhoid, and other diseases. World leaders should concentrate on these real problems, instead of unfounded concerns about carbon dioxide emissions.
From the political scene to the continued growth of hydrocarbon energy, the global climate consensus and the push for Net Zero is crumbling. It’s time for nations to return to sensible energy policy.
This commentary was first published by RealClear Energy on November 13, 2025.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and author of the bestselling bookGreen Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
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