Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Tucked beneath the pine forests and farm fields of southwest Arkansas, drillers have stumbled upon a critical mineral jackpot: lithium in the region’s ancient saltwater formations.
Last fall, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that an estimated 5 to 19 million tons of lithium are located in southwestern Arkansas. That is enough lithium to meet the world’s estimated 2030 demand for lithium nine times over.
The lithium is located in the Smackover Formation, a geological formation created by an ancient sea that extends across southwest Arkansas and several neighboring states. Back in the 1920s, oil was discovered in the Smackover Formation, setting off a boom in southern Arkansas.
The Smackover Formation is a deep (roughly 8,000–10,000 feet) carbonate aquifer that has been tapped for decades for oil, gas, and bromine-bearing brines, resulting in extensive existing subsurface data and infrastructure. Recent technological developments now enable the U.S. to tap previously unusable brines to extract lithium, a key component of batteries, pharmaceuticals, glass, ceramics, and military equipment.
Now, with the development of the new Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) process, this quiet corner of the South is suddenly staring at an economic bonanza.
A recent study estimated that there could be enough lithium inside a giant slab of limestone rock, known as the Smackover Formation, to meet the entire global demand for electric cars in 2030 nine times over.
Using DLE, miners will soon be able to pull out lithium-rich saltwater from underground reservoirs in Arkansas, filter out the minerals, and return the processed groundwater to the Earth within 24 hours.
The 2024 estimate of 19 million tons of lithium in the Smackover Formation would be enough to erase the nation’s current dependence on China, which controls roughly 70 percent of the world’s lithium supply.
Katherine Knierim from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said: ‘We estimate there is enough dissolved lithium present in that region to replace US imports of lithium and more.’
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In DLE, lithium‑rich brine from reservoirs, oilfield water, or geothermal fluids is first pretreated to remove impurities, then passed through lithium‑selective media that capture Li⁺ while most other ions remain in the brine. Then the lithium is stripped into a concentrated solution (often lithium chloride) and further processed into battery‑grade lithium carbonate or hydroxide. Unused brine is typically reinjected underground.
The entire process enables faster production (hours to days), higher recoveries, and a smaller land and water footprint compared with conventional methods.
The new process needs to be scaled, but the company has been refining it since 2024 and anticipates bringing the lithium product to market by 2028. The area is poised for economic growth and long-term prosperity.
The DLE process, developed with Koch Technology Solutions and Equinor, extracts lithium directly from brine, offering a faster and cleaner alternative to traditional mining. However, this method has yet to be proven at a commercial scale in the U.S., making Arkansas a testing ground for the future of lithium production.
The project promises economic benefits for South Arkansas, including new high-skilled jobs, major investments in rural communities, and growth for local businesses. Standard Lithium is also negotiating up to $1 billion in project financing with international lenders and export credit agencies.
Ultimately, what is happening in Smackover feels less like a regional development project and more like a distinctly American magic trick: turning salt water into the modern world’s version of gold.
Engineers and chemists are stitching together advanced membranes, custom sorbents, and real‑time controls in a high‑tech update of the old oil patch, proving that the same ingenuity that once fueled the petroleum age can now power the battery age.
As brine flows down and lithium‑rich solution comes back up, Arkansas becomes a live demonstration that American innovation can rewrite the value of its own geology…reworking the “waste” of yesterday into the strategic treasure of tomorrow, one shimmering stream of salt water at a time.
“There is no evidence that UN COP meetings and more than $10 trillion spent on renewables over the last 30 years have affected the climate. The average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, which is blamed for global warming, has been rising over the last 50 years without any change to the trend.”
“There is no evidence that UN COP meetings and more than $10 trillion spent on renewables over the last 30 years have affected the climate. The average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, which is blamed for global warming, has been rising over the last 50 years without any change to the trend.”
World leaders are in turmoil. For 30 years, the United Nations, World Economic Forum, and International Energy Agency, among business and political leaders called for a shift from hydrocarbon fuels to renewable energy. Thousands of laws were enacted to try to force a net zero energy transition. But it’s now clear that green energy is unable to meet the needs of growing developing nations or support the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution in advanced nations.
Since the founding of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, the UN has led efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to try to fight human-caused global warming. Delegates from more than 180 nations meet at the annual UN Conference of the Parties (COP) to discuss climate action, with recent COP attendance exceeding 50,000 attendees.
But there is no evidence that UN COP meetings and more than $10 trillion spent on renewables over the last 30 years have affected the climate. The average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, which is blamed for global warming, has been rising over the last 50 years without any change to the trend.
The World Economic Forum (WEF), a forum of business leaders established in 1971, states: “business should not only create economic value but also serve society and the planet.” At the WEF Sustainable Development Impact Summit in 2020, more than 4,500 leaders called for a “Great Reset for Sustainable Development,” committing to reach Net Zero by 2050 or sooner.
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) was established in 2004 by the UN as a framework to evaluate a company beyond traditional financial metrics. Of high importance in ESG is a firm’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and support policies to fight climate change.
But net zero policies cannot support the energy needs of growing developing nations. Also, the rise of artificial intelligence drives a huge need for electrical power in advanced nations that cannot be supplied by intermittent green energy sources. Businesses and political leaders now realize that Net Zero and ESG are not the keys to the future.
Today, more than 6,500 coal-fired power plants operate with more than 1,000 new plants in planning or under construction. Coal plants provided 34% of world electricity in 2024, the leading source. Leaders call for an end to coal-fired power, but coal consumption grew to an all-time high in 2024. Still, 700 million people still do not have access to electricity and about two billion suffer blackouts or brownouts every other day.
In 2021, Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said,”If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas, and coal from now—from this year.” But last year the IEA World Energy Outlook predicted that oil demand would continue to increase to 2050 and that gas consumption would increase 30% by 2050 in their “current policies scenario.”
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright recently pointed out that each of the billion people in the developed world uses about 13 barrels of oil per year, while a developing nation resident uses only about three barrels per year. The US and Europe have one or two vehicles per person compared to less than one vehicle for every ten people in Africa or India. Residents of wealthy nations use ten times the plastic used by people in developing countries. Developing countries will propel the demand for hydrocarbon fuels to better their standards of living.
The AI revolution now drives the need for electric power in wealthy nations. The US and China are competing for AI dominance and Europe wants to join the battle. Data center construction is skyrocketing to support AI. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft invested over $380 billion last year on AI infrastructure, a total larger than the gross domestic product of more than 140 nations.
Larry Fink, co-chair of the WEC and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment fund, said at the WEC conference last month, “You cannot rely solely on intermittent sources like wind and solar. You need dispatchable power because these data centers cannot simply turn on and off.” AI data centers are being powered by natural gas and in some cases nuclear power.
Leading firms pledged to become Net Zero, but the AI revolution is shattering those plans. In 2020, Google announced a goal to operate on carbon-free energy by 2030. But in 2024 Google admitted their emissions rose 48% over the last four years due to AI-driven services.
In 2020, petroleum company BP launched a $200 million “environmentally friendly” public relations campaign. The firm rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum,” pledging to reduce oil and gas production 40% by 2030 and to boost investments in renewable energy. Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron all announced plans to invest in renewables or green technologies such as carbon capture and storage.
But oil and gas firms found that renewables couldn’t make money, even with government subsidies. Returns on renewable projects were about six percent while oil and gas project returns were over ten percent. BP and Shell scaled back their renewable goals and investments in 2025.
In 2020, Larry Fink declared that he intended to use the trillions of US dollars managed by BlackRock to address global warming. Almost every major financial institution pledged to reduce emissions. ESG became a defining feature of Wall Street investing. More than 100 companies joined Climate Action 100+ to focus on reducing emissions globally. The UN-convened Net Zero Banking Alliance was established in 2021 and quickly grew to 140 financial institutions.
The Great Reversal
But a conservative backlash attacked financial industry support for ESG and climate action. Republican legislatures in the US introduced more than 100 bills to penalize financial companies that supported ESG practices. Republican state treasurers withdrew money from BlackRock.
As a result, climate and ESG efforts in the financial industry have collapsed. After Donald Trump’s re-election in November 2024, almost every US financial institution pulled out of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, causing the group to fold. Dozens of firms left Climate Action 100+. European firms also pulled back from climate commitments.
The shutdown of US climate policies during President Trump’s second term have devastated the global climate movement. The US has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement and the UNFCCC and cut funding for climate organizations. A climate tax on shipping proposed by the International Maritime Organization was halted by US and China opposition. The ending of US subsidies for wind, solar, and electric vehicles heavily impacted those industries.
Microsoft founder and climate activist Bill Gates authored the bookHow to Avoid a Climate Disaster in 2021. But last fall he changed his position. In a memo to COP30, he criticized the climate community for their “doomsday outlook” and focusing too much on “near-term emissions goals,” stating that “our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.”
In addition to US Republican opposition, other political parties withdrew support from Net Zero. Reform UK, which is leading in UK polls, coined the phrase “Net Stupid Zero.” Alternative für Deutschland, the number two party in Germany, calls wind turbines “windmills of shame.” Both the National and the Liberal parties in Australia scrapped their support for Net Zero last fall, concerned with green energy costs.
Conclusion
World leaders are pulling back from climate hysteria and demands for net zero energy. It’s time to return to sensible energy policy and to adapt to climate change, as humanity has done for all of history.
———
Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy, and author of four books, includingGreen Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
Editor’s Appendix: Goreham Posts at MasterResource
A mark of a true scholar is how his or her writings and conclusions stand the test of time. Steve Goreham’s writings for MasterResource for more than a decade read well today. His books and illustrations on climate/energy issues are excellent. And with his editorials in the Wall Street Journal (see here, here, and here) and other leading publications, this ‘talented amateur’ is running circles around leading academics on the same issues.
It has been revealed that judges in the US are being influenced by fake climate propaganda when making decisions. John Solomon’s Just the News has the story:
‘A coalition of 27 Republican attorneys general is joining a growing chorus of criticism over climate activists providing one-sided material to judges that’s presented as an impartial scientific resource to train the judges in climate science.
It has been revealed that judges in the US are being influenced by fake climate propaganda when making decisions. John Solomon’s Just the News has the story:
‘A coalition of 27 Republican attorneys general is joining a growing chorus of criticism over climate activists providing one-sided material to judges that’s presented as an impartial scientific resource to train the judges in climate science.
‘The coalition, which is led by West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey, is demanding that material dealing with climate science be removed from a manual that’s utilised by thousands of federal judges and published by a federal agency. The coalition members argue the material is ideologically biased in favour of plaintiffs suing energy companies over climate change.
‘The Federal Judicial Centre, an educational and research agency for the federal courts, publishes the Reference Manual on Science. In a letter to the FJC, the attorneys general argue that the material on climate science isn’t adhering to the FJC’s purpose of the manual, which is to “describe the basic principles of major scientific fields” without instructing judges about what “evidence should be admissible”.
‘The FJC provides the manual to over 3,000 judges, and it’s been cited in over 1,700 opinions. The Supreme Court has also cited the manual multiple times to explain principles in science and math, and all this makes neutrality of the manual vital, the letter argues.’
Which all raises the question – is something similar happening over here?
There have certainly been many illogical judgments handed down by UK courts in recent years, which appear to have no basis whatsoever in law. They all have the same thing in common – the ‘climate emergency’, which is said to trump all other considerations.
For instance, there was the notorious court case five years ago, when XR vandals smashed windows at HSBC’s Canary Wharf HQ. The nine activists were tried for criminal damage costing £500,000 but were inexplicably acquitted because ‘their actions were justified by the greater harm of climate change and the bank’s role in it’. Although it was the decision of a jury, any unbiased judge would have instructed them there was no legal basis for the defence’s claim and overruled the jury if necessary.
A few years earlier, Greenpeace protesters, who had climbed a chimney at Kingsnorth coal power station, were similarly acquitted, because they were ‘preventing further climate harm’. Many XR and Just Stop Oil protesters are let off before even getting to court for offences that any normal member of the public would be banged up for.
And more recently, the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest civil court, blocked development of the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields because no account had been taken of downstream emissions – greenhouse gases released when the extracted oil and gas are burned/used by consumers – an utterly absurd judgment which ignores the fact that the aforesaid consumers will simply burn oil imported from another country. One of the judges, Lord Ericht, emphasised that protecting against climate change outweighed the private interests of the developers.
All of these cases revolve around the assumption that there is something called a ‘climate emergency’ and that a Greenpeace protester or a decision by an oil company such as Shell will make any difference to the world’s weather.
If bank staff at HSBC are trapped inside the building when it is on fire, it would obviously perfectly within the law to smash the windows to get them out. But breaking the law because there may or not be a ‘climate emergency’ plainly is not.
It is not unreasonable to assume that many of our judges have been well and truly brainwashed about climate change by the constant flow of misinformation being pumped by the Green Blob.
World cereal production breaks more records
For years we have been told that food production has suffered because of global warming. One study published last year repeated the lie, claiming that climate trends have caused current global yields of wheat, maize, and barley to be 10, 4, and 13 per cent lower than they would have otherwise been.
The studies all have one thing in common – they are based not on actual data, but fraudulent computer models, which ‘imagine’ what food output would otherwise have been.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the official UN data continues to expose the lies of the climate scammers, who make big grant money concocting scare stories to fit their political agenda.
The UN has updated its database of agricultural statistics. It confirms that world cereal output hit yet another record high in 2024 and has doubled since the 1980s. It is the same story for overall agricultural output.
The long-term increase in food output has been undoubtedly driven by fossil fuels. Fertilisers have, of course, been hugely important, but maybe more important still has been the increase in productivity resulting from mechanisation.
Mechanisation on farms has obviously transformed the agricultural sector. But the ability to get foodstuff to markets, refrigeration and shipping are all equally important factors.
None of this would be possible without fossil fuels.
It’s kind of sad really. While mum and dad are busting their guts trying to build a future, woke teachers to whom they entrust their kids’ education are filling the kids heads with woke nonsense.
Can Business Alliances Move the Needle on Climate Change?
Featuring Peter Tufano. By Rachel Layne on February 6, 2026.
Who will champion environmental, social, and governance issues at a time when such causes are under fire? Peter Tufano says that business alliances could play an important role.
One of the first tenets of systems change is that ‘It takes a village.’ I have a particular interest in this topic because a lot of my career has been about collaboration in service of positive systems change through business. I cofounded the Innovation Lab at Harvard and joined with seven other deans to found Business Schools for Climate Leadership. These days, I lead a consortium of 150 schools and regulatory bodies to advance climate finance.
Our conclusion was that there was an ownership type, among public firms, that seemed to have less appetite for what we call ESG: Family firms, or firms with vestigial family ownership. The way that a family becomes an owner in a publicly traded firm is by selling stakes to non-family members. Public firms with remaining family ownership show far lower adoption of ‘ESG’ practices than firms with institutional, employee, managerial, or government ownership.
Given that families usually claim that they have longer-term horizons and greater social sensibilities, we tried to understand this finding in more detail. While perhaps family owners might tend to treat firms as piggy banks, it’s not just about ownership, but also about control. Where families are in the second or third generation, the firms are much more prone to adopt ESG practices, and when they are in charge, even more so.”
It’s kind of sad really. While mum and dad are busting their guts trying to build a future, woke teachers to whom they entrust their kids’ education are filling the kids heads with woke nonsense.
So, when the kids take over the firm, they don’t understand how damaging focusing on anything other than running the business is. They start living the ESG visions their teachers instilled in them.
I was going to say “and then the business fails”, but the case for this isn’t as clear – apparently the claim the third generation loses the business is a bit of a myth. Or maybe it isn’t, the sources I looked up are contradictory. Maybe by the third generation the business is robust enough to withstand a little ESG nonsense from woke third generation owners, if the founder and his or her successor picked the right senior managers.
Politicians and trial lawyers in Louisiana are hoping to use the home-field advantage of state courts to shake down oil and gas companies. The alleged misdeed: contributing to coastal erosion and damaging wetlands while producing aviation fuel for the U.S. military during World War II.
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Politicians and trial lawyers in Louisiana are hoping to use the home-field advantage of state courts to shake down oil and gas companies. The alleged misdeed: contributing to coastal erosion and damaging wetlands while producing aviation fuel for the U.S. military during World War II.
Cash- strapped coastal parishes (counties), politically well-connected trial lawyers, and Louisiana’s reputation as what the American Tort Reform Association calls a “litigation hellhole” have created a toxic brew with implications that reach far beyond the Bayou State.
On Jan. 12, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Chevron USA et al. v. Plaquemines Parish et al. The justices will decide (probably by late June) whether companies can be sued in state courts for actions they took on behalf of and under contract with the federal government.
A ruling by the high court allowing a Plaquemines Parish jury’s $744.6 million verdict in April against Chevron under a 1978 Louisiana law to stand would deal a serious blow to the U.S. oil and natural gas sector — precisely when the nation has reemerged as a global energy superpower.
The roots of the high-stakes Supreme Court showdown stretch back over eight decades, when Chevron (then known as Texaco) produced aviation gas (avgas) under contract with the Petroleum Administration for War, a federal wartime agency. In 2013, the state of Louisiana and Plaquemines Parish sued Chevron and other energy companies for damages stemming from the production of crude oil for refining into avgas, alleging that the companies’ drilling and other activities caused coastal erosion.
The whopping $744.6 million verdict handed down last year prompted Chevron and other oil companies, supported by the Trump administration, to petition to have the case removed to federal court. They have good reason to seek a less-biased venue.
“State courts in Louisiana present a substantial risk of local bias against out-of-state defendants,” said Richard A. Epstein, a professor of law at New York University. “The Louisiana Attorney General’s Office entered into a joint prosecution agreement with [Plaquemines Parish] counsel John Carmouche, contractually prohibiting the State from supporting any defense, however meritorious, raised by Chevron. This arrangement erased the attorney general’s independence and improperly aligned the State’s interests with private financial gain.”
“This risk of bias was further evident in the conduct of Judge Michael Clement — a recipient of campaign contributions from Mr. Carmouche and his associated PACs — in a related trial involving identical issues,” Mr. Epstein added.
Congressional efforts to protect private parties, including contractors, from overzealous state prosecutors and courts date to 1815. Hoping to add clarity to those legal protections in 2011, Congress broadened the scope of the standard that allows cases to be removed to federal court to include actions “related to” the fulfillment of a federal contract. This bears directly on the case in Louisiana, where pollution from oil drilling was linked to refining it into wartime aviation fuel.
“The record is clear,” the Washington Legal Foundation and the Atlantic Legal Foundation note in an amicus brief submitted to the high court. “Petitioners’ World War II oil production directly relates to their federal avgas contracts.”
In a vertically integrated company such as Chevron, there would have been no aviation fuel without the drilling.
The implications of tying up wartime federal contractors in state court are not lost on two military leaders who submitted their own brief to the Supreme Court.
“Our nation can ill afford the divisions, confusion, and uncertainty that would necessarily result if disputes arising from wartime decision-making were adjudicated in piecemeal fashion in various state courts,” retired Gen. Richard B. Myers and retired Adm. Mike Mullen said.
Louisiana’s loss of coastal wetlands — caused by hurricanes, sinking land (subsidence), and the diversion of the Mississippi River for flood control — long predates World War II. Targeting a single, deep-pocketed industry as the culprit ignores the complexities of the region’s ecosystem.
“There are over 40 cases pending in state courts that are dripping with political bias and contempt for the defendants,” the American Tort Reform Association points out. If the high court rules to keep the Louisiana case in state court, then it will set a precedent that opens the door to the imposition of ruinous, retroactive liability nationwide.
When the BBC makes claims about record rainfall, I suggest you check your wallet!
Official statistics for January have been released by the Met Office and confirm what many will already suspect – it has been very wet for many areas.
Northern Ireland, south-west and southern England, and the east of Scotland all had one of their wettest Januarys on record.
With 70% more rain than average Northern Ireland experienced the wettest January for 149 years. Culdrose in Cornwall recorded two and a quarter- times its average, while Aboyne in Aberdeenshire had nearly four times its January average of 68.9mm.
It was not a record January in N Ireland – it was wetter in 1877:
In the small print, you will see “the wettest January for 149 years” – most people will assume that was the start of the record. Either way, the BBC’s headline is false – no records were broken in N Ireland.
Nor was it a record in East Scotland, it was only the ninth wettest:
The BBC also fails to put any of these numbers in proper context. Instead, they only want to spread “record rainfall” propaganda.
Rainfall in N Ireland totalled 195.6mm last month. Across all months, there have been a total of 24 months with more than 190mm there. The wettest month came in October 1870, when 247.9mm fell.
In simple terms, it was the wettest month in N Ireland for six years – but that does not make scary headlines!
It was, of course, very wet in certain localities, as often happens when the jet stream gets stuck. It was the South West which came off worst last month, as people who live there have rightly commented.
The Somerset Levels have flooded, but it was not as wet in Yeovilton last month as it was in January 2014 – 147.2 v 166.4 mm.
Since the start of records there in 1964, there have been fifteen months with more than 140 mm of rain, with the wettest being 192.4mm in November 2002:
The Met Office are, frankly, piss poor at providing meteorological data to the public. They offer no historical daily data at all and only monthly data at a handful of sites, such as Yeovilton.
I gather there was 271 mm in Torbay. But even that pales into insignificance in comparison with some of the totals registered in November 1929. October 1960 was also extremely wet in Devon, with 311 mm falling in Exeter.
To demand men give them money?
In other words, this group of progressive climate activists are demanding nations they say are controlled by men give them money.
Why thousands of feminist leaders will soon arrive in Melbourne
When over 6,500 feminist leaders, activists, and changemakers gather in Naarm (Melbourne) from April 27-30 for the Women Deliver 2026 Conference, they will be confronting an uncomfortable truth:
climate change is not just an environmental crisis;
it’s also a gendered catastrophe unfolding in slow motion.
The gendered dimensions of climate crisis reveal themselves in stark ways. …
Yet despite bearing the heaviest impacts, women remain largely excluded from climate decision-making. Globally, women hold only around one quarter of parliamentary seats.
While women’s participation in national delegations to UN climate conferences rose slightly to 35 per cent between 2012 and 2022, the proportion of delegations headed by women actually declined. Women occupy just 15 per cent of positions in climate-related ministries, 18 per cent in forestry, and 11 per cent in water and irrigation ministries.
The path forward requires what UN Women calls “feminist climate justice”, an approach that recognises women’s rights, labor, and knowledge, ensures just transitions that don’t deepen inequality and repairs historical injustices.
This means wealthy nations must meet their climate finance commitments and ensure funds reach grassroots women’s organisations. It means polluting corporations must be taxed and regulated. It means women must have equal power in climate policy- making.
The claim is women remain excluded from decision making.
They demand wealthy nations must meet their climate finance commitments.
In other words, this group of progressive climate activists are demanding nations they say are controlled by men give them money.
Have these people got no self- respect?
I’m not anti-women, I work with strong, capable career women every day, who wouldn’t dream of setting out a begging bowl and demanding men fill it with cash.
My wife is an active part of our business.
Australia has strong, inspirational female leaders who didn’t get there by begging men for help.
Consider Pauline Hanson, whose climate skeptic One Nation party is riding high in the polls, endured years of abuse from male politicians, but is on the brink of prevailing anyway, through guts and determination, and commitment to a message Australia is ready to hear.
How about Aussie Trump supporter and mining tycoon Gina Rinehart, who has been rated the richest person in Australia for the last six years. Gina didn’t get there by begging for a handout, she inherited a near bankrupt company and through her own guts, determination and brains built it into a titan of the Aussie business world.
Or take plastic surgeon and burns specialist Fiona Wood, born in Britain but lives in Australia, who revolutionised treatment of severe burns with her 1993 invention of spray on skin. Maybe not quite a household name as Gina or Pauline, but her work has touched thousands of lives, saved lots of people from misery, disfigurement and death. Anyone who has studied medicine or plastic surgery in Australia would have heard her name.
If the Woman Deliver Conference 2026 want money for climate projects, they shouldn’t run begging to men for a handout, by demanding countries which they claim are mostly run by men provide climate finance. They should go out and make their own money like Gina Rinehart, or win the nation’s support like Pauline Hanson, or become a scientific leader like Fiona. They should become the inspiration for women which they claim to be.
There’s a lot of buzz in the climate community about all the layoffs at the Washington Post in their climate division. From what I’ve heard, roughly 75% of their climate staff have been let go. What shocked me was learning that they actually had around 20 people working on climate coverage. How many times can you repeat the same thing over and over — and have so many people dedicated to doing it? That was the first question I asked myself when I saw the firings. How did they justify having so many people focused solely on climate?
There’s a lot of buzz in the climate community about all the layoffs at the Washington Post in their climate division. From what I’ve heard, roughly 75% of their climate staff have been let go.
What shocked me was learning that they actually had around 20 people working on climate coverage.
How many times can you repeat the same thing over and over — and have so many people dedicated to doing it? That was the first question I asked myself when I saw the firings.
How did they justify having so many people focused solely on climate?
I’ve always been a fan of the Capital Weather Gang over there.
Those people love the weather — even if they’re probably not fans of me because of my stance on climate issues. The weather is far more important than whether the Earth will be 1° warmer or 1° colder in 50 or 100 years.
With these cuts, the climate side has now been pared down to roughly the size the weather team has always been. Even that to me has too many people focused on climate. But I guess they did their job since a lot of their readers are brainwashed and refuse to look at the other side of the issue.
This is exactly what I wrote about in the situation with NOAA. In my opinion, the Weather Gang is a great group for people who are into weather. But they were overshadowed by an out-of-control climate division that would take any event and claim it was due to man-made climate change.
The same thing happened at NOAA: they’ve done so much great work in weather forecasting, advancing warnings, and improving predictions — work that people often overlook because it was drowned out by the constant, relentless focus on climate issues. When the cuts come down, they end up impacting areas that perhaps shouldn’t have been impacted.
The American public is waking up. (BTW Europe should be waking up given their natural gas in some countries is teetering on the brink.)
The fact is, it is highly likely that CO2 does very little compared to large natural forcings.
People like me have always believed that — if there is going to be an argument at all — it is over attribution. It is almost as if the scientific community has turned into a bunch of theologians arguing over how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.
One reason for this is that it gives people a lot of attention. In what I do, every single day the weather presents a challenge, so attention is built in.
Something is happening somewhere globally, and the weather you see today began long ago. But in climate discussions, the change is so gradual that somehow people feel compelled to make it sound urgent.
So, they blame weather events on a changing climate, even though similar situations have happened many times before (for example, as I showed in my last blog: warming over the pole associated with major Arctic outbreaks).
If it has happened many times before, why do you now decide the reason is different?
To push an agenda, some make things up or simply lie about them. Essentially, an entire cottage industry has been driven by an agenda not centered on a love of the weather or climate, but on what the weather or climate can do to advance that agenda — often with overkill.
Twenty people focused on climate?
How is that even possible, given that life today is better than ever on planet Earth?
The reality is that a lot of people who want to dismantle what has made this country great — and bring us down to the level of everyone else — decided climate was a perfect vehicle for it.
If you can convince people that you can control the weather and climate, that you can make life better by ensuring every day is perfectly sunny with rain only at night for three hours to water the garden, and that all social ills are somehow tied to man-made climate change, then you’ve got a strong case for tearing down the system that supposedly caused it.
Every media outlet and government agency that promoted this agenda — often with ulterior motives — finally got a reality check.
What’s a shame is the collateral damage.
For instance, I’m seeing some things at NOAA being limited that I don’t agree with — not that it matters, because no one cares what I think.
My sincere wish for the Washington Post is this: keep the Capital Weather Gang intact.
If they want to make arguments that something is due to climate, that’s fine — but weather has to come first. What they should actually do is bring me on to argue with them. Of course, that would probably lead to some brouhahas, and we wouldn’t want that.
The world is trapped in a digital Matrix, not unlike the one depicted in the iconic 1999 film (The Matrix) where Morpheus offers Neo a choice: take the blue pill and remain in a comforting illusion or the red pill and confront the unsettling truth. The blue pill, in our case, is the dominant narrative on climate change, peddled relentlessly by mainstream media, tech giants like Google, social media sites like YouTube and artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT. This narrative — man-made global warming, caused by fossil fuel use, is an imminent existential threat — has achieved near-total dominance, suffocating dissent and sidelining credible scientists who dare question it.
In a recent article entitled ‘The Devil’s Algorithm: Unplugging from the Climate Matrix’, I wrote:
The world is trapped in a digital Matrix, not unlike the one depicted in the iconic 1999 film (The Matrix) where Morpheus offers Neo a choice: take the blue pill and remain in a comforting illusion or the red pill and confront the unsettling truth.
The blue pill, in our case, is the dominant narrative on climate change, peddled relentlessly by mainstream media, tech giants like Google, social media sites like YouTube and artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT.
This narrative — man-made global warming, caused by fossil fuel use, is an imminent existential threat — has achieved near-total dominance, suffocating dissent and sidelining credible scientists who dare question it.
One such credible scientist is Dr Jules de Waart. Born in Amsterdam, he studied physical geography with climatology as a minor at university. In 1971, he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on the landscape development of southern France over the last 60 million years. In the 70s, he worked as an exploration geologist in Uganda and Congo for several years, then returned to the Netherlands and became a civil servant at the Ministry of Public Health and Environmental Hygiene. He was politically active, a member of the Labour Party and served as spokesman for the environment and for development cooperation.
He published Crisis or Hoax? Climate Change in Science, Media and Politics and, except for a short entry by Marcel Crok in the contrarian website Watts Up With That?, one looks for reviews of his book in the mainstream papers in vain. Quite unlike the book How To Avoid Climate Disaster by Bill Gates, who never earned a degree in the social or physical sciences and made his fortune developing software. Adulatory reviews of the Gates book abound in the media (here, here and here), despite the obvious shortcomings of the amateurish attempt by one of the world’s richest men.
Crisis or Hoax? arrives not as another pamphlet in the overcrowded literature of climate polemics, but as a long, reflective and unusually self-aware intervention by a scientist-politician. It is a book written less to persuade than to understand — and therein lies its ‘red pill’ strength. In an era where climate discourse has hardened into moral catechism, de Waart insists on returning to first principles: what science can say, what it cannot, how uncertainty is managed — or abused — and how politics and media have come to dominate ‘settled science’.
De Waart is engaged in the essential task of disentangling empirical climate science from the ideological superstructure erected atop it. His method differs from Steven Koonin’s book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters. Where Koonin writes as a physicist correcting public misrepresentation of data, de Waart writes as a reflective chronicler of a long institutional drift — away from falsification, scepticism and open debate, towards consensus-by-acclamation and fear-driven policy. While both are scientists, Koonin’s role was as a professional science advisor as under- secretary for science under the Obama administration, whereas de Waart became a politician himself.
A book about climate — and about science itself
Crisis or Hoax? is expansive, almost encyclopaedic. It is divided into three broad parts: the first situates the modern warming period within geological and historical context; the second surveys the scientific foundations of climatology and related disciplines; and the third turns to climate policy in what de Waart calls the “Modern Warm Period”. This architecture mirrors the author’s core contention: that climate change cannot be understood in isolation from deep time, from the philosophy of science or from the political institutions that mediate knowledge into policy.
What distinguishes the book is not merely its scepticism toward the IPCC’s claims, but its sustained inquiry into why dissent has become taboo. De Waart is explicit that scepticism does not mean denial. He accepts recent warming. He disputes its attribution, magnitude and projected harms. Above all, he rejects the extraordinary policy certainties claimed on the back of probabilistic models and contested assumptions. In this sense, the book stands squarely in the tradition of Koonin’s Unsettled, which similarly documented how assessment reports, media headlines and political rhetoric progressively distort the underlying science.
But de Waart goes further back than Koonin, both intellectually and historically. He draws on the Royal Society’s founding motto Nullius in verba — take nobody’s word for it – to frame his argument: science advances not by authority or consensus, but by doubt, replication and falsification. The climate debate, he argues, has inverted this ethic. Consensus is treated not as a provisional sociological outcome, but as proof itself. Doubt is re-described as disinformation. Scepticism becomes heresy.
Alarmists, sceptics and the missing middle
One of the book’s most valuable contributions is its refusal to caricature. De Waart describes both “alarmists” and “sceptics” as genuine scientists, often separated less by data than by priors, incentives and institutional pressures. His de-bunking of the so-called ‘97% consensus‘is measured but devastating. He dissects its methodological origins, its rhetorical uses and its near-total irrelevance to the actual scientific questions at stake — how much warming, driven by what causes, at what cost and with what human consequences.
Here the book resonates strongly with my earlier review of Koonin’s work, where the central indictment is not climate science per se but its politicised communication. Koonin showed how the IPCC’s own reports — when read carefully — undercut the apocalyptic headlines they inspire primarily through the IPCC’s politically-approved ‘Summary for Policy Makers‘(SPM) as amplified by the mainstream media’s alarmist soundbites. De Waart reinforces this point repeatedly, noting the IPCC’s Working Group reports that use careful language of likelihoods and confidence intervals. This is contrasted with the absolutist pronouncements of the SPR, politicians, UN officials and their stenographers in the mainstream media. The result is a widening credibility gap that erodes public trust not only in climate science but in science itself.
The tragedy, as de Waart sees it, is the disappearance of the middle ground: those uncomfortable with alarmism yet remaining to be convinced by radical scepticism. It is for this audience that the book is written. His tone is calm, occasionally weary, never shrill. He does not promise revelation or salvation. He promises context.
Models, media and the manufacture of fear
A recurring theme is the over-reliance on climate models — tools that are indispensable for hypothesis-testing, yet dangerously misused when converted into policy oracles. De Waart echoes a critique familiar from the sceptical literature: models ‘tuned’ arbitrarily to reproduce past temperature trends do not thereby acquire predictive authority over complex, multi-decadal systems. Their uncertainties compound, their outputs diverge wildly, and yet policy is increasingly framed as if these projections were engineering tolerances rather than speculative scenarios.
The media’s role in amplifying worst-case storylines receives sustained scrutiny. Extreme weather attribution as a basis for climate litigation, image-driven shock narratives and the uncritical repetition of activist claims all serve to short-circuit rational debate. The result, de Waart argues, is not informed consent but climate anxiety — particularly among the young — used to legitimise policies whose economic and social costs are rarely examined with rigour.
This analysis complements and in some ways deepens the criticism I levelled at Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Gates, for all his technocratic optimism, largely sidestepped empirical evidence from real-world energy transitions — Germany, California, the UK — where costs, instability and deindustrialisation have been anything but trivial. De Waart is candid: climate policy, as currently designed, risks becoming more disruptive than the climatic changes it seeks to avert.
Science, politics and the ‘double ethical bind’
Perhaps the most striking section of the book is de Waart’s discussion of Stephen Schneider’s infamous ‘double ethical bind‘ otherwise known as the ‘noble lie‘- the claim that scientists may need to exaggerate risks to mobilise public action. De Waart treats this not as a marginal curiosity but as a moral faultline. Once persuasion supplThis article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/02/05/this-book-by-a-dissenting-climate-scientist-is-the-perfect-red-pill-for-the-curious/ants truth-seeking, science forfeits its authority. Fear may win short-term compliance, but it corrodes the foundations upon which democratic legitimacy rests. The need for an objective weighing of costs and benefits for public policy formulation by politicians is thus dangerously obviated.
This argument aligns closely with Alex Epstein’s critique of what he calls the “anti-human” narrative of environmentalism. Epstein’s moral framework puts the focus on human flourishing, energy abundance and resilience. De Waart is less overtly philosophical, but the convergence is unmistakable: policies that impoverish societies in the name of speculative future harms violate both empirical prudence and moral proportionality.
Strengths — and limits
Crisis or Hoax? is not a book for the impatient. It repeats itself at times, it ranges widely and it assumes a reader willing to follow long chains of argument. Those seeking a polemical knockout blow will not find it here. What they will find is something rarer: an honest attempt to restore intellectual hygiene to a debate poisoned by moral grandstanding.
If there is a weakness, it lies perhaps in the book’s very moderation. De Waart documents censorship, career risks and institutional bias, but stops short of a full political economy of climate science — the funding incentives, regulatory capture and rent-seeking dynamics that increasingly shape research agendas. Others such as Tim Ball have ventured further down that path. Yet de Waart’s restraint is also his credibility.
The Good Red Piller
To ‘red pill’ someone is to set him or her free from the manufactured climate consensus, to be open to contrarian views and, in the process, to restore science to its proper place as a field of sceptical inquiry, not ideology. Jules de Waart has written a serious, humane and necessary ‘red- pilling’ book. It belongs alongside Koonin’s Unsettled and Epstein’s Fossil Future as part of a growing counter-literature that does not deny the climate changes but refuses to surrender science to ideology. In reminding us that uncertainty is not a bug but a feature of genuine inquiry, Crisis or Hoax? performs a service not only to the climate debate, but to the Enlightenment tradition itself.
At a time when dissent is pathologised and consensus fetishised, de Waart’s quiet insistence on thinking — slowly, critically, independently — may prove to be the most radical gesture of all.
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