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.
Al Jazeera claims to have seen a leaked memo detailing the USA’s “strong objections” to Vanuatu’s actions. But there is a lot more to this story.
US pressures Vanuatu at UN over ICJ’s landmark climate change ruling
Cable seen by Al Jazeera says the US ‘strongly objects’ to the island nation seeking support for ICJ’s landmark climate ruling.
By Lyndal Rowlands and News Agencies Published On 14 Feb 202614 Feb 2026
A US State Department cable seen by Al Jazeera on Saturday says that the Trump administration “strongly objects” to the proposed resolution being circulated by the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu in support of last year’s ruling by the ICJ – the UN’s top court.
“We are strongly urging Vanuatu to immediately withdraw its draft resolution and cease attempting to wield the Court’s Advisory Opinion as a basis for creating an avenue to pursue any misguided claims of international legal obligations,” a copy of the cable seen by Al Jazeera states.
Louis Charbonneau, Human Rights Watch’s director at the UN, urged support for Vanuatu’s draft resolution on Friday, saying “governments should live up to their obligation” to protect human rights around the world by protecting the environment.
“Responsible governments shouldn’t allow themselves to be bullied by those that reject the global scientific consensus and continue to support reliance on harmful fossil fuels,” he said.
Vanuatu has one of the nicest cultures of any place I’ve ever visited, especially outside the capital Port Vila. My favourite place was Port Luganville. I decided to walk back into town from my cruise, when a tour operator who had just finished dropping everyone off at the cruise liner asked if I wanted a lift. I said “sure, thanks”, then asked them where the best steak restaurant was. They took me to a place where for US $3 I had one of the best steaks I’ve ever eaten – raising beef cattle is big business in Vanuatu. The tour operators who gave me a lift, I offered to buy them lunch or a beer, to say thank you for showing me the restaurant, they said, “sorry, we’ve got to get back to work”. That was my lasting impression of Luganville – tropical paradise, no hustle, people dressed in rags waving and smiling from across the street, no panhandlers, and lots of kindness.
Vanuatu’s capital city Port Vila is faster paced. You have to be more careful in Port Vila. Like most poor nations, in Vanuatu you are most likely to get into trouble in the capital city. But even so the crime risk in most of Port Vila is nothing like the scale of crime risk you face in cities like Fiji’s Suva or Phillipines Manila.
Sadly no place is perfect. In Vanuatu, some of the people nobody wants in their village leave and become politicians.
The locals I spoke to hate their politicians, but in a place like Vanuatu, there’s not a lot an ordinary person can do to stop questionable use of public funds. A taxi driver who took me on a tour around Port Vila, pointing out the sites, described the parliament building as “corruption house number one”. Then he pointed to a large, under-utilised convention center built with Chinese money and said “corruption house number two”.
But I doubt Vanuatu will back off from pursuing climate claims against the USA, no matter how much ICJ climate court action offends the USA or upsets the Vanuatu people. The Vanuatu government is too desperate for cash, and are utterly desperate to keep their Chinese creditors happy.
Why would China lend so much money to a place which obviously can’t pay them back? Why would China want a small island nation under their thumb, a place so mired in debt they stay afloat only by the generosity of their Chinese creditors?
Only the Chinese know what they are thinking when they lent Vanuatu all that money, but it’s interesting that not all the infrastructure loans were wasted. That Luganville port my cruise liner docked at – a surprisingly good port for such as low income place. For some reason when Vanuatu asked the Chinese to build a civilian port for the tourist industry, the Chinese instead built a military grade deep water port of thick reinforced concrete, large enough for warships. I’m sure that was all just some kind of misunderstanding, nothing to do with Espiritu Santo, the island where the city of Luganville is, being a mountainous place with lots of rugged defensible terrain, a mere 1200 miles from the North East coast of Australia. I’m sure its also just a coincidence that Australia recently reinforced a major combined army and air force base in Townsville, close to the shortest sea route between Luganville and the Australian coast.
If you do visit Vanuatu, and you will have a wonderful time if you do, you still need to take precautions. Make sure you purchase top quality holiday health insurance. Vanuatu’s medical system is a little basic. Seek medical advice before you travel. If you have any serious health problems you’ll probably need a medivac to Brisbane or Singapore. Bring some Malaria pills, and ensure you have all the usual vaccinations for visiting such places.
Vanuatu is a lovely place to visit with a laid-back friendly culture, by far my favourite Pacific Island holiday destination. But one area where corners have been cut due to public cash shortages is mosquito spraying.
Twenty years after Al Gore’s apocalyptic movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Trump administration has put the final nail in the coffin of the lie that scared a generation into believing the planet was about to explode in flames if they kept using fossil fuels.
Former Vice President Al Gore during the Global Action Climate Summit Friday, Sept. 14, 2018, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
Twenty years after Al Gore’s apocalyptic movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Trump administration has put the final nail in the coffin of the lie that scared a generation into believing the planet was about to explode in flames if they kept using fossil fuels.
In what the White House calls “the largest deregulatory action in American history,” the EPA on Thursday will repeal an Obama-era proclamation that has mandated greenhouse-gas regulations for 17 years,
The 2009 “endangerment finding” has been the primary climate handbrake on American industry, forming the legal justification for increasingly punitive greenhouse-gas regulations.
Rescinding it would “save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week, with the EPA projecting an average saving of $2,400 per vehicle and further savings on farm machinery, soon to be freed from the complex extra circuitry required to restrict emissions.
Yay! It’s about time that common sense returned to energy policy.
During the recent bone-chilling winter storm that hit 200 million Americans across more than 35 states, it wasn’t wind and solar that kept the lights on but fossil fuels.
Fueling US prosperity
According to the Florida Municipal Power Agency, 90% of power generation in the country at the height of the storm was natural gas, coal, nuclear or oil.
Cheap, abundant energy fueled America’s prosperity, but charlatans citing pseudoscience have conspired to send us back to the dark ages with hyperbolic predictions that keep falling apart.
As we keep sailing past the various doomsday deadlines set by climate shucksters from Gore to Greta Thunberg, the public has been waking up to the hoax.
A Gallup poll found in 2024 only 2 percent of Americans cite climate change or the environment as their main concern.
It’s telling that green activists have been relatively silent in the face of a full-scale assault by Trump and his Cabinet on climate shibboleths the past year. He lauded EPA administrator Lee Zeldin and his rapid-fire deregulation moves as the administration’s “secret weapon” in his war against the “war on coal.”
“Biden and the radical left wanted to abolish coal,” Trump told the assembled group of coal miners in hard hats and hi-vis vests in the East Room.
“They did everything they could . . . but on Day 1 of this administration I ended the war on coal. We terminated the green new scam and we withdrew from the unfair, one-sided Paris climate deal.”
He also boasted that he has saved 74 coal fired power plants from extinction and announced that the Tennessee Valley Authority has just taken two coal plants off the chopping board.
Meanwhile, buoyed by falling electricity prices, the first American aluminum smelter in 50 years is now slated to be built in Oklahoma.
Net-zero policies adopted by in Europe, Canada and Australia, with their blind reliance on wind and solar, have failed. Add the huge new demand for power by data processing centers underpinning artificial intelligence, and the climate fiction has become impossible to sustain.
Now, policymakers and powerful influencers are hoping they can sidle away from the disastrous decisions they forced on us with false pretenses.
Climate activism out
Billionaire activistBill Gates has renounced climate alarm, declaring quietly last October that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and “the global temperature doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of people’s lives.”
Thank you, Captain Obvious. Maybe there are more pressing problems in the world that we could more usefully spend his money to solve.
On Wall Street, ESG (environment, social and government) stocks have fallen out of favor.
Public disillusionment is happening as the underpinnings of the climate hoax have collapsed.
In congressional testimony last week Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pointed to the “monumental retraction” of Nature magazine’s infamous paper on “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change” which claimed the cost of global warming would be $38 trillion per year by 2049. It was retracted two months ago because, Nature admitted, the errors were “too substantial for a correction.”
Bessent declared that the repudiation of the influential economic modeling “laid bare the radical left’s apocalyptic hyperbole on climate change . . .
“This fatally fraught paper, with errors far too substantial for correction, has been frequently used and abused to justify bad policymaking around the world, undermining both energy abundance and better living standards.”
These days, when Energy Secretary Chris Wright meets his European and Australian counterparts behind closed doors, they confide to him that he “may be right on the data,” but the public still “feels” climate alarm is real.
As he points out, that’s because they’ve been lied to for a quarter of a century. The truth hurts, but it’s better than the alternative.
The story reflects deep ideological divides: The Telegraph views any post-Brexit alignment as regression, while the government frames it as forward-looking pragmatism. As of mid-February 2026, it’s a live political flashpoint but not yet a signed agreement.
Social media (e.g., Facebook, X): Users and commentators called it a “disaster for the UK,” with posts accusing Starmer of economic self-harm and vassalage to the EU.
The story reflects deep ideological divides: The Telegraph views any post-Brexit alignment as regression, while the government frames it as forward-looking pragmatism. As of mid-February 2026, it’s a live political flashpoint but not yet a signed agreement.
Social media (e.g., Facebook, X): Users and commentators called it a “disaster for the UK,” with posts accusing Starmer of economic self-harm and vassalage to the EU.
‘Dynamic alignment’ of UK law with EU rules on promotion of renewable energy will require country to decarbonise rapidly
Sir Keir Starmer has drawn up plans under which the UK will ramp up its net zero targets and cede control over its energy policy as part of closer alignment with Brussels. The Telegraph has the story.
A memorandum, published by the Cabinet Office earlier this month, spells out the price that the UK is willing to pay to reset relations with Europe.
This includes a “dynamic alignment” of British law with EU rules on “the promotion of renewable energy”, which could require the UK to decarbonise – not just electricity, but also heating and transport, rapidly.
In practice this could see net zero targets doubled, potentially leading to draconian measures such as reducing meat consumption and restrictions on flying, wood fires and driving.
In a speech on Saturday, Sir Keir said Britain must align itself more closely to the EU single market and called for “deeper economic integration” with the bloc.
He suggested closer economic alignment could happen as soon as this year, adding that the UK needed to go further on closer relations with the EU in other sectors, including defence. The Conservatives accused Labour of a “Brexit betrayal”, saying the deal would “reduce growth and make Britain poorer”.
Several Democrats framed the Trump administration’s repeal of a cornerstone climate regulation on Thursday as a move that will allow pollution to sweep the nation.
Several Democrats framed the Trump administration’s repeal of a cornerstone climate regulation on Thursday as a move that will allow pollution to sweep the nation.
The Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined Thursday that the Obama-era regulation known as the Endangerment Finding extended beyond congressional authority. President Donald Trump announced that repealing the finding amounted to the “largest deregulatory action in American history,” and noted that the action is expected to save Americans on new vehicle costs and other related
Former President Barack Obama said on Thursday in response that without the EPA holding the ability to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, “we’ll be less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change — all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money.”
Several more Democrats that have either supported or enacted harsh climate regulations allowed by the finding aired their grievances on social media following the announcement, including Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, former Vice President Al Gore, Democratic Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, former Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, among others.
Newsom declared that California would soon “fight this lawless action in court.”
Donald Trump's administration is falsely claiming that greenhouse gases are not a threat to public health — breaking the law to once again grovel to the oil industry.
Notably, Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced on Thursday that the finding was used to allow a de facto national electric vehicle (EV) mandate, led by California. After congress passed multiple resolutions in 2025, Trump officially dismantled the de facto EV mandate on June 12.
The Trump Administration is once again trying to deny science and reality – this time, by throwing out the well-established research connecting the climate crisis to public health.
While the Trump Administration can try to ignore the climate crisis, it’s painfully clear that the…
Gore has a history of citing climate change proclamations that were later shown to be false, Fox News notes. The former vice president became a prominent public voice on the issue, especially after his failed 2000 presidential run and the release of the influential 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which featured Gore’s views on climate change.
This shameful abdication—an economic, moral, and political failure—will harm Americans’ health, homes, and economic well-being.
It ignores scientific fact and common-sense observations to serve big political donors. https://t.co/xEpUJk1Haf
The Trump EPA has abandoned its duty to protect the American people from greenhouse gas pollution and climate change devastation.
As climate change drives up insurance premiums, grocery prices, energy costs, and health care spending, American families will be left holding the… pic.twitter.com/971mA54CGh
🚨 This is another win for Big Oil and other big polluters at the expense of everyone else.
Instead of giving polluters a free ride, we should pass my Polluters Pay bill to make them — not all of us — pay the bill for the huge amount of damage they’ve caused.… pic.twitter.com/9gOW6eFObC
The president is overruling science to eliminate measures that protect us from pollution and environmental damage, mainly to benefit multinational corporations that have thrown money at his campaign, ballroom, and family.
The Trump EPA estimated that repealing the finding would save American taxpayers over $1 trillion dollars. Several energy policy experts and agency insiders previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation the finding was politicized, relied on “cherry-picked data” and that its elimination will benefit consumer choice.
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While the world’s self-appointed guardians of the thermostat lectured on the moral imperative of lowering living standards, they turned the sky above Davos into a parking lot for ultra-luxurious aviation.
While the world’s self-appointed guardians of the thermostat lectured on the moral imperative of lowering living standards, they turned the sky above Davos into a parking lot for ultra-luxurious aviation.
Reports from the World Economic Forum (WEF) revealed a grotesque spectacle of consumption that would make a Roman emperor blush. The globe’s most powerful individuals gathered to discuss global challenges while incinerating the Swiss atmosphere with exhaust emissions that dwarfed the lifetime output of entire communities.
Data indicate that for every four attendees discussing the “existential threat” of “carbon” emissions, one private jet descended upon the scene. In a display of indifference that belied the environmental concern of conference participants, the number of private flights registered at surrounding airports spiked by 10% compared to the traffic seen in 2024 and 2025.
Nearly 20% of these aircraft departed from France, 13% from the United Kingdom and 12% from Germany. These are the very nations whose governments have spent the last decade deindustrializing economies and forcing citizens into energy poverty under the pretense of climate leadership.
The United Kingdom currently faces some of the highest electricity prices in Europe, and Germany is not far behind. They have forced a transition to unreliable wind and solar energy, justified by a metric known as the Levelized Cost of Energy. This index is one of the great deceptions of the modern age. It claims renewables are the “cheapest” form of power by isolating the cost of generation while ignoring the trillions required for backup batteries, grid expansions and fossil fuel plants that must run when the sun and wind refuse to do their part.
This misleading pricing model is used to convince consumers that skyrocketing utility bills are a necessary sacrifice. The Davos crowd demands you carpool to work yet refuses to plane-pool to save the planet.
The global elite seek to normalize a two-tiered energy system: Affordable, reliable, conventional energy for themselves, delivered via private jets and maintained through their personal infrastructure. Expensive, intermittent renewable energy for everyone else, sold on the basis of manipulated pricing indices and false accounting.
If the climate emergency were real in the way described – a time bomb threatening human extinction – would these leaders pack 3,000 people into hundreds of separate jets? Their behavior proves they do not believe their own rhetoric. They know the climate is not collapsing. They know CO2 is not a poison.
The ugliest face of the climate agenda is eco-imperialism. A single flight from New York to Davos may emit more carbon dioxide than an entire village in sub-Saharan Africa over a period of decades. Yet the Davos narrative portrays the development of African fossil fuels as a crime against nature.
Fortunately, the United States has managed to avoid the full brunt of this European-style suicide pact. Despite the aggressive push for a Green New Deal in the early 2020s, the current administration has rightly kept this industry-destroying policy at bay.
We must credit the U.S. Department of Energy for finally acknowledging what honest science has shown for years: There is no basis for class warfare disguised as climate policy. The current leadership has recognized that energy security is national security. By rejecting the medieval mindset that equates suffering with virtue, the U.S. has maintained its status as an energy superpower.
Let me be clear: I want our policymakers and the ultra-rich – and every person aspiring to be so – to use private jets. The technology is a triumph of engineering and efficiency, saving time in advancing diplomacy and driving economic activity.
The problem is not the machine; the problem is the message.
We do not need to ban private jets; we need to reject efforts to shackle the aspirations of the common man. We need to demand the same energy abundance for the single mother in Ohio and the farmer in India that a CEO in Davos enjoys.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.
The recent harsh winter weather across much of North America (especially the eastern and central U.S. and Canada) in late January through mid-February 2026 has brought record cold, heavy snow, ice storms, and dangerous wind chills.
The recent harsh winter weather across much of North America (especially the eastern and central U.S. and Canada) in late January through mid-February 2026 has brought record cold, heavy snow, ice storms, and dangerous wind chills.
Fernando del Pino Calvo- Sotelo’s article “Cold, rain, snow: climate change?” (originally published in Spanish as “Frío, lluvia, nieve: ¿cambio climático?” on February 9, 2026, on his blog fpcs.es) directly tackles the very question: what do episodes of cold, rain, and snow actually reveal about climate change claims?
Climate propagandists are worried. Indeed, the preferred weather conditions for climate propaganda are heat and drought, and since the end of December we have had cold weather and huge amounts of rain. In fact, in mainland Spain, January has been the rainiest in the last 25 years, and many reservoirs have ended the month at 100% capacity. We have definitely left the drought behind, the beginning and end of which, incidentally, the Spanish Meteorological Agency (AEMET) was unable to predict.
We should learn three lessons from this fact. The first is the unreliability of weather forecasts beyond a time horizon of a few days. A well-kept secret is that science is still in its infancy in its understanding of the climate, a nonlinear, complex, and chaotic system. Therefore, meteorologists have no way of knowing with any degree of certainty what will happen this coming spring, or next year, let alone in 2100. They operate in an environment of enormous uncertainty and base their seasonal forecasts on factors that are only partially explanatory, such as ENSO.
Once again, the AEMET
Hence the probabilistic approximations obtained after laborious calculations—that is, by eye—such as that made by the AEMET when it predicted that there was a 60% chance of a warmer-than-normal winter. Such prediction has earned much criticism, tempered by the fierce defense of the Agency systematically carried out by fact-checkers and the left-wing media (almost all), not surprisingly, since AEMET is the main authority for promoting the climate agenda.
In reality, AEMET’s huge mistake lies in not having been able to predict the enormous volume of rainfall recorded in January. In fact, criticism of its temperature forecast distracts attention from this point and is also premature (and certainly naïf, since AEMET holds the monopoly in calculating Spain’s temperature). Indeed, the average temperature for the meteorological winter in Spain is 6.6ºC, so for it to be a “warmer than normal” winter, it would only need to be a few tenths of a degree above that temperature. If we accept that January temperatures were normal, as the AEMET seems to have suggested, for its winter prediction to be wrong February will have to be colder than normal (below the 40th percentile), which is statistically less likely than the opposite scenario. Hence, the Agency is relying on February’s temperature measurements to restore its reputation, or rather, on the statistical estimates that temperature calculations have become, since, following its recent methodological change, most of the data points do not come from direct thermometer measurements, but from interpolations on small grids using multiple regression models[1].
The second lesson we must remember is that the great climate threat that should concern us is the extreme cold typical of Ice Ages, not the milder temperatures caused by the slight warming we have fortunately been experiencing since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-19th century. Heat is synonymous with life, and cold is synonymous with death. That is why birds migrate to warmer areas in winter, and citizens of central and northern Europe come on vacation to Spain, and not the other way around.
The final lesson to be learned is that we must be on guard against the relentless, Soviet-style, climate propaganda bombardment. Indeed, if this early winter had been warm and dry instead of freezing and rainy, climate propaganda would have immediately blamed it on climate change. Well, it is just as ridiculous and unscientific to extrapolate a cold, rainy, and snowy month and link it to supposed global cooling as it is to link every heat wave, every drought, or every particularly warm season to global warming. Please remember this the next time climate activists—starting with the AEMET—turn mere local, temporary, and irrelevant weather phenomena into irrefutable evidence of global climate change.
Prophets of doom
For the prophets of climate doom, the bad news keeps piling up, as Bill Gates now claims that “although climate change will have serious consequences (…), people will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future”[2]. After writing a book a few years ago with the alarming title How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, his change of tone (or opportunistic shift) has coincided with the erosion of apocalyptic projections—discredited time and again by observed data—and, above all, with the political change that has taken place in the US, a country that has decided to abandon, and therefore stop funding, all kinds of environmental organizations, including the UN’s IPCC[3].
We must be aware that effective climate propaganda blames climate change for all kinds of phenomena, even those of an opposite nature.
That is precisely why “global warming” came to be called “climate change,” a less restrictive concept that admits everything under its umbrella. This is why those who make a living from the climate narrative try to explain that global warming is to blame for the heat, but also for the cold; for torrential rain, but also for drought; for total calm, but also for gale-force winds. However, although atmospheric physics is sometimes counterintuitive, I trust that common sense tells you, dear reader, that it is usually difficult for the same factor to cause completely opposite results. If not, be careful the next time you put ice in your drink, lest it heat up, or take an antipyretic, lest it raise your fever instead of lowering it.
Contrary to what the propaganda claims, global warming has not yet caused any increase in climate instability or in the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events, as the IPCC itself acknowledges[4]. But let’s imagine for a moment that it did, as its propagandists claim: should we then conclude that global cooling would bring great climate stability? This does not seem to be the case. In fact, the Little Ice Age (13th-19th centuries) was a period of “great climatic instability” that led to severe grain crop failures and, consequently, famines[5]. On the contrary, increased CO2 and milder temperatures favor plant growth. Thus, cereal crop yields (measured in tons per cultivated hectare) have only grown in recent decades and are now double what they were 60 years ago, which is great news for feeding a growing world population[6]. Bless CO2.
Global drop in temperatures
January’s cold, rain, and snow have not been limited to Spain, but have been a global phenomenon in the northern hemisphere. Anecdotally, it is worth mentioning that on the night of Epiphany, 30 cm of snow fell on the beaches of the French Atlantic coast[7], that in the US the cold and snow storm at the end of January rivaled the record set the previous winter[8], and that on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in the far east of Russia, there was unprecedented snowfall[9].
But beyond the anecdotal nature of experiencing a cold, rainy, and snowy month, the fact is that global temperatures have been falling for two years, which means that the unusual peak observed in 2023-2025—clearly exogenous and circumstantial in nature, due to its extreme and sudden nature—is subsiding in a typical example of reversion to the mean. Do not forget that in 2023, 42% of the planet’s surface experienced temperatures two standard deviations above average. In this regard, the contrast between the countless news reports publicizing the sudden warming of those years and the deathly silence that has accompanied the subsequent cooling, just as sudden but not fitting into the official narrative, is quite telling.
As I wrote at the time, no serious scientist suggested the sudden rise in temperatures in 2023-2025 was due to anthropogenic forcing (unlike the AEMET). Some linked it to a strong El Niño phenomenon; others to a completely unexplained very low global cloud cover, as science still struggles with moist convection and therefore does not know the factors that control the planet’s cloudiness (how could climate models not fail?). Finally, other scientists pointed to the massive eruption of the Hunga-Tonga underwater volcano, which was one of the largest geological phenomena of the last century, releasing 150 Mt of water vapor, the most important greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere at once[10].
Therefore, it is possible that the recent and sudden cooling of the Earth has been associated with La Niña, a phenomenon which, like so many others, is impossible to predict in duration and intensity except with comfortable probability ranges that do not usually stray far from equiprobability (to protect the forecaster’s reputation). But it is also possible that the main factor explaining the recent cooling has been the gradual disappearance of the temporary greenhouse effect caused by the Hunga-Tonga eruption[11]. Who knows?
As you can see in the graph below, since 1979—a particularly cold year, but the first in which there were satellites in space to measure temperature—it is estimated that the average temperature of the planet has increased at an imperceptible rate of 0.15°C per decade (yes, 15 hundredths of a degree per decade)[12]. You will agree with me that it takes a lot of fine-tuning to detect this centesimal increase in the temperature of an entire planet:
You will also notice that the planet’s temperature barely increased in the period 1980-1995 and remained very constant from 1998 to 2015, approximately, despite the constant increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. This latter episode was called “the hiatus”, although climate propaganda would later deny that such a term had ever been used. Really? In 2013, Nature magazine published an article entitled “The recent hiatus in global warming”[13], and the IPCC itself cited “the hiatus” 53 times in its Fifth Assessment Report (2013) and devoted a special chapter entitled “Climate models and the hiatus in global warming over the last 15 years”[14].
Long graphs
The above graph of satellite data is a very short graph, as climate change is usually measured in centuries or millennia. That is why I like to introduce the long graph that the IPCC included in its First Report, which shows the reconstruction of global temperatures over the last 10,000 and 1,000 years. In it, you can see that temperatures at the end of the 20th century were lower than or similar to those in the days when Fred Flintstone drove his log car, that is, when there was no industrialization or anthropogenic CO2[15]:
Good news
On the other hand, some of my Canadian friends who are concerned about climate change will have been reassured by the recent publication of their country’s summer temperature series since 1900, which shows a gentle cyclicality with no clear trend, equating temperatures at the beginning of the 21st century with those experienced 100 years ago, when CO2 levels were supposedly “normal” (according to climate propaganda nomenclature)[16]:
They will also be reassured to know that poor Greta’s tearful denunciation at the UN of a supposed mass extinction of species because of climate change was the result of hysteria rather than science. In fact, a recent study published by the Royal Society concludes that the rate of species extinction—irrelevant in any case from a relative point of view—has decreased over the last 100 years[17]. Yes, you read that right: there are fewer species extinctions, which means that the biosphere (the system that encompasses all living beings on the planet) is doing wonderfully well with slightly warmer temperatures and a little more CO2, a source of life and food par excellence for plants.
We also have reassuring data regarding rising sea levels. A study published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering has compared the increases predicted for 2020 by the IPCC for a multitude of coastal locations around the globe with the actual measurements obtained at those locations. Its conclusion is categorical: “Approximately 95% of locations show no statistically significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise. Our research suggests that in the remaining 5% of locations, local non-climate phenomena are the plausible cause of accelerated sea level rise.” It concludes: “On average, the IPCC’s projected rate of rise is biased upward by approximately 2 mm per year compared to the observed rate”[18]. Given that the latest IPCC report projects a 4 mm/year increase until 2100 in its most plausible scenario, this means that its flawed models double the actual rise in sea levels. Don’t rush to sell your beach apartment.
Consensus or censorship?
Climate propaganda claims that there is almost complete consensus among the scientific community regarding the anthropogenic origin of global warming and the apocalyptic consequences attributed to it. This is patently false: what has happened is an asymmetrical media treatment of both sides of the debate and an aggressive communist or Orwellian-style censorship that has actively silenced the multitude of scientists who are skeptical and outraged by the political hijacking of science.
Such is the case of an editor of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, who allowed the publication of an article that would soon become the second most read article in the publication’s 83-year history. The article criticized the IPCC’s alarmism, never corroborated by empirical evidence, that is, it dared to commit blasphemy against the prevailing dogma with commendable clarity. Well, the editor was fired[19]. Please read the conclusions of this article carefully:
“The IPCC claims that extreme weather events are now worse than in the past, but observations do not support this claim. Some extreme weather events, such as the land area affected by extreme droughts, are decreasing rather than increasing (Lomborg, 2020). Globally, the incidence of hurricanes shows no significant trend (IPCC, 2013, p. 216; Lomborg, 2020). Observations also show no increase in damage or danger to humanity today due to extreme weather or global warming (Crok and May, 2023, pp. 140-161; Scafetta, 2024). Therefore, given that the current climate is possibly better than the pre-industrial climate and that we have not observed any increase in mortality from extreme weather events, we conclude that we can plan for adaptation to any future changes. Until a danger is identified, there is no need to eliminate the use of fossil fuels”[20].
For years, Washington politicians told the American people there was a carbon dioxide (CO2) “problem” so serious it justified rewriting our entire energy economy. They claimed CO2 was dangerous, labeled it an “endangerment,” and used that finding as a blank check for regulation, mandates, and subsidies.
For years, Washington politicians told the American people there was a carbon dioxide (CO2) “problem” so serious it justified rewriting our entire energy economy. They claimed CO2 was dangerous, labeled it an “endangerment,” and used that finding as a blank check for regulation, mandates, and subsidies.
Many of us warned that this wasn’t science… it was politics. Now, even the Environmental Protection Agency is backing away from that claim.
By repealing the so-called endangerment finding, the EPA has admitted what working Americans have known all along: CO2 was never the existential threat it was sold to be. This single regulatory reversal wipes out more than a trillion dollars in compliance costs and saves families thousands of dollars per vehicle.
But before taxpayers breathe a sigh of relief, we need to talk about the billions already wasted, and the billions more Washington still wants to spend.
CO2 makes up about 0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere. It is essential for photosynthesis and life itself. Plants depend on it. Crops require it. Throughout Earth’s history, life flourished when CO2 levels were far higher than today.
Yet politicians treated this trace, life-supporting gas as if it were toxic waste. And once you convince people there’s a “crisis,” the spending never stops.
Now comes the most dangerous and dishonest phase of the carbon agenda.
After telling Americans that CO2 is a menace, the same policymakers are asking taxpayers to fund massive carbon capture and underground sequestration projects, projects that would take a harmless, widely dispersed gas and turn it into a concentrated substance capable of killing people if it escapes.
Think about that. For decades, regulators told us their mission was to clean up environmental hazards, reduce risk, and protect public health. Now they want to create a new health and safety threat on purpose, inject it underground, and hope nothing goes wrong, all while sending the bill to taxpayers.
This is where the conversation always gets uncomfortable, because it exposes the truth.
Every time you hear a multi-billion-dollar energy company brag about how they are “lowering carbon” or “cleaning up emissions,” ask two simple questions:
Why?
And who’s paying?
Now we know the answers. There is no real carbon emergency. And you’re paying for it anyway.
If carbon capture and sequestration were truly safe, proven, and economically viable, it wouldn’t need massive government subsidies. It wouldn’t rely on tax credits, grants, and federal guarantees. Companies would fund it themselves, just like every other productive investment in a free market.
Instead, taxpayers are being forced to bankroll projects that compress CO2 into dangerous concentrations, transport it across communities, and inject it underground near farms, water supplies, and homes. Regulators admit monitoring systems are incomplete. Long-term liability is unclear. And once the CO2 is injected, the public, not the corporation, will be left holding the risk.
That isn’t environmental protection. That’s regulatory insanity.
We talk a lot these days about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. We talk about “DOGE-ing” government, doing away with bloated programs that don’t solve real problems. Carbon capture subsidies should be at the top of that list.
This is corporate welfare disguised as climate policy.
It is billions of taxpayer dollars spent to “solve” a problem politicians overstated, using technology that isn’t proven at scale, while creating new safety risks that didn’t previously exist. And it all happens while families struggle with higher energy bills, inflation, and an electric grid that is less reliable than it was a decade ago.
Meanwhile, the global picture hasn’t changed. The United States is told to cut emissions, while countries like China continue building coal plants at a staggering pace. Emissions aren’t reduced, they’re exported, along with jobs and energy security.
The EPA’s repeal of the endangerment finding is a step back toward honesty. It acknowledges that CO2 is not the villain it was made out to be.
Now policymakers need the courage to finish the job. That means ending the fear-based carbon narrative, stopping taxpayer handouts to politically favored corporations, and refusing to create new environmental and health risks in the name of virtue signaling.
Americans don’t need another green scheme. They need affordable, reliable energy, and a government that stops charging them to fix problems that never existed.
Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
Most people can tell you the worst car they’ve owned. For me, the award goes to the 1994 Saturn SL2. I got the car from my future brother- and sister-in-law in 2007 after my reliable Toyota Corolla (God rest her soul) finally died. They offered to give me the car, but I insisted on giving them a few hundred dollars.
Old car used as decoration and flower pot in a garden
There’s no shortage of awful vehicles produced in the 20th century. The Trabant, however, tops them all.
Most people can tell you the worst car they’ve owned. For me, the award goes to the 1994 Saturn SL2. I got the car from my future brother- and sister-in-law in 2007 after my reliable Toyota Corolla (God rest her soul) finally died. They offered to give me the car, but I insisted on giving them a few hundred dollars.
My Saturn’s only virtue was that it got great gas mileage, probably because it topped out at 77 mph (when it began to shake) and had as much acceleration as a rhinoceros after a Thanksgiving meal. Cramped and low-riding, it made you feel like you were driving a clown car or a big wheel. It was made of some cheap plastic-like substance.
The day my Saturn’s transmission went out, I was at my friend’s wedding, serving as a groomsman. We were leaving a bar to drive to the reception, but when we got in my car the engine wouldn’t turn. When the tow truck driver arrived, I thanked him and handed him the keys. I never saw the car again.
As bad as my Saturn was, it was not the worst car in history. In fact, my Saturn was a luxury car compared to the Worst Car Ever award-winner. That distinction goes to the Trabant, a dreadful vehicle produced from 1957 to 1990 by the former East German car manufacturer VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau.
A Long, Distinguished List
There’s no shortage of awful vehicles. The Ford Edsel, which debuted in 1955, was famously ugly. The Delorean is remembered fondly today because of Back to the Future, but it’s easy to forget that its poor design—it was notoriously heavy and had a weak engine—left its creator broken and bankrupt.
The Gremlin, a car produced by American Motors Corporation, a company that went belly up in the Reagan era, looked like it was designed for an actual gremlin; worse, it handled poorly and had lousy suspension. And let’s not forget Ford’s Pinto, whose engineering flaws included a combustible fuel tank that may have inspired this famous Fight Club scene and most definitely inspired this Top-Secretscene. (Sidebar: if you haven’t watched Top Secret, you’re missing out.)
The Trabant, however, tops them all.
The Trabant ‘Smoked Like an Iraqi Oil Fire’ and Cost a Year’s Wages
The smoke-belching Trabant, affectionately known as the “Trabi” to people who never had to drive one, debuted in East Germany in November 1957. Initially, the car was not a disaster, at least not entirely. In fact, it had some enviable attributes for its era. Its much-mocked duroplast body was an innovation at the time of its introduction. The vehicle’s front-wheel-drive transmission system and independent suspension were also modern advancements, one Trabant driver notes.
That, however, is where the vehicle’s virtues stop and its problems begin.
It wasn’t that the Trabant had a weak two-stroke engine, though it did. It wasn’t just that the Trabant was made with recycled waste (usually from wool or cotton), though it was. It wasn’t that Trabants topped out at 60 mph and “smoked like an Iraqi oil fire,” as one writer put it.
No, the Trabant’s biggest problem was that it never really improved. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the 1957 Trabant had no tachometer, no turn signal, no seat belts or fuel gauge, no trunk liner, and used an oil/gas mix. The fact that these basic amenities were still missing when Taylor Swift was born is a bit more surprising. Indeed, when the last Trabant was produced in 1989 it still topped out at about 60 mph, which it took 21 seconds to reach from a stop. The Aston Martin Virage, which debuted the same year, took 6.5 seconds.
Perhaps just as shocking is how much a Trabant cost. The P601 model, which hit production lines in 1963 and was the most heavily produced Trabant, was listed at 7,450 eastern marks by the state ($1,862 USD in 1963, $15,600 in 2019). The average monthly income of an East German in 1960 was 558 marks, which means a Trabant cost more than an entire year’s wages for a typical worker, and it was paid in advance.
Trabants, however, were actually even more expensive. Because of automobile scarcity, on the second-hand market, a used Trabant sold for more than double the price of a new one, says Eli Rubin, an associate professor of history at Western Michigan University. Why were people paying so much for such a janky vehicle?
East Germany’s other car, the Wartburg, a steel beast (well, critter, anyway) with twice the horsepower as a Trabant that went for thrice the price, was produced for export (and Party VIPs). Indeed, despite its few amenities and poor reliability, East Germans considered themselves lucky just to get a Trabant. The average waiting period was 10 years.
When the Wall Fell
Despite its many problems, a total of 2,818,547 Trabant 601s were produced—all of which became obsolete on November 9, 1989.
On that day, the Berlin Wall fell. With the grotesque scar that had marred Germany removed, the poor Trabant’s days were about over. Richard Leiby, a longtime editor at TheWashington Post who wrote a book on the unification of Germany, says with its puny engine and lack of pollution controls, the Trabant was “clearly inferior to just about any automobile manufactured in Europe.”
Trabants spewed four times as much pollution as typical European vehicles, which meant they did not meet emission standards in other European nations.
Many Trabants were sold for as little as a few marks. Others were simply given away or abandoned as families fled to Western Europe. One reason for this was that European nations didn’t want them. Trabants spewed four times as much pollution as typical European vehicles, the historian Victor Sebestyen notes in Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, which meant they did not meet emission standards in other European nations. But that didn’t stop thousands of Germans from using them to migrate westward on what some remember as “the Trabi Trail.” (In Czechoslovakia, the event was dubbed the Trabi Invasion.)
The Trabant’s Legacy
Despite being a dreadful automobile, quite possibly the worst ever produced on a mass scale, the Trabant holds an important place in history. It is the car that “gave Communism a bad name,” a vehicle so inferior to automobiles produced in Europe and America that few could deny the system’s failings. It became, in short, a joke.
And its memory lives on. On Saturday, the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, will host the 13th annual Parade of Trabants to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall. On L’Enfant Plaza, history buffs, car enthusiasts, and Trabant owners will gather to celebrate and marvel at some of the 33,000 Trabants still in existence today.
For decades we’ve been told a simple story: more carbon dioxide means higher global temperatures. That simplicity proved politically convincing and underpins the most expensive set of policies in modern history, covering Net Zero targets, taxes and vast subsidies to decarbonise industry, energy and transport within a generation. The world is effectively betting trillions that the temperature dial can be turned down by squeezing CO2 emissions.
For decades we’ve been told a simple story: more carbon dioxide means higher global temperatures. That simplicity proved politically convincing and underpins the most expensive set of policies in modern history, covering Net Zero targets, taxes and vast subsidies to decarbonise industry, energy and transport within a generation. The world is effectively betting trillions that the temperature dial can be turned down by squeezing CO2 emissions.
But what if that core assumption is far less robust than advertised?
My answer came in an analysis published last month in Science of Climate Change that used my background as a finance academic the way a financial analyst would interrogate a market hypothesis. In finance, no matter how elegant a theory looks, you still test it against hard data. If the numbers don’t confirm the model, the model gives way, not the other way around…
The starting point is uncontroversial: since the 19th Century both CO2 and global temperatures have risen. The correlation is visually potent. But anyone who has worked with time series knows how deceptive such correlations can be. Ice-cream sales and shark attacks rise together in summer; that doesn’t make one the cause of the other. Two trending variables will often appear tightly linked even when the relationship is entirely coincidental.
Econometricians therefore strip out time trends and examine how annual changes relate to each other. Does each year’s increase in CO2 reliably produce a corresponding nudge in temperature? When we look at the data since reliable measurements began around 1960, the answer is awkward. CO2 has risen sharply, yet the rate of temperature change has not moved in lockstep. In fact, the annual changes diverge. If CO2 were the master control knob, you would expect accelerations in CO2 to march closely with accelerations in temperature. They don’t.
I stress-tested this across multiple temperature and CO2 datasets. The result was the same: the neat, linear linkage between CO2 levels and temperature weakens once you look beneath the headline trend. The famous correlation appears, at least in part, to be a statistical mirage.
Then comes causality. For CO2 to be the principal driver of warming, changes in CO2 must consistently lead changes in temperature. You can’t have the thermometer moving first. Yet simple regressions show no clear lead-lag pattern in the levels. And when we switch to annual changes, temperature movements often lead those in CO2, not the other way round. That should raise eyebrows.
In finance we talk about the “joint test problem”: you often can’t measure a key variable directly and end up assuming the very thing you are testing. Climate science runs straight into this. The quantity ‘anthropogenic warming’ cannot be observed; models infer it. But because those same models assume that solar and volcanic effects explain everything that isn’t CO2 and are tuned to match past temperatures, any conclusions risk circularity. The theory looks right because it was effectively built into the machinery from the beginning.
So, what does explain temperature movements in the data? My paper doesn’t claim a full alternative climate model, but it does identify three variables with strong and persistent statistical links to temperature: the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (a long-lasting pattern in North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures), atmospheric humidity and, interestingly, global cereal production. Regressions using both levels and annual changes show these variables have clearer, more stable relationships with temperature than CO2 does. This doesn’t ‘disprove’ CO2’s role; it simply shows that the empirical picture is far more complex than the official narrative suggests.
Concerns about spurious correlations and causal ambiguity have been raised before, but they receive little attention because the climate debate has become dominated by model-driven certainty. In most fields, relying almost entirely on internally calibrated models with limited independent empirical challenge would be treated as a recipe for groupthink. In climate policy it has become normal.
The practical implications are huge. Global policy is premised on a near-linear relationship between cumulative CO2 and temperature. But when the relationship is confronted with historical data it looks surprisingly fragile. Yet governments are pursuing decarbonisation on the assumption that this linearity is scientifically settled and operationally dependable. If it isn’t, then the promised temperature returns on emissions cuts may be much smaller than advertised, despite the economic and social costs.
Finance has a name for this: model risk. When a model drives trillion-dollar exposures, prudent institutions demand independent validation, stress-testing and transparency about uncertainty. Climate policy deserves at least the level of scrutiny applied on Wall Street.
A prudent approach would treat the dominant CO2 narrative as a leading hypothesis rather than revealed truth. That means diversifying policy: more emphasis on adaptation; more focus on resilient infrastructure; and greater use of ‘no-regrets’ measures that pass cost-benefit tests even if climate sensitivity to CO2 turns out to be lower or more complicated than today’s models suggest.
It is always tempting for policymakers to dismiss uncomfortable analysis, especially when so much political capital rests on a single storyline. But genuine risk management welcomes challenge. When a finance researcher can take publicly available climate data, apply standard analytical methods and find that the central claim of global policy doesn’t survive basic statistical scrutiny, it is not a sign of scientific heresy. It is a sign that we need more open debate, not less.
Data are stubborn things. They don’t bend to political necessity. And when real-world numbers begin to contradict the narrative, serious people – especially those spending other people’s money – ought to pay attention.
Dr Les Coleman is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne and author of eight books on investment, research, risk management and biography.
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