Day: January 17, 2026

The Monthly ITCZ Central Latitude

The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) is a narrow belt of low pressure that encircles Earth near the equator, where the northeast trade winds from the Northern Hemisphere and the southeast trade winds from the Southern Hemisphere converge.

World map illustrating the movement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in July and January, with regions highlighted in blue for January and red for July.

The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) is a narrow belt of low pressure that encircles Earth near the equator, where the northeast trade winds from the Northern Hemisphere and the southeast trade winds from the Southern Hemisphere converge.

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Aerial view of dramatic cloud formations with varying textures and shadows under a bright sky.

From Watts Up With That?

By Andy May

World map showing precipitation levels for September 2024, with varying shades of green indicating different amounts of rainfall.

The Intertropical Convergence Zone or ITCZ is where the trade winds from the Northern and Southern Hemisphere converge and where the column-integrated meridional (north-south) circulation and the “near-surface meridional mass flux” vanishes according to Adam et al., 2016. For a history of the discovery of the ITCZ see Nicholson, 2018. The ITCZ is not the solar equator, the latitude where the Sun is directly overhead at noon, but it is closely related to it, and they move in a coordinated fashion. The ITCZ is an oceanic phenomenon and doesn’t really exist over land in the same way as described here, except in coastal areas (Nicholson, 2018).

The Sun is almost directly overhead at noon each day in the ITCZ, and it delivers over 940 W m-2 of power to that location at noon, which is enough to raise the water temperature to 86°C or 187°F on a clear day, absent a cooling mechanism. The solar radiation causes intense evaporation which carries away a lot of latent heat. When the heat carried away by convection and conduction is added to the escaping latent heat, the surface water is cooled to a more reasonable 20° to 30°C (Sud et al., 1999). Since water vapor is much less dense than dry air, the moist air rises. The result is deep convection that can sometimes reach the upper troposphere and even the stratosphere (Gettleman et al., 2025). When the rising air hits the more stable stratosphere it spreads horizontally, with a significant poleward component in both hemispheres.

My new paper (May, 2025) shows that the ITCZ location affects the distribution of atmospheric properties and moves the location of the peak altitude of the molar density intersection with it throughout the year. The monthly extremes of the ITCZ are shown in figure 1.

Map depicting Earth's Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) with January position marked in purple and July position marked in orange. The map includes geographic regions such as North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, and oceans like the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian.
Figure 1. The approximate locations of the ITCZ in January and July. Source: (Britannica & Chmielewski, 2025). URL: (https://www.britannica.com/science/intertropical-convergence-zone#/media/1/291738/299514). Data sources: (Cheng et al., 2012) and (Weninger et al., 2014). By courtesy of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., copyright 2024; used with permission.

As noted in (Nicholson, 2018), the ITCZ is an oceanic phenomenon, so the extreme positions shown in figure 1 in Asia, Africa, and South America are probably not real. I didn’t use these positions in my study but approximately identified central ITCZ latitudes for each month using several measures.

The location of the ITCZ

A summary of the latitudes and the evidence used is given in Table 1. These recent (~1990 to 2025) locations are approximate and vary from year to year, century to century, and millennia to millennia (Yuan et al., 2023). Yuan, et al. document that the ITCZ moved dramatically northward from ~3500BC to ~2000BC and then dramatically southward from ~500BC to ~500AD when it reached its southernmost position since the last glacial period.

MonthWaliser, 1993, figure 4Zero v_i (N-S wind speed)Minimum Total mass fluxNear zero N-S Mass fluxITCZ windITCZ Latitude used
January-68-10-10-4.0-5.0
February-510-10-6-2.0-3.5
March-42-10-5-4.3-4.2
April000-2-0.7-0.3
May40000.02.0
June5100-22.73.8
July8320-85.06.5
August91020-19.79.3
September810101110.39.2
October50000.02.5
November1-10-10-3.7-1.3
December-23-10-6-4.3-3.2
Table 1. Various estimates of the average latitude of the ITCZ in recent decades. The second column are estimates made in Waliser, et al. from their Fig. 4. The next three columns were made using radiosonde data as explained in May, 2025. The next-to-last column is the average of the radiosonde estimates. The last column is the average of the Waliser, et al. estimate and the “ITCZ wind” average.

Defining the ITCZ

In both model studies and studies of historical data there is uncertainty about the location of the ITCZ and the distribution of tropical rainfall (Jung et al., 2023). There are many definitions of the ITCZ and none of them are universally accepted, further they often conflict with one another. It has been called the climatic equator or the meteorological equator and represents a narrow, tropical band of low pressure, rising air, and heavy precipitation. One cause of confusion is that the area of lowest tropical pressure and the lowest meridional mass flux is not always the location of the most intense precipitation and the heaviest clouds (Nicholson, 2018). Another source of confusion is that the tropics sometimes seems to contain two ITCZ bands of clouds and storms, this happens often in the month of April, see slide 8 here.

While the definition of the ITCZ is unclear it is one of the central features of the global water cycle and yet modeling it is problematic and very sensitive to model resolution (Yuan et al., 2023) & (Jung et al., 2023). This includes global circulation models as well as weather reanalysis models. This is probably the result of the complexity of the Hadley circulation and the multiple ITCZ definitions used. Is the ITCZ the location where meridional (north-south) mass flux ceases or where the column integrated meridional energy flux vanishes (Adam et al., 2016)? Is it the location where the north-south wind speed vector reaches zero? Is it the location where tropical precipitation is maximal (Jung et al., 2023) and (Marshall et al., 2014)? Or is it the location where the meridional stream function as computed from air pressure is the lowest (Byrne et al., 2018)? All these definitions have been used, and they do not all happen at the same location (Adam et al., 2016) & (Nicholson, 2018).

About one-third of Earth’s precipitation falls within the ITCZ (Clark et al., 2024) and (Kang et al., 2018). All models create an ITCZ-like precipitation feature near the equator due to the intense insolation at that location (Jung et al., 2023). However, the details of the ITCZ vary dramatically as the model’s resolution changes. Increasing the model cell size (decreasing the horizontal resolution), while reducing convection, increases rainfall in the ITCZ, while decreasing the cell size decreases the ITCZ rainfall (Clark et al., 2024). Larger cells produce more low-level clouds, accelerate the Hadley circulation, as well as increasing precipitation. Smaller cells increase energy transport efficiency, weakening the Hadley circulation, and reducing precipitation. This serves as a warning when interpreting model results, many critical weather processes can only be modeled at very small scales, that is at very high resolution.

While the ITCZ is usually thought of as a narrow band of deep convective clouds and intense precipitation that circles the Earth (Adam, et al., 2016), I prefer to think of it as the point where the north-south wind component (meridional transport) reaches zero. Because the radiosonde data is mostly over land this definition is hard to use because the presence of land confuses wind direction and speed measurements. Thus, the ITCZ location is hard to detect with radiosonde measurements. Also, due to land, its location is not a circular path around the earth, but wavy between the extremes shown in Fig. 1 (Britannica & Chmielewski, 2025).

Locating the ITCZ

Exactly why the distinctive tropical band of clouds surrounding the Earth is so complex on average is not completely understood and often hotly debated (Nicholson, 2018). The constantly moving zonal-mean ITCZ central latitude is the origin of the ascending branch of the Hadley circulation (Adam et al., 2016). The cartoon drawings of the so-called northern and southern “Hadley Cells” are oversimplified (Connolly et al., 2021) and (Connolly, 2025), because they do not have a fixed location and their mean air flow is not north and south, but a rather complex constantly moving three-dimensional pattern with a significant meridional (north-south) component.

Besides the mean ITCZ latitudes provided by Waliser, et al. (column 2 in Table 1), the vector-average north-south wind speed (v_i), the minimum total mass flux (in any direction), and the north-south mass flux were all examined by latitude. An example illustration is shown in Fig. 2 for the month of September. The upper left plot in Fig. 2 is the east-west (zonal) wind speed vector (“u”) plotted by latitude. Positive values indicate the u wind component is blowing toward the east, the opposite of the meteorological convention. This measure was initially examined but ultimately rejected as an ITCZ latitude indicator because it disagreed with the other measures.

E/W wind speed vector plot against latitude with a Loess fit line.
Figure 2. Four radiosonde wind speed and mass flux measures that relate to the ITCZ location for September. The top two plots are vector average wind speeds in the east-west direction (+ is blowing to the east) and the north-south direction (+ is blowing to the north). The bottom two plots are total mass flux, and the vector-mean north-south mass flux.

The top-right plot in Fig. 2 is the north-south wind speed vector (v), with positive values indicating the v wind component is blowing toward the north. The v component crosses zero wind speed at about 10° N, a latitude marked by the vertical line. The lower left plot shows that the north-south total mass flux for July reaches a minimum between the equator and 20° N, the central value at 10° N is lowest so it is the value chosen. The plot on the lower right is the north-south vector average mass flux for September. According to Adam, et al. this is the value that should be zero at or near the ITCZ location. The value reaches very close to zero at about 11° N. Table 1 lists all the values for all months.

How to define and locate the ITCZ is a subject of debate (Nicholson, 2018). But it is usually detected globally by following either the deep convective cloud pattern near the equator or the heavy precipitation that accompanies it (Marshall, et al., 2014) & (Clark et al., 2024). The ITCZ doesn’t really exist in any organized way over land, except in coastal regions, so it may not be detectable in land-based radiosonde data (Nicholson, 2018).

While using tropical cloud patterns and maximum tropical precipitation to locate the ITCZ can be debated, I used these as two of the factors to consider when picking the ITCZ latitudes used in this study (Nicholson, 2018) & (Adam et al., 2016). Further complicating the picture is that the location of the ITCZ does not move smoothly, but mostly in two jumps (Hu et al., 2007). These jumps are from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere around mid-April and from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern from around mid-December. This inter-hemispheric movement is accomplished in about 10 days and are the most abrupt jumps in the ITCZ during each year (Hu et al., 2007).

A line graph displaying fluctuation over time, with a horizontal dashed line indicating zero. Two vertical lines mark specific dates: April 10 and December 11. The graph features shaded areas representing variability in the data.
Figure 3. The average latitude of the ITCZ for the years 1997-2006 using NOAA’s GPCP (Global Precipitation Climatology Project) daily data. Notice the jumps around April 10 and December 11. Source: (Hu et al., 2007).

Figure 3 is based only on precipitation and cloud cover, which are only two of the criteria for the ITCZ, but they are important. The precise reason why the ITCZ jumps abruptly across the equator is unknown but probably related several factors: cooler temperatures at the equator due to equatorial upwelling of deeper waters in the Pacific, monsoons, and enhanced convection off the equator (Hu et al., 2007). Convection always favors warmer SSTs, so the ITCZ jumps from one warmer region to the other and skips the cooler temperatures at the equator (Hu et al., 2007).

One known multi-year-scale driver of the ITCZ location is ENSO (Adam et al., 2016), but there may be others. The central latitudes in Table 1 are rough, but act as a guide on the maps. September, August, July, and April have a fairly well-behaved and flat ITCZ in the Pacific, but other months do not. The ITCZ is hard to locate over southeastern Asia due to the South Pacific Convergence Zone northeast of Australia. This zone of converging winds trends southeast to northwest (see Fig. 4) complicates locating the ITCZ over Indonesia.

As described by Adam, et al. (2016), the ITCZ is often considered to be the location of the precipitation maximum in the tropics, the darker colors in Fig. 4. It is also the location of the densest cloud cover in the tropics and the place where the near surface meridional (north/south) mass flux disappears and low-density moist air rises to great heights, sometimes reaching the stratosphere. Further, as Adam, et al. write, it is also the location of the energy flux equator where the column integrated meridional energy flux vanishes. To choose the central ITCZ latitudes shown in Table 1 we examined NOAA’s precipitation maps for 2024 and 2025, our computed North/South wind speed vector (“v”), the total mass flux, and the North/South mass flux vector component.

Global precipitation map for September 2024, highlighting varying levels of rainfall across different regions.
Figure 4. An example NOAA total precipitation map for September 2024. The darker colors locate deep convective clouds and intense precipitation that are often used to locate the ITCZ. The yellow line is the central latitude of the ITCZ used in this study for September (9.2° N). After (NOAA, 2025). URL: (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/global/mapping/pcp/202508/value). Public domain image.

Plots like figures 2 and 4 for all months can be downloaded and viewed here. The various methods used to pick the central latitude do not always agree, in choosing the central latitude I emphasized the mean north-south mass flux and north-south wind speed vector over the other estimates since these are the most direct measures. The 2024-2025 NOAA precipitation maps were secondary and often the chosen latitude does not look very good on them in the Northern Hemispheric winter, especially in the Pacific, although from March through September they look OK.

September is usually the final month of the Indian monsoon, a period of intense upwelling of moist air in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. The monsoon location is easily identified in Fig. 4 as where the ITCZ and the South Pacific Convergence Zone meet north of central Australia. September is also the month with the highest relative humidity in the tropics at the molar density intersection, as shown in Fig. 5, which also shows the molar density intersection relative humidity for all the monsoon months.

Four scatter plots showing the relationship between relative humidity at intercept and latitude slice for the months of June, July, August, and September. Each plot features a Loess fit curve and highlights specific data points, including mean latitude and highest tropical relative humidity.
Figure 5. Plots of mean relative humidity at the molar density intersection (y axis) by latitude slice (x axis). September has the highest tropical (~10S to 10N) relative humidity (51 %) at the intersection.

The highest molar density intersection is between 20° S and 10° N, and is above 14 km. It is not easy to get water vapor this high, since it normally precipitates out long before reaching this altitude. As you can see in Fig. 5, the highest monthly mean relative humidity seen in the tropics is in September at 51 %. The other monsoon months, June, July, and August are also high in the tropics. To a lesser extent, so are December, February, January, November, and October. While the ITCZ is constantly moving (see the SSEC geostationary satellite Image animations available here), it does lift (through evaporation and updrafts) moisture into the stratosphere (Raymond, 2017). Once the moisture has frozen out of the air, the cooler and drier air descends toward the surface helping to form subtropical deserts and the ocean gyres, see figures 3 & 5 here or (May, 2025).

Discussion

It is clear that the ITCZ moves north and south seasonally, however the precise monthly location is unknown. Since the ITCZ location changes continuously and is the root of the Hadley circulation, it is important to global weather. It can only be approximately located by studying the atmospheric mass flux, wind speed and direction, and the zone of maximum precipitation and cloudiness, thus it is very hard to pin down.

Works Cited

Adam, O., Bischoff, T., & Schneider, T. (2016). Seasonal and Interannual Variations of the Energy Flux Equator and ITCZ. Part I: Zonally Averaged ITCZ Position. Journal of Climate, 29(9). https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0512.1

Britannica, E., & Chmielewski, K. (2025, November 30). intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ). Retrieved from Encyclopædia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/science/intertropical-convergence-zone#/media/1/291738/299514

Byrne, M., Pendergrass, A., & Rapp, A. (2018). Response of the Intertropical Convergence Zone to Climate Change: Location, Width, and Strength. Curr Clim Change Rep, 4, 355–370. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40641-018-0110-5

Cheng, H., Sinha, A., & Wang, X. (2012). The Global Paleomonsoon as seen through speleothem records from Asia and the Americas. Climate Dynamics, 39, 1045-1062. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-012-1363-7

Clark, J. P., Lin, P., & Hill, S. A. (2024). ITCZ response to disabling parameterized convection in global fixed−SST GFDL-AM4 aquaplanet simulations at 50 and 6 km resolutions. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 16. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023MS003968

Connolly, M. (2025). 20 Million weather balloons: How this data shows that all the climate models are based on wrong assumptions. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Hp9CqSlMQ&t=1026s

Connolly, M., Cionco, R. G., Connolly, R., Soon, W., Herrera, V. M., & Quaranta, N. E. (2021). Analyzing Atmospheric Circulation Patterns Using Mass Fluxes Calculated from Weather Balloon Measurements: North Atlantic Region as a Case Study. Atmosphere, 12. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12111439

Gettleman, A., Salby, M., Randel, W., & Sassi, F. (2025). Convection in the Tropical Tropopause Region and Stratosphere-Troposphere Exchange. Retrieved from SPARC: https://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/SPARC/News17/17_Gettelman.html

Hu, Y., Li, D., & Liu, J. (2007). Abrupt seasonal variation of the ITCZ and the Hadley circulation. Geophysical Research Letters, 34(18). https://doi.org/10.1029/2007GL030950

Jung, H., Knippertz, P., Ruckstuhl, Y., Redl, R., Janjic, T., & Hoose, C. (2023). Understanding the dependence of mean precipitation on convective treatment and horizontal resolution in tropical aquachannel experiments. Weather and Climate Dynamics, 4(4), 1111–1134. https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-4-1111-2023

Kang, S., Shin, Y., & Xie, S. (2018). Extratropical forcing and tropical rainfall distribution: energetics framework and ocean Ekman advection. npj Clim Atmos Sci, 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-017-0004-6

Marshall, J., Donohoe, A., & Ferreira, D. (2014). The ocean’s role in setting the mean position of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone. Clim. Dyn., 42, 1967–1979. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-013-1767-z

May, A. (2025). The Molar Density Tropopause Proxy and its relation to the ITCZ and Hadley Circulation. OSF. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/GKF2P

Nicholson, S. (2018). The ITCZ and the seasonal cycle over equatorial Africa. BAMS, 99(2). https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0287.1

NOAA. (2025, November 30). Climate at a Glance Global Mapping. Retrieved from NCEI.NOAA.gov: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/global/mapping/pcp/202508/value

Raymond, D. (2017). Convection in the east Pacific Intertropical Convergence Zone. Geophys. Res. Lett., 44. https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL071554

Sud, Y. C., Walker, G. K., & Lau, K. M. (1999). Mechanisms Regulating Sea-Surface Temperatures and Deep Convection in the Tropics. Geophysical Research Letters, 26(8), 1019-1022. https://doi.org/10.1029/1999GL900197

Waliser, D. E., & Gautier, C. (1993). A Satellite-derived Climatology of the ITCZ. Journal of Climate, 6(11), 2162 – 2174. https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(1993)006<2162:ASDCOT>2.0.CO;2

Weninger, B., Clare, L., Gerritsen, F., Horejs, B., Krauß, R., Linstädter, J., . . . Rohling, E. J. (2014). Neolithisation of the Aegean and Southeast Europe during the 6600–6000 calBC period of Rapid Climate Change. Documenta Praehistorica. https://doi.org/10.4312/dp.41.1

Xie, S.-P., & Saito, K. (2001). Formation and Variability of a Northerly ITCZ in a Hybrid Coupled AGCM: Continental Forcing and Oceanic–Atmospheric Feedback. Journal of Climate, 14(6). https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(2001)014<1262:FAVOAN>2.0.CO;2

Yuan, S., Chiang, H., Liu, G., Bijaksana, S., He, S., Jiang, X., . . . Wang, X. (2023). The strength, position, and width changes of the intertropical convergence zone since the Last Glacial Maximum. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., 120(47). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2217064120

Satellite image of a cyclone over the ocean, featuring swirling clouds and distinct color variations indicating different atmospheric conditions.

Southeast Asia Continues Hurtling Down the Net Zero Suicide Track

Net Zero may be on life support in the US and Europe, but Southeast Asia doesn’t appear to have got the note. Not, at least, if a new paper by leading scholars at the National University of Singapore published in a journal affiliated with the US National Academy of Sciences is any indication. Technically sophisticated, but based on economic modelling untethered from reality, it assumes what it should test, minimises costs without measuring them and ignores a host of political, institutional and technological obstacles.

Night view of Singapore's skyline featuring Marina Bay Sands, Gardens by the Bay, and illuminated Supertree structures.

From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

Historic map of Southeast Asia and surrounding regions, showing countries such as Burma, Thailand, and the Philippines, with geographical features and place names.

Net Zero may be on life support in the US and Europe, but Southeast Asia doesn’t appear to have got the note. Not, at least, if a new paper by leading scholars at the National University of Singapore published in a journal affiliated with the US National Academy of Sciences is any indication. Technically sophisticated, but based on economic modelling untethered from reality, it assumes what it should test, minimises costs without measuring them and ignores a host of political, institutional and technological obstacles.

The recently published paper ‘Charting net-zero pathways for ASEAN’s energy sector’ in PNAS Nexus by research scholars at the Energy Studies Institute at the National University of Singapore and ExxonMobil sets out to explore “pathways to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050” in Southeast Asia. Using a linear-programming model integrating electricity generation, regional power grids, carbon storage and hydrogen, the authors identify two stylised pathways: one dominated by wind, solar and battery storage, and another relying heavily on carbon capture and storage (CCS) alongside the use of so-called ‘green’ hydrogen. The paper concludes that regional grid connectivity can reduce storage and reserve needs, offering “clear insights” for policymakers as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations marches toward Net Zero.

The publication of such a paper, bearing the imprimatur of a journal affiliated with the US National Academy of Sciences, would have been unremarkable five years ago. Today, it borders on the surreal. Europe — the self-styled global leader of climate virtue — is quietly retreating from its more extreme green policies as de-industrialisation, energy insecurity and collapsing competitiveness concentrate political minds. The United States, under President Trump, has gone further still, withdrawing funding and political support from climate agreements and dismantling what officials openly call a global climate hoax. Last year’s UN COP30 climate conference in Brazil ended in disarray without even the usual aspirational closing statement to end use of fossil fuels and hasten the so-called energy transition.

And yet, against this backdrop of Western retreat and reassessment, ASEAN is urged — by its own scholars — to double down on Net Zero by 2050, as though the past decade of policy failures in countries and states leading the climate crusade – Germany, UK and California – had taught us nothing.

The central flaw of the paper is not its mathematics. It is its worldview.

Net Zero as a Modelling Constraint, Not an Economic Choice

The ASEAN paper begins by asserting that electricity demand in the region will more than triple by 2050, with electricity rising to nearly 60% of final energy use. It notes that over 73% of ASEAN’s current electricity generation still comes from fossil fuels and that industrialisation and urbanisation will drive massive energy demand growth. From this factual starting point, however, the analysis veers sharply into fantasy.

Net Zero by 2050 is imposed not as a hypothesis to be tested but as an article of faith — a binding constraint around which the model must contort reality. The result is an exercise in internal consistency rather than external validity. The model identifies ‘least-cost’ pathways, but only conditional on achieving Net Zero. There is no comparison with a business-as-usual pathway that prioritises affordability, reliability and economic growth. Crucially, there is no estimate of the welfare loss imposed by the constraint itself. In short, costs are minimised within the model but never measured against the real alternative: not pursuing Net Zero at all. It offers no basis for measuring opportunity cost, the basis of all economic policymaking.

This is not a trivial omission. It is the entire question.

Europe’s experience has demonstrated that the economic cost of decarbonisation is not marginal. It is systemic and economically suicidal. Sky-high electricity prices, collapsing heavy industry, fiscal strain from subsidies and declining living standards are not theoretical risks; they are observed outcomes of Europe’s climate-obsessed energy policies. Yet the ASEAN paper makes no attempt to quantify what Net Zero would cost ASEAN economies relative to continued reliance on coal, gas, and oil — fuels that have underwritten every successful industrialisation in history.

For instance, using actual cost data, one 2020 study found the EU faces a capital cost commitment of the current EU renewable capacity installed of €520 billion. Of this, the excess cost over gas-fired capacity is €450 billion. The long-term (60 years) capital and operating cost commitment of the current EU renewables 65 Gigawatts installed is approximately €2,000 billion, of which the excess costs over gas-firing is €1,800 billion. Note that these excess costs only consider the existing renewables capacity (in 2020) in the EU, not the costs of Net Zero by 2050 which would be a multiple of the excess costs reported.

Kathryn Porter calculates that had Britain continued with its legacy gas-based power system in the period since 2006 instead of going full bore with levies and mandates for wind and solar power as it has, consumers would have been almost £220 billion better off (in 2025 terms) even after taking into account the impact of the gas price increases in 2022 due to the Ukraine war.

Renewables: Intermittency Ignored, System Costs Evaded

Wind and solar form the backbone of the paper’s “renewables-led” pathway. Their intermittency is acknowledged but treated as a technical characteristic rather than a fundamental economic flaw. Storage, reserves and regional grid integration are assumed to smooth variability. But the paper never confronts the empirical literature showing that system costs rise sharply — not fall — as intermittent generation increases.

Graph showing the relationship between household electricity prices (in USD per kWh) and the percentage of solar and wind in the electricity mix for various countries.
Source

The European experience is again instructive. As the share of weather-dependent renewables has risen, so too have electricity prices, grid instability and the need for duplicated backup capacity. The excess system costs of wind and solar — once transmission, curtailment, reserve margins and storage are included — have been documented extensively. Yet in the ASEAN paper, these costs are either abstracted away or buried in model assumptions that lack transparency

The problem is not merely financial. ASEAN’s geography and development realities make the renewable fantasy even less plausible. Land intensity, material requirements and grid fragility loom far larger in densely populated or archipelagic nations than in Europe. Solar and wind are not simply ‘clean’ substitutes; they are sprawling industrial systems with enormous upstream footprints in mining, manufacturing and logistics — often outsourced to China and powered by coal.

The Trans-ASEAN Power Grid: A Mirage Revisited

The paper places great faith in regional grid connectivity to offset intermittency and reduce storage requirements. This is not a new idea. The Trans-ASEAN Power Grid (APG) has been a flagship aspiration since the late 1990s. A quarter of a century later, progress remains modest, confined largely to a few bilateral interconnections rather than the integrated multilateral system imagined by planners.

The reasons are well known. ASEAN is profoundly heterogeneous — economically, politically and institutionally. Electricity markets range from vertically integrated state monopolies to partially liberalised systems. Pricing regimes differ wildly. Legal frameworks, regulatory capacity and risk tolerance vary enormously. Financing large, cross-border infrastructure in such an environment is notoriously difficult. Operation and maintenance across jurisdictions multiply complexity. These challenges are laid out clearly in ASEAN energy planning documents and presentations stretching back over a decade

Yet the ASEAN paper treats grid integration as a technical optimisation problem, not a political-economic one. It assumes away the very frictions that have stalled the APG for decades. Models can wish these frictions out of existence; reality cannot.

Batteries, Hydrogen and the Alchemy of Costless Storage

Grid-scale battery storage appears in the paper as a solution to intermittency, but without any serious assessment of scale or cost. The prohibitive material and capital requirements of battery systems capable of backing up national grids for days or weeks are well documented. Even heroic assumptions about cost declines do not alter the arithmetic: power storage at scale is ruinously expensive.

Hydrogen fares no better. ‘Green hydrogen’, produced via electrolysis using renewable electricity, is treated as a flexible energy carrier for power generation, industry and storage. In reality, it remains a monument to inefficiency. Converting electricity to hydrogen and back again squanders energy at every step. Costs remain multiples of natural gas even under optimistic assumptions. Infrastructure requirements — from specialised pipelines to storage — are vast and largely non-existent. The global hydrogen economy remains, at best, a collection of pilot projects and hyped-up press releases.

The paper’s treatment of hydrogen echoes the same magical thinking of the ‘new energy economy’ that has plagued international energy modelling for years: technologies at demonstration scale are assumed to mature, scale and cheapen precisely when needed, without evidence or precedent.

CCS: The Highest Hype-to-Reality Ratio in Energy Policy

If renewables and hydrogen are fantasies of abundance, carbon capture and storage is the fantasy of absolution: a promise that fossil fuels can continue without consequence. The ASEAN paper leans heavily on carbon capture and storage (CCS) in its alternative pathway yet offers no serious discussion of its dismal real-world record.

After decades of effort and billions in subsidies, CCS accounts for a vanishingly small fraction of global emissions. Many flagship projects have failed outright; others operate only with massive public support, often serving enhanced oil recovery rather than climate mitigation. Even its advocates concede that CCS suffers from high capital costs, severe energy penalties, legal liability uncertainties and chronic underperformance.

Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, observed wryly in 2021 that the number of academic papers written on CCS divided by real-life implementation of it yields “the highest ratio in the history of science”. Thus, Britain’s own quixotic CCS crusade — lavishing tens of billions on technologies that have failed repeatedly — stands as a cautionary tale, not a model to emulate.

To propose CCS as a cornerstone of ASEAN’s energy future is not realism; it is cargo-cult policy, importing the rhetoric of Western climate ambition without its painful lessons.

The IEA Precedent: Advocacy Disguised as Analysis

The intellectual lineage of the ASEAN paper is unmistakable. Its structure, assumptions and optimism mirror those of the International Energy Agency’s ‘Net Zero by 2050’ roadmap — a document that has since been subjected to devastating critique. That roadmap rested on implausible assumptions about technology costs, energy efficiency gains, behavioural change and global coordination. It assumed away geopolitics, development priorities and economic trade-offs. It transformed the IEA from a guardian of energy security into a cheerleader for climate advocacy.

The same critique applies here. Like the IEA roadmap, the ASEAN paper constructs an internally coherent model detached from political economy, cost realism and historical experience. It is not that ASEAN cannot imagine Net Zero in spreadsheets; it is that societies do not run on spreadsheets.

Stockholm Syndrome in Southeast Asia?

Why, then, do ASEAN scholars and politicians persist in this line of thinking as Europe retreats and America revolts? The answer may lie in a peculiar form of the Stockholm syndrome. Having been lectured, cajoled and incentivised by Western political leaders and institutions for decades, elites in developing countries internalise climate narratives long after their authors such as Bill Gates begin to abandon them. The moral authority of the ‘Church of Climate’ lingers even as its economic foundations crumble in the West. ASEAN risks mistaking virtue-signalling for strategy, modelling elegance for development policy.

For example, Dr Tan See Leng, Singapore’s Minister-in-charge of Energy and Science and Technology, said last year that “It is no longer feasible or practical for Singapore to avoid working towards a Net Zero future”. The Minister also said that fluctuations in the prices of fossil fuels due to geopolitical conflicts have driven up energy prices and dealing with the impacts of climate change, such as rising sea levels, is critical for Singapore. Along similar lines, Ed Miliband, UK’s Energy Secretary, told the House of Commons in 2024 that issuing licences for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea “will ensure the UK remain at the mercy of petrostates and dictators who control fossil fuel markets and is entirely incompatible with the UK’s international climate change commitments”.

But lately, geopolitical events and ample oil and gas supplies have seen energy prices trending downwards since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. MPs in the British Parliament were told by energy company CEOs in October that even if international natural gas prices halved, Net Zero levies and mandates would drive up household electricity bills. As for Singapore’s concerns about rising sea levels (which no evidence shows are accelerating), the prudent response would be to adapt to it with dykes and sea-walls, as the Netherlands has done for over two centuries.

Economic Suicide by Spreadsheet

The ASEAN Net Zero paper ignores the central lesson of modern history: abundant, affordable and reliable energy is not a luxury. It is the precondition of development. ASEAN’s extraordinary growth over the past half-century was powered by fossil fuels, not despite them. To abandon that foundation on the basis of Western climate dogma — just as the West itself begins to recoil from the consequences — would indeed be an act of economic self-harm.

Net Zero by 2050 may exist in models. It is not tenable in the real world. And policy built on that confusion risks condemning Southeast Asia to slower growth, higher costs and diminished prospects — all in service of a creed whose high priests are already losing the faith.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/01/16/southeast-asia-continues-hurtling-down-the-net-zero-suicide-track/

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

Conservative Environment Network Want More Renewables

Following Kemi Badenoch’s pledge to abolish Net Zero, I questioned whether the wets in her party would let her get away with it.

The wets, many of whom are little more than Lib Dems in disguise, are ably represented by and often members of the Conservative Environment Network, CEN, which has been vigorously campaigning in support of Net Zero and associated green policies for years.

A row of wind turbines in the ocean under a clear blue sky, with a small ship visible in the distance.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Following Kemi Badenoch’s pledge to abolish Net Zero, I questioned whether the wets in her party would let her get away with it.

The wets, many of whom are little more than Lib Dems in disguise, are ably represented by and often members of the Conservative Environment Network, CEN, which has been vigorously campaigning in support of Net Zero and associated green policies for years.

Last month, its Director, Sam Hall wrote this piece for Conservative Home. It proves beyond doubt that a leopard never changes its spots!

Screenshot of a news article on the Conservative Environment Network website discussing the importance of embracing renewable energy sources.
Badenoch can win the war on energy – but that means embracing everything, including renewables

Sam Hall begins by ludicrously trying to defend Conservative Government policies:

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the first offshore wind farm to come into operation off the coast of Blyth, the first of the 45 offshore wind farms that have sprung up across Britain.

This growth was delivered almost entirely by Conservative governments stimulating private investment into the sector. This market-driven approach not only helped mitigate the impact of the gas price spike following the Russian invasion of Ukraine but also ensured offshore wind delivered better value for money for taxpayers over successive auction rounds and brought tangible economic benefits to coastal areas. We should be more vocal about celebrating this legacy, as well as acknowledging mistakes. 

Celebrate? What planet is this guy on? He should be ashamed of the fact that, largely thanks to his party’s policies, we will be paying more than £20 billion this year alone to subsidise wind farms and other renewables, most of which, as he rightly says, were signed up under the Tories’ watch.

He goes on to support Badenoch’s prioritising of cheaper energy, but still maintains we need more renewables:

Kemi by contrast is asking the right questions when it comes to energy. She is prioritising cheap electricity, wants to cut red tape to make it easier to build new nuclear, and is calling for an end to the windfall tax on oil and gas companies to boost energy investment.

But achieving energy security and affordable bills does not have to be mutually exclusive with growing our offshore wind sector. At the right price, it still has potential to reduce our reliance on imported fossil fuels and deliver cheap, clean energy to households and businesses. But this requires cutting red tape, dropping arbitrary clean power targets, and harnessing markets and price signals to eliminate waste. 

Does Mr Hall realise that there is no such thing as “cheap” offshore wind power. I have no objection at all to anybody building a wind farm, as long as they sell their power on the open market and don’t ask for guarantees and subsidies. They won’t because it would never be viable.

If he really wanted cheaper energy, he would call for the immediate abolition of all carbon taxes.

He tries to justify his policy by appealing to opinion polls, which supposedly show that renewables are popular! They may be popular amongst people who believe the lies that they are cheap! But more wind farms will simply send energy bills higher still, as we learnt this week.

I know which option the public would choose between more renewables and lower bills!

Sam Hall has inadvertently exposed the real agenda of the green wing of the party.

They are ideologically wedded to renewable energy and are blind to the costs already imposed by their own policies. They still believe the pursuit of Net Zero by successive Tory governments was right.

They will not give up Net Zero without a fight.

Philosopher Schopenhauer: Climate Science Certainty Stems from Stupidity, Ignorance

German philosopher Schopenhauer: Stupidity creates certainty while intelligence creates doubt…Why climate alarmists are, well, idiots.

A serious older man with white hair and a beard, wearing a black coat and holding glasses, poses against a neutral background.

From No Trick Zone

By P Gosselin 

German philosopher Schopenhauer: Stupidity creates certainty while intelligence creates doubt…Why climate alarmists are, well, idiots.

Black and white portrait of an older man with disheveled hair and a stern expression, wearing a dark coat and white shirt collar.
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer

The video, Why ‘Idiots’ Think They’re Intelligent — Schopenhauer, reminds us a lot of all the idiots out there who are convinced of the AGW crisis and why they believe the absurdity, and lots of other nonsense.

Intelligence sees complexity

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) argued: Intelligence requires the ability to perceive complexity.

Conversely, if a person is too ignorant to see that complexity, everything appears simple and convincing, leading to a state of blissful confidence. Here we quiickly realize how this applies so perfectly to Climate Science, and many other fields.

Some examples of stupid, simplified claims:

  1. Climate Science: Climate is regulated by a single control knob, CO2! The higher the atmospheric CO2 level, the more violent our weather and climate become!
  2. COVID immunization: If you get vaccinated, you won’t get sick and spread the disease. (80% believed it and got the jab!)
  3. Public Health: Wear a mask, and the mask will catch your virus-carrying droplets and prevent others from getting infected!
  4. Biology: A fetus is just a clump of cells, the center of which is pulsing for some unimportant reason.
  5. Economics: Just print a lot of money and everyone will have enough!
  6. Nutrition: All calories are the same. And dietary fat is bad for you because it clogs your blood vessels.
  7. Neurology and Consciousness: Your brain produces your consiousness. When your body dies, you end!
  8. Economics: Permanent trade tariffs protect jobs and industries.
  9. Astronomy: The earth is flat and it’s the center of the universe.

All the above are examples of extremely complex issues that get (got) grotesquely simplified to a level where the masses of idiots, media and much of academia think it’s settled. For idiots, once you ignore all the complexity, it beomes simple, certain and unchallengeable.

Idiots can only comprehend simple things

And because these not-very-bright dimwits manage intellectually to finally grasp the absurd simplifications, they become convinced they know it. Just take a look at the audience of dummies watching Al Gore and his Inconvenient Truth presentation in his Oscar-winning propaganda movie. In the end, they all believed it was as simple as CO2 regulating the atmosphere.

Why are the skeptics intelligent?

Schopenhauer noted that stupidity creates certainty while intelligence creates doubt. Really iuntelligent people will always have doubt. Ask yourselves, who claims to be certain about climate science, and who sees that it’s far more complex and uncertain?

If people admitted they didn’t know everything about a topic, they would never have to fear admitting they were wrong later. When it comes to issues of great complexity, certainty always comes from ignorance.

Meta Does It Right with Nuclear Power

Meta is making some of the boldest and most comprehensive moves in the tech industry to secure nuclear power for its massive AI data centers- and many analysts and commentators see it as doing things right.

Just this month (January 2026), Meta announced landmark 20-year agreements with three major players in the nuclear space: Vistra, TerraPower and Oklo.

Aerial view of a cooling tower facility with the Meta logo prominently displayed in the foreground.

Meta is making some of the boldest and most comprehensive moves in the tech industry to secure nuclear power for its massive AI data centers- and many analysts and commentators see it as doing things right.

Just this month (January 2026), Meta announced landmark 20-year agreements with three major players in the nuclear space: Vistra, TerraPower and Oklo.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

From Watts Up With That?

Logo of Meta, featuring a blue infinity symbol and the word 'Meta' in black text.

By Daniel Turner

Meta did something right, and it deserves recognition and replication. 

Recently, the American-owned technology company announced a private partnership with three nuclear firms, Vistra, Terra Power, and Oklo, to expand electricity production supporting their own data center needs and generating surplus power to benefit the regional grid. 

This should happen anywhere data centers are in the discussion. It is what every politician courting the tech communities to build data centers in their city or state must expect going forward, because right now data centers face massive opposition, and no amount of spin will fix it. 

The main concern about data centers is their incredible electricity need. Of course, we all like and use technology, and your average American even fundamentally embraces the patriotic need to “beat China” in the AI race. None of that denies the “affordability” issue, and the frustration of ratepayer who have yet to see a tangible benefit ubiquitous data centers bring to his personal life. To highlight this, let me use the example of a rural Virginia farmer: me. 

For years, Virginia enjoyed bipartisan enthusiasm for data centers. A third of the nation’s data centers are in the Commonwealth, and every politician relishes ribbon cutting photos and self-congratulatory press releases promoting “investment” and “jobs” and “tax revenue.”

What do I see? I see my farm’s electric bill 40% higher than it was in 2020 with a projected 14% increase this year. For all of the historic revenue, my tax burden remains the same (or higher). From my perspective, data centers are a burden. 

There is a general good, and I am happy for all the construction jobs, electricians, cement and steel workers. There is new money for “education.” I can find dozens of statements celebrating essential programs for “mental health” and “nutrition” and whatever else sounds caring. 

None of this benefits me. In fact, it costs me several hundred dollars more per year. I would at least like a thank you. Maybe a fruit basket.

Meta did something right, and it deserves recognition and replication. It did not just announce a plan to build expecting ratepayers would finance it through higher monthly bills. It brought its own money and government coordination to tell the locals things could actually… get better. Imagine that. 

Our elected leaders should be building nuclear power plants (and coal power plants and natural gas power plants) because we are in desperate need of increased baseline power, something Energy Secretary Chris Wright deeply understands and regularly addresses. During recent remarks to Meta, the Secretary mentioned that decades ago, before Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg was even born, he was studying nuclear power in college, and here he is, decades later, helping usher it into reality.

Meta has the money. Vistra, Terra Power, and Oklo have the know-how, and Chris Wright has the humility to let it happen. Government as a willing facilitator to online new energy technologies for the benefit of us all. Imagine that. 

I named my organization Power The Future deliberately. What will power the future?  “God only knows…” to quote The Beach Boys, but one thing which I do know, of which I am certain, the geniuses who will power the future with new technologies and new energy sources are, right now, in need of reliable, affordable, abundant energy, American energy, and if we punish ourselves now by punishing energy, we are not hastening that better tomorrow. We are conscripting ourselves to the status quo. 

AI is likely going to figure out how to power the future, but AI will not happen unless more power comes online fast. Meta did it the right way, and every tech company with data center desires should take note. We may just be simple farmers, but we vote and we fight. You can win us over if you treat us right, and Meta is the first to do so. 

Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs. Contact him at daniel@powerthefuture.com and follow him on Twitter @DanielTurnerPTF

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.

The New Scientist Misses the Science on ‘Sinking Pacific Islands’

The New Scientist (NS) recently published “The Pacific Islanders fighting to save their homes from catastrophe” by Katie McQue and Sean Gallagher. The article claims that small Pacific island nations face an existential threat from rising seas and intensifying storms driven by climate change, with displacement already underway and submergence looming. This article is factually false and unsupported by real-world data.

Aerial view of vibrant turquoise waters with coral reefs and sandy patches, under a clear blue sky with scattered clouds.

From The Climate Realism

By Anthony Watts

Aerial view of a small island with homes along the shoreline, surrounded by blue ocean water, featuring text overlay reading 'BOGUS'.

The New Scientist (NS) recently published “The Pacific Islanders fighting to save their homes from catastrophe” by Katie McQue and Sean Gallagher. The article claims that small Pacific island nations face an existential threat from rising seas and intensifying storms driven by climate change, with displacement already underway and submergence looming. This article is factually false and unsupported by real-world data. The piece relies on emotive anecdotes and dire projections while ignoring a substantial body of empirical research showing that many low-lying islands and atolls are stable or growing, keeping pace with sea-level rise rather than succumbing to it.

The article asserts that “rising seas are anything but a distant projection,” that high tides now regularly inundate areas that “used to stay dry,” and that island nations such as Tuvalu could be “almost completely submerged at high tide by the end of the century.” It further suggests that climate-driven sea-level rise is already forcing migration and poses an existential risk. These claims are presented as settled science, yet New Scientist fails to engage with the very studies that have directly measured island change over time.

Actual surveys of island nations tell a very different story. As summarized in Climate at a Glance’s evidence-based review “Islands and Sea Level Rise,” dozens of peer-reviewed studies using aerial photography, satellite imagery, and on-the-ground surveys show that the majority of low-lying coral islands have remained stable or increased in land area over recent decades. Research on atolls in the Pacific and Indian Oceans finds that sediment transport, reef dynamics, and natural island-building processes allow islands to adjust to gradual sea-level rise. In other words, these islands are not passive sand piles waiting to drown; they are dynamic landforms.

This is not a fringe view. Climate Realism has repeatedly documented how media outlets ignore these findings, including in its coverage collected under island and sea-level rise reporting, where studies showing island growth in places like Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and Kiribati are contrasted with alarmist headlines predicting imminent disappearance. Those empirical studies directly contradict New Scientist’s framing of inevitability and catastrophe. Further, sea level rise data from NOAA on the island of Kirbati is quite modest, just 0.77 feet per century.

Graph displaying the relative sea level trend at Betio, Kiribati from 1920 to 2020, with annotations for linear trend, confidence intervals, and monthly mean sea level adjustments.
The relative sea level trend is 2.34 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 2.83 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1974 to 2022 which is equivalent to a change of 0.77 feet in 100 years.

Equally telling is what is happening on the ground. Island nations supposedly facing near-term sea level submergence are investing heavily in long-term infrastructure. Tuvalu, the Maldives, Fiji, and other Pacific and Indian Ocean nations are expanding airports, reclaiming land, and approving major hotel and resort developments. These are capital-intensive projects with planning horizons measured in decades, not emergency stopgaps for populations about to flee. Governments and investors with real money at stake do not behave this way if these countries are about to vanish beneath the waves.

NS also conflates local flooding, erosion, and freshwater management problems with global sea-level rise. High tides washing into low areas, saltwater intrusion into wells, and coastal erosion are often driven by local factors such as land use, groundwater extraction, reef damage, and poor coastal management. Treating every such problem as proof of climate catastrophe is a classic case of confusing site-specific issues with global trends.

Perhaps most damning is what NS does not do.

It does not cite the extensive body of peer-reviewed literature documenting island stability and growth. It does not explain why measured island area changes contradict its narrative. It does not ask why nations allegedly facing “existential” risk are expanding infrastructure rather than abandoning it. Instead, it relies on selective anecdotes, speculative end-of-century projections, and emotionally charged language to imply a settled scientific conclusion that the data do not support.

If the New Scientist were actually doing science rather than regurgitating rhetoric, this article would not exist in its current form. A serious treatment would grapple with the observational record showing that many island nations are keeping up with sea-level rise, not disappearing beneath it. By failing to cite that science and by presenting a one-sided story of inevitable catastrophe, the New Scientist misleads readers and does a disservice to both the public and the people living on these islands, whose real challenges deserve honest, evidence-based discussion—not recycled counterfactual climate alarmism.


Global Tropical Cyclone Landfalls

Back in 2012, Jessica Weinkle, Ryan Maue, and I published the first peer-reviewed paper presenting a time series of global tropical cyclone landfalls of hurricane strength.

Satellite image of a powerful hurricane over the ocean, showing a clear eye and swirling cloud formations.

From The Honest Broker

By Roger Pielke Jr.

Satellite image of a hurricane over the Caribbean, showcasing swirling clouds and a prominent eye at the center.
Category 5 Melissa in the Gulf. Image: NOAA.

Back in 2012, Jessica Weinkle, Ryan Maue, and I published the first peer-reviewed paper presenting a time series of global tropical cyclone landfalls of hurricane strength.

In that paper we concluded:

From currently available historical TC records, we constructed a long-period global hurricane landfall dataset using a consistent methodology. We have identified considerable interannual variability in the frequency of global hurricane landfalls; but within the resolution of the available data, our evidence does not support the presence of significant long-period global or individual basin linear trends for minor, major, or total hurricanes within the period(s) covered by the available quality data. Therefore, our long-period analysis does not support claims that increasing TC landfall frequency or landfall intensity has contributed to concomitantly increasing economic losses. Because of documented multidecadal variations in TC frequency and intensity on global and basin scales, our findings strongly support the usage of long-period historical landfall datasets for trend analysis (cf. Liebmann et al. 2010).

While there is continued uncertainty surrounding future changes in climate (Knutson et al. 2010), current projections of TC frequency or intensity change may not yield an anthropogenic signal in economic loss data for many decades or even centuries (Crompton et al. 2011). Thus, our quantitative analysis of global hurricane landfalls is consistent with previous research focused on normalized losses associated with hurricanes that have found no trends once data are properly adjusted for societal factors (e.g., Pielke et al. 2008; Crompton and McAneney 2008; Neumayer and Barthel 2011; Barthel and Neumayer 2012; Bouwer 2011; Raghavan and Rajesh 2003).

Map showing hurricane tracks in the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding areas (a).
Global landfalls 1970 to 2010 from Weinkle et al. 2012.

Since 2012, Ryan and I have updated the dataset every January. With 13 years of additional data, the conclusions of our 2012 paper remain current.

The figure below shows the updated time series for the period of available data at the global scale, 1970 to 2025. Last year was a fairly typical year, with 19 total landfalls, of which 7 were major hurricanes. Overall tropical cyclone activity in the Northern Hemisphere was below average and above average in the Southern Hemisphere.

The total includes:

  • 5 in the Southern Indian / Australian region;
  • 1 in the Eastern Pacific;
  • 1 in the North Atlantic;
  • 12 in the Western North Pacific.
Bar graph showing global tropical cyclone landfalls at hurricane strength from 1970 to 2025, with black bars representing Category 1 and 2 storms and grey bars representing Category 3 and above.

Since 1970, the number of major hurricane landfalls has increased, while the number of minor landfalls has remained constant, meaning that a greater proportion of landfalling storms are at the higher intensities. This trend is consistent with the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for overall tropical cyclone activity (landfalling or not). Perhaps this is a signal of human caused changes in climate?

Well . . .

Bar graph depicting global tropical cyclone landfalls from 1970 to 2025, with black bars representing Category 1 and 2 cyclones, and red bars representing Category 3, 4, and 5 cyclones. The graph includes trend lines for linear landfall rates in each category.

It is well understood that the 1970s and early 1980s were a period of lower tropical cyclone activity overall. We can get a longer-term perspective by looking just at the Western Pacific and North Atlantic, which together account for ~70% of total global landfalls, and have reliable data going back to 1950.

The figure below shows landfalls in these two basins from 1950 to 2025. You can see that there are no upwards trends in either major or minor landfalls, but there is an increase in major landfalls from 1970 to 2025 (not shown).

Bar graph showing North Atlantic and Western North Pacific tropical cyclone landfalls from 1950 to 2025, with minor landfalls (Category 1 and 2) represented in black and major landfalls (Category 3 and above) in red.

This longer-term perspective leads me to conclude that the increasing proportion of major landfalling storms from 1970 to 2025 is encompassed by historical natural variability. You can find a much deeper dive on this issue at the post below:

A grid featuring various satirical paper titles related to climate change, each represented as a mock-up of a research paper layout.
Trends in the Proportion of Major Hurricanes

My conclusion is consistent with the IPCC AR61:

Identifying past trends in TC metrics remains a challenge due to the heterogeneous character of the historical instrumental data, which are known as ‘best-track’ data (Schreck et al., 2014). There is low confidence in most reported long-term (multi-decadal to centennial) trends in TC frequency- or intensity-based metrics due to changes in the technology used to collect the best-track data. This should not be interpreted as implying that no physical (real) trends exist, but rather as indicating that either the quality or the temporal length of the data is not adequate to provide robust trend detection statements, particularly in the presence of multi-decadal variability.

Of course, the rather tame science of detection and attribution with respect to tropical cyclone behavior is no match for climate hype.

Canada’s Climate Wake up Call

Canadian fearmongering about a “climate emergency” served
only to empower a bureaucratic class intent on
controlling consumption and taxing lifestyles. 

Silhouettes of oil pumps against a sunset backdrop featuring the Canadian flag.

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

A graphic featuring a white oil pump jack inside a red maple leaf silhouette, symbolizing the Canadian oil industry.

Vijay Jayaraj writes at American Thinker Canada wakes up to climate reality Excerpts in italics with my bolds

Canadian fearmongering about a “climate emergency” served
only to empower a bureaucratic class intent on
controlling consumption and taxing lifestyles. 

A recent memorandum of understanding between Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and Alberta premier Danielle Smith represents the inevitable reassertion of economic necessity over the fantasy of “decarbonization” that has gripped Ottawa for the past decade.

Allowing for the construction of a pipeline to transport Albertan oil to a Pacific export terminal, the agreement prompted the resignation of one liberal member of parliament and celebration from the province’s leader. “This is a great day for Alberta,” declared Smith.

Alberta is a major vessel in Canada’s economic bloodstream. The province’s energy sector generates $88 billion in annual gross domestic product (GDP), which is 25% of the Alberta’s total economic output. This revenue flows east to the national capital to fund federal transfers that support public finances of other provinces, some of which oppose the oil production that provides them cash.

Map of Canada showing estimated percentage of population affected by climate change as of 2015, with a color gradient from dark blue to yellow indicating varying levels of impact.
Global Warming survey of Canadians, twisted and ignored by Trudeau Liberals.

Atlantic Canada, parts of Quebec, and even Ontario benefit from royalties and tax revenues generated by hydrocarbons extracted thousands of miles away. So-called moral objections to oil sands development are often voiced by inhabitants of Halifax or Montreal but rarely heard is a willingness to forgo the western revenue that keeps hospitals open and public payrolls funded.

So, it was financial reality that drove Carney to upend expectations established by countless government documents, climate pledges, and regulatory frameworks the previous government put in place to “save the planet” by discouraging the use of fossil fuels. 

A political cartoon illustrating a tornado labeled 'Federal Carbon Taxes and Fuel Regulations' approaching a house and a barn, representing Alberta.

Canada’s climate industrial complex had predicted that pipelines would become stranded assets and that Alberta would fade into irrelevance as net zero became federal policy. However, the deal signed by Carney moves in the opposite direction, making provisions for new infrastructure and signaling that even Canada’s most climate-obsessed federal leadership cannot govern without fossil fuels.

A political cartoon depicting four people from Saudi Arabia, the U.S., Russia, and Canada, each wearing oversized chimney-like hats labeled with their respective countries, highlighting the theme of emission caps.

In technical terms, the federal cap on oil and gas emissions has been suspended. The Clean Electricity Regulation — a proposed constraint on Alberta’s ability to generate affordable power — has been loosened. Timelines for reducing methane emissions have been extended beyond 2030. Yes, there are caveats that appear to impose a soft form of anti-carbon sentiment, but the overall picture has changed. 

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a publicly funded institution, has consistently parroted environmental advocates who treat fossil fuels as abominations rather than economic necessities. This messaging has convinced many Canadians that their government is committing a terrible sin by producing energy the world demands. Lost on them is the fact that Canadian oil and natural gas are produced under far more stringent standards than exist in the Middle East, Russia, or other regions.

Scatter plot showing the relationship between electricity consumption per capita (kWh) and GDP per capita (current US$). The plot highlights a trend indicating that there are no low energy, rich countries, with a note in red stating 'There are no low energy, rich countries'.

Energy abundance underpins prosperity. Nations that constrain their energy supply impoverish themselves. Nations that produce reliable, affordable energy benefit their populations and the broader world. Canada should produce the energy for itself and export the surplus to global markets.

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Beyond energy economics, there is another dimension to Canada’s economic future that the legacy climate orthodoxy dismisses: agriculture. Canada’s warming climate has extended growing seasons across the prairies and opened new agricultural possibilities. 

Bar chart illustrating Canadian all wheat production in thousands of metric tons from 2001 to 2023, showing yearly fluctuations and projections.

According to official data, “total wheat production rose 11.2% year over year to a record 40 million (metric tons) in 2025, surpassing the previous record set in 2013.” Canola production rose 13%, surpassing a record set in 2017. Barley and oat production rose 19% and 17%, respectively.

In all, the output for all principal field crops increased by 4% year-over-year. For the next crop year (2025-2026), total production is projected to reach near record levels, up 3% year-over-year and 8% above the previous five-year average.

Graph depicting global crop yields from 1961 to 2023, showing trends for various crops like bananas, potatoes, cassava, and maize.

Historical analysis demonstrates that climate conditions across Canadian agricultural regions have shifted toward longer growing seasons, with more frost-free days and expanded viable crop zones.

Critics will claim that allowing a new pipeline is a betrayal of future generations. But what truly endangers posterity? A fraction of a degree of warming that extends growing seasons? Or a future of energy scarcity, deindustrialization, and economic stagnation?

A cartoon depicting a large machine labeled 'JUST TRANSITION' with workers in hard hats approaching it, while another character at a counter asks if they would like fries with their order, referencing a Walmart-like setting.

Fearmongering about a “climate emergency” served only to empower a bureaucratic class intent on controlling consumption and taxing lifestyles. It did nothing to change atmospheric physics or the needs of people who rely on affordable energy to survive.

Billboard message promoting the idea that there is no climate crisis, featuring a person sleeping peacefully. Includes text directing viewers to CO2coalition.org.

New York Nuclear Plan

New York Governor Hochul plans to pursue “the most ambitious development of nuclear power in America, setting a new goal to build five gigawatts of new nuclear capacity”.  While I believe that nuclear power is the best option to reduce electric system GHG emissions, this announcement represents another New York politician meddling in energy policy. This summarizes a more detailed post at Caiazza’s blog.

View of the Statue of Liberty with the New York City skyline in the background, featuring skyscrapers and cooling towers along the waterfront.

From Watts Up With That?

Roger Caiazza and Richard Ellenbogen

The Statue of Liberty stands prominently in the foreground, with the New York City skyline in the background featuring skyscrapers and smoke rising from cooling towers at sunset.

New York Governor Hochul plans to pursue “the most ambitious development of nuclear power in America, setting a new goal to build five gigawatts of new nuclear capacity”.  While I believe that nuclear power is the best option to reduce electric system GHG emissions, this announcement represents another New York politician meddling in energy policy. This summarizes a more detailed post at Caiazza’s blog.

Hochul Proposal

On January 13, 2026 Hochul presented her State of the State  address.  It described the nuclear proposal as follows:

Establishing a Nuclear Reliability Backbone for a Zero-Emission Grid

As New York transitions to a zero-emission electric grid, the State must ensure reliable and cost-effective baseload power to keep homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure running at all hours.  Governor Hochul will ensure that New York State leads in the race to harness safe and reliable advanced nuclear energy to power homes and businesses with zero-emission electricity for generations to come.

To catalyze progress towards those goals, the Governor will advance a new initiative, the Nuclear Reliability Backbone, directing state agencies to establish a clear pathway for additional advanced nuclear generation to support grid reliability. The Nuclear Reliability Backbone will be developed by a new Department of Public Service (DPS) process to consider, review, and facilitate a cost-effective pathway to four gigawatts of new nuclear energy that will combine with existing nuclear generation and the New York Power Authority’s (NYPA) previously announced one gigawatt project, to create an 8.4 gigawatt “backbone” of reliable energy for New Yorkers.

This effort will provide firm, clean power that complements renewable energy resources and reduces reliance on fossil fuel generation. By creating a stable foundation of always-on energy, the Backbone will allow renewable resources to operate more efficiently and flexibly. Together, these actions will support a resilient, flexible, and zero-emission grid that meets New York’s growing energy needs.

New York Energy Issues

New York’s Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) includes a 2040 “zero-emissions” mandate for the electrical sector.  We have chronicled the myriad issues with this target for years.  In brief, the State expects that the interim 2030 target to obtain 70% of New York’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030 is years behind schedule and the recently released State Energy Plan suggests that there will be a continuing need for fossil-fired units beyond 2040.

To her credit Hochul apparently recognized that nuclear should be included in a decarbonized electric system in her State of the State. The problem is that the State of the State did not confront the reliability crisis confronting the state in the near term that cannot be fixed with nuclear plants that will not be online for a decade or more.

Last November the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) released its 2025-2034 Comprehensive Reliability Plan (CRP).  The report found that “the electric grid is at an inflection point driven by the convergence of three major trends: the rapid growth of large loads, (e.g.: microchip manufacturing and AI-related data centers); the aging generation fleet; and a lack of new dispatchable generation resources being added to the system.”   The description of the CRP went on to say:

The CRP highlights that the future reliability of the grid depends on the development of flexible generation capable of performing during extended periods of high consumer demand and extreme weather. The report examines lessons-learned from the June 2025 heatwave and the need for a planning framework that better reflects present challenges of operating the grid while anticipating plausible future risks.

“The system requires additional dispatchable generation to serve forecasted increases in consumer demand,” said Zach Smith, Senior Vice President, System and Resource Planning. “We also need to refine and evolve our planning processes to better reflect this period of great change on the grid and a broader range of plausible future outcomes.”

The CRP demonstrates that due to emerging reliability challenges, traditional planning methods built around a single forecast are no longer sufficient. To maintain system reliability and protect public safety, the economy and quality of life, the CRP recommends actions that will strengthen planning processes across a broad spectrum of system conditions and advance needed investment before reliability margins disappear.

Our biggest concern is the reliability margin crisis described in the CRP.  The NYISO plausible range of reliability margins illustrates the problem (Figure 1).  The CRP doesn’t explain what is going to keep the lights on after 2033, and possibly as early as 2027 if replacement capacity does not keep up with retirements.  Several new gas turbine projects were being permitted when Climate Act implementation started but two were rejected because of the Climate Act and others quietly stopped the process.   This should be the energy program priority but Hochul proposes a nuclear program.

Figure 1: Plausible Range of Statewide System Margins NYISO 2025-2034 Comprehensive Reliability Plan 

Line graph showing the plausible range of statewide system margins from 2026 to 2034. The graph includes a summer margin range highlighted in red and a winter margin range highlighted in blue, with dashed lines indicating the high and low ends of the margin envelope.

For background consider New York’s nuclear power plants (Table 1).  Five gigawatts of nuclear is basically equivalent to building five new traditional reactors like Nine Mile 2, the last completed plant in New York. While adding new nuclear capacity is appropriate, replacement of existing capacity must also be considered.  The youngest of the 3.4 GW of existing nuclear in NY State will be reaching 60 years of age by 2040.

Table 1: New York Nuclear Generating Plants

Table summarizing the in-service and retirement dates, nameplate ratings, and operating capacities of various power stations in New York.

We agree on one thing completely: It’s a step in the right direction but it is too little, too late.  Building this amount of capacity will take a long time.  Nine Mile 2 construction took 13 years, and the most recent reactors built in the US at Vogtle, Georgia took 15 years from the start of initial site work.

The new Vogtle units are Westinghouse AP1000 designs with passive safety systems; The capacity of each unit is on the order of 1.1 GW.  Construction went over schedule and budget “as the first new U.S. nuclear build in decades, became a protracted megaproject with schedule slips and cost growth to roughly the mid‑$30‑billion range, widely characterized as one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in U.S. history”. These issues were caused by a “combination of incomplete design and planning, contractor and supply‑chain problems, first‑of‑a‑kind AP1000 implementation issues, weak project management and oversight, and the 2017 Westinghouse bankruptcy, which disrupted construction and financing”. 

Most of these underlying factors will be problems for New York State.  If new technology is used the design and planning will have to evolve as the plants are built.  There are contractor and supply-chain problems with existing infrastructure construction so this will be more of a problem for the new technology.  If the deployment goes so far as to mandate that the facilities are “built by and for New Yorkers”, then there will be delays because there are insufficient skilled trade workers available today.

Conclusion

In our opinion, nuclear power should be part of New York’s electric system future.  However, Hochul’s proposal is too little, too late as part of the Climate Act implementation without revising the schedule.  It is necessary first to pause implementation and reassess the schedule and ambition of the Act so that it can play a meaningful role without negatively impacting the reliability of the utility system as it is presently doing.

Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.  Richard Ellenbogen has been commenting since 2019 regarding the deficiencies inherent in NY State Energy policy.