Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
2012 wasn’t the first doomsday Professor Guy McPherson predicted. Back in 2007 Guy McPherson predicted peak oil would cause permanent blackouts starting in 2012.
The end of civilization and the extinction of humanity
Many experts who write about simply one of these issues — Peak Oil — predict complete economic collapse within a decade, followed shortly thereafter by utter chaos and the subsequent death of more than 80% of the world’s population. After all, the exponential curve of human population growth matches perfectly the exponential growth of world energy supply, suggesting that the downturn of the energy curve will cause a large-scale die-off of human beings. And if you think chaos can’t descend on this country, you weren’t paying attention to New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina. Horrible as that event was, nearly everybody involved knew it was a temporary inconvenience; I’m concerned how people might act when they recognize Peak Oil as a long emergency.
One by one, starting in 2012, the world’s cities will experience permanent blackouts; and once we enter the Dark Age, the Stone Age won’t be too far behind. Bear in mind, I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I know the current culture — the culture of make believe, or the culture of death, depending on how deeply you care to think about it — is the worst possible route for most of the planet’s species; as a conservation biologist, I realize the faster and more complete the collapse of Empire, the greater our biological legacy. On the other hand, the paralyzing hand of fear grips me every time I think about Peak Oil; a life in the ivory tower is damned poor preparation for Stone-Age living. Fortunately, I only think about it a few thousand times each day.
So what is Professor Guy McPherson up to these days? You’re be glad to know that to date he has not been claimed by the mass extinction. A few weeks ago he gave an interview discussing the dangers of microplastics and the destabilisation of the global magnetosphere – and explained how we’re actually in the 9th mass extinction – or maybe the 10th or 12th.
Perhaps I’m not being fair – we still have a few months until November, the 10 year anniversary of Guy McPherson’s global warming mass extinction prophecy. Don’t forget, the science is settled folks.
Has the Climate Crisis been downgraded in the wake of the RCP 8.5 cancellation?
From the Encyclical;
ENCYCLICAL LETTER MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS OF HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIV ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
INTRODUCTION
1. Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world. Whenever humanity is in danger of marring its true identity, we Christians lift our eyes to the Incarnate God, knowing that it is “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.” [1] In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness.
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5. It now falls to us to face the challenges of our time with clarity of thought and responsibility. It is necessary to establish adequate regulatory tools capable of upholding justice and curbing the distorting effects of technological power. Nevertheless, the issue is not limited to regulation. As Pope Francis warned, we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it: “It must also be recognized that nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our own DNA, and many other abilities which we have acquired… have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world.” [7] In the past, it was largely up to the State to guide and direct innovation. Today, however, the main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments. Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good.
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10. We must, then, avoid the “[Tower of] Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise. Instead, let us choose the “way of Nehemiah,” which highlights the importance of working together to make the City of God a safe place for returning exiles. Rebuilding today means recognizing that, precisely from the plurality of voices and visions which, even though they sometimes remind us of the confusion caused by the diversity of spoken languages, a bright possibility emerges. Indeed, this is the possibility of building together, of transforming diversity into a resource and of making listening and dialogue the common ground upon which to cultivate justice and fraternity. Within this shared task, Christians discover their unique role of guiding actions toward God so that, in his light, pluralism does not dissipate into disorder, but instead, through the practice of synodality, it becomes the space in which humanity rediscovers its solid foundations and its final end. In the Book of Revelation, John sees the New Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev 21:2) as a gift for all humanity. And this vision of grace is an invitation for us Christians to work together in order to foster a peaceful, just and dignified life in community within today’s “cities.”
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[The word “Climate” doesn’t appear until 81, though Laudato Si’ and the environment are mentioned earlier]
81. A litmus test for social justice today is the treatment of migrants, refugees and those forced to move due to poverty, violence, climate change and environmental disasters. The way a society treats them reveals whether its sense of justice is driven by fear or by the spirit of fraternity. Pope Francis urged us to see migrants not simply as a problem to be managed, but as a living image of the People of God on the move. [109] They are people with dignity, resources and dreams, who have the right to be treated with respect and to ask to become active members of the societies that welcome them. Social justice in this area entails at least two complementary commitments. On the one hand, this means protecting the rightful hopes of those forced to leave by ensuring safe and legal routes, dignified conditions for receiving them, and genuine pathways to integration. On the other hand, it means promoting the right to remain in one’s homeland in peace and security by addressing the root causes that force people to migrate, including those linked to economic injustices and the climate crisis. When these rights are respected, migration can become an opportunity for encounter and mutual enrichment among peoples.
All we need is for leading climate figures like Michael Mann to re-invent themselves as artificial intelligence experts, and the transition to the new scare campaign will be complete – Mann has already started issuing warnings about AI.
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Mann also highlighted the role of artificial intelligence, cautioning that we now face the risk of infinite disinformation, where misleading narratives can be endlessly generated, recycled, and amplified at unprecedented scale. He closed by emphasizing that urgency must be paired with agency. The most meaningful individual action, he said, is joining collective action that drives systemic change.
“After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” Trump wrote, quite incorrectly, on Truth Social. “Unlike the Dumocrats, who use Climate Alarmism nonsense to push their Green New Scam, my Administration will always be based on TRUTH, SCIENCE, and FACT!”
Even in light of the Trump administration’s gutting of American science and the president’s well-documented reckless disregard for the truth, this post stands out as patently, particularly absurd. But Trump’s new climate-denial talking point is a weaponized version of new developments in climate science. Trump’s typically bombastic disinformation—if casually combined with a real debate within the climate community about one climate projection—will muddy the public understanding of science enough that Americans on both sides of the aisle might be left with an incorrect and dangerous belief that they no longer need to worry about the climate crisis.
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The new high-emissions scenario hypothesizes a backsliding of progress, where current climate policies are rolled back, clean-energy development slows, and fossil-fuel use expands. This scenario leads most likely to a temperature rise of about 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, but the range of possible heating by that date spans from 2.5 degrees to 4.3 degrees Celsius. The scenario also projects more heating after 2100, since global emissions fail to shrink to net zero. Indeed, the new high-emissions scenario projects that the world could heat up to RCP8.5’s 5 degrees Celsius by 2150, just 50 years later.
Sooo – it’s still an urgent emergency we have to deal with right now, even though thermageddon has been deferred by at least 50 years?
For a long time I’ve been relishing the prospect of Michael Mann having to publicly downgrade his climate claims, but now that moment has arrived, I don’t feel the satisfaction I thought I would feel. The damage done to the global economy by these clowns – decades of stunted economic growth – is too great to feel happiness at a grudging admission their predictions were too extreme.
Even sadder that Mann has chosen to cling to the tattered remnants of his mantle of alarmism, instead of coming clean and properly admitting he was completely wrong. To paraphrase Gandalf in Lord of the Rings during the confrontation with the defeated wizard Saruman, even now Mann could have done some good, by following climate alarmist James Lovelock’s footsteps and admitting climate alarmism was a mistake. Such an admission might have helped to reduce the suffering in backwards outposts of climate ignorance like the European Union, by accelerating their awakening from their Net Zero nightmare.
But Michael Mann, as always, in my opinion has placed his personal vanity ahead of attempting any kind of restitution for all the harm his “hide the decline” hockey stick climate alarmism has caused over the years.
Way back in 2012, climate “scientist” Michael Mann, then at Penn State University, sued four defendants for defamation. The four were commentators Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg, who had written blog posts about Mann, and National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, entities which had respectively hosted the Steyn and Simberg posts. The occasion for the Steyn and Simberg posts was that independent investigator Louis Freeh had issued a Report that had castigated Penn State President Graham Spanier for having whitewashed the conduct of the university’s assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky, in a sex abuse scandal.
Way back in 2012, climate “scientist” Michael Mann, then at Penn State University, sued four defendants for defamation. The four were commentators Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg, who had written blog posts about Mann, and National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, entities which had respectively hosted the Steyn and Simberg posts.
The occasion for the Steyn and Simberg posts was that independent investigator Louis Freeh had issued a Report that had castigated Penn State President Graham Spanier for having whitewashed the conduct of the university’s assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky, in a sex abuse scandal.
Steyn and Simberg had compared Spanier’s exoneration of Sandusky to his exoneration two years previously of the university’s star climate science professor, Mann, after the so-called “ClimateGate” emails had shown Mann deeply involved in data manipulation schemes to support the narrative of climate apocalypse.
Here we are now in 2026, more than 13 years later. The Mann v. Steyn case has gone through a truly incredible procedural history, including multiple motions to dismiss, two appeals to the D.C. Court of Appeals (different from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals), a certiorari petition to the Supreme Court, a jury trial after remand (in 2024), and a bevy of post-trial motions.
I have previously had numerous posts covering this case, including the trial and subsequent developments. My most recent post was this one from March 2025, covering decisions by the trial judge (Alfred Irving of the D.C. Superior Court) on most of the post-trial motions.
A few days ago, on January 22, the Judge Irving finally issued a decision that appears to resolve the last of the post-trial motions. Most notably, the judge has now put numbers on the amounts that Mann will be required to pay to Steyn and Simberg for having presented false evidence at trial and thus having put those two through the effort of disproving the false evidence.
However, the amounts are quite modest in the context of the vast resources that have gone into fighting this battle: Mann is ordered to pay $11,404.80 to Steyn, and $16,762.82 to Simberg.
As I reported in my March 2025 post, the high point of the case for Mann came in February 2024, when the jury returned its verdict. Although the jury awarded Mann only one dollar of “nominal” damages against each of Steyn and Simberg, it awarded $1 million of punitive damages against Steyn, and $1,000 of punitive damages against Simberg. (National Review and CEI had previously been dismissed from the case on motions.). Mann and his media acolytes immediately took to gloating on social media about his great victory.
But before long the “victory” turned to dust. In January 2025 Judge Irving awarded National Review some $540,820.21 in fees and costs from Mann, under a D.C. statute that entitles prevailing defendants in defamation cases to recover their fees. On March 4, 2025, in his decision on post-trial motions, the judge reduced the punitive damages award as against Steyn from $1 million to $5000.
And then on March 12, 2025, Judge Irving issued another order on a motion for sanctions against Mann, in which he lit into Mann for having presented to the jury false evidence of his supposed damages. The March 12, 2025, Order invited Steyn and Simberg to submit evidence as to how much Mann’s bad faith conduct had cost them in incremental fees and costs.
Now in his January 22 Order, Judge Irving not only puts numbers on the award of sanctions but also provides a new summary of the misconduct that led him to award sanctions against Mann. A piece of that summary is worth quoting here:
Dr. Mann throughout this litigation complained that he suffered lost grant funding directly stemming from the defamatory statements of Messrs.
Simberg and Steyn, while providing very little in the way of specifics about the dollar amounts of his losses directly attributable to the statements (such as corroborating testimony from percipient witnesses), all while promising to illuminate the Court at trial.
At trial, Dr. Mann elected through his attorneys to present to the jury a blown-up demonstrative, without redaction or explanation, a demonstrative intentionally prepared for its use at trial, which included a budget (loss) amount of $9,713,924.00, when the correct amount, previously corrected during a third round of discovery, was $112,000. . .
While Plaintiff and his attorneys find nothing wrong with such practice, the Court simply cannot condone such bad faith litigation tactics.
It’s fair to say that Mann’s bad faith trial tactics got Judge Irving very, very angry.
As far as I can tell, this Order resolves the last remaining issues in this case at the trial court level. At Steyn’s website, the comment is “Next stop in Mann vs Steyn? The Court of Appeals.”
Meanwhile, some other things have changed during the passing years. In October 2025 National Review put up a piece headlined “Michael Mann finally goes away,” in which they report that “Mann has finally dropped any claims against us.”
The brief piece contains no information as to any payment of money from one side to the other, or what happened to the $500,000+ award of sanctions that NR had recovered against Mann.
It is possible that there was a payment of some sort that the parties agreed to keep confidential, but my inference would be that NR walked away from the sanctions award in order to avoid further years’ worth of appeals. After all, Mann’s efforts appear to be funded by wealthy backers with essentially infinite deep pockets.
Also while this case has been endlessly going on, in 2022 Mann moved his base of operations from Penn State to the University of Pennsylvania.
There he flaunts the ridiculous title of “Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and founding director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.” Well, University of Pennsylvania, you now have a “Presidential Distinguished Professor” who has been adjudicated to have lied under oath to fabricate a damages case, and to have engaged in “bad faith litigation tactics.”
And yet they continue to support him as some kind of hero, I guess because he is on the right team. Other Penn professors who are actually serious scholars but find themselves not on the right team (e.g., Stanley Goldfarb, Amy Wax) get completely different treatment.
Damned. Lost. Done. President Joe Biden keeps saying the world as we know it will be gone if global temperatures rise beyond 1.5 degrees.
Which led Michael Mann (a leading climate scientist/activist) to complain that Biden’s pitch was “misleading and unhelpful.” Mann continued:
It indeed feeds doomerism since there’s a very real possibility that we will fail to limit warming below 1.5 C. If we miss that exit ramp, we don’t continue headlong down the fossil fuel highway. We get off at the earliest possible exit.
“Doomerism” Everywhere?
Mann’s critique of Doomerism re Biden (or his handlers) applies equally to all the leading lights of modern neo-Malthusianism. Begin with the long careers of Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren. Continue with Al Gore, since at least Earth in the Balance (1992). Not to mention John (“running out of time to avoid irreversible impacts”) Kerry.
Consider too the dark words of United Nations’ head António Guterres, who declared last year:
We are on a fast track to climate disaster. Major cities under water. Unprecedented heatwaves. Terrifying storms. Widespread water shortages. The extinction of a million species of plants and animals. This is not fiction or exaggeration.
Reacting to the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN Secretary-General insisted that unless governments everywhere reassess their energy policies, the world will be uninhabitable.
Turning to the scientists, the father of the climate alarm, James Hansen, stated back in 2006:
We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.
Scientist/activist Andrew Dessler, an ally of Mann in the climate wars, tweeted something close to Biden’s doomerism five years ago:
If we want to protect ecosystems & keep the Earth looking pretty much like it looks now, I have some bad news for you. That boat has sailed.
A climate pundit much admired by Mann, Bill McKibben, stated: “[Climate] is not only a crisis, it is the most thorough and complete crisis our species and our civilizations have ever faced, one there is no guarantee that we will survive intact.” And: “If we don’t win very quickly on climate change, then we will never win.” That was six years ago….
Mann’s admonition to avoid Doomerism brings up the aforementioned IPCC’s latest climate assessment, which chose the worst-case, much-maligned RCP8.5 scenario for its base case, leading to dire forecasts which were then exaggerated in the Policymakers Summary and again by the mainstream media.
The fact is that climate alarmists walk a tightrope. They must exaggerate to grab the public’s attention and priorities but not exaggerate so much as to project hopelessness. Then the public might shift climate policies from (government) mitigation to (free-market) adaptation. That would all but disintegrate the mighty climate intellectual-industrial complex.
The high-wire act was acknowledged by climatologist Stephen Schneider in 1989 when he infamously stated that gaining “some broad based support” meant having “to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.” In the same year, Paul Ehrlich (with Robert Ornstein) stated:
In the long run CO2-induced warming would melt the polar ice caps, thus flooding many areas, putting New York City, Washington, D.C., and Sacramento, California, under water…. Florida would largely disappear, and much of the lower Mississippi River Valley would become an inland sea (New World, New Mind, p. 77).
Decades later, the lapping waters are not yet in sight. But, as always, the goalposts are reset to issue the alarms anew.
Mr. Gore, addressing a hall filled with scientists in Chicago, showed a slide that illustrated a sharp spike in fires, floods and other calamities around the world and warned the audience that global warming “is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented.” … Mr. Gore removed the slide from his presentation after the Belgian research group that assembled the disaster data said he had misrepresented what was driving the upward trend…. A spokeswoman for Mr. Gore said he planned to switch to using data on disasters compiled by insurance companies.
As the year draws to a close, the guardians of climate orthodoxy have once again unleashed their ritualistic howls of indignation at the actions of the Trump administration. Last week’s op-ed in The Guardian, Bob Ward and Michael Mann—attack dogs of the alarmist establishment—likened the US government’s decision to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to tyranny, “paid for” by fossil fuel interests. Their op-ed opens with the astonishing claim that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin “would have understood and even appreciated” Trump’s actions.
As the year draws to a close, the guardians of climate orthodoxy have once again unleashed their ritualistic howls of indignation at the actions of the Trump administration. Last week’s op-ed in The Guardian, Bob Ward and Michael Mann—attack dogs of the alarmist establishment—likened the US government’s decision to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to tyranny, “paid for” by fossil fuel interests. Their op-ed opens with the astonishing claim that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin “would have understood and even appreciated” Trump’s actions.
They accuse President Trump of suppressing climate science, evoking the spectre of Lysenkoism, that infamous episode where ideology trumped empirical inquiry under Stalin’s regime. The irony is exquisite even if lost on its progenitors. Here are two figures who have spent their careers calling for the cancelling of dissenters, now projecting their own sins onto a political leader intent on liberating science from ideological captivity.
An Orwellian Malignancy
This latest salvo is no aberration but a symptom of a deeper malaise. The climate alarmist narrative, much like its twin in the COVID-19 hysteria, relies on a censorship complex that brands any deviation as “misinformation.” Ward, a fixture in the environmental NGO circuit, has long specialized in ad hominem attacks on respected academics like Richard Lindzen and Richard Tol, dismissing their peer-reviewed critiques as heresy. Mann, infamous for his “hockey stick” graph that conveniently erased historical climate variability to fabricate a crisis, has faced courtroom rebukes for his litigious zeal. In his defamation suits, judges have accused him and his legal team of misleading tactics, underscoring the fraudulence of his claims. Yet, in the pages of The Guardian—that reliable echo chamber for green ideologues—the pair inverts reality, portraying Trump’s defunding of activist institutions as censorship, when it is precisely the opposite.
Consider the economic and institutional realities underpinning this charade. NCAR, after over five decades, has devolved into a taxpayer-funded propaganda mill, churning out models that predict apocalyptic futures while ignoring the stubborn facts of atmospheric physics and human adaptation. The Trump administration’s move to shutter it aligns with a broader push to restore scientific integrity, as outlined in the president’s “Gold Standard Science “executive order. This directive mandates transparency in federally funded research, ensuring that models and data are replicable and free from the biases that plague alarmist projections. Far from Stalinist suppression, this is a reclamation of science from the clutches of unelected bureaucrats and their NGO allies, who funnel billions into “climate education” grants that invariably promote one-sided advocacy. NOAA, for instance, routinely awarded multimillion-dollar sums to nonprofits peddling green dogma, all under the guise of environmental stewardship.
The parallels with the COVID-19 debacle are striking, revealing how the misinformation label serves as a blunt instrument for silencing debate across scientific domains. Just as climate skeptics are tarred as “deniers,” COVID dissenters were branded spreaders of falsehoods. Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, a leading epidemiologist, recently highlighted this hubris in a post on X: the notion that a cabal of bureaucrats and activist scientists can infallibly discern truth from error on complex matters is not just arrogant—it’s delusional. Bhattacharya himself endured censorship orchestrated by Anthony Fauci who among others in the medical establishment pressured social media platforms to throttle views challenging lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
Across the Atlantic, the European Union’s censorship regime under European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen exemplifies this technocratic overreach. The unelected Eurocrat boasts of safeguarding free speech against “harmful and illegal activities” online with its Digital Services Act. It aims to restrict media platforms which host “disinformation” and critical views on mass immigration, the Ukraine conflict, or the ruinous costs of the green agenda in Europe.
In a rant that would impress Orwell, Ms. Von der Leyen speaks about how “pre-bunking” is preferable to “de-bunking” alleged untruths and where alleged “misinformation” is a virus:
“…we need to build up societal immunity around information manipulation, because research has shown that pre-bunking is much more successful than debunking. Pre-bunking is basically the opposite of debunking. In short, prevention is preferable to cure. Perhaps if you think of information manipulation as a virus—instead of treating an infection once it has taken hold, that is debunking—it’s much better to vaccinate so that the body is inoculated.”
Where have we heard that vaccination/inoculation story before? Perhaps we should not digress into Ms. Von der Leyen’s missing SMS phone messages which sealed the EU’s deal for 1.8 billion doses of corona “vaccine” costing €35 billion negotiated with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.
In New Zealand, former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern went further, declaring government sources the sole arbiters of COVID truth, effectively criminalizing legitimate critiques from sceptical doctors and scientists upholding their Hippocratic oath. This Orwellian stance—where state-approved narratives are sacrosanct—mirrors the climate arena, where questioning net-zero fantasies invites professional ruin.
The Trumpian Pushback
The EU’s Digital Services Act plans to coerce social media giants into suppressing content that challenges Brussels’ orthodoxies, leading to a chilling effect on open discourse throughout the world. Earlier in the month, the European Commission fined Elon Musk’s X $140 million for “failing to comply” with regulations. But it is now a Trumpian world which frustrates Eurocrats to no end. America’s commitment to First Amendment principles clashes with Europe’s slide into regulatory authoritarianism. The US house judiciary committee describes the digital regulations as censorship which is “largely one-sided, almost uniformly targeting political conservatives.”
The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio shot back last week:
“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship. Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”
The U.S. state department’s sanctions on NGO leaders and a former EU official involved in these efforts underscore the geopolitical rift. Under Secretary Sarah Rogers detailed the individuals and the reasons why they have been barred. On the US state ban list are Imran Ahmed (Centre for Countering Digital Hate), Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg (HateAid), Thierry Breton (former EU Commissioner) as well as Clare Melford (Global Disinformation Index).
Let’s go through each of these censors. Thierry Breton was a key architect of the Digital Services Act. In August 2024, as European Commissioner for Internal Markets and Digital Services, he issued a letter to threaten Elon Musk ahead of his live stream interview with candidate Trump who was campaigning for his second term. The hubris of an EU functionary to warn Mr. Musk that his platform could be charged for amplifying harmful content in the EU can only be described as bizarre.
Undersecretary Rogers accused the UK citizen ImranAhmed of collaborating “with the Biden Administration’s effort to weaponize the government against U.S. citizens” in a social media post on December 23rd, writing that his organization published the “infamous ‘disinformation dozen’ report” that spurred a campaign to de-platform those questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines including the current Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. . “Leaked documents from CCDH show the organization listed ‘kill Musk’s Twitter,’ and ’trigger EU and UK regulatory action’ as priorities…The organization supports the UK’s Online Safety Act and EU’s Digital Services Act to expand censorship in Europe and around the world.” It is interesting and not coincidental that Imran Ahmed’s CCDH was founded by Morgan Sweeny, Kier Starmer’s chief adviser. Clare Melford is the founder of the Global Disinformation Index, another British NGO that vigorously pursues anti-“hate-speech” activism, in fact hunting down anyone who has views different from the official dogma on climate change or so-called anti-vaxxers
Anna Lena von Hodenberg is the leader and founder of Hate Aid, a German NGO founded after the 2017 German federal elections to counter conservative groups such as the AfD. Ms. Anna and her NGO is an official “trusted flagger” under the EU’s digital services act. Clare Melford. Ahmed is the CEO of The Center for Countering Digital Hate, and Melford is the founder of the Global Disinformation Index, both two entities extremely active in anti-“hate-speech” activism, in fact hunting down anyone who has views different from the official dogma on climate change or so-called anti-vaxxers,
Morally Bankruptcy of the Eurocrats
Von der Leyen’s pronouncements on “inoculated information” ring hollow amid Europe’s deindustrialization, where energy policies driven by climate ideology have shuttered factories, spiked power prices, and eroded competitiveness. Germany’s Energiewende, once hailed as a model, now stands as a cautionary tale of economic self-harm, with manufacturing output shares plummeting and GDP growth stagnating.
At the heart of this EU-led censorship complex lies a modern Lysenkoism, where ideology masquerades as science. Today’s climate Lysenkoists similarly dismiss empirical inconveniences: satellite data showing no acceleration in sea-level rise, historical records of globally warmer periods like the Medieval Warm Period, or the economic models demonstrating that net-zero targets would cost trillions while yielding negligible climate benefits. But Eurocrats will condemn as “misinformation” self-evident arguments that cheap, reliable energy is the bedrock of human welfare. Witness Asia’s ascent, where coal, oil and gas have fueled GDP growth rates averaging 7% over decades, slashing poverty from 60% to under 5% in regions like East Asia.
The institutional incentives behind climate alarmism are pernicious. Multilateral agencies like the IMF and World Bank, alongside green lobbies, perpetuate myths of “fossil fuel subsidies“ that distort markets, penalizing hydrocarbons while subsidizing intermittent renewables to the tune of $1.3 trillion annually globally. In Africa, the push for “renewable leapfrogging“ ignores the continent’s dire need for baseload power, condemning millions to energy poverty under the banner of climate justice. Western elites, insulated from the consequences, preach degrowth while developing nations in BRICS+ reject such masochism, opting for pragmatic energy mixes that prioritize growth over virtue-signaling.
The contradictions of the censors of “misinformation” are glaring: alarmists decry “misinformation” while propagating doomsday scenarios that fail to materialize—recall the 50 years of apocalyptic predictions. Europe’s precipitous industrial decline exposes the folly of subordinating energy policies to ideology. In the U.S., the virtue signalling ESG investment drive — pushed by BlackRock’s Larry Fink among others — which funnelled trillions into underperforming green assets, is unravelling as returns lag and lawsuits mount over fiduciary breaches.
A New Year’s Gift
Yet, there is cause for optimism in this twilight of technocratic hubris. President Trump’s re-election signals a pivot toward evidence-based policy, unshackling science from the misinformation inquisition. By defunding activist enclaves like NCAR and enforcing transparency via executive order, the administration paves the way for genuine inquiry. Imagine a world where debates on climate sensitivity, the role of solar cycles, or the costs of adaptation are conducted openly, without fear of cancellation.
As Jay Bhattarcharya reminds us, free speech and replication as the standard of truth are necessary conditions for science to flourish. We need rational argument and data, not the censorship of state-defined “misinformation”. The US state department censoring the censors is good news as the New Year beckons.
I’m calling it the ‘Revenge of Alimonti’. In 2023 a group of activists including ‘hockey stick’ inventor Michael Mann, Attribution Queen Frederike Otto and Marlowe Hood and Graham Readfearn from AFP and the Guardian respectively managed to get a paper led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti retracted by Nature because it had spoken the obvious truth that there was little scientific evidence that extreme weather events were getting worse.
I’m calling it the ‘Revenge of Alimonti’. In 2023 a group of activists including ‘hockey stick’ inventor Michael Mann, Attribution Queen Frederike Otto and Marlowe Hood and Graham Readfearn from AFP and the Guardian respectively managed to get a paper led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti retracted by Nature because it had spoken the obvious truth that there was little scientific evidence that extreme weather events were getting worse. It was the high point of ‘settled’ science, a time when it was acceptable to trash the cherished free speech principles of the scientific process. But as the Net Zero fantasy starts to collapse and most of the shonky science backing it is facing increasing ridicule, Alimonti 2 is back, bigger and better. In his latest paper on the non-existent climate ‘crisis’, he shows there has been no statistically worsening trends of climate impacts. Indeed there have been many improvements in humans adapting to whatever nature has thrown at them
The publication of the paper is well timed. It should be pinned on the wall of every climate reporting room in mainstream media, starting with the hopelessly biased BBC. Perhaps not the Guardian though, sadly a lost cause beyond redemption. In considerable but easily understood detail, the paper debunks many of the extreme weather claims that remain the mainstay of grossly misleading climate science reporting.
Professor Gianluca Alimonti of the University of Milan is a leading expert in high energy particle physics. Michael Mann can try to repeat his original Guardian-published attack along the lines that it was another example of scientists from “totally unrelated fields” coming in and naïvely applying inappropriate methods to data they don’t understand. How we laughed then, but even more so today. The new Alimonti blockbuster shows it is not difficult to find all the relevant climate data, while the education needed to understand it relies mainly on an ability to read words and comprehend numbers. This climate paper is not breaking new barriers of scientific understanding, rather it is a work of investigation and compilation from freely available sources, many of them to be found in the published output of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Most extreme weather events are not getting worse, with or without human involvement, whatever alarmists from the climate comedy turn Jim ‘jail the deniers’ Dale to the BBC say. Inconveniently, the IPCC says more or less the same thing.
For lovers of fiction, there is much to admire in the constantly evolving art of fearmongering practised by climate activist ‘journalists. It is mostly accepted that the strength and frequency of tropical cyclones and hurricanes are not getting worse. The ‘boiling’ oceans are not playing along but – wait – the speed of storms is slowing, meaning they can cause more damage when they hit land. This often-reported scare arises because the IPCC has observed that hurricane speeds have likely slowed over the USA since 1900, but the IPCC also noted that evidence of similar trends in other regions “is not robust”. The jury is still out on changing wind speed since the available data are often incompatible, while new satellite-era results could skew the picture either way.
Drought and water shortages are another widespread scare story. Alimonti draws attention to the IPCC findings that there is low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency “for any type of drought, in all regions”. Results from a recent paper are quoted that find droughts had shown little change on a global scale over the last 120 years. A few years ago there were fanciful media reports blaming drought migration pressures on the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. Claims of ‘billions’ of future so-called climate refugees are also commonplace, although the IPCC notes that weather extremes are more likely to cause short-distance movements to urban areas, “rather than permanent or international migration”. Far from being driven overseas by changes in the weather, hundreds of thousands of people are drawn to the open borders of the UK by the prospect of four-star accommodation, cash handouts and generous state benefits.
Other work is quoted to show that there is little evidence to support claims that any of the increase in global economic losses is attributed to human-caused climate change. Despite bad weather, global crop yields are up 305% from 1961 to 2023, with staples rising by 381%. It could be worse. Massive floods struck Europe from 1312 to 1320 causing the complete failure of the European cereal harvest in 1315-1316. Around this time, as temperatures cooled, the Black Death arrived, and it remained endemic for most of the 500-year Little Ice Age. In the first 20 years of the 21st century, net temperature-related deaths are reported to be down 0.3%, with cold fatalities accounting for 91% of the total – far outpacing deaths from the heat.
One of the most reliable purveyors of climate tosh, and by extension wasters of substantial amounts public money, is the UK Health Security Agency. Who can forget its 2023 effort to cause mass climate psychosis by suggesting that climate change could lead to endemic dengue fever in London by 2060. Garbage in, garbage out computer modelling suggesting temperatures could rise by 4-5°C within 80 years was behind this particular bunkum. Now, thanks to climate change, these crackpots suggest many of us could be driven to blot out mental anguish by firing up our own crackpots. I could go on and report more of the findings from this daft 80 page report. but I fear losing the will to live with such a task. Suffice to say that a key finding is that a rise in ‘eco-anxiety’, including perceived or anticipated environmental threats, could lead to higher consumption of drugs and alcohol. The report calls for the usual spending of more public money to mitigate mental health impacts. Defunding the Health Security Agency along with the BBC climate department might be a cheaper option.
There is of course no climate ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’, or at least not one that is evident from current scientific observations. Compared to recent historical experience, the current climate is relatively benign. Slightly warmer, more carbon dioxide leading to higher biomass and no increase in most types of bad weather. The fear of some sort of ‘crisis’, usually prophesised for an ulterior purpose, is ubiquitous in human history. Hysteria rises and falls dramatically, sometimes over long sustained periods, and in the case of climate this is displayed by an interesting graph compiled by Alimonti.
Google searches for climate ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’ reveal two recent hysteria peaks, namely at the time of the Al Gore agitprop film An Inconvenient Truth featuring the infamous Michael Mann temperature hockey stick, and the Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion-led lunacy at the turn of the current decade.
Professor Alimonti proposes a data-focused toolkit to cut through the hype around a ‘climate crisis’. Instead of the alarmism, it is suggested that clear trackable metrics such as economic damages and health effects are tied to the key climate trends and events. Analysing these metrics shows no strong worsening trends. Any adaption plans for a changing climate should be based on real evidence, not one-size-fits-all panic.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Followhim on X.
If you’ve been following the climate circus for as long as we have here at WUWT, you know that Michael Mann – the self-proclaimed guardian of the infamous “hockey stick” graph – has been skating on thin ice for years. Well, it looks like that ice just cracked wide open. According to a gleeful piece in the National Review titled “Michael Mann Finally Goes Away,” Mann has dropped his long-running defamation lawsuit against them after a whopping 12 years of legal clownery.
If you’ve been following the climate circus for as long as we have here at WUWT, you know that Michael Mann – the self-proclaimed guardian of the infamous “hockey stick” graph – has been skating on thin ice for years. Well, it looks like that ice just cracked wide open. According to a gleeful piece in the National Review titled “Michael Mann Finally Goes Away,” Mann has dropped his long-running defamation lawsuit against them after a whopping 12 years of legal clownery.
That’s right: the guy who threatened to “destroy” them is now slinking off into the sunset, tail between his legs, while their blog post calling his research “sketchy” and “intellectually bogus” remains proudly online for all to see. But wait, there’s more! In true Mann fashion, he’s probably out there right now insisting he’s the victor, even as reality nibbles away at his relevance like a hungry squirrel on a… well, corn cob. Which brings us to the perfect meme for this moment. Back in 2011, the legendary X (formerly Twitter) account @dril posted this gem:
"im not owned! im not owned!!", i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob
“im not owned! im not owned!!”, i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob.”
It’s become the ultimate symbol of online denial – that moment when someone’s been utterly “owned” in a debate, but they keep flailing in protest, only to morph into a sad, shriveled vegetable. Sound familiar, Dr. Mann?
Picture it: Mann, fresh off losing his case (despite a temporary jury win against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg that’s already crumbling under appeal), simmers while the National Review editors pop the champagne.
They even thank their lawyers and supporters, noting how the First Amendment proved too “inconvenient” for Mr. Hockey Stick.
And let’s not forget the article’s zinger: Mann and his alarmist crew are “losing the climate debate,” as evidenced by his recent whinging about Bill Gates daring to inject some common sense into the conversation. Ouch. That’s gotta sting worse than a polar vortex.
Just yesterday, we ran a piece titled “Gloom, Despair, and Agony on Me,” absolutely roasting the 2025 BioScience special report – “The State of the Climate: A Planet on the Brink” – for its over-the-top doomsaying. (Note: One of the co-authors? None other than Michael Mann himself. Mann’s involvement? It’s like he’s the lead singer in that despair choir, belting out tunes about economic “post-growth” models and blaming the “wealthiest 10 percent” for everything short of bad hair days. Now, with his lawsuit in the dustbin, Mann’s descent into irrelevance is complete. He’s not just owned – he’s corncobbed. As @dril so prophetically put it, he’s shrinking smaller by the day, insisting he’s still the big cheese in climate town while the world moves on. The National Review sums it up best:
“As for Michael Mann, he’s belatedly taken our very good advice from so many years ago and gotten lost.”
Hey, Mike – if you’re reading this (and we know you are), maybe it’s time to embrace your inner corn cob. Pop some butter on, sit back, and watch the real climate debate thrive without your lawsuits and hysteria. After all, in the words of the meme: “im not owned!!” Sure, buddy. Sure.
Trump administration is “moving to destroy the methods by which his or any future administration can respond to climate change.”
By Zachary B. Wolf
Americans are used to whiplash in their climate policy. The US has been in and out and in and out again of the key Paris climate agreement over the past four presidencies.
But in his second administration, President Donald Trump is not just approaching climate science with skepticism. Instead, his administration is moving to destroy the methods by which his or any future administration can respond to climate change.
These moves, which are sure to be challenge
His Environmental Protection Agency announced plans this week to declare that greenhouse gas emissions do not endanger humans, a move meant to pull the rug out from under nearly all environmental regulation related to the climate.
But that’s just one data point. There are many others:
► Instead of continuing a push away from coal, the Trump administration wants to do a U-turn; Trump has signed executive orders intended to boost the coal industry and has ordered the EPA to end federal limits on coal- and gas-fired power-plant pollution that’s been tied to climate change.
► Tax credits for electric vehicles persisted during Trump’s first term before they were expanded during Joe Biden’s presidency. Now, Republicans are abruptly ending them next month.
d in court, extend far beyond Trump’s well-documented antipathy toward solar and wind energy and his pledges to drill ever more oil even though the US is already the world’s largest oil producer.
His Environmental Protection Agency announced plans this week to declare that greenhouse gas emissions do not endanger humans, a move meant to pull the rug out from under nearly all environmental regulation related to the climate.
But that’s just one data point. There are many others:
► Instead of continuing a push away from coal, the Trump administration wants to do a U-turn; Trump has signed executive orders intended to boost the coal industry and has ordered the EPA to end federal limits on coal- and gas-fired power-plant pollution that’s been tied to climate change.
► Tax credits for electric vehicles persisted during Trump’s first term before they were expanded during Joe Biden’s presidency. Now, Republicans are abruptly ending them next month.
► The administration is also ending Biden-era US government incentives to bring renewable energy projects online, a move that actually appears to be driving up the cost of electricity.
► Republicans in Congress and Trump enacted legislation to strip California of its authority to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles beginning in 2035.
► Trump is also expected to overturn national tailpipe standards enacted under Biden’s EPA and is also to challenge California’s long-held power to regulate tailpipe emissions.
► The authors of a congressionally mandated report on climate change were all fired; previous versions of the report, the National Climate Assessment, which showed likely effects from climate change across the country, have been hidden from view on government websites.
► Other countries, large and small, will gather in Brazil later this year for a consequential meeting on how the world should respond to climate change. Rather than play a leading role — or any role at all — the US will not attend.
Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, sees a hostility to science in the Trump administration.
“Not since Stalin and Soviet Lysenkoism have we seen such a brazen effort to misrepresent science in service of an ideological agenda,” Mann told Nilsen, referring to the disastrous effects of political interference in the scientific process in the Soviet Union.
“Joe Romm soldiers on in a futile, quixotic crusade against energy and climate reality. No midcourse correction as his tent grows smaller and smaller. Angry Joe wants to stay that way.”
“Joe Romm soldiers on in a futile, quixotic crusade against energy and climate reality. No midcourse correction as his tent grows smaller and smaller. Angry Joe wants to stay that way.”
Perennially wrong Joseph Romm is now with Michael “Climategate’ Mann at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. And the news is bad, very bad, for both Romm and Mann as the general public is not buying climate alarm–and is upset about “green” energy. Their Center, meanwhile, employs no critics of climate exaggeration and wind/solar/battery industrialization. It is in the tank for the Climate Industrial Complex.
So what is the latest from Romm, the subject of numerous posts over the last 15 years here at MasterResource? Before Trump 47, his habit (as always) was blaming ‘”cimate change” for bad things, as well as fussing at a world going the other way. And now with the new regime reversing Podesta-Biden-Harris’s “whole of government” approach to climate alarm/forced energy transformation? More breathless warnings and despair.
Consider these social media posts:
Romm is often his own worst enemy. And he gets pushback from the alarmist community. In response to an angry post by Romm on the link between solar/wind and the Spanish blackout, David McKeown politely wrote:
Joe, the setting forces me to repost not comment. I just want to ask you to use your influence differently. I have enjoyed and learned from many of your posts. But this one worries me.
Surely we need to understand the root causes properly? We also need to understand how those were worsened or lessened by current designs and arrangements and actions. This means objective analysis without regard to blame in the first instance.
If you encourage blame based on more noise, or suggest that increased weight of opinions (including ignorant and ill-informed) should direct future policy, you undermine the application of engineering and science. You also reduce trust in knowledge and competence.
Let’s not try to shout louder. Let’s try to focus everyone on the facts and single truth, (not my truth or their truth!!). I choose to believe that reports yet to be issued will clarify and seek truth not obfuscate.
Then let’s also try to understand why some actors may have got things wrong innocently or deliberately. We need to make assumptions explicit, especially across contractual and organisation/team boundaries. (Silo mentalities don’t help and especially entrenched positions from fear of blame.)
Sorry to be critical. But please think how your influence can help. Thank you.
No quarter from Joe Romm on this one. He soldiers on in a futile, quixotic crusade against energy and climate reality. No midcourse correction as his tent grows smaller and smaller. Angry Joe wants to stay that way.
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