Tag: global boiling

Miliband’s Favourite Economist Doesn’t Understand How Markets Work

Ed Miliband, as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero in the Labour government, spoke at a Good Growth Foundation event. He praised Mariana Mazzucato (UCL professor, often called the “godmother of missions”) for shaping Labour’s approach. Miliband framed the transition away from fossil fuels as delivering both energy security and cheaper energy long-term, positioning government-led “missions” (directed investment, industrial strategy, and public direction of innovation) as the solution to climate and growth challenges.

From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

When Ed Miliband took the podium at the Good Growth Foundation’s National Growth Debate in Westminster last week, he did not disappoint his audience of the converted. Flanked by the economist he has long revered, Miliband delivered a speech that could serve as a textbook case of what I have elsewhere called the “economic illiteracy of UK energy policy”.

Yet to dismiss it as mere stupidity would be a mistake. There is a method to Miliband’s madness—one honed over years in the cloistered halls of “woke” Oxford and the Fabian-inspired London School of Economics and now supercharged by the “mission”-obsessed theories of Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College London.

In that speech—republished by the New Statesman—Miliband declared that “the era of fossil fuel security is over, and the era of clean energy security must come of age.” He credited “the godmother of missions, Marianna Mazzucato, who’s with us,” for the intellectual scaffolding of Labour’s clean energy push.

The mission, he said, established in opposition and now in government, has “two parts—driving to a clean electricity system but also electrifying as much as we can, as we decarbonise the wider economy.” Informed by the “lessons” of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the latest crisis over the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Miliband insists Britain must “double down” on net zero, tax North Sea oil and gas investments punitively, and “electrify everything” while rejecting any new exploration and development of domestic hydrocarbons.

Pernicious Political Elite

This is not ignorance born of inexperience. Miliband has been a central figure in Britain’s—and the world’s—climate movement for nearly two decades. As Climate Change Secretary under Gordon Brown, he helped shepherd the 2008 Climate Change Act, the legislative foundation for the UK’s self-proclaimed folly of “international climate leadership”. He has since served as Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and, since July 2024, as the government’s Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary.

His fingerprints are on every major escalation: the legally binding net zero target by 2050, the push for “clean, homegrown” renewables, and the deliberate throttling of North Sea production through windfall taxes and regulatory hurdles. Far from a novice, Miliband is a seasoned operator who has consistently placed climate ideology above economic realism. The roots of this approach lie in his education. Miliband read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before earning an MSc in Economics at the LSE.

PPE, that notorious Oxbridge conveyor belt of generalist debaters and policy wonks, has long been criticised for producing slick operators fluent in debating abstractions and civil service procedures but often shallow on real world trade-offs and incentives. The degree is seen as a “sure ticket to the top,” having regularly produced numerous UK Prime Ministers (including Cameron, Truss, and Sunak), cabinet ministers and top civil servants.

Add the Fabian socialist ethos of the LSE—long a cradle of central planning and state-directed “progress”—and you have the perfect incubator for learned economic illiteracy. This is not a failure to learn economics; it is the active absorption of a peculiar strain of it, one in which “saving the planet” by a self-appointed expert class from the apocalypse of “global boiling” trumps every mundane consideration of reliability or opportunity cost.

Enter Mariana Mazzucato, the UCL professor whose 2021 book Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism has become the bible for Starmer’s five-mission Labour platform. Miliband’s praise of her as the “godmother of missions” was no throwaway line. Mazzucato’s framework—bold state “missions” to shape markets, “directionality,” “intersectoral collaboration,” and “public value”—has been adopted wholesale. Starmer’s missions on net zero, health, education, and the rest echo her call for government to move from “fixing market failures” to actively creating markets through “moonshot” ambition.

Critics of Prof. Mazzucato, including economists like Alberto Mingardi in City Journal and Michael D. Thomas in The Independent Review, refer to her work as an example of the “nirvana fallacy”: comparing imperfect real-world markets to an idealised, omniscient state free of rent-seeking, bureaucratic capture, or coordination failures. Her evidence is selective—she overstates the state’s role in innovations like the mobile phone while downplaying government waste, political short-termism, and the knowledge problem that Friedrich Hayek warned against in his critique of central planning’s “fatal conceit.”

Mazzucato’s jargon—“missions,” “moonshots,” “collective intelligence”—is not neutral rhetoric. It is the linguistic scaffolding of a worldview in which experts in white papers and government institutes know better than price signals, consumer choice, or entrepreneurial discovery. Miliband and Starmer quote her not as an economist offering testable hypotheses but as an influencer whose narrative fits the climate zeitgeist.

Since 2023, Prof. Mazzucato has served as a key technical adviser to Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley and co-authored with the prime minister two major reports on inclusive and sustainable development for Barbados. A central plank of the government is the Bridgetown Initiative which Mottley launched and invited Mazzucato to join as a founding member in 2022. The Initiative calls on the UN to give climate-vulnerable small island developing states (SIDS) which allegedly face existential threats from sea-level rise expanded access to loss-and-damage funding and climate finance mechanisms.

The Climate Imperative Above All

Economics is the science of ranking alternatives under scarcity, aka “opportunity costs” and trade-offs among various public policy choices by government. When climate change is elevated to existential imperative, trade-offs disappear by fiat. There is only one opportunity (“decarbonize”) and only one cost (“decarbonization”) that matters. The only permissible policies are those that accelerate decarbonisation, no matter the cost to bills, jobs, or growth. Nowhere is this clearer than in UK energy policy. Miliband insists that renewables are “homegrown” and “clean,” and “cheaper” to boot, insulating Britain from volatile global fossil fuel prices.

Yet none of these claims survive scrutiny. Solar and wind components are overwhelmingly manufactured in China, whose coal-fired power underpins the entire global supply chain from mining rare earths to refining polysilicon. The “clean energy superpower” vision depends on Beijing’s dirty energy. The UK has various “on shoring” initiatives to bring about a “manufacturing renaissance” in clean energy. Most are far-fetched to say the least (remember Boris Johnson’s boast about making the UK the “Saudi Arabia of wind energy”?) There are no UK-owned major OEM (original equipment manufacturers). Turbines are still designed and largely supplied by foreign companies (Vestas, Siemens Gamesa, GE Vernova). A “British wind turbine” from scratch would require enormous R&D, capital, and scale that doesn’t currently exist.

In any full-cycle analysis of renewable energy manufacturing, the mining and refining of minerals and rare earths required to produce components in solar, wind and battery technologies is anything but clean. And the myth of “cheap” renewables has been debunked countless times though interminable debates on system costs and intermittency keep being repeated across the energy policy literature. But the real test for all countries embarked on the Net Zero campaign remains as to how long can government subsidies for renewables on the one hand and high taxes on fossil fuels on the other, last before voters revolt over high energy bills and before the bond vigilantes come calling as the country tests its creditworthiness in international credit markets.

Meanwhile, punitive taxes on North Sea investments have accelerated decline in a sector that still provides Britain energy security and tax revenues. IEA’s Executive Director Fatih Birol — who had sounded contrite previously regarding his anti-fossil fuel posture in public meetings with US Energy Secretary Chris Wright — once again echoes Miliband. Since no new oil and gas investments are needed because demand will fall and investments will be stranded, Mr. Birol advises that the UK should forgo much of its potential North Sea expansion “despite the pressure”.

In the energy crises brought on by the Russian invasion of the Ukraine in 2022 and now in the face of the Hormuz crisis, Fatih opined in an “exclusive with the Guardian” interview:

“There will be a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future…And this will cut into the main markets for oil…The vase is broken, the damage is done – it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together. This will have permanent consequences for the global energy markets for years to come.”

What Net Zero Has Wrought for Britain

Britain’s cumulative GDP growth since 2008 lags the US and even much of the EU, as Jon Moynihan meticulously documents in his two-volume Return to Growth: How to Fix the Economy. While the US boomed on the shale revolution and market-led innovation, the UK has presided over deindustrialisation, energy poverty, and policy-induced stagnation.

Massive government R&D spending on green innovation — as per Prof. Mazzucato’s call for “moonshot missions”—falls short when subjected to economic scrutiny. Miliband’s £22 billion bet on carbon capture and storage (CCS)—an unproven, outrageously expensive technology—exemplifies the conceit. It is the very industrial policy Mazzucato champions: government “picking winners” while socialising risks and privatising rewards for cronies.

Private firms like Google and SpaceX often lead where government lags. Government R&D subsidies invite cronyism—firms find it easier to lobby for handouts rather than compete in a competitive marketplace. Bureaucratic committees cannot replicate the dispersed knowledge of markets with skin in the game. Nuclear fusion, for instance, always remains “50 years away,” and history is littered with white elephants from state-directed innovation. Miliband’s approach reflects this planner’s hubris writ large.

Lenin’s Useful Idiots

The deeper problem is emotional, not intellectual. As one perceptive X post claims, Ed Miliband suffers from a “saviour complex”. Advisers who understand economics are sidelined because the mission is messianic: Britain must lead the world in “climate leadership,” consequences be damned. This learned illiteracy is shared across the Anglosphere’s progressive governments—from Ottawa to Canberra to Brussels. They double down on net zero dogma even as energy prices soar, industries flee, and voters revolt at the ballot box.

Mazzucato’s ideas provide the perfect intellectual cover. Her missions promise purposeful capitalism without the messy realities of perverse incentives, bureaucratic failure or unintended policy consequences. They elevate “public purpose” above profit and loss, allowing politicians to pose as visionaries while entrenching bureaucratic power and corporate welfare. In this, they serve a larger agenda: using climate as the Trojan horse for expanded state control over the economy.

Lenin famously found “useful idiots” among Western intellectuals sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause—naïve fellow travellers who lent credibility to revolutionary violence. The Greens, it seems, have found their own cadre in the Mazzucato mould: well-credentialed, jargon-fluent economists whose learned illiteracy provides intellectual respectability to policies that immiserate the working class, hobble growth, and enrich cronies.

Call them Mazzucato’s idiots. They are indispensable to the Net Zero agenda precisely because they cloak ideological zeal in the language of economic sophistication. Britain deserves better. Until policymakers rediscover the humility of classical political economy—acknowledging trade-offs, the limits of state knowledge and state action, and the superior information-processing power of competitive markets—the method to Miliband’s madness will continue to deliver higher bills, lower growth, and energy insecurity dressed up as climate virtue and moral triumph.

The mission, it turns out, is not to save the planet. It is to remake capitalism in the image of the administrative state. And the bill, as always, will be paid by ordinary Britons.

A version of this article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/04/29/milibands-favourite-economist-doesnt-understand-how-markets-work/

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

Scientists Find No Change in Global Warming Rate Since 1970 Despite “Hottest Year Ever” in 2023

A sensational science paper has blown holes in alarmist claims that global temperatures are surging. Just published results in Nature show “limited evidence” for a warming surge. “In most surface temperature time series, no change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s is detected despite the breaking record temperatures observed in 2023,” the paper says.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

A sensational science paper has blown holes in alarmist claims that global temperatures are surging. Just published results in Nature show “limited evidence” for a warming surge. “In most surface temperature time series, no change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s is detected despite the breaking record temperatures observed in 2023,” the paper says. Written by an international group of mathematicians and scientists, it is unlikely to be acknowledged in the mainstream media where general hysteria reigns over the anomalous 2023 experience. As we have seen, constant misinformation is published to scare the general public and this is exemplified by climate comedy-turn Jim ‘jail the deniers’ Dale forecasting almost daily Armageddon and exhorting people to “join up the dots”.

In science, one swallow does not make a summer and in climate science it is impossible to show a trend by picking on short periods or individual weather events. This paper is an excellent piece of climate science work since it takes the long statistical view and challenges the two-a penny clickbait alarmists looking for a headline on the BBC. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a biased body but it understands the importance of long-term climate trends by stating, much to the chagrin of Net Zero-promoting activists, that it can find little or no human involvement in most extreme weather events either in the past or in the likely immediate future. But these findings, along with the paper on the warming trend, are inconvenient to those promoting the unproven claim that humans control the climate thermostat by utilising hydrocarbons.

The paper is highly technical and mathematically-inclined readers can study the full workings out in the open access publication. It notes that global temperature datasets fluctuate due to short-term variability and this often creates the appearance of surges and slowdowns in warming. It is important to consider random noise caused by natural variation when investigating the recent pauses in temperature and the more recent “alleged warming acceleration”, it adds. In fact there have been a number of plausible explanations given for the recent spike, with attention focused on the massive Hunga Tonga submarine volcano adding 13% extra water vapour to the stratosphere, a strong El Niño and even the reduction in atmospheric particulates caused by recent changes in shipping vessel fuel. Several “changepoints” were used by the mathematicians and it was found that “a warming surge could not be reliably detected any time after 1970”.

While the focus was on whether there had been a continued acceleration in the rate of global warming, it was recognised how unusual the surface temperature anomalies were in 2023. Indeed they were, and it was widely argued that this showed the climate was breaking down, or in the silly words of the UN chief Antonio Guterres that the planet was “boiling”. Last year’s hysterics were useful for short-term alarmism but they help destroy the ‘settled’ science around CO2. If human-caused CO2 is responsible for the rise, why did the temperature pause from 1998-2012 when atmospheric levels of the gas were on the up. Does alarmism on the BBC and most other mainstream media only apply when the temperatures spikes upwards for a few months?

One of the key conclusions in the paper arises from considering two time series – 1970-2023 and 2013-2023. This of course includes the early 1970s when global cooling fears were all the rage and average temperatures were falling. Estimated temperature trends were said to be 0.019°C per year for the first time segment and 0.029°C for the second that includes the spike from last year. This 0.029°C estimated slope “falls far short” of an increase needed to point to a change in the warming trend in the recent past. This is because of short-term variability in the U.K. Met Office HadCRUT global database since 1970 and “uncertainty” of the 2012 changepoint. This uncertainty arises over speculation as to whether 2012 and the ending of the pause was a year marking an important change in the longer time series. ”The HadCRUT record is simply not long enough for the surge to be statistically detectable at this time,” they note.

Cliff Mass is the Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington. He has a golden rule of weather extremes: “The more extreme a climate or weather record is, the greater the contribution of natural variability, and the smaller the contribution of human-caused global warming.”

The mathematicians used changepoint statistical techniques which were designed to identify structural changes over time. Four global mean surface temperature records over 1850-2023 were used including HadCRUT. This of course is problematic since there is substantial evidence that these datasets hype the warming trend by their careless treatment of urban heat corruptions – the fact that urban areas become warmer through ongoing development. In addition, substantial retrospective adjustments are made, often cooling the past and warming the near present to increase the ‘trend’. Despite writing copiously about the 1998-2012 ‘pause’, the Met Office has now removed it from its own record by adding 30% retrospective warming. Perhaps the Met Office need not have worried, with the mathematicians noting that the pause was “not unusual” given the level of short-term variability present in the data. But these datasets are the best we have and nobody doubts that the planet has warmed a small amount over the last 200 years since the lifting of the little ice age. For want of anything better, using these datasets for scientific analysis is fair, although it could be suggested that overall warming is probably less than suggested by this paper.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Suitable Cases for Treatment

I suffer eco-anxiety. It hit new highs when the UN’s socialist Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced that “the era of global boiling has arrived” but I continue to draw comfort from counsellors at Psychology for a Safe Climate, who have a website full of tips on how neurotics like me can cope with global boiling.

From Climate Scepticism

BY TONY THOMAS

I suffer eco-anxiety. It hit new highs when the UN’s socialist Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced that “the era of global boiling has arrived” but I continue to draw comfort from counsellors at Psychology for a Safe Climate, who have a website full of tips on how neurotics like me can cope with global boiling. The members, largely female and Sydney-Melbourne based, will tackle the panoply of clients’ eco-anxieties including anger, fear, hopelessness, guilt, betrayal, sadness, shame, shock, trauma and delusion, plus some 200 other discomforts catalogued in a taxonomy of climate hurts by endlessly quoted eco-psychologist Panu Pihkala of the Theology Faculty of Helsinki University.

PSC now offers a “Climate Feelings Space” which went live a few months back. As they alerted me by email (Feb 15) ,

Preparing ourselves emotionally for unpredictable climate events may also be leading to unpredictable internal worlds. This is why we created this new offering. The Climate Feelings Space is filled with practices, events, and training to support your emotional wellbeing as we navigate complex climate impacts.

For my heebie-jeebies about global boiling, they recommend I take a slow walk into my back garden. It’s actually my wife’s territory and the length of a kitchen bench. I’m not normally permitted near it. But under PSC guidance I allowed myself to notice a flower and “be allured by it.” PSC continues,

 Move toward this other being, with curiosity. Notice it: take in its details, savour its scent, its colour, its shape, its sound, whatever moves you in the moment …  As it feels authentic to you, offer your praise to this other being, out loud. Speak (or sing or dance!) about what drew you to this Other…Appreciate its mysteries and unknowns. Let yourself be surprised at what you express. If it feels right, you might even bow to this being, or offer it a gesture of thanks. Then keep wandering!

I spotted an orange snapdragon and moved close to savour it, although it was actually on its last legs because we’ve been away in Portugal. I spoke to it, “Congrats on surviving. Sorry about you getting parched, and eaten by those pesky caterpillars.”

My next task was to sing and dance to this petalled Other. Not easy as the seedlings bordered my study wall, restricting my dancing to a half circle. I sang to it, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina!” To finish I honoured the plant with the bow I last practised in 1962 in Hamlet at UWA Drama, where I played an attendant lord.

Little escapes my wife. As I scraped off the garden dirt at the back door she called,

 “Are you OK? What were you doing out there anyway?”

“Yeah no! Nothing really, like, those seedlings needed a squirt.”

PSC SAYS its reach extends to hundreds of mental health professionals. Members are closely allied with the UK Climate Psychology Alliance and cross-contribute to each other’s journals. Not all the Alliance’s UK psychotherapy is successful: its journal chronicles how a disturbed person, “Charlie”, was being counselled about the planetary CO2 death drive.

Charlie’s own personal journey through climate activism and psychological difficulty came to a head in 2019 when he jumped from the six-storey roof of his psychotherapist’s consulting room. He survived, but only just, and both of his legs had to be amputated. (p27).

Charlie’s own therapeutic and “brilliant” book begins, “I am pretty mad, by conventional standards”. To me he seems just as sane, or insane, as all the green-Left alarmists, writing,

the politics of late capitalism divides, alienates and disorders those who struggle against the climate crisis……[involving] the depressing interrelationships of colonialism, disrespect for indigenous culture and environmental destruction…

The Alliance’s reviewer Ro Randall concludes that

there is much here for us as mental healthpractitioners, particularly in his accounts of his own and others’ psychological struggles as part of the climate movement.

I expected the leftist PSC crowd to be offering counselling gratis to mentally distressed Hamas fighters, but found no such evidence.The UK Alliance twin, however, has gone the full keffiyeh. Last March the Alliance’s co-founder Paul Hoggett wrote

The liberal West needs to face up to another truth, that the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza may be the forerunner of the catastrophic loss of life that the deepening climate crisis will visit upon the Global South in the coming decades. We don’t yet have a word for it – a mass extermination which will affect many different peoples who nevertheless will have one thing in common, they will be overwhelmingly non-white. 

He deplores what he calls “the events” of October 7, but claims 

we are afraid to face up to the difficult truth that, despite suffering persecution at the hands of Christians for a millennium, despite the Holocaust, Jewish people are themselves capable of becoming perpetrators … The comforting distinctions we hold to between good and bad, right and wrong, collapse under the rubble of Gaza … There is a genocidal dimension to the Israeli attacks on Palestinians, one which could prefigure the massive casualties to come in the Global South arising from the climate crisis. If we let this happen in Gaza we have taken a step towards ensuring that our indifference will be visited upon the peoples of the South in the climate deranged future.

“Deranged”? They got it in one. Back home, PSC members divide their time between hand-holding ferals at “coal protest camps” and relieving the eco-distressed of their professed emotional loads. PSC members appear to be let loose by the Education Departments on “teachers and students and parents”. But they struggle to get government grants for mental support for highway blockers, and others “grappling with grief, fear, despair, rage and hope”. In 2019 PSC did raise $40 from a workshop on “grief for activists”, but the financial grief involved a $2.98 cash loss after $42.98 for the name-tags. In 2021-22 their accounts show fundraising of $4,449.16 but offset by fundraising fees of $15,143.97. Website costs rocketed from $116.18 in 2019 to a phenomenal $11,030.07 in 2022 — if they put this job out to tender I’ll certainly apply
The PSC’s top team has included founder Carol Ride, senior psychiatrist Dr Charles Le Feuvre, activist Dr Sally Gillespie, newsletter stalwart Bianca Crapis, secretary Dr Yalcin Adal and scribe Dr Susie Burke of Castlemaine from the parent Australian Psychological Society (27,000 members). Without wanting to create an encyclopedia, I’ll sample their talents and output.

Dr Sally Gillespie is a Jungian “with a background in depth psychology and ecopsychology”. I was initially perplexed to read that she’s a recent guest editor of Quadrant, but found that her Quadrant is the Journal of the CG Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology (New York), “embracing different cultural, mythological, and arts-based perspectives including painting, music and dance.”

She authored Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Re-imagining our world and ourselves, “an essential resource for counsellors, psychotherapists, social workers and other helping professionals, as well as climate campaigners, policy makers, educators, scientists and researchers.” In this book[i] she describes how, because of a dream “which felt more like a vision”, she abjured her previous career and lifestyle to focus on stopping global warming. Her dream

was a terrifying depiction of global chaos caused by climate disruption. In my dream I swung on a rope above the Earth as land masses shifted around beneath me. I saw continents sinking beneath rising seas. Millions of people in the oceans desperately attempted to cling to fast disappearing land. Somehow I knew I had to join them. I let go of the rope and dropped into this catastrophe, becoming one of many attempting to hold on to the heaving shores. In the midst of this horror, a desperate poodle swam into my arms. I cared for my newfound companion as best I could, while feeling the futility of everyone’s struggle to survive. 

I’d label that account as expurgated, because in her PhD thesis, which involved five years’ work, she includes that she “cared for my newfound [poodle] companion as best I could” by stealing biscuits for it.[ii] Maybe dreams of biscuit-stealing wouldn’t look good on a Jungian’s CV. In any event, she was

dazed by the “shock and awe” experience of dropping into an apocalyptic world. Any possibility of distancing myself from climate change reports collapsed… 

That dream

catapulted me out of my old life and view of the world. I shook for the vulnerability of all beings on Earth, as my consciousness opened up to the realities of collective fate… my world, the one I knew as a reality, was ending…I felt in my gut that I had to acknowledge the full seriousness of global warming, and that, in one way or another, I would spend the rest of my life acting in response.

My own questioning of myself, my society and our world has catapulted me into a voyage of discovery which I am grateful for, despite the horror and grief I feel. 

In following years she had new dreams rounding out her poodle-powered epiphany:

In each dream, I was approached by an animal who looked for care and connection. In one, I gazed into a stormy sea, eagerly anticipating the end of the human race and, with this, the restoration of the health of the oceans. But then a thirsty, bedraggled and crusty-skinned seal unexpectedly leapt into my arms, jolting me into the present. My mind abandoned its bleak and guilty imaginings in order to work out how to best care for this desperate creature…. 

This series of climate change dreams navigated me through a sea of feelings. Over time, waves of despair, guilt, judgement, grief and confusion made way for currents of tenderness, connection, delight, wonder and love. In 2012, nearly four years after my initial dream, I had two successive dreams which brought some sense of resolution. 

In the first, I swam in the ocean circled by two seals and a dolphin who all looked deeply into my eyes before the dolphin reached forward with its snout and touched my arm. In the second, I travelled to the United States and walked along a waterfront when a seal swam up close to greet me. I gazed back, marvelling at its rodent-like features, golden eyes and grey mottled skin…Taken together, my dreams felt like a kind of initiation. They brought me face to face with my human self, my animal relations and my place in the world. Both in dream and waking life, I found my way from hopelessness and horror to commitment and care.

Her PhD thesis[iii] (no longer online) includes another dream, which assigned her to critique a Doris Lessing novel about climate change. She gets low marks from “a young woman, a smart cultural theorist” who provides comments written on ravioli.

The tantalising image of the ‘ravioli marks’ stayed with me, strangely apt in its sensual interplay of inner and outer, forms and fillings, offering richly-embodied sustenance and meaning (p39).

For her thesis she created and tracked a seven-member group of excitable women, some 50-plus, to share their own climate-apocalypse dreams – “fellow crew members sailing a vessel of inquiry.” By their second meeting they’re fantasising about surviving “systemic collapse.” For example, “stories of cannibalism are shared” (p106).

Gillespie: I wonder what those stories are serving for us at the moment, in teasing us into these questions. Not only the literal question: would I eat someone else or not [but] what’s the value of human life and culture and society?

Participant Veronica was the most notable member, in a car-crash sort of way, of the therapeutic group of seven. Sally writes that Veronica

broke into tears on her way to our meeting when she walked past a cat, explaining “I want a cat, but I don’t want a cat. And that’s climate change in terms of species preservation … I mean the tentacles of this issue are every freaking where!” (p186).

Veronica watched the US gas documentary Gaslandon television one night and sobbed “huge wailing tears–my parents live right near where fracking is going on, they’re having earthquakes for the first time in recorded history” (p119). She and her husband fled to Australia from “their very grief-filled time” in the US, “in the hugest bastion of [Republican] denial”. She confessed that if she didn’t believe in the eternal soul, “I would be one angry bitch.” (p77).

Dr Gillespie in her book pays homage to “teenage student climate strikers who call out adult political leaders for their reckless lack of responsibility and maturity in failing to address the climate emergency.” She feels the kids highlight the “inappropriate adolescent behaviour in adult leaders”. She quotes Greta Thunberg, who seems a patron saint of green psychologists and these days gets around in a keffiyeh. Sally quotes Greta, “They [politicos] know they haven’t done their homework – but we have.” Although Dr Gillespie decided that “throwing scientific evidence at dogged denialists never works”, her tract concludes on a hopeful note:

As I finish writing this book, hundreds of thousands of school students around the world are taking to the streets demanding action on climate with placards reading “Save our planet, save our future,” “We are all in the same boat, stop drilling holes in it,” “Global warning,” “We can’t drink oil, we can’t eat money.” Their signs tell us that a global myth of alarm and danger, and care and respect is being born.[iv]

Dr Charles Le Feuvre: Melbourne psychiatrist and psychotherapist Charles Le Feuvre has been the group’s intellectual leader and now its Honorary Senior Advisor. He’s also been a consultant psychiatrist at Royal Melbourne Hospital and psychotherapy chair of the College of Psychiatrists. Sadly, his house at Wye River was completely burnt in the 2016 climate-caused bushfires. Only his statue of Venus was saved.

With fellow-psychs’ help he laid out the PSC manifesto as “The Pschodynamics of Climate Change Denial,” a work heavily referencing fellow-shrink Harold Searles and his Unconscious processes in relation to the environmental crisis. Searles rates the climate-ecological crisis as an even more dire threat to humankind than a brisk exchange of thermonuclear missiles, and he frets that people continue with “severe and pervasive apathy” about climate. Le Feuvre continues,

He (Searles) discusses the Freudian phallic and oedipal stages. Our genital primacy, he suggests, symbolized by our cars, is threatened. He mentions, for example, that our envy and hatred of Oedipal rivals, in particular succeeding generations, makes us happy for them to be polluted into extinction. These factors can contribute to Oedipal guilt. He also speaks of the moralizing tone used by writers on the subject, who imply ‘that we have raped Mother Earth and now we are being duly strangled or poisoned’ (p. 364) projecting, he suggests, their Oedipal guilt. 

 Searles elaborates:

“Environmental pollution shields one from the full depth of emotional depression within oneself —instead of feeling isolated within emotional depression, one feels at one with everyone else in a realistically doomed world”.

Le Feuvre finishes with a final quote from Searles:

It seems to me that we psychoanalysts, with our interest in the unconscious processes which so powerfully influence man’s behaviour, should provide our fellow men with some enlightenment in this common struggle.

Le Feuvre thinks that our global predicament is so overwhelming and so difficult to process that news on the alleged climate crisis almost needs to come with a mental health warning. Eco-anxiety victims need to get to a health specialist or Lifeline, he recommends.

He’s no fan of conservative politicians, having written (as at 2019)

In Australia there continues to be Government denial. Our leaders could be seen psychiatrically as deluded and a danger to others and if so certifiable. At worst they can be seen as guilty of crimes against humanity and nature-homicide and ecocide — and indeed in the future they may be found to be …What is the nature of Scott Morrison’s denial? 

Early this year he drafted and presented the PSC’s backing of wet independent Senator David Pocock’s “Duty of [Climate] Care Bill”, and claimed the government must ratchet up anti-emission targets or kids will have nervous breakdowns.[v] He argues a similar case in a co-authored academic paper[vi]:

The authors discuss the failure of political leadership in the face of the climate and ecological crisis, particularly in the Australian context. This failure exacerbates the climate distress of young people.

Dr Yalcin Adal, the group’s secretary, who does cybersecurity at the Bureau of Meteorology. For those who thought BoM staff were dispassionate sciencey types, Yalcin writes that he “believes deeply in PSC and the work it does” and is proud to be its secretary. He says that the BoM’s mission is “zero lives lost from climate hazards” which I find a bit weird. Firstly, droughts storms and floods involve weather hazards not climate. And, secondly, lives lost globally from weather are already down 99%-plus in the past century. I don’t know how Dr Adal or the BoM can stop someone being hit by a falling tree on a windy day, but I hope Yalcin is working on it.

Bianca Crapis, PSC newsletter author, is a foe of “extractivism”, which I assume refers to Australia’s useless mining industry. She works in LGBTQIA+ mental health and ecological justice, and is “passionate about apprenticing in collective liberation practices for all beings.” She did the PSC newsletters for the past three years, “a monthly act of delight,” she says. However, for Ms Crapis

Despair, confusion and alarm about our collective climate collapse floods me regularly …. I am no stranger to catastrophic thinking, the departure of connection to my body, and the regular buzz of anxiety. But each month, I’ve had a ritual [the newsletter] that has kept me grounded… I am reminded of the power that lies in choosing to weave our griefs into something tangible. How that process of remaking our hurts into something that can be shared opens up a part of my heart that wants to keep putting time and energy into dreaming futures beyond collapse, beyond oppression, beyond extractivism and individualism. (email, May 3, 2024).

Dr Susie Burke, of the Australian Psychological Society, is also a member of the Safe Climate crowd, running similar gigs for the distressed and offering similar tipsheets for assuaging climate griefs.

Burke in her co-authored tipsheet for parents wants a total overhaul of Western lifestyles “to stop climate change”, insisting these lifestyle changes “could make us happier and healthier.” The tract illustrates its mantras with a pic of girls about 12-15 parading around Melbourne Central Station with signs “Act Green”.[vii] Her tipsheet [viii] wants parents to teach kids “active citizenship skills” including

♦ “Getting them to join you on marches/protests” (I assume not the farmer-tractor protests against greens’ attacks on farmers’ livelihoods, or covid anti-jab protests)

♦ “Showing them how to write letters and emails to politicians, CEOs of fossil fuel companies, etc.”  (Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill must have a pretty full daily mailbox of kids’ templated climate rubbish).

♦ Discuss ways they [parents] could help them, like asking their school to bring in speakers who can raise awareness, raising money to send to communities that are affected by climate change, writing to the government to ask for more overseas aid. (This looks like the magic-pudding economics of unlimited government money).

The Psychological Society feels it is “contributing to a more mentally resilient, future-ready Australia”. Incidentally, 94% of the 27,000 APS members are fretting about the mental health impacts on Australians of the establishment-backed global warming hysteria.

In my opinion the PSC and APS credentials on global warming science are stuck at kindergarten level. The highly-educated members believe every word of the “global boiling” hyperbole from the UN’s climate crazies like Guterres. Like Flannery’s Climate Council, they blame all bad weather, including “droughts and floods” (make up your mind please), on CO2 emissions.

If these thousands of psychs and shrinks really want to help their new-found eco-anxious paying clientele, they should start by reassuring them that

♦ The IPCC’s global warming suite of models has to date over-hyped actual warming by a factor of two or more (also here)

♦ The past century of circa 1degC of warming has led to greening of the planet to an area of two and a half times the Australian continent along with shrinking of deserts.

♦ CO2 increases have assisted crop yield growth that shows a prolonged rising trend and is feeding the planet’s burgeoning population. Humanity has never been healthier than today.

♦ The IPCC’s latest Working Group 1 report, as distinct from “Summaries” written and vetted by its political masters, found human influence on weather as follows: Heatwaves, yes: heavy rain, yes; flooding, no; meteorological/hydrological drought, no; ecological/agricultural drought, yes; tropical cyclones, no; winter storms, no; thunderstorms, no; tornados, no; hail, no; lightning, no; extreme winds, no; fire weather, yes.

♦ Climate science after 40 years is still in its infancy, bereft of  knowledge and data about key variables including  long-term oceanic cycles, impacts of cloudiness  and solar irradiance and even causes of warming-cooling cycles in the 20th century, let alone Minoan, Roman and medieval warming.

Why the medical/psych community (or sorority) are so out-front as climate crazies is a mystery. They need to touch base with Hippocrates about “First, do no harm”.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[i] Gillespie, Sally (2019). Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Re-imagining Our World and Ourselves . Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition $44.18, paperback $46.97.

[ii] “My thesis ‘Climate Change and Psyche: Mapping the myths, dreams and conversations in the era of global warming’ charts the psychological terrain of those who are actively engaged with climate change issues. Based upon phenomenological research, its aim was to capture something of the shifts in worldview, meaning-making, identity, behaviours, social and political understandings and anticipations of the future within individuals whose daily realities involve thinking about and working with global warming concerns.”

At another stage I cling to the shore line and a poodle swims up into my arms. I steal biscuits for us… I know billions must die and only tens of thousands will remain… The air is running out, death is close.

[iii] The book costs $44 even as a Kindle, putting it above my Quadrant pay grade, but I was able to access a sample chapter or two. I’ve infilled with material from her PhD.

[iv] School strikers aren’t actually smart or literate enough to cook up these sassy slogans themselves, it’s done for them by climate PR professionals who provide the templates on line for the kids to download.

[v] “We depend on our leaders to engage with climate reality. However we know they are only taking limited action. To feel this uncared for is deeply traumatic and can also lead to unbearable anxiety, born of a feeling of helplessness and aloneness in the face of survival threats.”

[vi] “Debate: How can child and adolescent mental health professionals show leadership in the face of the ecological and climate crisis?”

[vii] The apparent word “act” is a little hard to read on the sign.

[viii] Another co-author is Professor Ann Sanson who sings in the Melbourne Climate Choir

Climate Change: A Curious Crisis

The fundamental problem with the climate crisis narrative is that it is simplistic and gives us only one side of the story. It is as though man-made climate change had been put on trial in the court of public opinion on a charge of crimes against the planet and humanity – but with only the prosecution case presented to the jury. 


From Climate Etc.

By Iain Aitken

As explained in my new eBook, Climate Change: A Curious Crisis, the climate change ‘debate’ has long-since become a Manichaean, deeply polarized, ‘you are either with us or against us’ war of words in which both sides accuse the other of being closed-minded and refusing to accept the ‘facts’.

Instead of a respectful exchange of views and the seeking of mutual understanding and common ground we tend to find sarcasm and ridicule and ad hominem attacks, as mutually intolerant, entrenched positions have arisen based on different interpretations of the science and evidence and different perceptions of risk. What should have been a mutually cooperative, disinterested, value-free search for the truth (basically, ‘science’) has morphed into a combative, biased, value-laden promotion of positions and ‘point scoring’ over opponents (basically, ‘politics’). Lest they yield any dialectical ground to their opponents, ‘doomsters’ are deeply reluctant to admit (perhaps even to themselves) that climate change might actually be predominantly natural and benign – and ‘deniers’ are deeply reluctant to admit (perhaps even to themselves) that climate change might actually be predominantly man-made and dangerous.

So what is the doomsters’ story? One of the most prominent and vocal doomsters is António Guterres, the UN Secretary General, who, in August 2021, described the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report as ‘a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse‑gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk’. And in response to the news that July 2023 was likely to be the warmest July since records began he stated, ‘The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.’ So what is all this ‘irrefutable evidence’ of the climate crisis that has so convinced Guterres and his fellow doomsters? Let’s examine a few representative examples:

(1) We know, based on the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory, that increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (e.g. by burning fossil fuels) will cause global warming to occur.

(2) We know, based on ice core data (and more recently direct atmospheric measurements), that in post-industrialization times the carbon dioxide level in our atmosphere has already risen by about 50% to a level that is unprecedented in more than 14 million years – and the rise rate is accelerating.

(3) We know, based on the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory, that the post-industrialization global warming cannot be explained by natural phenomena.

(4) We know, based on all the leading temperature datasets, that in post-industrialization times about 1.2ºC of global warming has already occurred, a level of warming that is unprecedented in at least the last 2,000 years (and probably the last 125,000 years) – and the rise rate is accelerating.

(5) We know, according to the World Meteorological Organisation, that the last 8 years have been the hottest years since records began and each decade since the 1980s has been hotter than the previous one.

(6) We know, based on global tide gauge and satellite altimetry data, that in post-industrialization times the global mean sea level has already risen by about 9 inches as a result of global warming – and the rise rate is accelerating.

(7) We know, based on satellite observations, that Arctic sea ice has already declined by 50% and is declining at a rate of about 12% per decade as a result of global warming – and the decline rate is accelerating.

(8) We know, based on observations and attribution studies, that extreme weather around the world has already become more frequent and intense and, based on the world’s largest study of climate-related mortality, that that is already causing almost 10% (5 million) of global deaths each year.

(9) We know, based on the Paris Climate Accord, that warming must be limited to 1.5ºC to avoid the most dangerous climate change impacts – and that based on the current warming trends that critical threshold may be crossed by 2030.

(10) We know that by the end of this century there could be up to 6ºC of warming (i.e. exceeding the 1.5ºC critical threshold by 4.5ºC) potentially resulting in catastrophic climate change.

The adverse climate change impacts noted above are just representative – many more could have been added, such as ocean acidification, coral reef loss, biodiversity loss and species extinctions – and that’s even before the consideration of potential ‘tipping points’ into irreversible climate change impacts. The climate crisis narrative (i.e. the cause and effect storyline) based on such evidence is simple and certain and compelling: our escalating burning of fossil fuels has caused a huge and unprecedented and accelerating rise in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere which have in turn caused a huge and unprecedented and accelerating rise in global surface temperatures which has in turn already caused huge and unprecedented and accelerating climate change impacts on the planet and mankind – and very soon it’s going to get catastrophically worse, unless we stop climate change by stopping burning fossil fuels. In this narrative climate change is a new and terrifying man-made phenomenon, an existential threat that has arisen as an insidious ‘by product’ of rampant industrialization and capitalism and that it can, and must, be stopped by urgent global decarbonization.

So how many of the above ten statements are actually true? I would argue that all of them are true – at least exactly as worded – and assuming we accept as beyond reasonable dispute the ‘scientific consensus on climate change’, Anthropogenic Global Warming theory, climate models, analyses and conclusions of the IPCC, the ‘internationally accepted authority on climate change’. Trusting the IPCC and believing such evidence and the frightening story it apparently tells is entirely rational and reasonable; in fact, why would any rational, reasonable person doubt it? On the face of it this evidence alone makes an irrefutable case in support of the existence of a climate crisis and it’s surely not at all hard to understand why so many people accept it – and think that those who do not accept it (the so-called ‘climate deniers’) are deluded, badly-informed, badly-intentioned, scientifically-illiterate, irresponsible fools (or are perhaps covertly in the pay of Big Oil).

But what if we don’t just accept as ‘beyond reasonable dispute’ the IPCC’s ‘scientific consensus on climate change’, its Anthropogenic Global Warming theory, climate models, analyses and conclusions, but instead consider criticisms of them by ‘denier’ scientists? In that case we find that the ‘simple and certain’ climate crisis narrative unravels and becomes decidedly complex and uncertain. I deconstruct the ten statements above and set out some of the key complexities and uncertainties in my eBook, in which I conclude that we simply don’t know (with a confidence level sufficient to inform climate policy)

  • whether carbon dioxide is the main (let alone sole) controller of the Earth’s climate system
  • whether rising carbon dioxide levels are on balance good or bad for the planet and mankind
  • whether the post-industrialization global warming has been abnormal (even over the last 2,000 years)
  • how much of the post-industrialization global warming has been human-caused
  • whether global warming is currently accelerating
  • whether our warming climate system is on balance good or bad for the planet and mankind
  • how much of the post-industrialization sea level rise has been human-caused
  • whether the sea level rise is currently accelerating
  • whether global decarbonization would materially reduce future sea level rises – and whether global decarbonization is anyway the most cost-effective policy for addressing future sea level rise
  • whether the recent Arctic sea ice loss has been abnormal
  • how much of the recent Arctic sea ice loss has been human-caused
  • whether the Arctic sea ice loss is currently accelerating
  • whether recent extreme weather events have been abnormal
  • whether recent extreme weather events have been human-caused
  • whether extreme weather events will become significantly more frequent and intense as a result of global warming
  • whether exceeding 1.5ºC of warming would be ‘dangerous’
  • whether achieving net zero by 2050 (in order to limit warming to 1.5ºC) is technically feasible (never mind geopolitically realistic)
  • whether achieving net zero by 2050 would materially improve the climate in this century
  • how much further global warming there will be this century and whether it might lead to ‘catastrophic’ climate change.

All of this can be summarized in one word: doubt. Doubts about the reliability of the science, doubts about the reliability of the climate models, doubts about the scientific integrity and policy-neutrality of the IPCC, doubts about the scale of future warming, doubts about the scale of the climate change risks (i.e. doubts about the scale of the possible adverse impacts and the probability of their occurring), doubts about the wisdom of the 1.5ºC warming ‘threshold’ – and doubts about the wisdom, not of decarbonization, but of precipitate and precipitous decarbonization (as epitomized by ‘net zero by 2050’ policies) that may do more socioeconomic harm than good largely as a result of the vast transitional costs and societal impacts of such fast and radical decarbonization and the current lack of affordable and reliable carbon-neutral alternatives to fossil fuels. Basically, the ‘irrefutable evidence’ that there is a climate crisis is not, perhaps, so irrefutable. So when António Guterres asks, ‘Can anybody still deny we are facing a dramatic emergency?’, the answer is, yes, many people can – and for very good reasons.

The fundamental problem with the climate crisis narrative is that it is simplistic and gives us only one side of the story. It largely expunges all the  scientific complexities, unknowns and uncertainties, all the benefits of global warming and higher carbon dioxide levels, all the serious difficulties, costs, impacts and risks of rapidly eliminating fossil fuels – as well as expunging the option of simply adapting to living in a warmer world as an alternative (to net zero) policy response. It is as though man-made climate change had been put on trial in the court of public opinion on a charge of crimes against the planet and humanity (with a presumption of guilt) – but with only the prosecution case presented to the jury. It has apparently been found guilty, not on the basis of certainty, not on the basis of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, not even on the basis of ‘on the balance of probabilities’ but simply on the basis of the possibility that it could be guilty, if not now, then in the future.

The ‘deniers’ (more accurately described as ‘doubters’) think that the uncertainties in the science are very high, that the possible worst case climate change outcomes are extremely unlikely to occur and that the socioeconomic risks of trying to eradicate the possibility of such outcomes are unacceptably high. The ‘doomsters’ (more accurately described as ‘believers’) think that the uncertainties in the science are very low and that however unlikely the worst case outcomes might be they are nevertheless possible and are so very bad that the very high socioeconomic risks of trying to eradicate the possibility of such outcomes are almost irrelevant. Both positions are rational and reasonable and worthy of intelligent debate – there is no ‘correct’ position. There does, however, appear to be a politically correct position and that, of course, is the position of the ‘doomsters’. To put it another way, the statements, ‘Climate change is probably not a very serious problem but net zero by 2050 probably is’ and ‘Climate change is possibly a very serious problem and net zero by 2050 possibly isn’t’ are not incompatible. Furthermore both sides agree that human activity, in particular our burning of fossil fuels, is contributing to a warming, changing climate – the debate is about how much we are contributing and how dangerous that warming actually is. On which basis there appears to be more uniting the two sides than dividing them.

Whether the IPCC’s theory and climate models are reliable (at least reliable enough to be fit to inform climate policy) is just a matter of opinion. Whether carbon dioxide is the ‘control knob’ of global warming is just a matter of opinion. How emissions will evolve this century is just a matter of opinion. Whether natural climate variability can partially (or even largely) explain the post-industrialization global warming is just a matter of opinion. Whether climate sensitivity is relatively low or high is just a matter of opinion. How much global warming there will be this century is just a matter of opinion. How much global warming is ‘dangerous’ is just a matter of opinion. Whether renewables technology will evolve quickly to deliver affordable and reliable carbon-neutral alternatives to fossil fuels is just a matter of opinion. Whether climate policy should be predicated on plausible/likely outcomes or worst case possible outcomes is just a matter of opinion. There is no ‘right’ answer to the climate change problem.

In summary, believing that we are experiencing a climate crisis and so we must eradicate fossil fuels as fast as possible is rational and reasonable – as is doubting that we are experiencing a climate crisis and so we must be very circumspect about how deeply and how quickly we eradicate fossil fuels (because the radical decarbonization ‘cure’ may be worse than the climate change ‘disease’). That simple claim may horrify ‘deniers’ and ‘doomsters’ alike, who both tend to a belief that they have the monopoly on rationality and reasonableness – which is why accepting this would be an excellent first step to reducing the current polarization of attitudes to the issue. To approach the truth about climate change you really do need to hear both sides of the story – and they are both good stories. At the very least, given all these doubts, if a climate crisis really exists then it is a very curious one.

England’s Global Boiling Summer

The temperatures were lower in 2006, 2018 and 2022 than in the global boiling summer of 2023.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

You would be excused for not noticing, but we have apparently just had six months of global boiling!

So what effect has this had in England in the Summer Half Year?

Temperatures were lower than in 2006, 2018 and 2022:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-and-regional-series

And rainfall was close to the long term average:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-and-regional-series

Somehow we all managed to live through this boiling!

Why COPs Should Have No Teeth

COP 28 in Dubai United Arab Emirates world cloud

The 28th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will convene from 30 November to 12 December 2023 in the United Arab Emirates.

From Watts Up With That?

Ivor Williams

One definition of insanity is ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.’ (Supposedly an Einstein quote.)

A good example is the forthcoming 28th session (COP28) of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This will convene from 30 November to 12 December in the United Arab Emirates. The ‘Parties’ are UN member states plus some observers. The last one, COP27 at Sharm el Sheik in Egypt, had 12,000 delegates from over 200 countries.

There has been one every year since except for 2020. All the 27 so far have warned about the increasingly noxious state of the atmosphere and declaring that something must be done about it before it’s too late.

It all began with the May 1992 UNFCCC Convention. This comprehensive document was supposed to lay the foundation for all subsequent action to deal with climate change. In essence it said: ‘human activities have been substantially increasing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases … the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response.’

Nothing much happened so the UN planned a series of Conferences of the Parties to the Convention. The first (COP1) in 1995 declared: ‘The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind … the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change.’

Ten years and ten Conferences later produced the Paris Agreement at COP21 in December 2015, ‘a legally binding international treaty on climate change.’ The 196 Parties attending agreed ‘to limit global warming to 1.5°C … greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030 … the Agreement is a landmark in the multilateral climate change process because, for the first time, a binding agreement brings all nations together to combat climate change and adapt to its effects.’

The scale of inaction now clearly bears traces of insanity. Seven years and seven Conferences after the Paris ‘landmark’ COP27(2022) announced: ‘Parties have established their resolve to limit the global average temperature increase to 1.5°C in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change … with cascading crises facing governments and citizens alike, global efforts risk backsliding against the scale and speed of action required … stakeholders must ensure they deliver on their promises.’

The CO2 content of the atmosphere has been measured since 1957 and has risen steadily every year. The twenty-seven Conferences have had no effect on total global emissions. Nations have realised their people’s need for electricity had to come first. The cheapest and quickest way to provide that is by way of fossil-fuelled power stations.

Leaders of nations may also have wondered at the increasingly manic shouts of: ‘global boiling’; ‘July the warmest in human civilisation’s history’; ‘oceans growing hotter … triggering global weather disasters … heat searing  enough to knock out mobile phones’; ‘daily temperatures hitting a 100,000 year high’; ‘the September data shows … the planet’s temperature reached its warmest level in modern records and probably in thousands of years.’

Advisers to leaders of nations may have pointed out that we have only been measuring daily world-wide temperatures for about 140 years. NASA makes it quite clear that ‘before 1880 there just wasn’t enough data to make accurate calculations.’ The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago; the advisors may have advised that it would therefore seem reasonable to expect that records will be broken, will continue to be broken, and may or may not have anything to do with global warming.

There has curiously been very little comment about the willingness of the UN to go on having Conferences calling for actions that don’t happen. Occasional remarks have appeared, in March 2019 for instance: ‘After 25 years of failure, we should abandon the UNFCCC … Emissions are at record levels and the international treaty designed to rein them in cannot drive action, it is time for new ideas to be explored.’

Dominic Raab, then the UK Foreign Secretary, was quoted in the Daily Telegraph for 24 October 2020: ‘We want to see a reformed UN, a UN that is ready … to address the global challenges that lie ahead.’ After the COP27 climate conference closed in Egypt, Simon Stiell, head of the UNFCCC, said he intended to review the COP process ‘to make it as effective as possible.’

Pope Francis, in his recent Laudate Deum Exhortation sums up the problem, declaring that (section 4.52): ‘the accords [of the UNFCCC] have been poorly implemented, due to lack of suitable mechanisms for oversight, periodic review and penalties in cases of noncompliance … international negotiations cannot make significant progress due to positions taken by countries which place their national interests above the global common good.’

But is it a problem? If the UN had had unlimited power and authority, would the industrialised nations have been ordered to give up their coal, oil and gas, send much of their ill-gotten treasure south and east as compensation to Africa and Asia, and shoved back a century as punishment for taking the world down the wrong path?

Perhaps we should be thankful that where climate is concerned the UN can only talk, not act.

And the Walter Duranty Award Goes To …

An international renewables-lobby outfit called Covering Climate Now (CCN) this week announced its 2023 prizes for media’s best hyping of the non-existent “climate crisis”, objectivity be damned. This “crisis” was most recently elevated to “global boiling” by the UN’s top idiot and socialist Antonio Guterres.

From Climate Scepticism

BY TONY THOMAS

In 1932, Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty of the New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for his glowing reports of happiness and progress in the Soviet Union. He followed that with denials of the genocide-by-famine in the Ukraine, in which Stalin engineered the death by starvation of four million peasants. Duranty’s peers at the time described his reporting as “the most enlightened, dispassionate dispatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world.”[1] But the verdict of Duranty biographer Sally J Taylor in “Stalin’s Apologist” (1996) was that his output involved “some of the greatest lies history has ever known”.

Prizes for journalists are akin to the beads and mirrors offered to grateful savages. High-profile print and TV journalists locally – I’d better not name them — have been showered with recent prizes for Canberra stories involving more spin than substance.

An international renewables-lobby outfit called Covering Climate Now (CCN) this week announced its 2023 prizes for media’s best hyping of the non-existent “climate crisis”, objectivity be damned. This “crisis” was most recently elevated to “global boiling” by the UN’s top idiot and socialist Antonio Guterres. And who should feature among the CCN prize-winners but our taxpayers’ very own Australian Broadcasting Commission. The ABC’s podcast “Who’s gonna (sic) save us?” won the radio/podcast category. The CCN commendation:

This engaging podcast tells the story of people who are standing up for their convictions and pushing back against organizations and companies acting with disregard for the climate crisis. The production draws the listener in with moments of high drama, like an Aboriginal woman boldly approaching an energy executive at a company board meeting to present “cease and desist” papers for trespassing on her people’s land, followed by a discussion about how Australians are using the law to stop climate change … Highlighting how everyone can take action, the podcast speaks to audiences in a way that sounds like an everyday conversation.

As a journalist myself, I don’t like outfits that work to turn journalists into propagandists, whether for “climate crises”, renewables or anything else. I remember 30-40 years ago, when the media had more ethics, my boss at BRW magazine banned journos from making extra money from media-training consultancies. Those outfits coached company chieftains on how dodge around aggressive interviewing. But today the ABC not only solicits and accepts prizes from media-corrupting groups like CCN, but has joined several international consortia dedicated to censoring inconvenient views which the censors label as ‘misinformation’.

CCN is a creature of the leftist Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, and the dark-green Guardian. It has persuaded close to 600 media groups to sign up to “educate” the public about supposed climate peril, and to stifle evidence that then campaign for Net Zero is sabotaging the West’s fossil-fuel-derived prosperity. As it boasts,

CCNow collaborates with journalists and newsrooms to produce more informed and urgent climate stories, to make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom — from politics and weather to business and culture — and to drive a public conversation that creates an engaged public.

CCN’s 600 rogues’ gallery includes news-syndicating giants Reuters, Bloomberg and AFP, along with a host of print, TV and radio channels such as Al Jazeera, CBS, NBC, Deutsche Welle, Lancet, New Scientist, NZ Herald, Teen Vogue, Science Alert(Australia), Nature, and of course The Conversation(Australasia). CCN claims its members indoctrinate a two-billion strong audience.

The ABC has not signed up to CCN because it would be too naked a breach of its statutory charter for taxpayer-funded impartiality. It’s signed up instead to “truthist” coalitions like Reconciliation Australia and the troubled RMIT/ABC Fact Check. It’s also in alliance with UK-based BAFTA-albertwhich wants to “set the cultural agenda” by promoting leftist memes in TV shows, documentaries and movies.

Last year the ABC joined the BBC’s “Trusted News Initiative” (TNI) – an international censorship alliance and, according to Robert Kennedy Jr, a cartel that labels material hostile to leftism as “misinformation”. TNI, with ABC assistance, stifles internet sites opposing Deep State narratives about Covid, elections, climate, and renewables being the cheapest form of energy (checked your power bill lately?)

So, what about the ABC’s prize from Covering Climate Now? It’s for the podcast called Who’s gonna (sic) save us, which is “a co-production of the so-called “science team” at ABC Radio National and triple j’s Hack.” Its brand logo involves, appropriately, a drum being banged, and a diversity-tick youth of colour screaming into a megaphone. In the background is a mob waving placards like “Don’t be a fossil fool”, “Go Solar! Save the planet”, and the hackneyed one about “No Planet B”. The text below reads,

We’re all looking for a way through the climate crisis. [Better, “climate madness”]. Who’s going to get us there — and how will they do it? Meet the people who are trying to draw the map to a better future. 

These people, led by Climate Minister Chris Bowen, are giving us a “better future” involving tripling of household energy bills and, probably, blackouts.

The podcast’s presenter is Jo Lauder, who we’re told has “reported extensively on climate change, the environment and young people.”

When I checked her social media, her top post on Xread

So I messaged her, “Hi Jo, isn’t it hypocritical to be carrying on about climate change while jetting to hang out in New York?” No reply yet.

The “Who’s gonna (sic) save us” series ran intermittently late last year. Although its ABC Listen app says we can “hear the world differently” the Jo Lauder series is same-old climate guff, with episodes of up to 50 minutes including “Citizens assemble!”, “Standing up for the climate”, “[activist] Scientists on strike”, “We fought the law”, “Community power”, and “Who do YOU think is going to [as distinct from ‘gonna’] save us?”

Dutifully, I listened in for well over an hour, absorbing Jo’s material:

“Who is your climate hero? Think big and small. Is it Saul Griffith, with his ambitious plan for decarbonising the entire nation or, hey! the world, or a small local like the gang at Totally Renewable Yackandandah who are focused on transforming their community’s future?”

“Traditionally Australia’s electricity system has been dirty, and heavily centred around coal communities. But there’s a shift happening. Towns around the country – from Yackandandah to Shackleton to Marlinja – are using renewables to take control of their energy. The benefits are flowing back into local communities, and remote places are finally getting reliable power.” 

I’d say that if Yakandandah wants to go right off the (coal-assisted) grid, good luck to them when the wind drops.

Who, by the way, is that ABC world-decarbonising climate hero Saul Griffith? The podcast invite reads,

Saul Griffith has an ambitious plan to save the planet. And it all begins at home. It’s an electrified revolution for the Australian household!

Saul turns out to be (thanks, Wikipedia) a successful Australian-American engineer and inventor from a Greenpeace-oriented family, now back in Wollongong after great times with Silicon Valley startups like Otherlab and Squid Labs (no relation to Squid Games). He advocates forcing every citizen into compliance with the Net Zero agenda. He’s also truly on board with the need for urgings from the likes of the ABC. Jo Lauder’s podcast opens with him saying, “Don’t under-appreciate the importance of storytellers. We need story-tellers more than anyone right now. We need the storytellers to make it OK for you to give up the V8 [desirable car engine].”

 As he’s written, (it sounds to me like one of those Soviet-era five-year plans):

Across the board we now need [renewables] adoption rates of 100%. This complete adoption rate [e.g. for electric cars] is required by the end-game decarbonization we ultimately need… A 100% adoption rate is only achieved by mandate—and robust financial incentives to back it up… The challenge of 100% adoption presents a giant conflict that we need to address head-on: the “free market” as we know it is not up to the task… This is not to say that businesses and the market don’t have roles; they are critical [I welcome that he rejects the North Korean model]. But in emergencies, ideologies must be put aside. When Mother Nature arm wrestles with the invisible hand, she will always win. As my friend, the economist Skip Laitner, says, the free market needs an invisible foot to give it a swift kick in the ass now and then…

We can rebuild a prosperous and inclusive middle class, as we enjoyed after World War II, with tens of millions of good new jobs that are vital and prideworthy. If America does it right, everyone’s energy costs will go down. [Should that read, “up”]. Everyone has a role to play in the war effort.

We now face a climate emergency as challenging as all of our other 20th-century emergencies combined. [e.g. World War One, the Great Depression, Hitler, Stalin, Tojo and the Cold War combined]. It requires mass mobilization with extraordinary speed and resources. Without a doubt, you are worried, scared, or worse. That’s reasonable, but we can’t do nothing, and this is also a vast opportunity to make the world, and our economy, better for everyone. (My emphases).

Call me out for misinformation but isn’t the real question, “Who’s gonna [sic] save us from Covering Climate Now, Saul Griffith, Buffoon Bowen and the ABC?”

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 and available here

[1] Conquest, R. Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Oxford University Press, New York. 1986, p. 320.

Global Boiling Summer In The USA

The BBC have been hyperventilating about US heatwaves seemingly all summer.
Now we have the data from NOAA for the last three months, we can see that it has not been remarkable at all, even using the heavily adjusted data

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66195722

The BBC have been hyperventilating about US heatwaves seemingly all summer.

Now we have the data from NOAA for the last three months, we can see that it has not been remarkable at all, even using the heavily adjusted data:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/national/time-series/110/tmax/3/8/1895-2023?base_prd=true&begbaseyear=1901&endbaseyear=2000

Neither has it been particularly drier than normal:

I wonder when the BBC will report that?

Heat v. Cold  —  A Crucial Case

As the planet Earth has slowly warmed, in fits and spurts over the last 3 or 4 hundred years since the end of the Little Ice Age,  the worries about global average surface temperatures have ramped up.  The much-denied Global Cooling Panic of the 1970s morphed into the Global Warming Panic when short-lived cooling stopped and the most current ongoing warming spurt started.

From Watts Up With That?

Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 12 September 2023

As the planet Earth has slowly warmed, in fits and spurts over the last 3 or 4 hundred years since the end of the Little Ice Age,  the worries about global average surface temperatures have ramped up.  The much-denied Global Cooling Panic of the 1970s morphed into the Global Warming Panic when short-lived cooling stopped and the most current ongoing warming spurt started.

This new panic, the history of which I will not recount, resulted in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and subsequent The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the current crop of international bureaucrats screaming about the Climate Emergency and Global Boiling.   The slight and mostly beneficial general warming is propagandistically portrayed as heating and hotness.  

Heat and Hotness are thus portrayed, always, as Too Much Heat and Too Hot; then to Dangerously Hot and Deadly Heat –in the time-honored 1984-ish propaganda slippery slope. 

Now, the Climate Emergency agenda demands blood – bodies in the morgue, dead and dying grandparents and dead children, to back up its storyline of  Deadly Heat. 

Thus we have the mainstream mass media repeating endlessly that the warming we are experiencing and the summers we have in the Northern Hemisphere are killing us.

There is a bug in that ointment:  Cold and low temperatures have always resulted in the deaths of far many more humans than warmth and high temperatures. 

The facts have not stopped dedicated scientists, whole teams of them, from trying to prove the opposite of the truth. 

In the United States, climate harm enthusiasts haul out the following chart from NOAA’s weather.gov site page:

Weather Related Fatality and Injury Statistics.

This particular graph gives an entirely false idea because it is simplistic.  It comes from the Storm Events Database and does not even pretend to represent total U.S. deaths from extreme temperatures, hot or cold, only those from “storms” in the database.  There is also the Cause of Death problem, which you can read about here.

To discover the truth about Heat v. Cold Deaths, it is necessary to look to the scientific literature on the topic.  A quick survey can be accomplished with a Google Scholar search like this.  It returns the first ten out of very many papers on the topic.  Typical findings are:

“Results: In UK regions, cold-related mortality currently accounts for more than one order of magnitude more deaths than heat-related mortality (around 61 and 3 deaths per 100,000 population per year, respectively). In Australian cities, approximately 33 and 2 deaths per 100,000 population are associated every year with cold and heat, respectively”   [ source ]

“Results    Between 2000 and 2010, 3.9% [CI 95% 3.2:4.6] of the total mortality was attributed to cold, and 1.2% [1.1:1.2] to heat.”  [ source ]

Results:  ….” Cold effects on mortality appeared higher than heat effects in this subtropical city with moderate climatic conditions.” (São Paulo, Brazil) [source ]

I wrote seven years ago:  “Surprising Results From Study: Moderate Cold Kills More People Than Extreme Heat”.   That essay related the findings of the then ‘latest’ study on heat and cold deaths:  Gasparrini et al. (2015) in Lancet 2015; 386: 369–75 (.pdf)

The title told it all.  This chart from Gasparini gives the details:

Compare these hot v. cold deaths bars to those of NOAA’s Weather.gov far above.

Interestingly, as the title declares, moderate cold kills far more than extreme cold or moderate or extreme heat in this multi-country, multi-continent study. 

Coming closer to present time, The Lancet–Planetary Health, published Qi Zhao et al (2021), titled: “Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study”.  The paper has a distressingly long list of authors.  But the authors made their best effort to do dig out “the global, regional, and national mortality burden associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures.”

When all the data was run through the computers and the models, the bottom line was:

“….9.43% (95% CI 7.58–11.07) of all deaths (8.52% [6.19–10·47] were cold-related and 0.91% [0.56–1.36] were heat-related. There were 74 temperature-related excess deaths per 100,000 residents (95% CI 60–87). The mortality burden varied geographically.”

That is:  non-optimal cold ambient temperatures cause ten times the number of deaths worldwide than non-optimal warm temperatures.

Bottom Line:

The question of which causes more human deaths worldwide, higher or lower temperatures, heat or cold, is not controversial.  It is well understood and the findings of many studies are quite clear. 

Cold, low ambient temperature, leads to the death of far more human beings than Heat,  higher ambient temperature, by an order of magnitude, ten times more deaths from low temperatures. 

Any report to the contrary, claiming that heat kills more people than cold, is either made from total ignorance of the facts, or is intentional disinformation.

# # # # #

Author’s Comment:

It is one of the sillier aspects of the Climate Wars that this issue is bandied about, with major journals, such as the Scientific American publishing such nonsense as “These heat waves pose a major risk to public health. “In an average year in the U.S., heat kills more people than any other type of extreme weather,” says Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.”

This type of misinformation is dangerous – the Gasparini chart in the essay shows that even in the U.S. extreme cold kills more people than extreme heat, but the real killer (well, leading cause of illness leading to death) is Moderate Cold.

I won’t say that the science is settled…but the evidence is in regarding Heat vs. Cold.  Cold is the killer.

Thanks for reading.

Our Global Boiling Summer Was As Hot As 1857!

They knew, of course, that it was not the hottest on record, because they have the Central England Temperature series, and this dates back further their UK records.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

It seems an age since we had a couple of weeks of nice weather in June, which naturally had the Met Office leaping up and down to blame on climate change:

June has been confirmed as the hottest on record for the UK.

A rapid study by Met Office scientists found the chance of observing a June beating the previous record of 14.9°C, like we have this year, has at least doubled since the period around 1940. The previous record of 14.9°C was recorded in 1940 and 1976.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2023/fingerprints-of-climate-change-on-june-temperature-records

They knew, of course, that it was not the hottest on record, because they have the Central England Temperature series, and this dates back further their UK records.

And according to CET, June 1846 was more than a degree hotter. It was also hotter in 1676, 1822 and 1826. That, of course, demolished their claims about global warming.

As I pointed out at the time, the average temperature in June was high because of the quirks of the calendar. Relatively warm, sunny weather pretty much lasted all month, before quickly disappearing at the beginning of July. At no stage however did temperatures reach unusually high levels.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/08/10/the-tale-of-two-summers-2023-v-1976/

The Met Office made a big play of the fact that June 2023 was hotter than 1976, part of the well-known summer of 1976.

It was grossly dishonest to even compare with 1976, because the heatwave only got going in the last week of June that year. When it did get going, temperatures peaked several degrees above this year, and the hot spell lasted well into July:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html

As we can also see, there was another long heatwave in August 1976.

And despite all of that global boiling in June, the summer of 2023 ended up pretty unexceptional, barely above the 30-yr average, no warmer than 1857 and 1859. There have been 38 years with summer temperatures as high or higher.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/07/04/hottest-evah-june/

There is an unmistakeable takeaway from these charts. This is the fact that average summer temperatures continue to fail to beat 1976, even if hot summers have tended to become more common.

And there is a good reason for this – hot summers are the result of dry, sunny weather, not global warming.

In other words, weather, not climate.