01/16/2026 – Climate- Science.press

Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ Has Been Thoroughly Debunked

It’s no understatement to say that the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” changed the direction of public policy.

A man in formal attire stands with an astonished expression against a backdrop of ice and water, with text overlay reading 'The Arctic will be Ice Free 2013.'

Glacier National Park removes signs predicting end of glaciers in 2020 after Gore’s prediction

It’s no understatement to say that the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” changed the direction of public policy.

And in fact, that’s exactly what failed presidential candidate Al Gore intended the film to do.

Fortunately for him, he found a willing audience of Hollywood celebrities and left-wing media outlets to uncritically promote his ideology and activism. OutKick has the story.

Unfortunately for him, 2006 is now far enough in the past that we can test some of the predictions, claims, and statements of fact he makes in that film. So that’s exactly what we did.

At the start of 2026, nearly 20 years after the film hit theaters and helped pave the way for Europe’s delusional “net zero” policies, electric car mandates, and low-flow showerheads, OutKick rewatched “An Incovenient Truth” to see how well it held up over time.

Spoiler alert: not particularly well!

The film starts off as a glowing tribute to Al Gore himself, an unsurprising beginning given his obvious ego and hubris. Almost immediately afterward, it jumps straight into the propaganda.

He references Hurricane Katrina as an example of more extreme weather events in the modern world.

There’s a “Simpsons” video with propaganda of “global warming,” remember, this is pre-rebranded to “climate change,” with a young girl seeing her ice cream cone melt.

Gore talks about what got him into this field which is one professor who took some measurements of CO2, then made vague predictions of what would happen if we didn’t make changes.

He says we started measuring CO2 in 1958, which, of course, thoroughly discredits his activism. Assuming the latest estimate is accurate, the earth is billions of years old.

It keeps growing by the year, but as of January 2026, it’s 4.54 billion years. Sure, you can estimate CO2 concentrations for part of that past, but not all of it. Or even a sizable percentage of it. And making predictions and assumptions on such limited data is awful science.

But ignoring the past and focusing on the future, one of his most concrete predictions of doom came regarding Mt. Kilimanjaro. In his discussion, he shows pictures of snow on the African mountain from decades ago, then images from the early 2000’s with much less snow.

He blames this on global warming, then ominously predicts, “Within the decade there will be no more snows on Kilimanjaro.”

How’d that age?

Gore’s Predictions Prove Woefully Wrong

Well, we’re now two decades removed from this claim, and there continues to be snow on Kilimanjaro. In fact, one story from The Times of London published a few years ago specifically highlighted how wrong Gore’s forecast was.

Methley Swai, the owner of a trekking company for Kilimanjaro excursions, told The Times:

“Many people have made Kilimanjaro a bucket list priority because of the Al Gore deadline, but when they get here, they are pleasantly surprised to find lots of snow.”

Sure enough, the story also reported,

“There were also abnormally high snowfalls in 2018, which led to the highest recorded growth for the total snow depth on Tanzania’s inactive volcano, an aggregated increase of 1.2m.”

Whoops! We’re not done there!

His next example of declining snow is Glacier National Park. Gore tells a story about how he personally climbed it with his daughter in 1998, then shows pictures of less glacier activity in the mountains.

Then, the kicker. A concrete prediction of what would happen to the park.

“Within 15 years this will be the park formerly known as Glacier,” he says, to oohs and aah from the crowd.

Here’s how poorly this prediction has aged.

Even CNN was forced to report in 2020 that “Glacier National Park is replacing signs that predicted its glaciers would be gone by 2020,” because unfortunately for Gore and his agenda, there continues to be plenty of glaciers remaining.

Nailed it again, buddy.

He mentions Argentina and Peru as countries where glaciers that are in danger of disappearing.

Yet, as you’d expect, there are still glaciers in Argentina and Peru in 2026.

In fact, one travelog from 2025 posted photos of the El Pertito Moreno glacier in Argentina, with the comment “Just west of El Calafate, this frozen river is one of the few glaciers in the world still growing.”

Nailed it again buddy.

Read the full story here.

A man in a black suit and tie smiles and gestures with his hand in front of a swirling storm background.

False and Absurd: The BBC’s Fantasy of Climate-Driven Pay Cuts

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Science Focus recently published “Climate change has now shrunk US salaries by 12%. And worse is to come” by Tom Howarth. The article claims that warming temperatures have already reduced U.S. incomes by roughly 12 percent and warns that future losses will be even greater. This article is not only false, it is absurd. Data show steady growth in incomes, coupled with increased productivity.

A cartoon character with a red hat and blue collar smiling widely, with the word 'fake' displayed beside it. The background features various wooden tools and objects.

From The Climate Realism

By Anthony Watts

A hand holding money with a superimposed 'FAKE NEWS' stamp. The background features a news article headline about climate change affecting US salaries.

The article asserts that “climate change has already cut incomes in the US by around 12 per cent since 2000,” arguing that warming is quietly eroding wages and purchasing power nationwide through complex supply-chain effects. To reach this conclusion, the study imagines a hypothetical United States without man-made greenhouse gas emissions and then estimates how much richer Americans would supposedly be today in that alternate reality.

That is the fatal flaw in the article: these are not observed losses, they are modeled counterfactuals, i.e., guesses about what might have happened in a world where climate change never existed. If climate change were truly shrinking U.S. salaries by anything close to 12 percent, the damage would be visible in real economic indicators. Instead, over the same period the study claims massive losses occurred, the U.S. economy expanded substantially, real GDP increased, productivity rose, and average living standards improved. An economy supposedly being “picked clean” by temperature would not look like this.

Climate Realism has documented this problem repeatedly in its critiques of climate-economics modeling, including in “The New York Times Claim That Climate Change Threatens the Global Economy Is False,” which explains how speculative assumptions about productivity and trade are stacked to generate alarming numbers that do not match observed economic performance. These studies do not measure losses; they assume them, then back-cast them into the present.

The broader empirical record directly contradicts the BBC narrative. The modest warming of roughly one degree Celsius since the late nineteenth century coincided with unprecedented economic growth, longer life expectancy, better nutrition, and vastly improved resilience to weather. Climate at a Glance documents one of the clearest indicators of this reality in “Deaths from Extreme Weather,” showing that climate-related deaths have fallen by more than 95 percent over the past century. If warming were already imposing a large, hidden economic tax, we would expect worsening human outcomes, not dramatic improvement.

The BBC article also ignores the role of CO₂ and modern agriculture in boosting productivity. Climate at a Glance summarizes NASA’s findings on global vegetation increases in “Global Greening,” explaining that rising CO₂ has contributed to increased plant growth and leaf area across large portions of Earth. It also documents surging yields in “Crop Production,” noting that crop yields for staples such as wheat, corn, and rice have risen strongly over recent decades. Those are real-world outcomes, not counterfactual guesses, and they are directly relevant to any claim that modest warming is already imposing large economic losses.

History further undermines the claim. Colder periods, not warmer ones, have consistently been associated with slower growth, food shortages, and poorer health outcomes. The Little Ice Age brought repeated crop failures and widespread hardship across Europe and North America. Warmer periods, by contrast, have generally supported longer growing seasons and higher yields. The BBC article never addresses this historical reality, instead assuming—without evidence—that today’s temperatures are economically harmful despite every major indicator pointing the other way.

Even the study’s authors concede the weakness of their own results, admitting the estimated income loss could plausibly range anywhere from 2 percent to 22 percent and that the exact figure “can move depending on assumptions.” In plain language, the headline number is unstable and assumption-driven. Change the model inputs, and the supposed loss shrinks—or disappears entirely. That is not a measured economic impact.

Most revealing is what the article cannot show: an actual decline in U.S. salaries attributable to climate change. No such decline exists, as seen in the chart below from Our World in Data.

Line graph depicting median income or consumption per day from 1963 to 2023, showing a steady increase with a notable rise around 2023 in the United States. The data is adjusted for inflation and differences in living costs between countries.

What exists instead is a growing economy, rising productivity, improving agricultural output, and falling climate-related mortality during the very period when temperatures increased modestly. The claim that climate change has already “shrunk U.S. salaries by 12 percent” is not supported by observation, history, or basic economic logic.

By presenting speculative modeling as real-world loss, BBC Science Focus misleads readers into believing climate change is already draining their paychecks. The data say otherwise. The United States has become richer, healthier, and more productive during the modern warming period. Assertions to the contrary are not grounded in evidence but are artifacts of models untethered from reality.

“Carbon” Capture, Utilisation & Storage – Separating Fact from Fiction

“Carbon” Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) is widely described as essential for meeting “climate targets”. Most “net-zero” plans assume large amounts of future CO₂ removal to offset emissions that cannot be eliminated.

Illustration depicting the process of capturing, transporting, and utilizing materials. It shows a factory setting with cooling towers, a water body with ships, and a pipeline leading underground, labeled with steps: 1. Capture, 2. Transport, 3a. Storage, and 3b. Utilization.

From Watts Up With That?

Dr. Lars Schernikau: Energy Economist, Commodity Trader, Author (recent book “The Unpopular Truth… about Electricity and the Future of Energy”)

Details inc the full Blog are available at www.unpopular-truth.com

1. Why CCUS sounds convincing but fails in practice

The question is… does carbon dioxide removal actually work at scale?

The short answer is…no

In my blog post, I examine whether Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), “Carbon” Capture and Storage (CCS), “Carbon” Capture and Utilisation (CCU), or Direct Air Capture (DAC) actually deliver meaningful climate benefits in practice.

Making use of published data from the IEA, IPCC, BCG, McKinsey, and peer-reviewed literature, I show that CCUS requires large amounts of energy and capital and delivers no measurable climate impact at scale as very little CO₂ is actually removed.

Before dismissing my conclusion as “harsh,” I invite you to read on (full blog here). Let’s look at what these terms really mean, what they aim to achieve, and what the data actually shows.

You can read the full blog here: “Carbon” Capture Utilization & Storage (CCUS)

2. Why carbon dioxide removal exists

In its Summary for Policymakers, the IPCC states that “net-zero” emissions must be reached “as quickly as possible” to limit global warming. Unlike emissions-reduction measures, which limit how much CO₂ is released, Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is defined as activities that remove CO₂ from the atmosphere and store it securely and long-term.

This distinction matters because “net-zero” cannot be reached through emissions reductions alone and therefore large future volumes of CO₂ removal are assumed. This is why CCS and DAC continue to attract policy attention and investment despite limited real-world results.

3. What are we really capturing?

Despite the name, “carbon capture” does not capture carbon. It captures carbon dioxide (CO₂), a big difference, but let’s ignore that for now…

Carbon itself is a solid element and a basic building block of life. Roughly a quarter of the human body is carbon, and almost all of it ultimately comes from atmospheric CO₂, if you wish the real building block of life. Plants absorb CO₂, animals and humans eat plants, and we exhale most of that carbon again.

Fact 1: CO₂ is not inherently a pollutant. It is a trace gas and a fundamental input to life.

4. CO₂ and warming: Diminishing “returns”

CO₂ makes up about 0.04% of the atmosphere.

Fact 2: CO₂ is a trace gas that acts as a minor greenhouse gas, with diminishing impact on temperatures

Water vapour and clouds account for most of the so called “greenhouse effect” that makes Earth a liveable planet. Crucially, CO₂’s warming effect decreases logarithmically. means that additional CO₂ translates into smaller and smaller temperature changes.

5. How much CO₂ has CCS actually removed?

After nearly 30 years, global CCS has captured less than 400 million tons of CO₂. Much of this was used for enhanced oil recovery, not permanent storage. Realistically, only 100-200 million tons were ever truly removed, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.

Today, global CCS capacity is about 50 million tons per year, while global emissions (including CH4 at GWP20) are roughly 70 billion tons per year. CCS remains a million-tons technology, while climate plans assume billion-tons deployment.

That gap is not political. It is physical.

6. The energy penalty no one likes to discuss

Capturing CO₂ is energy-intensive.

Adding CCS to a modern coal power plant reduces efficiency by 25–30%. When additional fuel mining, transport, compression, and CO₂ handling are included, the plant requires about 40% more primary energy to deliver the same electricity.

Fact 3: For a modern coal-fired power plant with ~90% CCS, the all-in primary-energy requirement per delivered MWh is typically ~40% higher than without CCS

This includes additional coal consumption, capture and compression, increased mining, handling and transport of the extra coal, and CO₂ transport and injection for storage, assuming all CO₂ is permanently removed, which in practice is not the case.

In simple terms: more fuel is burned to hide the exhaust.

CCS does not “clean” energy systems. It makes them larger, more complex, and less efficient.

Fact 4: The “energy cost of CCS” for a coal-fired power station is about 1 MWh per 1 ton of CO₂

Considering the fuel multiplier for gas-fired power plants with CCS, we are looking at about 25% less, because gas-fired power stations tend to be more fuel efficient, despite the smaller CO₂ concentration in the exhaust stream.

Germany, for instance, plans to capture about 2 million tons of CO₂ per year…at that scale, the “climate impact” is negligible.

Australia’s flagship Gorgon CCS project was approved on the condition it would capture 80% of reservoir CO₂. In reality, it captured less than half that amount in 2024. These examples show the same pattern of high ambition, but poor delivery.

7. Using CO₂ doesn’t remove it

“Carbon” Capture and Utilisation (CCU) turns CO₂ into products, often fuels. But CO₂ is already fully oxidised. Turning it into fuel requires large amounts of additional energy, mainly hydrogen.

Producing fuels from CO₂ typically consumes 8–10+ MWh per tons of CO₂, and the CO₂ is released again when the fuel is burned.

The most common use today is enhanced oil recovery (EOR) which is economically sensible, energy-positive, and climatically questionable. EOR is a set of techniques used to extract oil that cannot be produced using normal primary or secondary methods.

Fact 5: CO₂ utilization to produce fuels represents an additional energy sink, and one that is more energy-intensive than CO₂ capture and storage CCS.

Fact 6: Producing fuels from CO₂ using hydrogen carries a total system-level energy cost of 8–10+ MWh per tonne of CO₂, and the CO₂ is ultimately still released into the atmosphere. The “energy cost” for producing and refining oil is significantly lower.

Flowchart illustrating CO2 capture processes, including CCS, CDR, and CCU methods, detailing conversion pathways for fuel production and associated materials.

8. Direct air capture is like fighting physics…

Direct Air Capture tries to remove CO₂ from ambient air, where concentrations are just 0.04%.

That extreme dilution means enormous volumes of air must be moved. Most of the energy is spent moving air, not capturing CO₂. Even optimistic estimates suggest 2–4 MWh per tons.

Removing 1 billion tons per year would require roughly 8–15% of global electricity production.

DAC is technically possible but practically unscalable.

Fact 7: Enhanced Oil Recovery it the most common utilization of CO₂, with questionable “climate benefits” if any at all. However, it makes economic sense and is energy positive because it produces oil that would otherwise not be recoverable.

9. What is the climate impact?

Fact 9: Assuming that, during the past 30 year, CCUS removed about 200 million tons of CO₂ (that never resurfaced) from the atmosphere then, according to IPCCs MAGICC, 2100 temperatures reduced by ≈ 0.0001 °C

Let’s round this up to zero as one cannot measure it, nor will it have any impact at all on extreme weather nor sea-levels

Even removing 1 billion tons per year for 75 years would reduce warming by only ~0.035°C which is below detectability, with no measurable impact on extreme weather or sea level rise and would only be true if IPCC models and assumptions are correct, which is in serious dispute.

10. The bottom line?

Carbon Dioxide Removal does not solve the climate problem at scale. It shifts emissions into complex engineered systems that must remain stable for centuries, while consuming vast amounts of energy and resources.

The climate benefits are negligible. The costs are enormous.

Those resources could instead deliver far greater benefit through efficiency, infrastructure, pollution control, health, education, and resilience.

That conclusion is not ideological…It follows directly from the data!

Continue reading the full blog here: “Carbon” Capture Utilization & Storage (CCUS)

A close-up of a green leaf with the text 'CCS' and '0%' in a natural setting, alongside a wooden thermometer showing temperature markings.

Rejecting Climatism: Trump Withdraws from UNFCCC and 66 International Organizations

The Trump administration has issued an executive order that withdraws the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and other international bodies. The order pulls the US back from organizations pursuing climate policies and other efforts that the administration does not consider to be in the national interest. The US abandonment of world climate groups may accelerate a pushback against climate and net zero energy policies.

A man in a blue suit and red tie gestures emphatically while speaking at a podium with a backdrop of green marble, indicating a public address or speech.

From The Master Resource

By Steve Goreham

Image of a presidential memorandum titled 'Withdrawing the United States from International Organizations, Conventions, and Treaties that Are Contrary to the Interests of the United States' dated January 7, 2026.

“The US withdrawal from UN climate programs may signal a worldwide retreat from Climatism and the push for net zero energy policies. Leading political groups in Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom appear to be joining the US to move back to sensible energy policy and away from efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions.”

The Trump memorandum issued on January 6 was titled, “Withdrawing the United States from International Organizations, Conventions, and Treaties that Are Contrary to the Interests of the United States.” It orders the US government to end participation and funding of 66 international organizations, including the UNFCCC and 30 other UN organizations.

Background

The UNFCCC, an organization and treaty that established in 1992 at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, is tasked with supporting “the global response to the threat of climate change.” The withdrawal leaves the US as the only nation not part of the UNFCCC.

Since the 1980s, the United Nations has used the ideology of Climatism, the fear of human-caused climate change, to pursue three objectives: 1) establish the UN as a world environmental leader, 2) strengthen efforts to establish a world government, and 3) redistribute wealth from the world’s advanced nations to the developing nations.

The UN has become the world’s leader in what is called the world’s biggest environmental issue. International climate events are held every month of the year, culminating in the COP (conference of the parties) event at the end of the year, with more than 50,000 people attending. The COP31, the 31^st annual COP, will convene in November of 2026 in Antalya, Turkey.

The multi-nation COP meetings led by the UN serve as a form of world government, placing demands on individual nations in the name of fighting global warming. Former French President Jacques Chirac stated that the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty of 1997 was “the first step toward global governance.” Each year, the leadership at COP meetings demands that hundreds of billions of dollars be redistributed from the US and other wealthy nations to developing nations.

IPCC Withdrawal

The trump order also withdraws the US from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body responsible for “assessing the science related to climate change.” The IPCC issued six assessment reports from 1990 to 2023, each warning that humans were responsible for global warming. With the withdrawal, the US will no longer participate in the IPCC or fund IPCC efforts.

The recent executive order continues Trump administration efforts to withdraw from global climate efforts. This follows a February 2025 order withdrawing the US from the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, which will take effect next month.

The withdrawals attracted immediate and vehement outrage from international leaders, including Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, former US Vice-President Al Gore, and environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club. Gina McCarthy, former top climate advisor in the Biden administration, stated that the withdrawals can “only harm the US economy, jobs and living standards, as wildfires, floods, mega-storms and droughts get rapidly worse.” But evidence shows that deaths from climate events are declining, and wildfires, floods, storms, and droughts are not getting worse.

The funding cut-off will have a significant negative impact on the UN budget. The Trump administration has been cutting funding not only to climate groups, but also the Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN Population Fund, the World Health Organization, and other bodies. The administration charges these groups with sponsoring “woke” and “divisive” causes that are “contrary to the interests of the United States.”

In 2025, the US provided $820 million, or 22% of the UN’s regular budget of $3.7 billion, down from 31% in 2024. The regular budget is part of an annual total UN revenue of over $65 billion, including peacekeeping and voluntary contributions to groups like the World Food Program and the UN Development Program. US cuts will heavily impact the budget for climate and other programs.

Conclusion

The US withdrawal from UN climate programs may signal a worldwide retreat from Climatism and the push for net zero energy policies. Leading political groups in Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom appear to be joining the US to move back to sensible energy policy and away from efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

US participation in the UNFCCC treaty was approved by Congress in 1992 and signed by President George H. W. Bush. The Trump administration withdrawal will likely be challenged in court.

The rejection of support for UN climate change efforts moves in a radically new direction in global environmental policy. Will other nations join the US and step back from climate alarmism? Year 2026 may provide the answers for a political movement that has not only lost its momentum but is also in peril.

—————

Steve Goreham, a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy, is author of the Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure (2023); Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development (2017); The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania (2012); and Climatism!: Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic (2010). His previous posts at MasterResource can be found here.

Blocking the sun: The folly of solar geoengineering

From Greek mythology’s Icarus, whose wax wings melted after he flew too close to the sun, to Goethe’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” who unleashed forces he couldn’t control, our culture warns us that hubris rarely ends well.

A large red moon rising over a calm ocean, surrounded by dark clouds and mountains in the distance.

From CFACT

By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

A dramatic landscape featuring a solar eclipse over rolling hills and a vast field of golden grass, with dark clouds overhead. — A mesmerizing solar eclipse casts a dark shadow over vibrant fields, framed by rolling hills and dramatic clouds, showcasing nature’s power and beauty.

A California startup wants us to “work together to cool our planet for future generations.” Make Sunsets seeks to combat climate change by reflecting sunlight (albedo enhancement) through releasing a balloon loaded with sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The plan is for the balloon to burst, scattering sulfur dioxide particles that then form clouds of dust that will block the sunlight, thereby cooling the planet. Serving as a role model is Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, whose 1991 volcanic eruption “cooled the Earth by 0.9°F or 0.5°C for over a year,” the company notes on its website.

Depending on the altitude and latitude at which they are released, Make Sunsets’ dust clouds can stay in the sky from six months to three years. The solar geoengineering company has raised more than $1 million from investors and sold $100,000 worth of “cooling credits” this year, The Washington Post reports. Make Sunsets has sprayed just over 240 pounds of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere this year — far short of the millions of tons needed to block enough sunlight to lower temperatures.

Standing in the way of wider application are skeptical governments. “Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida have banned the practice, and further bans have been proposed in 34 other U.S. states, at the federal level, and in Mexico,” the Post notes. The Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates sulfur dioxide as a criteria air pollutant under the Clean Air Act, acknowledges that it is investigating Make Sunsets.

“Geoengineering, weather modification, stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening … the list goes on where people have questions,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told The Daily Caller in early December. “And my position is that they deserve answers.”

Aside from EPA’s concerns about a technology whose centerpiece is the injection of vast amounts of a criteria pollutant into the stratosphere, there are other reasons to be worried about solar geoengineering. What if the technology actually succeeded in blocking sunlight?

A 2018 study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution explored how the introduction of solar geoengineering, also known as solar radiation management (SRM), could affect biodiversity. The type of solar geoengineering it investigated involved injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, which would form a protective veil around the Earth, reflecting sunlight and cooling the planet.

“Aerosols have a limited lifetime in the stratosphere and would need to be released at regular time intervals in order to be effective,” Carbon Brief explains. “If the release of aerosols were suddenly stopped, global temperatures could rapidly rise again.” Many species would be unable to cope with rapidly changing environmental conditions, study author professor Alan Robock of Rutgers University told Carbon Brief:

“The main findings are that any implementation of stratospheric geoengineering could end catastrophically for many species. Although if geoengineering were ever done, it would not make sense to abruptly end it, there are credible scenarios where this might happen. Might society ever take that risk?”

Geoengineering, along with never-ending lawsuits, has become the Plan B for alarmists who have seen their fortunes wane, as the public’s appetite for climate-related sacrifices diminishes. But the risks of geoengineering are real and are being pursued in the absence of any compelling reason.

“Satellite data from the past four decades confirm a significant growth in vegetation over as much as half the globe,” Vijay Jayaraj, a science and research associate at the CO2 Coalition, points out. “During this period, atmospheric CO2 increased from about 350 parts per million (ppm) to more than 400 ppm.” The result is the “longer growing seasons of a modestly warmer climate paired with higher levels of CO2. This is hardly the making of a catastrophe that some would have us believe.”

Starving the Earth of sunlight and reducing atmospheric levels of life-sustaining CO2 would open a Pandora’s box of troubles that threaten both wildlife and agricultural productivity. As the low crop yields and resulting famine during the Little Ice Age (ca. 1300–1850) document, there is nothing desirable about a cooler planet.

Efforts to promote global cooling by fiddling with the stratosphere will backfire on far more than just the misguided souls who set the scheme in motion.

This article originally appeared at Issues & Insights

New Study: Species Extinction Rates Declining Since 1980 – ‘Climate Change Is Not an Important Threat’

According to many recent studies intended to alarm the public about the consequences of tenths-of-a-degree warmer surface air temperatures, “20-30% of all plant and animal species may be lost to climate change in future decades” (Saban and Wiens, 2025).

A vibrant and detailed collage depicting a human face composed of diverse wildlife, including pandas, tigers, bears, and various birds, surrounded by lush greenery and industrial smokestacks in the background, representing the contrast between nature and human impact.

From No Trick Zone

By Kenneth Richard

A surreal landscape contrasting nature and industry, featuring lush greenery with animals like elephants and bears on one side, and smoke-emitting factories and a polluted sky on the other. Two figures in suits sit on the grass, reflecting on the divide between the natural world and industrial development.

“Remarkably, we found here that species-level extinctions related to climate change have not significantly increased over the last approximately 200 years.” – Saban and Wiens, 2025

A landmark 2004 study published in Nature (which has now been cited over 10,000 times) predicted one million species will be driven to extinction by 2050 due to climate change.

But now a 2025 study published in The Royal Society finds (a) “climate change is not an important threat to biodiversity,” (b) species-level extinction rates “peaked many decades ago,” and (c) there has been no significant increase in climate-related extinctions in the last 200 years.

Ongoing habitat loss and the introduction of invasive species (primarily in the 18th and 19th centuries) on islands remain the two most predominant extinction threats in recent centuries. The authors express surprise that the threat from climate change (surface air temperature warming) has remained insignificant throughout the modern era.

“Extinctions from invasive species and (surprisingly) climate change did not change significantly over time.”

“[P]ast extinctions strongly suggest that climate change is not an important threat to biodiversity.”

“[T]hese past extinctions do not show biodiversity loss as rapidly accelerating, but instead show extinction rates that generally peaked many decades ago, and that declined in some important groups (arthropods, plants).”

“Most groups showed declining extinction rates after peaking in the 1980s.”

Scientific article on extinction crisis rates and causes in plants and animals, featuring graphs and data from the Royal Society. — Image Source: **Saban and Wiens, 2025**

Confirmation Bias Replaces Science: How a Climate Scientist Turned 23 Zettajoules into Twitter Fiction

There are mistakes, and then there are mistakes that only happen when you already know the answer you want.

A surreal landscape featuring a turbulent ocean with swirling, ethereal waves in shades of blue and turquoise, contrasted by vibrant red and orange clouds in the sky.

From Watts Up With That?

By Anthony Watts

A thermometer displaying high temperatures amidst a fiery, molten landscape with dramatic orange and red hues.

There are mistakes, and then there are mistakes that only happen when you already know the answer you want.

The newly published paper “Ocean Heat Content Sets Another Record in 2025” reports a year-to-year increase in upper-2000-meter ocean heat content of about 23 zettajoules (ZJ), depending on dataset. Fine. Ocean heat content (OHC) is a possible diagnostic metric, and most people studying the Oceans believe that the oceans have been warming since the end of the Little Ice Age. However, as we recently pointed out in the WUWT post “Measuring Climate Change Without a Ruler,” from a strict epistemological standpoint, we do not know—at high confidence—whether the total energy of the Earth’s climate system is increasing, decreasing, or remaining approximately constant.

But then came the Twitter/X post — and this is where physics quietly left the room, and narrative building took its place.

Zeke Hausfather, a coauthor, triumphantly announced:

Graph depicting global ocean heat content (OHC) changes over time from 1960 to 2025, showing a significant increase in heat anomaly. Inset graph compares monthly OHC for different decades, highlighting trends from 1955 to 2025.

In a newly published paper, we find that in 2025 human emissions of greenhouse gases added around 23 billion trillion joules of heat to the world's oceans – 39 times as much as the annual energy produced by all human activity on Earth. https://t.co/tJISNHNkpO pic.twitter.com/WzroYGug3s
— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) January 13, 2026

This is not a harmless simplification. It is flatly wrong — and it is wrong in a way that a supposedly competent “climate scientist” absolutely should know better than to make. He’s attributing the increased energy retention solely to a single variable – Carbon Dioxide. Earth’s climate system is far more complex than that.

What happened here is not a math error. It is confirmation bias, plain and simple: starting with the conclusion (“GHGs did it”) and backfilling the interpretation, even if it violates basic energy accounting.

Let’s walk through it slowly, because apparently that’s necessary.

What the paper actually says (and what it very carefully does not.) The paper is here.

The paper reports that global upper-2000 m ocean heat content increased by ~23 ± 8 ZJ from 2024 to 2025 in one dataset (IAP/CAS), with smaller increases in others.

That number is:

an observed year-to-year change
a net storage term
the residual of everything that happened to the climate system that year

It already includes:

greenhouse gas forcing (from all prior years, not just 2025),
aerosol changes,
ENSO evolution (the paper explicitly mentions La Niña development),
atmosphere–ocean heat exchange,
internal variability,
circulation and mixing,
and, yes, measurement uncertainty.

It is the entire balance sheet, not a line item. Nowhere does the paper calculate:

heat from 2025 emissions,
a partition of OHC change by forcing agent,
or an attribution showing that GHGs alone account for 23 ZJ.

Because it can’t — at least not from this analysis.

As the great Steve McIntyre is fond of saying, “Watch the pea under the thimble.”

Hausfather’s tweet commits a textbook category error.

It takes:

a change in stored energy (ΔOHC, a stock),

and rebrands it as:

heat added by that year’s emissions (a flow).

This is Climate Science 101 stuff. You don’t get to do this. By that logic, one could just as easily say:

“In 1998, CO₂ emissions caused El Niño,”
or “In 2023, SUVs caused the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.”

Correlation plus narrative is not causation — especially when you skip the accounting.

It’s a basic conservation-of-energy test (which the tweet fails.)

Let’s take the claim literally.

If “2025 human emissions added 23 ZJ to the oceans”, then one of the following must be true:

Every other process affecting ocean heat that year added zero net energy, or
Some other process removed an equal and opposite amount of heat — and we can quantify it.

Neither is shown. Neither is even attempted. Instead, the tweet simply assigns 100% of the observed net heat gain to one favored cause. That’s not attribution. That’s myopic storytelling. Whether he meant cumulative emissions over time and phrased it badly, or he really believes the increase of CO₂ added all that extra heat is unclear. What is clear is that one year of increased emissions could not have added all that extra OHC.

Here’s the incremental forcing problem with the math shown. This is the part that completely breaks Zeke’s claim.

Atmospheric CO₂ increased by roughly 2–3 ppm during 2025 (consistent with CO2 global means).

Radiative forcing from CO₂ is commonly approximated as:

Mathematical equation showing the relationship between change in force (ΔF), and the ratio of two concentrations (C2 and C1), using the natural logarithm.

Taking a representative case:

Mathematical calculation showing the change in concentration of two values in ppm and the resulting impact on radiation forcing in W m−2.

That is the incremental forcing added in that year.

Now convert that forcing into energy over one year:

A mathematical representation calculating energy (E) based on the Earth's surface area and time, including variables for surface area and seconds per year.

That is:

0.43 zettajoules (ZJ)

Not 23 ZJ.
Not even close Zeke. Maybe Zeke should create his own heat units. I propose Zekajoules – a fictional unit. That way, he’s never wrong.

Even allowing for generous assumptions, the incremental effect of 2025 emissions is well under 1 ZJ, not tens of ZJ. The climate system responds to the accumulated forcing from decades of emissions, not to the incremental bump from one year’s emissions — which is exactly why pretending that “2025 emissions added 23 ZJ” is nonsense.

This is the difference between forcing and storage, and confusing the two is inexcusable for a professional “climate scientist.”

ENSO, Zeke’s inconvenient elephant in the room.

The paper itself notes that evolving La Niña conditions likely contributed to the 2025 OHC change. ENSO redistributes tens of zettajoules of heat between ocean layers and the atmosphere on annual timescales. This is not controversial. It’s in the textbooks. Yet in the Zeke version of events, ENSO mysteriously vanishes — because it’s inconvenient to the preferred narrative. That’s confirmation bias at work.

Why this matters (and why this deserves calling out.)

Zeke Hausfather is not a random blogger. He is routinely presented as a serious “climate scientist,” cited by media outlets as a trusted explainer. That makes this worse, not better.

A graduate student might be forgiven for confusing:

Observed OHC change with heat attributable to a specific year’s emissions.

A published “climate scientist” should not. When a scientist allows narrative alignment to override physical meaning — especially in public communication — that’s not “simplifying for the public.” That’s lowering standards. And it wrongly trains journalists, policymakers, and the public to think energy accounting is optional.

It isn’t. But that’s the common narrative from “climate science” these days. Sigh.

What Zeke should have said:

Here’s a version of his Tweet that would have been technically correct, and without the biased and ambiguous language, nor placing blame on a single climate variable that is one of many in a complex climate system:

“Global upper-2000 m ocean heat content increased by ~23 ZJ from 2024 to 2025, reflecting the ongoing long-term planetary energy imbalance plus year-to-year variability, including ENSO evolution.”

That’s accurate.
That’s defensible.
That doesn’t require abusing units.

But it doesn’t make for a good viral climate scary tweet, does it?

The public is told to “trust the science.” But science only deserves trust when scientists:

respect definitions,
respect conservation laws,
and resist the temptation to turn diagnostics into propaganda.

When a “climate scientist” takes a perfectly valid observational number and repackages it as “heat added by emissions” — without doing the attribution — that’s not science communication.

That’s confirmation bias with a PhD.

And non-PhD. people like me that are tired of this shit, notice.

BBC Fact-Checking Show More or Less Gets its Climate Facts Wrong Again

The BBC More or Less statistics programme is one of the last remaining Radio 4 programmes worth a listen. It tries to dispassionately analyse the data behind often narrative-driven and politicised claims. Except when it comes to climate change and Net Zero of course. Here it is seemingly bound by the BBC’s weird view of ‘settled’ science which gives alarmists and activists a free broadcast pass to create mass climate psychosis. Case in point, a recent cringe-inducing ‘why are you so very wonderful’ interview with the Green Blob-funded Attribution Queen Professor Friederike Otto.

Close-up portrait of a woman with brown hair and blue eyes, smiling at an event. She has multiple earrings and is wearing a black outfit with a patterned scarf.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

A woman sitting at a desk with a black chair, wearing a black jacket with buttons, looking directly at the camera. Papers and a notebook are on the desk, and a whiteboard in the background has graphs and notes.

The BBC More or Less statistics programme is one of the last remaining Radio 4 programmes worth a listen. It tries to dispassionately analyse the data behind often narrative-driven and politicised claims. Except when it comes to climate change and Net Zero of course. Here it is seemingly bound by the BBC’s weird view of ‘settled’ science which gives alarmists and activists a free broadcast pass to create mass climate psychosis. Case in point, a recent cringe-inducing ‘why are you so very wonderful’ interview with the Green Blob-funded Attribution Queen Professor Friederike Otto.

Presenter Tim Harford set the ball rolling with a suggestion that the British weather is getting “downright weird”. This seems to refer to the fact that days can sometimes be sunny, sometimes sodden, sometimes on the same day. These factual burdens might be considered obvious to anyone who has bravely lived for more than six months in the British Isles. Otto of course was delighted to run with the Guardianista “weird” tag, suggesting that some colleagues do actually call it “global weirding”. Particularly colleagues who like herself try to second guess the chaotic atmosphere with computer models producing pseudoscientific, lawfare-ready climate Armageddon nonsense, it might be said.

No attempt was made to question Otto’s bonkers claim that “every time it rains now, it rains more than it would have without climate change”. Not in Scotland, Harford might have noted, the rainiest country in the United Kingdom. As the Met Office graph below shows, the amount of Scottish rainfall has flatlined for about 40 years.

Line graph depicting annual rainfall amounts in Scotland from 1840 to 2020, with various trend lines and markers indicating lowest, highest, and average values.

Over in Northern Ireland, the flat line has been holding steady for 25 years, while in England, cyclical rainfall amounts have recovered to 1870s levels. Not much sign of humans fiddling with the weather with regard to these ones, Harford did not point out.

On a global level, rainfall totals do not seem to have changed much. A recent paper found little overall change in the Amazon over the last 300 years. In 2022, a group of Italian scientists led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti consulted widely available data and found that rainfall intensity and frequency had remained stationary worldwide, with no sign of a significant rise in flood magnitude.

The Alimonti findings were eventually retracted by Nature after a gang of activists – including, no prizes for guessing, F. Otto – said it that it should never have been published. Otto claimed that the scientists were not operating in “good faith” and “if the journal cares about science it should withdraw it loudly and publicly, saying that it should never have been published”. There are lots of stats in this infamously retracted work, including those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a biased body, but one nevertheless that currently observes little recent change in most extreme weather events. But, it seems, none of these stats interest More or Less.

Global temperatures have risen by 1.6°C since pre-industrial times, stated Otto, a claim that seems to reply on picking a recent high point that is now rapidly falling, unreliable temperature measurements and seemingly adding some extra for luck. Even the UK Met Office – activist-central for the Net Zero fantasy – estimates that long-term warming averaged over decades is around 1.3°C. In fact, unnatural urban heat corruption and regular additions of warming on a retrospective basis probably mean the true figure is more like 1°C. Try as it might, the Met Office cannot get anywhere near 1.6°C. Its imaginative 20-year average from 2015-2034 that cherry picks a strong El Niño spike in 2015 and estimates/invents temperature figures going forward a decade can only get to warming of 1.4°C.

Perhaps one day More or Less can get around to investigating the moveable feast that is global temperature calculation. Good luck on that one – there are more fiddles in this particular branch of climate science than can be found at the Come all ye Fiddlers Night at the Fiddlers Arms in Fiddlington-on-Sea.

More or Less has past form in listening reverently to activists cherry-picking data to push a narrative. In 2024, a short World Service edition noted that the Daily Sceptic had reported sea ice in the Arctic had soared to its highest extent for 21 years on January 8th of that year. A claim of “cherry-picking” appeared even though the rest of the article considered the short and long-term trends. The BBC consulted Professor Julienne Stroeve, an ‘Earth Scientist’ from UCL, who noted that the long-term decline from 1979 was easy to see. Just as easy to see was the flatlining of the sea ice extent over the last 20 years. In fact, using a four-year average, the trend has been slightly upwards over the last few years. Perish reporting the thought that 1979 was an obvious cyclical high, with lower sea ice in the decades before. Ignoring or downplaying all this plays into a favoured narrative, peddled by everyone from Al Gore to David Attenborough, that the summer sea ice is about to disappear in the northern polar regions.

If More or Less is going to brave the politically treacherous waters of climate change science, it needs to up its game, start examining all the data and stop giving an easy, unquestioning ride to those with an obvious Net Zero fantasy narrative to promote.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.

While Newsom combs his hair, Trump is protecting California from raw sewage

Since the 1930s, Mexico has released hundreds of billions of gallons of untreated raw sewage into the Tijuana River, which flows north into San Diego County. This has caused years-long beach closures, foul odors, degradation of the Tijuana River Valley, and lost economic opportunity. These air- and water-borne pathogens make people sick on both sides of the border.

Aerial view of a dry riverbed with brownish grass, flanked by a metal border wall on one side and urban structures on the other, showcasing a mix of debris and natural elements.

From CFACT

By Duggan Flanakin

A street view in Tijuana featuring the iconic Tijuana arch, with shops and palm trees lining the road, as well as traffic lights and vehicles. — Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico – Mar 14 2025: Tijuana Monumental Clock or Millennium Arch one of the most important symbols of this border between Mexico and the United States

Decades of neglect and intransigence were interrupted in 2020, when Congress approved a $300 million fund to expand the International Wastewater Treatment Plant San Ysidro, or so we thought. Instead, half of the allocation was used to address deferred maintenance after Hurricane Hilary further damaged the inadequate infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Tijuana’s own crumbling wastewater system suffered several pipeline breaks, allowing 33 billion gallons of sewage and chemical tainted water to flow into San Diego just in 2024 – putting additional pressure on the U.S.-based plant, and causing it to rack up numerous clean water violations.

In December 2023, the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) announced a Rehabilitation and Expansion Progressive Design-Build project for the International Wastewater Treatment Plant, but until now, little progress has been made to actually solve the problem.

In 2024, California officials begged Congress for another $310 million in federal funds, but despite lip service in support of the effort, California Governor Gavin Newsom refused to declare a state of emergency even as state auditors were uncovering up to $72 billions of state revenues lost to waste and fraud.

All that changed with the 2024 reelection of Donald Trump. Last April, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin took a helicopter tour of the area. By July, he had negotiated a new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that outlined a fast-tracked strategy to complete all infrastructure projects under Minute 328 of the U.S.-Mexico Water Treaty by the end of 2027 – including a “100% solution” to the near-century-old flow of untreated sewage from Tijuana into Southern California.

Under the MOU, Mexico obligated $93 million to accelerate the timeline for project completion and launch construction on projects to divert up to 10 million gallons per day (MGD) of treated effluent and rehabilitate the Parallel Gravity Line by the end of 2025.

The U.S. in turn agreed to complete upgrades to Pump Station 1 and the Tijuana River collection system, while the IBWC promised to complete expansion of the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant from 25 to 35 MGD.

And just last month, Zeldin announced the signing of Minute 333, another historic binational agreement that calls for significant new actions to address Tijuana River contamination. The U.S. and Mexican sections of the IBWC agreed to new infrastructure projects, research, enhanced monitoring, and planning for operation and maintenance of critical sites and systems that will account for future population growth in Tijuana – a key component missing from all prior binational agreements for the area.

In signing the agreement, Zeldin emphasized the importance of accounting for the “inevitable population growth of Tijuana and surrounding areas” in Minute 333. Zeldin said he saw the frustration of San Diego-area residents firsthand in April and promised a 100% solution.

The new agreement requires Mexico to build new wastewater infrastructure and to work harder to properly operate and maintain existing – and new – facilities. Mexico also agreed to enhance technical information sharing, promote industry best practices for wastewater and stormwater management to be consistent with U.S. practices, and to strengthen public communications.

Minute 333 also authorizes creation of an operations and maintenance account at the North American Development Bank that will set aside a portion of any future dollars provided to Mexico to be held for future O&M costs.

Mexico must develop a Tijuana water infrastructure master plan by June 2026, and a Minute 333 binational working group will be created to assess the feasibility of constructing an ocean outfall for the San Antonio de los Buenos Wastewater Treatment Plant, as well as for expanding its capacity from 18.26 MGD to 43.37 MGD.

Mexico also agreed to construct a sediment basin in Matadero Canyon (Smuggler’s Gulch) before the 2026-27 rainy season and to construct the 3 MGD Tecolote-La Gloria Wastewater Treatment Plant by December 2028. And that’s not all.

Solving a near-century-old wastewater controversy in Baja California was hardly the only U.S.-Mexico border action involving wastewater tackled by the Trump 47 administration. While President Trump has infuriated Mexican officials with plans to expand the border wall, the U.S. State Department boasts of a “new era of cooperation characterized by swift and decisive actions” regarding Rio Grande water quality.

While Congress is far from passing its fiscal 2026 federal budget, spending bills for natural resource and environment agencies have maintained support for the EPA’s border wastewater programs funded through North American Development Bank grants. The Senate bill authorizes $36 million, while the House bill would allow $45 million to be spent on border wastewater projects – comparable to prior spending levels.

Across the border, there is a renewed emphasis on improving debilitated wastewater and sewer systems. When Nuevo Laredo Mayor Lilia Canturosas took office in 2021, broken sewer lines were leaking wastewater onto city streets.

Under the direction of general manager Silvia Fernandez Gallardo, COMAPA (the potable water and sanitation commission) in 2023 broke ground on an $80 million binational project to repair the failing wastewater plant and damaged sewer lines. One treatment plant repair stopped a flow of 12 MGD of raw sewage into the Rio Grande and local groundwater.

In her view, binational collaboration is the key to improving the lives of people on both sides of the border. She told reporters that, “Rehabilitating the Rio Bravo doesn’t just mean improving local environmental conditions. It also represents an opportunity to move toward shared water security between Mexico and the United States.”

Further collaboration will be necessary to fully clean the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo). South of the Amistad Reservoir, downstream of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, the IBWC’s 2024 Rio Grande summary report found E. coli readings nearly 2,000 times the Texas water quality standard.

This part of the Rio Grande below the Amistad Reservoir, known as segment 2304, exceeds Texas standards for bacteria. The report warns these readings demonstrate “serious health risks” and that the water is unsuitable for recreational activities, consumption, or even river crossings. The IBWC says bacteria levels are also elevated in the urban areas of El Paso/Ciudad Juarez, Del Rio/Ciudad Acuna, Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras, and in Hidalgo County.

So, while President Trump and Administrator Zeldin can take some credit for tackling a job no one else had done successfully (the Tijuana River), the many remaining problems with wastewater and water quality – from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico – demonstrate there are miles to go before anyone can really take a victory lap.

Day: January 16, 2026

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