tipping points – Climate- Science.press

Rapid Warming Could Tip the AMOC at Just 2°C — Slow the Pace and It May Survive Beyond 5°C

A recent modeling study finds that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has no fixed global-temperature tipping threshold; its stability depends strongly on the rate of warming. Rapid CO₂-driven warming (near today’s pace) can trigger collapse near ~2°C above pre-industrial levels, while much slower warming can keep it stable well past 5°C.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is a major system of ocean currents that transports warm, salty surface water northward in the Atlantic and returns colder, denser water southward at depth.

It carries roughly 1.2–1.3 petawatts of heat northward—far more energy than all human energy use combined—and helps keep northwestern Europe and parts of the North Atlantic relatively mild.

A substantial weakening or full collapse (a transition to a much weaker or near-shutdown state) would produce large, often abrupt, regional and global climate impacts. These are drawn from climate model experiments (including “hosing” simulations that add freshwater to the North Atlantic), paleoclimate analogs (e.g., Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events), and assessments such as the IPCC and Global Tipping Points reports.

Note that projected impacts vary with the degree of weakening, the background global warming level, and the specific model; a full collapse is considered less likely this century by some assessments but remains a significant risk under rapid warming.

The paper, “Failure to track a stable AMOC state under rapid climate change” (van Westen, Börner & Dijkstra, Nature Climate Change, August 2026), used the Community Earth System Model with controlled CO₂ ramps:

Slow ramp (+0.5 ppm/year): AMOC stayed intact even as global mean surface temperature reached ~+5.5°C.

Faster ramps (+2.5 ppm/year, comparable to the recent ~2.6 ppm/year Mauna Loa average, and +5.0 ppm/year): AMOC collapsed near ~+2°C.

Previous estimates often cited a rough ~4°C (range ~1.4–8°C) temperature threshold.

The new work shows that figure is not universal: under rapid forcing the system fails to track a stable “AMOC-on” equilibrium because surface and interior ocean properties cannot adjust coherently.

Slow forcing allows stabilizing processes—enhanced evaporation, reduced sea-ice extent, and better vertical adjustment—to counteract the destabilizing salt-advection and density feedbacks.

Researchers estimate a critical warming rate near ~0.3°C per decade (the world is already approaching this range). Under continued high rates, collapse indicators could appear around mid-century (e.g., ~2060 in some projections tied to ~2–2.5°C).

Slowing the rate of CO₂ increase can therefore be more important for AMOC resilience than the eventual total warming level alone.

Results come from one state-of-the-art model (and supporting conceptual analysis). Other models show varying AMOC sensitivity; some suggest greater resilience even under strong forcing. Real-world behavior also depends on freshwater input from ice melt, precipitation changes, and internal variability.

An AMOC collapse would still carry major regional impacts (stronger cooling/shifts in the North Atlantic and Europe, altered rainfall patterns, etc.), even if global mean temperature effects are more complex.

In short, the headline is accurate: the pace of warming can determine whether the AMOC tips near 2°C or remains functional at much higher levels. Rapid emissions cuts that slow the rate of change improve the odds of avoiding collapse.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Failure to track a stable AMOC state under rapid climate change

“Failure to track a stable AMOC state under rapid climate change” is a peer-reviewed paper by René M. van Westen, Reyk Börner, and Henk A. Dijkstra (Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University), published in Nature Climate Change on 13 August 2026 (DOI: 10.1038/s41558-026-02730-w; arXiv:2602.09964).

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) does not have a universal global-mean surface temperature (GMST) tipping threshold.

Its stability depends primarily on the rate of radiative forcing (CO₂ increase), not on a fixed warming level. Rapid forcing can cause rate-induced tipping (failure to track a stable “AMOC-on” equilibrium), while slower forcing allows the system to remain stable at much higher temperatures.

Previous estimates often placed a collapse threshold near +4.0 °C (range ~1.4–8 °C). The new results show this is not meaningful in isolation.

Simulations started from a quasi-equilibrium pre-industrial state with a background freshwater “hosing” flux ( $overline{F_H} = 0.45$ Sv over the North Atlantic) that places the AMOC in a more vulnerable regime (a bias-correction approach, as pure models often require unrealistically large freshwater input to tip).

Slow CO₂ ramp: +0.5 ppm yr⁻¹ → AMOC remains stable up to ~+5.5 °C GMST anomaly.

Faster CO₂ ramps: +2.5 ppm yr⁻¹ and +5.0 ppm yr⁻¹ (the former comparable to the recent Mauna Loa average of ~+2.6 ppm yr⁻¹) → AMOC collapses near ~+2 °C.

Comparable behavior appears in extended RCP scenarios (collapse under RCP4.5/RCP8.5 at lower warming levels under the same background hosing; recovery possible under RCP2.6).

Supporting analysis uses a conceptual 5-box AMOC model to illustrate the moving saddle-node bifurcation and rate-dependent tracking failure.

Slow warming permits coherent adjustment between surface and interior ocean properties.

Higher sea-surface temperatures drive enhanced net evaporation and reduced sea-ice extent over the Atlantic.

These effects salinify the ocean and counteract the destabilizing salt-advection feedback. This stabilizing process operates on timescales longer than present-day forcing rates, so rapid warming outpaces it and the AMOC fails to track the stable state.

There is no “magic” temperature level that guarantees collapse or survival.

The critical factor is the warming rate (researchers note a rough critical rate around ~0.3 °C per decade under current conditions; the world is already approaching this range).

Limiting the rate of greenhouse-gas emissions is therefore critical for reducing near-term AMOC collapse risk, even if total cumulative emissions (and eventual temperature) are not fully constrained.

Under continued rapid rates, collapse onset could occur around mid-century in some projections tied to ~2–2.5 °C.

Results are from one comprehensive climate model (plus conceptual analysis and some CMIP6 context).

Other models show varying AMOC sensitivity; some indicate greater resilience even under strong forcing. Real-world thresholds also depend on ice-melt freshwater, precipitation changes, aerosols, internal variability, and model biases.

An AMOC collapse would still produce large regional climate impacts (e.g., stronger cooling and shifts over the North Atlantic/Europe) regardless of the exact trigger mechanism.

Published: Nature Climate Change

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-026-02730-w

Provided: Utrecht University

Authors: René M. van Westen,
Reyk Börner &
Henk A. Dijkstra

Abstract

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a tipping element of the climate system, currently has an estimated global warming threshold for collapse of +4.0 °C (uncertainty range 1.4–8 °C). However, such a threshold may not be meaningful because AMOC stability depends on the rate of radiative forcing change, not a set temperature. Here we identify an AMOC stabilizing mechanism that operates on timescales slower than present-day warming rates. Slow forcing permits coherent adjustment of surface and interior ocean properties, supported by enhanced evaporation and reduced sea-ice extent, counteracting destabilizing feedbacks. Using a slow CO₂ ramp (+0.5 ppm yr⁻¹) climate model simulation, we explicitly demonstrate the AMOC remains stable up to +5.5 °C of global warming. By contrast, under faster CO₂ ramps, the AMOC collapses at substantially lower warming levels (+2 °C). Our findings demonstrate rate-induced AMOC tipping and imply that limiting the rate of emissions is critical for reducing the risk of an AMOC collapse.

King Charles Still Playing Net Zero Politics With His Increasingly Bizarre Stuck-Record Climate Claims

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

You have to give it to King Charles; he does the Bertie Wooster meets Hugh Grant schtick very well. “By Jove”, he exclaimed at one point in his recent joint address to the US Congress, an exclamation that almost nobody has used in the UK since the passing of P.G. Woodhouse. But the fading Old World aristo charm only gets you so far in the New World. In all his unelected glory, Charles is a highly political Head of State as witnessed in his regular Net Zero promotion. Decades have been spent regaling his no-questions-allowed audiences with tales of impending doom. When he stepped up in 2009 to warn that Planet Earth had only 96 months to avert “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse”, he was talking, as he invariable does on his chosen subject, out of his Princely Posterior.

He has little in common with the thrusting capitalism that still drives many inhabitants in the United States. Let’s be honest – he would be telling Donald Trump to use the tradesman’s backdoor if he was not the US President. In 2009, he informed the British people that consumerism could no longer be afforded, and the “age of convenience” was over. Not, of course, for the pampered and indulged members of Britain’s Royal Family. Even his disgraced brother, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, has all the high-born, inherited comforts. In his Sandringham estate exile, he is provided with a chef and a valet – perish the thought that the ending of the age of convenience should mean that the King’s younger sibling cooks and dresses himself.

Charles and the sinister Miliband seem as one in trying to ban convenience. By all accounts they get on well. One harking back “just the other day” to a pre-industrial time when cap-doffing peasants worked on the ‘sustainable’ landed estates and the other pushing a neo-Marxist dream where similar political control and heavily diminished expectations are imposed by state diktat. How Charles must have been impressed with Miliband’s recent suggestion to ban tumble dryers.

Our generation must decide how to address the collapse of critical natural systems, noted the King in Congress, a reference to his love of so-called ‘tipping points’. In his address to COP28 in 2023, the new King claimed that “we are seeing alarming tipping points being reached”. Alas, no specifics were given, understandably since there aren’t any. The US Climate Depot publication has tracked Charles’s regal ruminations for years, noting that he may be “the world’s wrongest man about climate change” – “may”, of course, being a necessary qualification since he is up against enormously strong competition.

In 2020, Charles said the world is “literally at the last hour” in the fight against climate change. At the time, Climate Depot noted that he had previously issued 10-year, 18-month, 100-month and 35-year tipping points. In true Davos Great Reset style, he went on to state: “We need a shift in our economic model that places nature and the world’s transition to Net Zero at the heart of how we operate”.

Over long decades of tedious claims of climate and nature collapses that failed to happen at the anointed hour, the Right Charlie has joined a select company of sandwich board know-all busybodies that also includes Al Gore and John Kerry. “Nobody is listening to me,” he nagged in 2016. “We are running out of time. How many times have I found myself saying this?” The uncharitable might note that constant repetition is the lot of the fool whose predictions never materialise.

So many ‘tipping points’, all of them inventions of garbage-in, garbage-out climate computer models, it is hard to keep up. And all the time, back in the real world, the climate seems to be improving with a little extra heat and carbon dioxide plant food causing massive ‘greening’ of the Earth. The Gulf Stream keeps streaming, the abundant coral reefs keep surviving as they have done for hundreds of millions of years while the polar bears are on the move across a thriving Arctic to avoid increasingly crowded neighbourhoods. Here’s a tip for His Majesty – stop sending children to bed crying with terrible predictions about their future by parroting invented, unfalsifiable pseudoscientific nonsense that you learnt from a small band of hand-picked, courtier Armageddonites.

His big claim in Congress noted the “disastrously melting ice caps of the Arctic”. Much of the Arctic is sea, where the ice waxes and wanes over the seasons. He was well advised to steer clear of the common claim that it will soon all be gone. Scientific data shows that the ice has been on a cyclical pause since around 2007. Presumably the King was thinking of the large Greenland ice cap, but again data shows that the rate of recent melting has declined. Over the last 20,000 inter-glacial years, ice up to 6 km deep has retreated from large areas of the northern hemisphere up to the Arctic. At current melt rates, the job in Greenland will finally be done in about 25,000 years’ time. It is easy to explain all these processes as natural variations, but that does not fit the political narrative of the Net Zero fantasy. But again, kids need to be sent to bed worried sick that any day soon a massive, unhinged ice sheet is about to crash into their houses, or at least inundate them with waters rising above their heads.

Stupid fear mongering, almost beyond belief.

And unbelievable nonsense stories are what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has finally cracked down on. Much of the climate information fed to high-profile influencers like King Charles is based on the clickbait product of computer models fed with RCP8.5 assumptions. The IPCC has bowed to the blindingly obvious and ruled that this notorious scenario is “implausible”. As we reported on May 6th, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of this finding since it renders most mainstream media scare stories over the last 15 years as junk.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.

German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points

A new post from the German climate science blog Klimanachrichten titled: “The Hallucinated Acceleration: How the PIK Crafts a Climate Catastrophe Out of Data Noise” sharply criticizes recent findings and public statements released by the climate ultra-alarmist Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

From No Trick Zone

By P Gosselin

The central thesis of the Klimanachrichten article is that the PIK (and specifically certain high-profile scientists associated with it) is interpreting natural fluctuations in climate data—what the Klimanachrichten calls “data noise”—as evidence of a permanent and accelerating climate catastrophe. Klimanachrichten argues that these “accelerations” are statistically insignificant or within the realm of historical natural variability.

Klimanachrichten writes that the PIK uses selective data periods (“cherry-picking”) to create the illusion of a sudden tip in the climate system. By focusing on short-term trends or specific regional anomalies, the blog argues that the PIK ignores longer-term contexts that might show a more stable or cyclical pattern.

The “tipping point” narrative

A significant portion of the Klimanachrichten post is dedicated to debunking the concept of “tipping points” (Kipppunkte). The PIK misuses these concepts as a psychological tool to instill fear and influence policy than as a strictly proven scientific reality. Klimanachrichten describes these tipping points as theoretical constructs that lack robust empirical backing in the current observational data.

Ideological bias and “science-policy” blurring

The blog post concludes the PIK has moved away from objective science and toward political activism. It argues that the institute’s primary goal is to provide scientific-sounding justifications for radical economic and social transformations (the “Great Transformation”), and little else.

Media amplification

Klimanachrichten also criticizes the mainstream media for uncritically adopting the PIK’s “alarmist” narratives, often as settled science. Journalists fail to ask critical questions about the underlying data, leading to a public perception of a climate “emergency” that Klimnachrichten believes is not supported by the raw evidence.

Conclusion

The Klimanachrichten post summarizes its position by stating that the perceived “acceleration” of climate change is a result of flawed statistical modeling and institutional bias. It calls for a return to a more “sober” analysis of climate data that accounts for natural cycles and acknowledges the limitations of current climate models. The author’s ultimate conclusion is that the “climate catastrophe” is a narrative construction rather than a data-driven inevitability.

Yale 360: We Briefly Crossed 1.5C But We Still Have Time to Reverse Climate Change

Now climate scientists seem to be flailing about, trying to figure out how to put their climate doomsday campaign back on track.

Four muscular men running forward with determined expressions, holding signs that read 'SAVE THE PLANET' and 'ACT NOW' in an urban environment.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Line graph showing global warming trends from 1950 to 2025, with a focus on the temperature reaching about 1.5 degrees Celsius. The graph highlights a statement from Yale Environment 360 about the implications of breaching this temperature limit.

What does it take to properly cross one of these tipping points?

Overshoot: The World Is Hitting Point of No Return on Climate

With warming set to pass the critical 1.5-degree limit, scientists are warning that the world is on course to trigger tipping points that would lead to cascading consequences — from the melting of ice sheets to the death of the Amazon rainforest — that could not be reversed.

BY FRED PEARCE • JANUARY 28, 2026

The world is poised to overshoot the goal of limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as for the first time, a three-year period, ending in 2025, has breached the threshold. And climate scientists are predicting devastating consequences, just as the world’s governments appear to have lost their appetite for tackling the emissions that are causing the warming.

…

“We are rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world with devastating consequences for people and nature,” says British global-systems researcher Tim Lenton, of the University of Exeter. If he and other scientists are right, then hopes currently being expressed of a temperature reset by reducing emissions after overshoot may be fanciful. Before we know it, there may be no way back.

…

A three-year breach of 1.5 degrees does not mean we have broken the Paris limit, which is framed as a long-term average. Conventionally, scientists measure this over 20 years, to smooth out year-on-year aberrations caused by natural cycles such as the El Niño oscillation. Using this method, it will be several more years before researchers can say for certain if warming has reached 1.5 degrees. But according to two studies published last year, the world has likely already surpassed this critical threshold.

Without an abrupt change of course, the warming will only accelerate. James Hansen, the Columbia University climatologist who first put climate change on the world’s front pages during testimony to Senate hearings in 1988, believes we could hit 2 degrees C as soon as 2045, a forecast based on several climate models under a high-emissions scenario.

…Read more: https://e360.yale.edu/features/1.5-degrees-tipping-points

I have a theory about 1.5C. Climate scientists appeared to be building up to a big dramatic tipping point crossed media frenzy, then the world spoiled the media campaign by abruptly jumping above their doomsday limit, likely due to the Hunga Tonga eruption.

Hunga Tonga volcano: impact on record warming

Hunga Tonga was an unusual eruption, because rather than blasting vast quantities of sulphur into the atmosphere, which would have temporarily cooled the planet, it blasted vast quantities of water vapour into the atmosphere, which has a strong warming effect.

The impact on climate scientists of blowing up their 1.5C limit was just as devastating as the impact of the eruption on Hunga Tonga on anyone nearby. I mean, here they were building up to a carefully orchestrated 1.5C climate disaster, then nature goes and spoils everything by shoving the world past their doomsday limit before they were ready.

The distinct lack of any noticeable doom hasn’t helped matters.

Now climate scientists seem to be flailing about, trying to figure out how to put their climate doomsday campaign back on track.

For a while there was an attempt to quietly memory hole the 1.5C limit, by pushing the new 2C limit, as if 1.5C wasn’t that important anyway.

Passing 1.5C Global Warming is Now an “Opportunity”

But the attempt to switch to 2.0C didn’t really gain traction. Everyone knew the 1.5C red line, so it was just too embarrassing to backflip the narrative by claiming it never really mattered.

So, climate scientists were forced to try to rescue their 1.5C narrative.

Passing a red line, that has some psychological impact. But passing a deadline then waiting years for anything interesting to happen, that’s just boring.

Obviously, these struggling climate scientists need our help to try to think up a new way to engage the public, to get past the embarrassment of their flopped 1.5C red line. What do you suggest?

Update (EW): Added “on anyone nearby” to clarify what I meant by the impact of the eruption of Hunga Tonga.

An astronaut standing next to a golden lunar rover on the moon's surface, with the Earth visible in the background and an asteroid floating nearby.

Wrong, Mainstream Media, A Brief 1.4°C Global Temperature Spike Isn’t Evidence of ‘Climate Doom’

Several media outlets including National Public Radio (NPR) and Politico recently published stories lamenting “warnings” from climate scientists about the current state of global temperature. Politico published “Global warming reaches 1.4C after third-hottest year on record,” by Zia Weise, while NPR posted “Scientists call another near-record hot year a ‘warning shot’ from a shifting climate.”

A stylized depiction of a fiery Earth emerging from water with dramatic orange and yellow hues, symbolizing urgency and climate change.

From The Climate Realism

By Anthony Watts

Screenshot of two news articles on climate change, one from NPR discussing a warm year and the other from Politico reporting on global warming hitting 1.4C, with the overlay text 'FALSE CONCLUSIONS'.

Several media outlets including National Public Radio (NPR) and Politico recently published stories lamenting “warnings” from climate scientists about the current state of global temperature.

Politico published “Global warming reaches 1.4C after third-hottest year on record,” by Zia Weise, while NPR posted “Scientists call another near-record hot year a ‘warning shot’ from a shifting climate.”

Both of these articles claim that the planet has effectively reached 1.4°C of warming above pre-industrial levels, with temperatures on the Earth accelerating along an unavoidable path toward breaching the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target, which will result in escalating risks and looming “tipping points.”

While the data does demonstrate this spike in temperature, the framing of both articles is highly misleading, leading to a false conclusion not supported by other temperature datasets.

The Politico article states that “average global temperatures are now around 1.4C higher than during the pre-industrial era,” and warns that “passing 1.5C risks triggering so-called tipping points,” citing Copernicus Climate Change Service data and some comments from scientists suggesting that overshoot is now inevitable. It treats the 1.4°C figure as both climatically decisive and globally unprecedented.

The NPR article goes even further saying,

Rising global temperatures intensify heat waves and other extreme weather, endangering people and causing billions of dollars in damage. The weather monitoring teams warn that the 2025 temperature increase is a dangerous sign of worsening storms, heat, floods and fires.

Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead of the Copernicus service, said the overwhelming culprit is clear: the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

“Climate change is happening. It’s here. It’s impacting everyone all around the world and it’s our fault,” Burgess told The Associated Press.”

What these outlets fail to tell readers is that Europe, with the longest and densest instrumental temperature records in the world, has already significantly exceeded 1.4°C of warming without experiencing the cascade of irreversible impacts long predicted at or near that threshold. See Figure 1 below.

Graph showing mean surface temperature in Europe from 1750 to 2000, including 10-year moving average (red line) and 12-month moving average, with a highlighted mean temperature of 9°C and a 2.0°C increase. — Figure 1. Berkeley Earth average European temperature showing a 2.0°C rise since about 1820. Source: http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/europe Annotated by Anthony Watts

Long before recent headlines, European temperature series showed regional warming above global averages, yet society, infrastructure, agriculture, and public health have all continued to improve.

The notion that 1.4°C or even brief excursions above 1.5°C represent a physical cliff is not supported by observational evidence. As Climate at a Glance explains in “Tipping Point: 1.5 Degrees Celsius Warming,” the 1.5°C number was a politically selected policy target, not a scientifically established threshold beyond which the climate system abruptly destabilizes.

In fact, there is no evidence or data indicating any dangerous impacts from exceeding 1.5℃ or even 2.0℃ of warming above pre-industrial levels. Global average temperatures have been higher in the past during periods when human civilization flourished.

The article also glosses over a major short-term driver of the recent temperature spike: the January 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption, which injected an unprecedented amount of water vapor directly into the stratosphere.

Water vapor is the most potent greenhouse gas, and multiple studies have noted that this injection temporarily increased Earth’s radiative forcing, contributing to unusually warm global temperatures in 2023–2025.

Climate Realism has documented this effect and the media’s failure to account for it in coverage collected under its reporting on the Hunga Tonga eruption. As the excess stratospheric water vapor gradually dissipates, its warming influence is expected to decline, undermining claims that recent warming represents a new, permanent baseline driven solely by CO₂.

This is highly evident in Figure 2 below, with the accurate UAH satellite record showing the plunge clearly falling from a peak in early 2024, to end the year 2025 at just 0.3°C.

A line graph depicting the UAH satellite-based temperature departures of the global lower atmosphere from the 1991-2020 average in degrees Celsius, spanning from 1979 to 2026. The graph features blue data points representing monthly temperature deviations and a red line indicating the running centered 13-month average. An annotation highlights the temperature departure for December 2025 as +0.30 deg. C. — Figure 2. The Version 6.1 global area-averaged linear temperature trend (January 1979 through December 2025) remains at +0.16 deg/ C/decade (+0.22 C/decade over land, +0.13 C/decade over oceans). Source: Dr. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama, Huntsville.

Politico/NPR’s heavy reliance on Copernicus data also deserves scrutiny. Copernicus’ flagship ERA5 temperature product is not a simple thermometer-based record. It is a reanalysis, combining sparse and uneven observations with climate models to infill vast regions of the globe, especially oceans and polar areas.

Climate Realism has repeatedly pointed out that reanalysis datasets are model-heavy reconstructions, not direct measurements, and can amplify warming signals depending on model assumptions, a problem discussed across articles indexed at Climate Realism’s coverage of Copernicus and reanalysis datasets.

Treating such outputs as precise, definitive indicators of long-term climate thresholds gives readers a false impression of precision and certainty.

The article further implies that each additional tenth of a degree inevitably brings more danger, yet it offers little observational evidence to support that claim.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), while often invoked rhetorically, is far more cautious in its actual findings, assigning low confidence to many asserted global trends in extremes and emphasizing regional variability and uncertainty.

Long-term outcomes that matter most to people tell a different story. Climate at a Glance shows in “Deaths from Extreme Weather” that climate-related mortality has declined dramatically over the past century, even as temperatures have risen. That reality is difficult to reconcile with claims that the world is now entering an unprecedented danger zone.

What Politico/NPR ultimately present is a narrative built on short-term averages, model-influenced datasets, and policy-driven thresholds, while ignoring historical context, natural variability, and known transient factors such as volcanic water vapor.

Briefly touching or approaching 1.4°C or even 1.5°C does not validate years of dire predictions, especially when those predictions have repeatedly failed to materialize in regions that have already experienced comparable warming.

By portraying a model-reconstructed temperature figure as proof that the world is on the brink of irreversible climate danger, both Politico and NPR are grossly misleading their readers by flatly misrepresenting the evidence about the true state of the climate based upon real-world data.

Europe has already passed the threshold portrayed by NPR and Politico as tipping points for disaster and yet no catastrophic consequences have resulted. The recent spike in warming has identifiable short-term contributors and is now fading.

The Copernicus temperature reanalysis are fictions of computer models, not direct measurements of temperature. With regards to the recent spike in temperature and “tipping points,” the mainstream media’s climate doom narrative is long on rhetoric, and short on proof – unsurprisingly, since hard data and historical evidence refutes claims of disaster.

Dialing Back the Panic: German Physics Prof Sees No Evidence of Climate Tipping Points!

German experimental physicist Prof. Gerd Gantefor explains in a recent video why he’s being made a climate denier by the fanatic parts of the climate movement: because he sees no evidence of tipping points nor the end of civilization.

A world map highlighting various climate tipping points with colored markers. Key areas include the Greenland Ice Sheet, Amazon Rainforest, and Boreal Permafrost. Annotations indicate likely timeframes for tipping points based on global warming scenarios.

From No Trick Zone

By P Gosselin

A collage depicting extreme weather events, including lightning, ice, volcanic eruption, forest fire, and a tornado, with the text 'FAKE CLIMATE CRISIS' prominently displayed in the center.

And also, he warns of a dictatorial monster by the movement.

German physicist Prof. Gerd Gantefor speaking in front of a blue background, holding a pointer in one hand and gesturing while discussing climate change topics. — *Image cropped here.*

Prof. Ganteför begins by distancing himself from the term “climate denier,” which is imposed from outside and intentionally associated with a dark past.

He differentiates between two main groups of people who are labeled as climate deniers: 1) Individuals who deny global warming and question the human cause (e.g., blaming the sun or clouds), negate the greenhouse effect, or dismiss the warming as normal climate fluctuation, and 2) people who fear a loss of freedom and prosperity or doubt the effectiveness of radical, national measures given the global nature of the problem.

As a Professor of Experimental Physics and former lecturer of a major course on Energy and Climate in the Master’s program in Physics, Ganteför emphasizes his deep understanding of the subject matter. He states that he is economically and intellectually independent (retired and funded by crowdfunding).

Says manmade climate warming is real, but…

Ganteför’s core theses are that warming is happening and is man-made due to CO2 emissions and that it is a serious problem. But what gets him in trouble is his confidence that humanity will not become extinct because of it. That’s enough to get labelled a “denier” by the German radical climate movement.

Ganteför also expects the 2-degree limit will be exceeded, as a timely global energy transition will not occur. But he feels the consequences can be managed with reason, science, and technological capability—not through self-restriction or regression. He sees no evidence for the often-cited “tipping points” in the main reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and calls these extremes.

Movement is concerned with the transformation of society

Ganteför views himself as the “natural enemy” of the radical wing of the climate movement because he exposes their true goals. According to his analysis, the radical movement is not primarily concerned with the global climate, but with the “transformation of society” toward eco-socialism and the “end of capitalism”.

He argues that climate apocalypse panic serves as a vehicle and a weapon to enforce unpopular, expensive, and, in his view, dictatorial measures (such as bans) that are concentrated on his own country (Germany), even though the problem is global.

He criticizes the movement for using personal attacks and threats because they lack substantive scientific arguments against him, as he relies on the plausible statements of the IPCC and exposes exaggerations.

Freedom just as important as climate protectin

The distinguised professor stands for democracy, freedom, and personal responsibility and rejects “non-negotiable” bans (German: alternativlos), which he views as dictatorial. He is in favor of measures implemented with the people, not against them, and considers freedom to be just as important as climate protection.

He proposes addressing the climate problem through international collaboration and agrees with the five guidelines published by civil society and business associations, which call for more effective and efficient climate policy. These include:

Comprehensive international cooperation.
Realism and pragmatism in international solidarity.
Use of natural and technical CO2 sinks.
Elimination of overregulation.
Ensuring societal acceptance and economic viability.

He concludes by affirming: “I am not a climate denier, but I fight the radical arm of the climate movement before it develops into a dictatorial monster”.

NPR’s Climate ‘Tipping Points’ Advocacy – Three Claims, Zero Evidence

National Public Radio (NPR) recently posted an article titled, “3 massive changes you’ll see as the climate careens toward tipping points,” by Rebecca Hersher and Lauren Sommer, which claims that coral reefs, the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, and Arctic permafrost are approaching dangerous, near-irreversible climate “tipping points.” NPR’s claims are false. There is no evidence that coral reefs, the ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica, or Arctic permafrost are caught in a loop of inevitable decline due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Data show that other factors are at play, and that the so-called tipping points are far from certain.

World map illustrating various climate tipping points, with indicated areas of concern such as the Greenland Ice Sheet, Amazon Rainforest, and Arctic Winter Sea Ice, alongside color codes for tipping likelihood.

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

An iceberg in Ilulissat, Greenland, with a boat nearby, illustrating the impact of climate change on ice sheets.

Let’s start with Greenland. As Climate at a Glance: Greenland Ice Melt discusses, Greenland contains roughly three million gigatons of ice – a value so large it is nearly impossible to comprehend. Even during the highly publicized melt years of the past decade, annual losses represent less than 0.01 percent of the total ice sheet. (See the figure, below). Further, as documented by NASA’s GRACE satellite gravity analysis, the observed mass losses from all sources contribute well under a millimeter per year to global sea level. The minimal recorded loss of ice mass is in large part due to the fact that ice that has melted refroze before ever reaching the sea.

Comparison of two graphs showing Greenland ice mass. The left graph illustrates cumulative ice mass anomaly since 1980, highlighting the media's portrayal of ice loss. The right graph shows the total ice mass changes since 1980, with minimal variation, emphasizing the reality of ice retention. — Figure 1. A comparison of presentations of satellite data capturing Greenland’s ice mass loss. The image on the right shows changes in Greenland’s ice mass relative to Greenland’s total ice mass. Sources: The data plotted in these graphs are from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-Comparison Exercise, a joint exercise by NASA and the European Space Agency. Graphs originally by Willis Eschenbach. Adapted and annotated by Anthony Watts.

NPR omits this important context entirely and also ignores major research showing that a substantial portion of recent Greenland surface melt is driven by darkened, low-albedo “dirty ice,” caused by soot, dust, and microbial darkening, not simply by rising air temperature.

Ironically, the NPR article itself provides a photo of “dirty ice” with apparently oblivious scientific researchers trekking across it, seen below.

A group of scientists trekking across a glacier with darkened ice, surrounded by a white ice landscape under a cloudy sky. — Scientists from the United Kingdom trek up to a research site on the west side of the Greenland ice sheet near Kangerlussuaq. This year marks the 29th year in a row that Greenland has lost more ice than it gained. Ryan Kellman/NPR

The article’s coral-reef tipping-point narrative is similarly false. Climate at a Glance’s “Coral Reefs” and “The Great Barrier Reef” show that corals have repeatedly demonstrated resilience over millions of years, surviving periods significantly warmer than today. Bleaching is a stress response, not a death sentence, and long-term monitoring by the Australian Institute of Marine Science has shown record-high coral cover following recent bleaching episodes. Multiple Climate Realism analyses highlight misreported coral-collapse claims, documenting how media narratives routinely ignore recovery. In addition, where coral has struggled in recent years, NPR ignores the role of local stressors, such as, pollution, sediment runoff, destructive fishing, and coastal development, which have contributed to true coral death on occasion, far outweighing small changes in ocean temperature as a factor.

NPR’s third “tipping point,” permafrost, relies on speculative model projections rather than observations. Although permafrost thaw is happening in some regions, methane trends do not match the runaway-loop scenario described. Peer-reviewed research summarized by Climate Realism in “Purdue Study Destroys the ‘Permafrost Methane Bomb’ Myth,” shows that thawed permafrost releases significantly less methane than early models predicted, with microbial oxidation, hydrology, and soil conditions limiting net emissions. Additional critique of runaway-feedback claims appears in Climate Realism’s review of flawed permafrost-collapse modeling, where even climate-alarmism proponents describe such models as unrealistic. NPR mentions none of this literature.

NPR’s “tipping point” claims are not new in either tenor or specifics; rather, they repeat a predictable pattern: dramatic scenarios derived from models are presented as near-term certainties, while actual measurements that undercut those scenarios are downplayed or omitted entirely. For Greenland, NPR omits that annual melt is microscopic relative to the ice sheet’s mass or that surface darkening, not temperature alone, drives melting. For corals, NPR ignores the empirical record of rapid recovery and the documented role of local human impacts. For permafrost, the article conflates regional thaw and infrastructure damage with large-scale climate feedbacks that measurements simply do not support.

NPR also avoids critical scientific context: natural variability, multi-decadal oscillations, and regional environmental factors. The tipping-point narrative also sidesteps the fact that short-term excursions above the much feared global temperature threshold of 1.5°C in recent years did not produce the predicted avalanche of catastrophic extremes. In point of fact, science has revealed no known tipping points. They remain theoretical speculations based on flawed climate model assumptions about unverified feedback loops within the global ecosystem.

NPR listeners and readers deserve the truth, which can only be discovered when the full context of each alarmist claim is presented. Instead, shamefully, Hersher and Sommer betray the ideal of journalistic pursuit of the truth, and instead embrace advocacy, providing a simplified and scientifically unjustified trilogy of “tipping points,” tailored to motivate or justify policy actions at the COP30 conference. Equally shamefully, NPR’s editors and fact checkers let their reporters get away with this flagrant activism cloaked as objective reporting. That is not science communication, it’s climate doom theater.

No, Reuters, Climate Change is Not Threatening Europe’s Resources

In the article, “Climate change and pollution threaten Europe’s resources, EU warns,” Reuters asserts that climate change poses a “direct threat” to Europe’s natural resources, citing an EU environment agency report, and warns of worsening droughts and extreme weather. These claims are patently false. History shows far worse droughts in the past with no appreciable trend of other types of extreme weather events becoming more common or severe. Europe’s resource problems are caused by humans, stemming from overuse and poor management, just not from human-caused climate change.

A landscape depicting a drought-affected agricultural field with cracked earth, farmers working, and a warm orange sky at sunset. — MEGADROUGHT of year 1540: Europe’s Forgotten Weather Catastrophe.

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

A cracked and dry corn field in Les-Rues-des-Vignes, France, with small green plants emerging from the ground, overlaid with the word 'FALSE' in bold red letters.

The article declares that “Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent and is experiencing worsening droughts and other extreme weather events.” It further states that more than 80 percent of protected habitats are in poor condition, blaming climate change and pollution.

“The window for meaningful action is narrowing, and the consequences of delay are becoming more tangible,” European Environment Agency executive director Leena Yla-Mononen told Reuters. “We are approaching tipping points – not only in ecosystems, but also in the social and economic systems that underpin our societies.”

The is political rhetoric couched in weak science.

The reality is far more mundane. The European Environment Agency’s own data show that water stress is primarily linked to intensive agriculture, industrial demand, and population growth. As the “Review of National Water Allocation Policies in Six European Countries” documents, many European countries continue to over-allocate water rights, creating artificial scarcity even in years with average rainfall. This is a governance problem, not a climate one. Similarly, biodiversity decline across Europe is overwhelmingly the result of land use change, habitat fragmentation, and invasive species—not a few tenths of a degree of warming over the last few decades.

When it comes to extreme weather, Reuters’ claims are directly contradicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 report which notes there is little to no attribution of many types of severe weather to climate change. As Climate at a Glance: Extreme Weather summarizes, data do not support claims that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent or severe worldwide.

Further, Europe’s worst droughts occurred long before today’s modest warming. The megadrought of 1540 lasted an entire year, with contemporaneous records describing riverbeds across central Europe running dry, widespread crop failure, and thousands of deaths. More recent severe droughts struck in the 1920s and 1940s, periods that cannot be blamed on modern greenhouse gas emissions. The paper “The 1921 European drought: impacts, reconstruction and drivers” describes the 1921 European drought as “the most severe and most widespread drought in Europe since the start of the 20th century.

In “A drought climatology for Europe,” decadal trends show “greater pan-European drought incidence in the 1940s, early 1950s … and lesser drought incidence in the 1910s, 1930s” over the 20th century.

And there are many more worse droughts even further back in the past, before climate change even had a name, as this graph from the 2021 paper Recent European drought extremes beyond Common Era background variability shows:

Graph showing the historical trend of droughts in Europe over the calendar years, with marked periods of wet and dry conditions and significant drought events labeled.

Compared to these historical drought episodes, recent intermittent summer dry spells are far from extraordinary.

Also, as detailed in multiple Climate Realism posts on the topics neither floods, here and here, for example, nor wildfires, here and here, are more frequent or severe now than they have been in the past.

Even heatwaves are neither more frequent nor deadly now than they have been historically, with deaths from temperatures declining.

Europe’s actual environmental challenges—such as nutrient pollution in rivers, overfishing, and urban sprawl—require pragmatic policy solutions, not grandiose climate pledges. By conflating resource depletion with climate change and exaggerating extreme weather risks, Reuters has misled its audience. The problems it describes are not new, not worsening because of climate change, and not solvable by CO₂ reductions. They are solvable by better governance, better planning, and better science. Once again, journalism has been sacrificed to climate alarmism.

Why Climate Doomsters Can’t Recant

Fertility rates have been falling, global economic growth slowing,
and the global economy decarbonizing for decades.

A group of anxious men stand in front of a flooded urban landscape, screaming and holding a sign that reads 'The end is nigh!', with dark clouds and lightning in the background.

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

Illustration of a worried dog standing on a shore with the phrase 'NATURAL DISASTERS' on its body, and 'CLIMATE' on its tail, set against a background of a city by the sea.

Ted Nordhaus writes at The EcoModernist Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist,
And why so many climate pragmatists can’t quit catastrophism. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In the book Break Through, Michael Shellenberger and I argued that if the world kept burning fossil fuels at current rates, catastrophe was virtually assured. I no longer believe this hyperbole. Yes, the world will continue to warm as long as we keep burning fossil fuels. And sea levels will rise. About 9 inches over the last century, perhaps another 2 or 3 feet over the course of the rest of this century. But the rest of it? Not so much.

A dual infographic comparing global crop yields from 1961 to 2023 and the decline in annual deaths from protein-energy malnutrition by age group from 1980 to 2021.

There is little reason to think that the Amazon is at risk of collapsing over the next 50 years. Agricultural yield and output will almost certainly continue to rise, if not necessarily at the same rate as it has over the last 50 years. There has been no observable increase in meteorological drought globally that might trigger the resource wars that the Pentagon was scenario planning back then.

Graph depicting temperature anomalies and risk impacts under various Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) from 1850 to 2100, with a color gradient representing risk levels. — Figure 3: CMIP6 GCM ensemble mean simulations spanning from 1850 to 2100, employing historical effective radiative forcing functions from 1850 to 2014 (see Figure 1C) and the forcing functions based on the SSP scenarios 1-2.6, 2-4.5, 3-7.0, and 5-8.5. Curve colors are scaled according to the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) of the models. The right panels depict the risks and impacts of climate change in relation to various global Reasons for Concern (RFCs) (IPCC, 2023). (Adapted from Scafetta, 2024).

At the time that we published Break Through, I, along with most climate scientists and advocates, believed that business as usual emissions would lead to around five degrees of warming by the end of this century. As Zeke Hausfather, Glen Peters, Roger Pielke Jr, and Justin Richie have demonstrated over the last decade or so, that assumption was never plausible. The class of scenarios upon which it was based assumed very high population growth, very high economic growth, and slow technological change. None of these trends individually track at all with actual long term global trends.

Fertility rates have been falling, global economic growth slowing,
and the global economy decarbonizing for decades.

A graph comparing the climate sensitivity estimates from instrumental studies and climate models, showing varying degrees of temperature increase in degrees Celsius.

As a result of these dynamics, most estimates of worst case warming by the end of the century now suggest 3 degrees or less. But as consensus around these estimates has shifted, the reaction to this good news among much of the climate science and advocacy community has not been to become less catastrophic. Rather, it has been to simply shift the locus of catastrophe from five to three degrees of warming. Climate advocates have arguably become more catastrophic about climate change in recent years, not less.

A cartoon depicting two people on a bridge discussing climate change. One person holds a sign stating 'Earth will be uninhabitable in [number] years,' while the other responds with confusion. Nearby, another person holds a sign reading 'Don't be a fossil fool!' and another mentions 'Climate justice is now,' showcasing a humorous take on climate anxiety.

When Is Weather Climate Change?

For me, the cognitive dissonance began as I became familiar with Roger Pielke Jr’s work on normalized hurricane losses, in the late 2000s. This was around the time that a lot of messaging from the climate advocacy community had started to focus on extreme weather events, not just as harbingers for the storms of our grandchildren, to borrow the title of James Hansen’s 2009 book, but as being fueled by climate change in the present.

If you want to know why Pielke has been so demonized over the last
15 years by climate activists and activist climate scientists,
it’s because he got in the way of this new narrative.

Graph showing annual ISAAC values from 1900 to 2010 alongside CO2 levels in parts per million. — *Integrated Storm Activity Annually over the Continental U.S. (ISAAC)*

Pielke’s work, going back to the mid-1990s showed, again and again, that the normalized economic costs of climate related disasters weren’t increasing, despite the documented warming of the climate. And unlike a lot of researchers who sometimes produce studies that cut against the climate movement’s chosen narratives, he wasn’t willing to be quiet about it. Pielke got in the way of the advocacy community at the moment that it was determined to argue that present day disasters were driven by climate change and got run over.

Diagram illustrating the relationship between climate-related natural disasters, exposure, vulnerability, climate hazards, and anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Put these two factors together—the outsized influence that exposure and vulnerability have on the cost of extreme climate and weather phenomena, and the very modest intensification that climate change contributes to these events, when it plays any role at all—and what should be clear is that climate change is contributing very little to present day disasters. It is a relatively small factor in the frequency and intensity of climate hazards that are experienced by human societies, which in turn play a small role in the human and economic costs of climate related disasters compared to non-climate factors.

A line graph showing global weather losses as a percentage of global GDP from 1990 to 2022, with annual data presented as vertical bars and a red trend line indicating a decreasing trend.

This also means that the scale of anthropogenic climate change that would be necessary to very dramatically intensify those hazards, such that they overwhelm the non-climate factors in determining the consequences of future climate related events, is implausibly large.

A Sting in the Tail?

For a long time, even after I had come to terms with the fundamental disconnect between what climate advocates were saying about extreme events and the role that climate change could conceivably be playing, I held on to the possibility of catastrophic climate futures based upon uncertainty. The sting, as they say, is in the tail, meaning so-called fat tails in the climate risk distribution. These are tipping points or similar low probability, high consequence scenarios that aren’t factored into central estimates. The ice sheets could collapse much faster than we understand or the gulf stream might shut down, bringing frigid temperatures to western Europe, or permafrost and methane hydrates frozen in the sea floor might rapidly melt, accelerating warming.

But like the supposed collapse of the Amazon, once you look more closely at these risks they don’t add up to catastrophic outcomes for humanity. While sensationalist news stories frequently refer to the collapse of the gulf stream, what they are really referring to is the slowing of the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Circulation (AMOC). AMOC helps transport warm water to the North Atlantic and moderates winter temperatures across western Europe. But its collapse, much less its slowing, would not result in a hard freeze across all of Europe. Indeed, under plausible conditions in which it might significantly slow, it would act as a negative feedback, counterbalancing warming, which is happening faster across the European continent than almost any place else in the world.

Infographic illustrating Eastern European alpine glacier history during the Holocene period, showing tree line changes, glacier extent, and summer temperatures over thousands of years.

Permafrost and methane hydrate thawing, meanwhile, are slow processes not fast ones. Even irreversible melting would occur over millennial timescales, fast in geological terms but very slow in human terms. The same is true of accelerated melting of ice caps. Even under very high warming scenarios, broadly acknowledged today as improbable, the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets contribute around a meter of sea level rise by the end of this century. Those processes would continue far into the future. But even very accelerated scenarios for rapid disintegration of ice sheets unfold over many centuries, not decades.

A satirical timeline infographic highlighting failed climate change predictions from various decades, illustrating exaggerated claims about environmental disasters and their projected timelines.

Moreover, the problem with grounding strong precautionary claims in these known unknowns is that doing so demands strong remedies in the present in response to future risks that are both unquantifiable and unfalsifiable, a problem made even worse by the fact that “fat tail” proponents generally then proceed to ignore the fact that the unknown, unquantifiable, and unfalsifiable risks they are referring to are incredibly low probability and instead set about centering them in the climate discourse.

Clean Energy Without Catastrophism

Why do so many smart people, most trained as scientists, engineers, lawyers, or public policy experts, and all who will tell you, and I say this not ironically, that they “believe in science,” get the science of climate risk so badly wrong?

There are, in my view, several reasons. The first is that highly educated people with high levels of science literacy are no less likely to get basic scientific issues wrong than anyone else when the facts conflict with their social identities and ideological commitments. Yale Law Professor Dan Kahan has shown that people who are highly concerned about climate change actually have less accurate views about climate change overall than climate skeptics and that this remains true even among partisans with high levels of education and general science literacy. Elsewhere, Kahan and others have demonstrated that on many issues, highly educated people are often more likely to stubbornly hold onto erroneous beliefs because they are more expert at defending their political views and ideological commitments.

A man wearing glasses and a beige suit jacket, speaking thoughtfully. Text overlay includes a quote from Thomas Sowell about social history and the contrast between effective solutions and popular ideas.

The second reason is that there are strong social, political, and professional incentives if you make a living doing left of center climate and energy policy to get climate risk wrong. The capture of Democratic and progressive politics by environmentalism over the last generation has been close to total. There is little tolerance on the Left for any expression of materialist politics that challenge foundational claims of the environmental movement. Meanwhile the climate movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk for which there is no consensus whatsoever.

A cartoon depicting a man expressing concern over a polluted environment in the first panel, and feeling satisfied in a cleaner, industrialized setting with wind turbines and solar panels in the second panel.

Whether you are an academic researcher, a think tank policy wonk, a program officer at an environmental or liberal philanthropy, or a Democratic Congressional staffer, there is simply no benefit and plenty of downside to questioning, much less challenging, the central notion that climate change is an existential threat to the human future. It’s a good way to lose friends or even your job. It won’t help you get your next job or your next grant. And so everyone, mostly falls in line. Better to go along to get along.

Finally, there is a widespread belief that one can’t make a strong case for clean energy and technological innovation absent the catastrophic specter of climate change. “Why bother with nuclear power or clean energy if climate change is not a catastrophic risk,” is a frequent response. And this view simply ignores the entire history of modern energy innovation. Over the last two centuries, the world has moved inexorably from dirtier and more carbon intensive technologies to cleaner ones. Burning coal, despite its significant environmental impacts, is cleaner than burning wood and dung. Burning gas is cleaner than coal. And obviously producing energy with wind, solar, and nuclear is cleaner than doing so with fossil fuels.

A portrait of Steven Koonin with a quote about the treatment of the Developing World and the impact of climate change fear on younger generations, set against a green, abstract background.

There is a view among most climate and clean energy advocates that the risk of climate change both demands and is necessary to justify a much faster transition toward cleaner energy technologies. But as a practical matter, there is no evidence whatsoever that 35 years of increasingly dire rhetoric and claims about climate change have had any impact on the rate at which the global energy system has decarbonized and by some measure, the world decarbonized faster over the 35 years prior to climate change emerging as a global concern than it did in the 35 years since.

Despite some tonal, tactical, and strategic differences, this basic view of climate risk, and corresponding demand for a rapid transformation of the global energy economy is broadly shared by the climate activists and the pragmatists. The impulse is millenarian, not meliorist.

An illustrated robot working on machinery labeled 'Revolution', with factories and buildings in the background, showcasing a blend of industry and technology.

Underneath the real politik, technocratic wonkery, and appeals
to scientific authority is a desire to remake the world.

For all its worldly and learned affect, what that has resulted in is the creation of an insular climate discourse on the Left that may be cleverer by half than right wing dismissals of climate change but is no less prone to making misleading claims about the subject, ignoring countervailing evidence, and demonizing dissent. And it has produced a politics that is simultaneously grandiose and maximalist and, increasingly, deeply out of touch with popular sentiment.

A satirical newspaper front page depicting a fictional climate crisis headline, featuring an illustration of people reacting to changing leaves and a forecast suggesting apocalypse, along with various commentary and political statements.

Now Scientists Claim Near 20-Year Stable Arctic Sea Ice is “Unsurprising” and Predicted by Models

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

Dramatic confirmation that the sea ice in the Arctic has been stable for nearly two decades is contained in a recently published science paper from a team led by Dr Mark England from the University of Exeter. The finding is of course obvious to anyone who studies the data, but it will inconvenience the activist cranks who continue to promote supposed reductions in Arctic Sea ice as an important sign of their imaginary ‘tipping points’ and their fake climate crisis. Despite the data showing the ice has been stable over every month in the year since around 2007, Sir David Attenborough told BBC viewers in 2022 that the region could be summer ice-free by 2035. The climate hysteric Al Gore never quite recovered his authority when he said all the ice could be gone by 2014.

There is still an occasional sighting in mainstream media but the ice vanishing act is having to be retired. In fact the smarter scientists seem to be rushing to accept the ice data while moving the climate trenches back to more defendable lines. The England paper notes a “surprising, but not unexpected pause” simulated by climate models, “relatively frequently”. Old school to the end, the Guardian reported last March that “scientists say” that ice-free summers were possible in the Arctic within the next decade.

Here is the graphic evidence from the two databases consulted by the England team.

These scientists are not the only ones to spot something that appears to have alluded mainstream journalists, scientists and politicians, keen as always to promote the Net Zero fantasy. Recently, the Arctic scientist Allan Astrup Jensen noted that the summer ice had plateaued from 1979-97, and then fell for 10 years. Either side of the drop – manna from heaven for climate cranks – there have been losses, albeit minimal ones. In fact, evidence shows that 1979 was a high cyclical point in Arctic Sea ice, a cherry-picked date that conveniently marks the start of more accurate satellite measurements. Sea ice extent was lower in the 1950s and observations stretching back 200 years suggest a 70–80-year waxing and waning cycle. In line with these findings, scientists suggest ocean currents play a large part in determining the sea ice extent.

Last year, the Daily Sceptic noted that Arctic Sea ice had soared to its highest level for 21 years. The article noted this interesting and correct fact but made our usual point that ice trends can only be understood over a long, preferably very long-term context. The BBC More or Less statistical radio programme referred to the article without putting the high in context. Rather it provided a case study in how alarmists counter the obvious lengthy pause. Professor Julienne Stroeve from UCL suggested the ice extent was thinner, although the presenter Tom Colls had to admit, “the data is not available yet”. What you see, claimed Stroeve, is that the trend is downwards for four decades. The overall decline in long-term Arctic ice is very easy to see, added Colls. A more statistically objective view, something the programme constantly tells listeners it aims to provide, might have noted the lower levels of the 1950s and the recent obvious lengthy pause.

Of course, when you are in the climate alarm business, there is a frequent need to explain why the various scares and tipping points never seem to occur. One favoured approach is to simply ignore any unwelcome improvement such as the coral growing back in record amounts on the Great Barrier Reef, and hope nobody has noticed. The other favoured tactic is to state that the computer models that predict one thing are in fact still entirely correct when the opposite occurs. We might refer to this as the ‘global warming leads to global cooling’ explanation. Since computer models rely on inadequate human input of a chaotic and non-linear atmosphere that is impossible to fully understand, it is usually possible to claim with a tweak or two that they were right all along.

The England paper is to be congratulated for laying out the Arctic Sea ice data but most of its work is seemingly designed to stay onside with those using computer models to provide what is sometimes called ‘evidence’ of a climate crisis. Rather than the multi-decadal pause being an unexpected event, the scientists note, “comprehensive climate models from CMIP5 and CMIP6 simulate such pauses relatively frequently”. According to these climate model simulations, it is noted, “this pause in the loss of Arctic sea ice could plausibly continue for the next five to 10 years”. ‘Plausible’ and ‘evidence’, it might be reasonably pointed out, are not words that always spring to mind when considering the output of climate computer models. It is of course only one small step that is needed for the crystal ball pseudoscientists to claim they can use models to attribute individual weather events to humans eating Big Macs and driving SUVs.

We can assume that the sea ice predictions of Gore and Attenborough were also derived from computer models – ever reliable to provide whatever scare you want to promote.

But all can be forgiven in the climate Armageddon business, particularly if you happen to be a high-profile eco loon like Gore. It would have been a “rather brave person” to have predicted that a sustained slowdown in ice loss was just around the corner after the large losses of 2007 and 2012, states the England team. This despite the ensuing pause which many have shown was “entirely consistent with what climate models simulate”. What utter bunk. How brave do you need to be to understand past sea ice cyclical trends? How much intelligence is required to abstain from making ludicrous predictions of an ice-free Arctic on the basis of two years’ data? And why give a free pass to a redundant American politician looking for a role who has helped cause enormous societal distress and economic destruction by inventing a climate crisis primarily designed to impose a supra-national collectivist agenda?

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Tag: tipping points

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