Day: September 3, 2026

Climate Majority Project: Scientists “Freaking Out”

Climate majority?

Only from polls where responders can claim to worry without having to pay for climate action–and not be told that their collective actions will not affect local or global climate for decades, if ever.

The pollsters might as well ask: “Do you want more or less extreme weather?” … “Do you want more or less safety?”

The fix is in.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“Say ‘enough’ to the United Nations/IPCC/COP process. Call off the CO2 fests. Shift from mitigation (fail) to adaptation. Demote government, promote realism and civil society. And practice social justice with the new imperative: First, do no harm. That starts and ends with energy prices–no climate premium please.”

The Climate Majority Project (CMP) is predicated on a shaky premise:

Most people sense that the planet is in deep trouble and want to do something. Welcome to the climate majority.

Climate majority? Only from polls where responders can claim to worry without having to pay for climate action–and not be told that their collective actions will not affect local or global climate for decades, if ever. The pollsters might as well ask: “Do you want more or less extreme weather?” … “Do you want more or less safety?” The fix is in.

CMP is dedicated to “effective, coordinated climate action by a broad-based coalition of citizens; from grassroots initiatives to high-level policy.”

Through grassroots and policy level organising with communities, schools [“Climate Courage Schools”] and businesses [“Regulate Us. Better.”], we are working to turn that silent majority into a self-aware one — one that is able to slow climate breakdown and prepare for the impacts that are already underway.

Freak Out?

The CMP recently stated that “Most climate scientists are quietly freaking out,”

A 2021 anonymous poll by Nature found that the vast majority of climate scientists don’t believe humanity will limit warming to 1.5°C. In fact, 60% expected temperatures to rise beyond 3.0°C — levels that mean a high risk of triggering “hothouse Earth” conditions. So it comes with no surprise that 82% of those same scientists expected to see catastrophic impacts to our civilisation in their own lifetimes. Yet almost none were saying so publicly.

Enter a new term, scientific reticence, “when being too cautious puts us at risk.”

This kind of silence has a name. James Hansen — the godfather of climate science — calls it “scientific reticence”: scientists’ tendency to hold back from stating their conclusions in full. There’s also a communication problem baked into scientific culture: researchers are trained to lead with uncertainty, even when the evidence is overwhelming. A finding with 90–95% confidence is remarkably strong but will often be communicated with ifs and buts and doubt – every caveat chips away at the message, and the public often walks away hearing cool uncertainty rather than alarm.

“Other people are waiting on scientists to take bold action on climate,” the Climate Majority Project continues.

That reticence has real consequences. Business leaders, policymakers, and civil servants often rely on scientific consensus to justify urgent action. When scientists won’t spell out how bad things truly are, it quietly removes the permission others feel they need to sound the alarm themselves.

Strange. The IPCC and mainstream media live off the “consensus” argument. And critics have responded that science is not consensus, and climate models are not science. Academic climate scientists are all-in with alarmism to demonstrate their importance as “experts” and to keep the government money flowing. Never mind Climategate or RCP 8.5. Just keep alarming and don’t dare get skeptical. The benefits of anthropogenic climate change? Don’t go there; let the skeptics do that and stick to the consensus meme.

Back to the upside down Climate Majority Project:

This matters more than it might seem. Research on climate communication consistently finds that powerful people respond strongly to direct, negative facts — more than to hopeful messaging. Frank, emotionally honest speech from scientists could itself become a tipping point, particularly when paired with visible public support for action.

Again, this seems opposite of the real world. The “negative facts” is the neo-Malthusian narrative since Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s. Doom fatigue set in a long time ago. The latest iteration–the European heat waves this summer–is not demonstrative because it is localized.

Gotta fundraise. Can’t be too negative. There is hope….

There are signs the taboo is lifting. Hansen was among the first prominent scientists to say plainly that mainstream climate action has failed. Since then, a Guardian poll of scientists, Bill McGuire’s book Hothouse Earth, and a petition signed by 1,500 climate scientists have all declared the 1.5°C target effectively dead.

Greater scientific openness could be a catalyst — for coalition-building, for mobilisation, and for giving people permission to speak honestly about what the evidence actually shows. If you are a scientist, or know a scientist, forward this message along. One of the positive things about silent majorities is that sharing messages such as this one can actually make a difference.

The Climate (non)Majority Project ends:

If you know a scientist, share this with them. One of the hopeful things about silent majorities is that the more we become aware of all the others who share our concerns, the more we can build the feeling of being part of a movement large enough to make a difference.

Or do the opposite. Say “enough” to the United Nations/IPCC/COP process. Call off the CO2 fests. Shift from mitigation (fail) to adaptation. Demote government, promote realism and civil society. And practice social justice with the new imperative: First, do no harm. That starts and ends with energy prices–no climate premium please.

Follow Science, New York Times, Coral’s Are Doing Well Amid Modest Climate Change

The New York Times (NYT) ran a story claiming climate change is threatening the survival of the world’s coral reefs. This is false. New coral colonies, adapted to warmer waters are being found with regularity and the largest coral reef in the world, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, as set records for growth and extent in recent years, confounding climate model predictions of decline.

From ClimateRealism

By H. Sterling Burnett

The New York Times (NYT) ran a story claiming climate change is threatening the survival of the world’s coral reefs. This is false. New coral colonies, adapted to warmer waters are being found with regularity and the largest coral reef in the world, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, as set records for growth and extent in recent years, confounding climate model predictions of decline.

In the story, “The World’s Coral Reefs Are Running Out of Time to Recover, Research Finds,” climate reporter, Quinn Glabicki, writes, “[c]oral reefs around the world, struggling as climate change drives more frequent and more intense marine heat waves, are running out of time for recovery, according to a sweeping new report on the state of the world’s corals published on Monday.

“The comprehensive global assessment … found that the world’s coral reefs had declined by 9.5 percent in the period from 2020 to 2024, compared with 1980 to 2009,” Glabicki continued. “The largest single-year coral decline on record, which affected 87 percent of reefs worldwide, occurred in 2024.”

Glabicki and the NYT’s fact checkers should have exercised a modicum of journalistic curiosity instead of reporting this study as if it were the final authoritative word on the state of the world’s corals. The 2023 through 2024 decline the story reported on represented one bad year of bleaching, but even the underlying report admits that bleaching does not per se equal coral death. Of the 8.9 percent of coral bleached, 6 percent had recovered in just one year, and based on past bleaching events, more coral might recover over time, resulting in possibly no net loss in coral during the sever 2023 to 2024 event. In fact, science hasn’t tracked coral extent for long, and hasn’t mapped all coral reefs, and types of coral, in existence.

Corals first developed on Earth during an explosion of life during the Cambrian period more than 540 million years ago when. At that time global temperatures, including ocean temperatures were warmer than today, and carbon dioxide concentrations were 10 to 30 times higher.

In fact, as discussed in Climate at a Glance: Coral Reefs, coral thrive in warm water, not cold water. As a result, the recent modest warming has allowed coral to expand their range poleward, while still thriving near the equator and the tropics.

Evidence, that is coral responses to past bleaching events tied to warming, also clearly shows that coral bleaching is not tantamount to coral death. Subsequent to previous strong El Niño induced recent bleaching events at the GBR, the coral reef repeatedly set new records for coral extent. That’s right, the coral not only recovered, but the coral colonies also seemingly adapted and expanded. This fact has been discussed in a number of previous Climate Realism posts, here, here, and here, for example.

In fact, warming seas are hardly the only and perhaps are not even the primary cause of bleaching. As discussed at Climate Realism, here and here, for example, inappropriate commercial fishing, terrestrial run-off and pollution from farms and urban development along the coasts, sedimentation, chemicals in some sun screens, and periods of rapidly cooling waters have all been linked to bleaching events and declines in local coral populations.

In recent years massive new and growing coral reefs have been discovered in places previously believed to be inhospitable to coral colonization. In a story titled “This huge coral reef has only just been discovered, and it’s undamaged by climate change,” CBC reported on the discovery of reef, deeper than most, suggesting there may be more unknown large reefs in oceans. CBC wrote:

Scientists have discovered a pristine, three-kilometre-long reef of giant rose-shaped corals off the coast of Tahiti, in waters of the southern Pacific Ocean thought to be deep enough to protect it from the bleaching effects of the warming ocean.

…

The reef off Tahiti lies in the “twilight zone” 30 to 120 metres below the surface where there is still enough light for coral to grow and reproduce. The discovery off Tahiti’s shores suggests there may be many more unknown large reefs in our oceans, given that only about 20 per cent of the entire seabed is mapped, according to UNESCO scientists.

“It also raises questions about how coral reefs become more resilient to climate change,” UNESCO’s head of marine policy, Julian Barbiere, told Reuters.

And that’s just one recent coral discovery. In 2022, research reported in a Phys.org story titled “Half a trillion corals: World-first coral count prompts rethink of extinction risks,” found that number of corals in the Pacific Ocean alone exceed half a trillion with likely trillions more globally.

The scientists involved in the research say the sheer number of corals and coral species means the risk of extinction due to climate change is vastly lower than previously claimed.

“In the Pacific, we estimate there are roughly half a trillion corals,’ said the study lead author, Dr. Andy Dietzel from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University,” writes Phys.org. “This is about the same number of trees in the Amazon, or birds in the world.

“The findings suggest that while a local loss of coral can be devastating to coral reefs, the global extinction risk of most coral species is lower than previously estimated,” Deitzel continued.

It is unclear if the trillions of corals and newly discovered reefs disclosed in those two recent discoveries were included in the sampling conducted by the authors of the report discussed by NYT, but it is doubtful. The study purports to examine long-known, long-term coral reef systems. Throwing the newly discovered trillions of corals in a study that was already ongoing at the time of discovery would have necessarily resulted in disclosing an increase in coral, not the decrease reported.

In fact, just two weeks before the NYT went on its coral decline hype, the Guardian, a well-known liberal paper which covers climate change extensively and alarmingly, ran a story, titled, “The Great Barrier Reef isn’t dead yet. According to News Corp that makes climate science a ‘pseudo-religion,’” discussing both a news story and a commentary published in The Australian. The news report and the commentary discuss the fact that extensive surveys of the world’s largest coral reef, The Great Barrier Reef (GBR), reveal that coral cover has rebounded to near-record levels across all regions following a recent mass bleaching event, with research and data indicating that coral reef system maintains resilience and is able to bounce back from disturbance.

Twenty-twenty six’s good news about the GBR followed closely on three straight years of record setting extent of the GBR. (see the figure, below).

The GBR’s success is due to the ability of the corals which make it up to adapt and evolve in the face of various environmental perturbations. It is not just that coral are bouncing back, it is that the newly formed/recovered coral are evolving rapidly to adapt and flourish in warmer temperatures. There is no reason that what’s happening on the Great Barrier Reef, shouldn’t also be happening in coral colonies across the globe, with newly formed corals showing plasticity and flexible responses in response to warming waters.

Even if it were the case that corals were undergoing decline, which is debatable, a decline caused primarily by warming oceans, also open to scientific debate, it is unclear whether anthropogenic warming is the cause. In fact the authors of the report underlying the NYT story assume human caused climate change is responsible for recent ocean warming, but not only is this connection not proven, other possible factors were ignored. The study reports on coral conditions, with the authors doing little or no original research into the cause of the present coral conditions they monitored. Yet other forcing factors, such as more sunlight reaching the sea surface as shipping emissions have been reduced or natural factors like the ongoing El Nino, discussed recently here and here, are also at play in ocean warming but have nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, recent bleaching events have coincided with recent strong El Ninos.

In the end, Glabicki and the New York Times went off half-cocked, reporting on a single study’s findings about coral reef conditions without checking them against other sources of data and research on coral. This makes for a scary story that advances the narrative that humans are causing catastrophic climate change, but doesn’t honestly report on the status of coral reefs and the various factors that affect them. Get back to reporting, New York Times, not advocating for progressive causes like ending fossil fuel use to battle a purported climate crisis.

Green Taxes Are Decimating British Industry – And My New Report Proves It

Britain lost two oil refineries last year – Grangemouth closed in April and Lindsey followed in August, leaving just four operating sites: Fawley, Humber, Pembroke and Stanlow.

Britain is increasingly dependent on imports.

Refining is highly energy intensive, so refiners have always had strong commercial incentives to improve efficiency: every unit of energy they save reduces costs.

AI generated by Grok

From The Daily Sceptic

By Kathryn Porter

Green taxes are decimating British industry and driving up energy prices, with nothing to show for it as emissions are merely pushed offshore, says Kathryn Porter, who has a new report setting out the damning details.

This week I published a new report into Britain’s oil refining sector, Fuel, Refineries and the UK ETS: What Policymakers Need to Know. Its conclusions are alarming.

Britain lost two oil refineries last year – Grangemouth closed in April and Lindsey followed in August, leaving just four operating sites: Fawley, Humber, Pembroke and Stanlow. My report finds that Government policy, and in particular the UK Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), is making it increasingly hard for the remaining refineries to compete.

This matters because liquid fuels still provide 47% of UK final energy consumption. Diesel, petrol and jet kerosene remain essential to transport, aviation, agriculture, construction and industry, with no alternatives available at scale in the near term.

Yet Britain is increasingly dependent on imports. In 2025 we imported 15.5 million tonnes more petroleum products than we exported, the largest deficit since becoming a net importer in 2013. Closing domestic refining capacity doesn’t mean we stop consuming refined products, it just means we import more, effectively outsourcing their production. Bizarrely, Government policy is actively encouraging this.

My analysis finds that the four remaining UK refineries face a net ETS cash cost of around £200 million per year. Their gross carbon-cost disadvantage relative to refiners outside carbon-pricing regimes is around £540 million per year. That’s a significant handicap in an internationally competitive, relatively low-margin business.

British refineries compete against facilities in the US, Middle East and Asia, many of which are newer, larger and more sophisticated, while also benefiting from state support, preferential access to crude oil, cheaper labour and much cheaper energy.

ExxonMobil UK’s Managing Director Paul Greenwood recently told MPs that his company is paying £70-80 million a year in carbon dioxide costs, which he expects to rise to £150 million over the next four or five years. His competitors, he pointed out, aren’t paying them. He explicitly identified this cost differential as one of the factors causing UK refineries to close. This might be defensible if the ETS was causing refiners to reduce their emissions. But it isn’t.

Refining is highly energy intensive, so refiners have always had strong commercial incentives to improve efficiency: every unit of energy they save reduces costs. European refineries were making significant efficiency improvements long before emissions trading existed.

Beyond incremental efficiency gains, there are few meaningful investments UK refiners can make today to materially reduce their emissions. All four remaining refineries have explored major decarbonisation investments, but none has gone ahead. Carbon capture and hydrogen schemes are not commercially viable without substantial government support, which has been discussed for years but not actually delivered.

Increasing the carbon price doesn’t magically make new decarbonisation technologies available. It just makes refining in Britain more expensive.

The Government knows carbon pricing creates a competitiveness problem, which is why energy-intensive industries receive some ETS allowances for free and why it is introducing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). The CBAM is supposed to protect British manufacturers by imposing an equivalent carbon cost on imported goods. Except refined petroleum products aren’t included.

A tanker of diesel or jet fuel can arrive from India, the Middle East or elsewhere without bearing the carbon cost imposed on the British refinery with which it competes. And refiners can’t simply pass their ETS costs through to consumers: refined products are internationally traded and largely fungible. If the British product becomes too expensive, buyers can buy imported alternatives.

When a British refinery closes, our demand for fuel doesn’t disappear – it’s met by imports instead. Imports that often have a higher carbon intensity because they are refined in countries with dirtier energy, with further emissions incurred in transportation. Closing the British refinery does not eliminate the associated emissions, it simply moves them somewhere else. That’s not decarbonisation, it’s offshoring.

In fact, it’s a form of greenwashing. Politicians celebrate reductions in Britain’s territorial emissions while ignoring emissions embodied in the increasing amounts of imported goods we use.

One of the most significant findings in my report comes from examining emissions trading compliance data. Of 1,702 UK installations on the EU ETS compliance register, 292 closed between 2008 and 2020. Since the UK ETS began in 2021, another 183 sites out of 1,415 registered installations have closed. Those figures don’t yet include Lindsey and Grangemouth.

Free allocations tell a similar story, falling from 37.8 million tonnes in 2021 to just 23.6 million tonnes in 2026, a drop of 38%. The largest recent reduction was 4.6 million allowances following the closure of the Port Talbot blast furnaces. Yet British demand for steel didn’t disappear with the blast furnaces. UK steel demand actually increased from 8.1 million tonnes in 2023 to 9.3 million tonnes in 2024 while the domestic share of supply fell dramatically.

Carbon dioxide molecules don’t care whether they were emitted in Port Talbot, Immingham, India or China. If climate change is the justification for these policies, global rather than domestic emissions are what matter.

This also casts a different light on falling European energy demand. EU industrial energy consumption fell 8.1% between 2014 and 2024 and has been in structural decline since 1990. Since the 2022 energy crisis there has been a particularly sharp contraction in energy-intensive industrial output as European businesses struggle with high energy costs.

This hits demand for refined products because factories consume diesel for on-site logistics, mobile machinery and backup generation, while their supply chains generate road-freight demand. Close the factory and all of that demand disappears. Falling energy consumption isn’t necessarily evidence of successful decarbonisation – it often just means we’re producing less.

This absurdity isn’t confined to industry. Since coal disappeared from Britain’s electricity system, gas has been the principal source of large-scale dispatchable generation. We still need it when wind and solar output is low, and there is currently no commercially viable investment that allows gas generators to significantly reduce or eliminate their emissions. Renewables aren’t incentivised by the ETS since they require huge subsidies to be built.

So what exactly is the ETS achieving in electricity? It makes electricity more expensive. And that’s it.

Gas generation sets the wholesale electricity price most of the time, with carbon costs now accounting for more than a fifth of wholesale electricity prices. Unlike refineries, generators can pass those costs through, so households and businesses pay more for their electricity.

Worse, we tax industries into near-oblivion and then, realising they’re actually important, are forced to consider subsidising them to help them stay open. That is utterly incoherent.

The original economic logic behind carbon pricing is superficially attractive: put a price on emissions and allow businesses to discover the cheapest means of reducing them. But that mechanism only works where real, viable decarbonisation choices exist.

Where economically sensible efficiency improvements are available, businesses already have strong incentives to pursue them. Where commercially viable substitutes exist, businesses already have incentives to adopt them. Where neither exists, increasing the carbon price doesn’t create them. It either makes British production uncompetitive against imports or raises costs for British consumers.

My report concludes that the UK should, at the very least, remove refineries from the ETS. Apply the same analysis to the rest of the economy and the justification for the entire scheme falls apart.

The UK needs to stop confusing lower territorial emissions with decarbonisation. An environmental policy which exports emissions, destroys domestic industry, increases import dependence and raises global emissions is deeply irrational.

It’s time to abolish the ETS.

Fuel, Refineries and the UK ETS: What Policymakers Need to Know can be downloaded here.

Kathryn Porter is an Independent Energy Consultant. She holds a Master’s degree in Physics and an MBA, and is an associate member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Energy Studies executive council. Subscribe to her blog.

Why Net-Zero Policies Risk Human Catastrophe and Carbon Dioxide Doesn’t

For years, the CO2 Coalition and independent scientists have warned that the U.S Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) rested on a foundation of sand. Its dramatic projections of catastrophe relied heavily on U.N.-sponsored Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) and its successor SSP5-8.5—both extreme predictions of carbon dioxide emissions that were treated as realistic.

From CO2 Coalition

By Angela Wheeler

For years, the CO2 Coalition and independent scientists have warned that the U.S Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) rested on a foundation of sand. Its dramatic projections of catastrophe relied heavily on U.N.-sponsored Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) and its successor SSP5-8.5—both extreme predictions of carbon dioxide emissions that were treated as realistic.

As far back as 2017, scientists noted the far-fetched nature of the U.N. predictions. In August, the Trump administration proposed an amendment to NCA5 that acknowledges its emission forecasts are implausible and must not guide federal policymaking. This is a welcome restoration of scientific integrity.

The amendment, issued under the U.S. Global Change Research Program and aligned with Executive Order 14303, “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” states that results dependent on RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, or equivalent emission scenarios “should not be used as expected, baseline, business-as-usual, likely, central, or policy-relevant federal planning futures.”

Any NCA5 figure, table, or claim based on these “implausible” scenarios must carry an explicit caveat. Projections of damages, health effects, or ecosystem collapse cannot stand alone as policy premises without comparison to plausible alternatives and real-world observations.

This correction is long overdue. RCP8.5 was never designed to forecast the most likely future. It was constructed as an upper-bound for climate-model experiments—an exploratory tool of imaginary, extreme conditions. Its predictions of global warming defied observed trends in growth of coal consumption, technological development, and socioeconomic trajectories, according to multiple peer-reviewed analyses.

Treating extreme emission scenarios as ordinary distorted the entire national climate assessment. It inflated projected impacts, fueled exaggerated risk narratives, and justified costly regulatory interventions that ignored economics and human welfare. The amendment properly requires that such results be contextualized or set aside for decision-making.

Yet this amendment, while necessary, is only a first step. NCA5’s deeper problems remain. It continues to lean on climate models that have systematically overestimated warming and failed basic observational tests. It elevates politically driven documents of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over scientific data. Most critically, it omits the extraordinary benefits of rising atmospheric CO2 and of the fossil fuels that produce it.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is the essential plant food that makes life on Earth possible. Current concentrations, near 420 parts per million, remain far below levels that have prevailed for much of Earth’s history and are still low for optimal plant growth. Decades of laboratory and field evidence demonstrate that elevated CO2 increases photosynthetic rates, improves water-use efficiency, and boosts crop yields—wheat by 20% to 30% and soybeans by up to 46% under controlled conditions. Satellite observations confirm global greening, with rising CO2 responsible for most of the increase in leaf area across vast regions. Nitrogen fertilizers derived from fossil fuels support roughly half the world’s population.

Without affordable energy and the CO2 fertilization effect, feeding 8 billion people becomes far more difficult.

Modest warming itself brings many benefits, including longer growing seasons in temperate zones, reduced cold-related mortality (which exceeds deaths from heat), and expanded habitable ranges. Trends of weather-driven disasters—hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires—do not match the alarmist storyline when examined against long-term records rather than model outputs.

The real catastrophe would come from policies that deliberately restrict reliable energy in pursuit of net zero. Such policies raise energy costs, harm the poor, slow development in the Global South, and risk food insecurity by limiting fertilizers and mechanization.

True gold-standard science demands that we begin with observations, test models against data, disclose assumptions transparently, and weigh risks and benefits. Future assessments must evaluate every emission scenario on empirical grounding, not institutional pedigree. They must acknowledge that humanity’s use of fossil fuels has lifted billions from poverty while restoring CO2 to levels that enhance the biosphere.

Validating what rigorous scientists have documented for years, the proposed NCA5 amendment is progress. Now, policymakers should seize this moment to reassess the entire report against observations, restore balance by including the benefits of CO2, and reject fearmongering that has driven policy for too long.

Energy abundance, a greener planet, and prosperity can be celebrated and advanced further through the application of science when ideology is set aside.

Originally published in Daily Wire on September 1, 2026.

Angela Wheeler is executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. She is a cum laude graduate of Emporia State University, Kansas, where she studied communication, with additional biology and pre-medicine coursework.

New CFACT Report: ESA Implementation Is Severely Flawed

A new CFACT policy report, “Endangered Species Act Implementation Is Severely Flawed,” by David Wojick, Ph.D., examines several major problems with the way the ESA is administered today — from extraordinarily expensive permitting requirements to questionable federal spending priorities and ongoing legal battles over recovered species such as the gray wolf.

From CFACT

By Christina Norman

The Endangered Species Act was created with a worthy goal: protecting species at risk of extinction. But more than 50 years later, its implementation has strayed far from that original purpose.

A new CFACT policy report, “Endangered Species Act Implementation Is Severely Flawed,” by David Wojick, Ph.D., examines several major problems with the way the ESA is administered today — from extraordinarily expensive permitting requirements to questionable federal spending priorities and ongoing legal battles over recovered species such as the gray wolf.

Among the report’s findings, a Florida landowner seeking to build a home on five acres faced an ESA-related fee of $139,440, while federal ESA expenditures totaled more than $1.1 billion in the most recent year examined.

The report argues that protecting endangered species remains a worthy objective, but that the ESA’s implementation needs significant reform to better respect property rights, sound science and responsible government.

Read the full report below.

Endangered Species Act Implementation is Severely Flawed

Earth’s Magnetic North Pole Now Closer to Russia Than Canada After 2,200 km Journey

The north magnetic pole moves because of changes deep inside Earth.

The geodynamo is the self-sustaining process that generates and maintains Earth’s magnetic field through the motion of electrically conducting fluid in the outer core.

Despite the north magnetic pole’s ongoing drift toward Siberia (Russia), there is no evidence that a full geomagnetic reversal (polarity flip) is imminent.

AI generated by Grok

Earth’s north magnetic pole has continued its long drift from the Canadian Arctic toward Siberia (Russia), and recent official models confirm it is now closer to Russia than to Canada.

The map you shared illustrates the historical path of the north magnetic (dip) pole, the point where the magnetic field is vertical, from roughly 1590 through 2019. Key labeled positions include:

Early locations near what is now northern Canada (e.g., around 1590-1730).

Movement through the 19th and 20th centuries (1860, 1900, 1975).

Acceleration northward past Ellesmere Island toward the geographic North Pole by 2000- 2019.

Unlike the fixed geographic North Pole, the magnetic pole wanders because of changes in the flow of molten iron in Earth’s outer core, which generates the geomagnetic field.

Recent updates (World Magnetic Model 2025):

The World Magnetic Model 2025 (WMM2025), released by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information and the British Geological Survey, tracks the pole’s ongoing movement. A higher-resolution version (WMMHR2025) was also issued for improved accuracy.

After more than 190 years centered in the Canadian Arctic, the pole has traveled over ~2,200 km overall. It accelerated in the 1990s- 2000s (reaching ~50- 60 km/year at times) but has slowed to roughly 35- 36 km/year recently, the largest deceleration recorded in the modern era.

By the mid- 2020s it lies closer to Siberia/northern Russia than to Canada. Positions around 2025- 2026 are near ~85.5- 86°N and longitudes shifting eastward into the Eastern Hemisphere (roughly 135- 140°E range in models).

Navigation systems (aviation, shipping, military, smartphones, and GPS corrections) rely on the WMM for magnetic declination. Outdated models would introduce growing errors, especially in polar regions. Blackout/caution zones (where compasses become unreliable) also shift with the pole. The model is updated at least every five years for this reason.

Experts emphasize this is normal secular variation in the geomagnetic field, not a sign of an imminent full pole reversal (which occurs on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years and is not indicated by current trends).

Official NOAA/BGS data and ongoing satellite monitoring (e.g., Swarm) provide the underlying measurements.

The north magnetic pole, the point on the Earth where a compass needle would point down, is sliding about 35 miles closer to Russia each year. By Jonathan Corum | Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The north magnetic pole moves because of changes deep inside Earth.

Earth’s magnetic field is generated by the geodynamo in the outer core (roughly 2,900- 5,150 km below the surface). This region consists of liquid iron and nickel that is extremely hot and continuously in motion.

Heat from the inner core drives convection currents in the molten metal.

Earth’s rotation organizes these flows into large- scale patterns.

The moving electrically conducting fluid creates electric currents, which in turn produce the planet’s magnetic field (the dynamo effect).

These fluid motions are turbulent and slowly change over decades to centuries. As the pattern of flow shifts, the overall magnetic field weakens or strengthens in different regions and its orientation gradually drifts. The points on the surface where the field is vertical, the magnetic (dip) poles, therefore wander.

This process is called secular variation. It has been continuous for at least the last few centuries of direct observation (and far longer in the geologic record). The recent acceleration toward Siberia, followed by a slowdown, simply reflects evolving flow patterns in the outer core; it is not a sign of an imminent full polarity reversal.

In short: the pole moves because the liquid-metal “engine” that creates the magnetic field itself is slowly rearranging.

AI generated by Grok

The geodynamo is the self- sustaining process that generates and maintains Earth’s magnetic field through the motion of electrically conducting fluid in the outer core.

1. The Setting

  • Outer core: A layer of liquid iron-nickel alloy (with lighter elements such as sulfur, oxygen, or silicon) lying between roughly 2,900 km and 5,150 km depth.
  • Inner core: A solid iron-rich sphere at the center that is slowly growing as the Earth cools.
  • The fluid is an excellent electrical conductor and is vigorously stirred by convection.

2. Energy Sources Driving the FlowTwo main buoyancy sources power the convection:

  • Thermal convection: Heat escaping from the inner core and residual heat from Earth’s formation create temperature differences. Hotter, less-dense fluid rises; cooler, denser fluid sinks.
  • Compositional convection: As the inner core solidifies, pure iron crystallizes onto it, leaving behind a residual liquid enriched in lighter elements. This lighter fluid is buoyant and rises.

These buoyancy forces, combined with Earth’s rapid rotation, produce complex, turbulent flow.

3. Role of Rotation (Coriolis Force)

Because Earth rotates once per day, the Coriolis force strongly organizes the fluid motion.

The flow tends to form elongated, helical columns aligned roughly with the rotation axis (Taylor columns). This rotational constraint is crucial: it converts chaotic convection into organized, large- scale helical motions that are efficient at generating magnetic fields.

4. The Dynamo Mechanism ItselfThe fundamental principle is electromagnetic induction in a moving conductor:

  1. A small “seed” magnetic field is present (left over from earlier times or generated by weak currents).
  2. Conducting fluid moves across magnetic field lines, inducing electric currents (Faraday’s law / v×B\mathbf{v} \times \mathbf{B}).
  3. These electric currents generate their own magnetic field (Ampère’s law).
  4. If the fluid motions are sufficiently vigorous and helical, the newly generated field reinforces and amplifies the original field, overcoming the natural tendency of the field to decay by ohmic dissipation.

In mathematical terms, the evolution of the magnetic field

B\mathbf{B} in the core is governed by the induction equation:

∂B∂t=∇×(v×B)+η∇2B

where v\mathbf{v} is the fluid velocity and η\eta is the magnetic diffusivity. The first term on the right is the generative (induction) term; the second is the dissipative term. A self-sustaining dynamo requires the inductive term to dominate on average.

5. Outcome and Observed Behavior

  • The process preferentially generates a strong dipole field aligned roughly with the rotation axis (the familiar north- south magnetic poles).
  • Higher-order multipoles and non- axisymmetric components are also produced.
  • Because the underlying fluid flow is turbulent and time- varying, the magnetic field continually changes:
    • Secular variation (gradual drift of the poles, changes in field strength and direction).
    • Occasional excursions and, on longer timescales, full polarity reversals.

The same physics that keeps the field alive for billions of years is also responsible for the observed wandering of the magnetic north pole toward Siberia in recent centuries.

In summary: heat- driven convection of liquid metal in a rapidly rotating, electrically conducting outer core converts kinetic energy into magnetic energy through electromagnetic induction, continuously regenerating Earth’s magnetic field against resistive losses.

A closer look at the map above shows the north dip magnetic pole (marked by a bold white asterisk) is now closer to Siberia than it is to Canada. Credit: NOAA/NCEI

Despite the north magnetic pole’s ongoing drift toward Siberia (Russia), there is no evidence that a full geomagnetic reversal (polarity flip) is imminent.

Key reasons experts reach this conclusion:

Pole wander but not reversal

The magnetic poles have always wandered due to changing flow patterns in the outer- core geodynamo. The recent acceleration and subsequent slowdown toward Russia is part of normal secular variation, not a precursor to a flip.

Field strength is still within normal historical ranges


The global dipole field has weakened by roughly 9-10 % over the past ~200 years, and the South Atlantic Anomaly (a region of unusually weak field) continues to evolve. However, paleomagnetic records show that the field has weakened and recovered many times without reversing. Similar anomalies have appeared and disappeared over the past 9,000 years.

Reversals take thousands of years


When polarity reversals do occur, they unfold over several thousand years (typically 1,000- 10,000 years). The field becomes weaker and more multipolar during the transition, then re-establishes itself in the opposite orientation. Nothing in the current satellite or ground data indicates that such a multi-millennial process has begun.

Last full reversal was ~780,000 years ago


Reversals happen irregularly (average interval of a few hundred thousand years in the recent geological past). The present “normal” polarity interval is longer than average but not unusually long. There is no fixed schedule that makes a reversal “overdue.”

Laschamp (Laschamps) excursion (also called the Adams event) ~42,000 years ago

The 42,000- year event was a major excursion, not a full reversal. It was a short- lived geomagnetic excursion: the magnetic field weakened dramatically (down to as low as ~5- 25% of its normal strength), the poles wandered widely (and briefly appeared reversed in some records), but the field then recovered and returned to the same polarity it had before. The whole event lasted only a few hundred to about 1,000- 2,000 years.

Recent studies


Research reconstructing the field over the last 9,000 years (including work from Lund University and others) concludes that features like the South Atlantic Anomaly are recurring and that Earth is not currently heading toward a polarity reversal. The anomaly is expected to weaken or disappear on timescales of a few hundred years.

The magnetic north pole’s march toward Russia is real and requires navigation models to be updated, but it is ordinary geodynamo behavior. A full geomagnetic reversal remains a distant, unpredictable future possibility measured in many thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, not decades.