Category Archives: Global Warming

Science vs. “Science”

With a hat-tip to our reader and commenter, the indefatigable JK, I offer you a detailed essay by Dr. Roy Spencer about climate modeling. (Dr. Spencer’s CV is here. Keep it in mind next time somebody tells you the scientific consensus among Actual Climate Scientists is “settled”.) One of the key ideas in this article […]

Catastrophizing The Weather

Yesterday’s deluge in New York City was a substantial and frightening event. In Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I lived for 40 years before selling up and moving out (thank goodness!), the flooding at the bottom of the moraine was up to the windows of stranded cars. As with every notable weather event these days, from […]

Signal And Noise

Here’s a pithy little item about uncertainties in climate-change modeling.

Power Failure

Reuters reports that California will be having problems with its energy supply this summer: California says it needs more power to keep the lights on May 6 (Reuters) – California energy officials on Friday issued a sober forecast for the state’s electrical grid, saying it lacks sufficient capacity to keep the lights on this summer […]

A Hatful Of Heresies

Having just had a commenter casually toss the execrable term “climate denier” into my comment-thread, comparing any dissent on climate policy and other such technically complex, politically charged topics to stubborn belief in a flat Earth, I thought I would draw your attention to a useful resource: a collection of thirty-one pages, each presenting useful […]

Ice, Ice, Baby

It appears that Arctic sea-ice coverage is, shall we say, heading North: SHARP UPTICK IN ARCTIC SEA ICE: EXTENT ON COURSE TO BE THE HIGHEST IN 15 YEARS I’m sure this will be all over the nightly news.

Before The Storm

Here in New England we’re awaiting the arrival of Hurricane Henri. The original projections showed the center of the tracking cone passing right over us in Wellfleet, but now it looks as though the storm will make landfall somewhere in central Long Island. What we’ll get out here will be storm surge and wind, but […]

Going Green

Next time you hear someone refer to carbon dioxide as a “pollutant”, mention this: Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds Carbon dioxide is plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide, make human food, and release oxygen. Humans breathe oxygen, eat plants, and release carbon dioxide. Simple and elegant.

There Is No Climate Emergency.

Here.

Ice, Ice, Baby

Here’s an amusing story: Ship With Climate Change Warriors Caught in Ice, Warriors Evacuated To quote Philip K. Dick once again: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” The problem with the modern Left’s new religion is that, having shot Heaven down from the sky, they are forced into […]

The Descent Of Mann

Our friend and commenter, the indefatigable JK, sent along a link to a story that’s attracting lots of attention today: climate “scientist” and rent-seeking fearmonger Michael Mann has lost his libel suit against the Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball. Dr. Ball had expressed in public his belief that Dr. Mann’s infamous “Hockey Stick” graph — […]

Be Very Afraid

It’s time to panic, because the disastrous effects of climate change have now caused the cherry trees in Washington to blossom exactly when they usually do.

Tilting At Windmills

It has for many years been a tenet of the Progressive religion that solar and wind power must replace fossil fuels as the source of supply for our energy-hungry civilization. Critics of the idea have said all along that this is an impossible dream, a colossal waste of resources, is destructive to the environment in […]

Judith Curry On Sea Level Rise

Actual Climate Scientist Dr. Judith Curry has spent eighteen months reviewing the issue of sea-level rise. Her report is here. Briefly, her conclusions are: Is the recent sea level rise (since 1993) of magnitude 3 mm/year unusual? No, although this conclusion is conditional on the quality of the global sea level data. The available evidence […]

Wolf!!

Well, the IPCC has released another terrifying report on the climate crisis. This time, we’ve got 12 years to make “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. Or we’re all doomed. This ultimatum is nothing new: we’ve had a decade or so to act before reaching some catastrophic “tipping point” for a […]

Warmism

Here’s a good piece, of unspecified age, describing the cult of climate change. (The author chooses to call it a “cult” because the belief-system isn’t old enough to qualify as a “religion”.)

The 9th Circus

Yesterday the 9th Circuit Court Of Appeals allowed a children’s climate-advocacy group to proceed with a lawsuit against the Trump administration for not preventing global warming. The suit argues, with a straight face, that inaction by the Federal government to produce what the plaintiffs believe to be necessary carbon-reduction policy violates the children’s Constitutional rights […]

I Predict

I’m just going to lay down a marker here, so I can say “I told you so” years from now. The world’s climate will clearly have become significantly colder within, at most, one decade, and we will be looking back at global-warming hysteria and wondering how we could have been such fools.

Freeman Dyson, Heretic

Our e-pal Bill Keezer sent along a link today to an essay on climate change by the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson. As it happened I offered a post about this very essay ten years ago, and it’s at least as relevant now as it was then. Have a look. My post is here, and the […]

Bon Débarras!

We note with satisfaction that President Trump pulled us out of that Paris-Agreement boondoggle yesterday. We never should have been in it in the first place: it was never put to Congress, and we signed up solely on the whim of Barack Obama, as a demonstration of sacerdotal virtue. The “motte-and-bailey” style of the left’s […]

Nye’s Quadrant

For today, some climate heresies: In a post at her blog, Actual Climate Scientist Judith Curry discusses a diagram that divides scientific work into four quadrants. The corners of the diagram represent high vs. low priorities on two different axes: the pursuit of some kind of practical utility (X), and the pursuit of basic understanding […]

And That’s The Fake News, Folks. Now, Here’s The Fake Weather.

Here’s a story I think we’ll be hearing a thing or two about. From the Daily Mail: The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris […]

In Science Consensus Is Irrelevant

I’ve been on the road today, with no time for writing. So for tonight we have for you an evergreen speech by the late Michael Crichton on how real science works. Money quote: In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke […]

Tilting At Windmills

I (and many others) have written often about the obvious religiosity of Progressivism, and about its being, quite plainly and transparently, a secular continuation and direct descendant of the Puritan “mission into the wilderness”. A particularly instructive aspect of this atheistic quest for holiness and salvation is the patently crypto-religious “climate-change” crusade. Early last year, […]

Rashomon

Shot. Chaser.

The True Believer

I just ran across some remarks made a few years ago by globalist uplifter Ottmar Edenhofer, then co-chair of the U.N.’s IPCC Working Group III. This is hardly current, but it’s instructive enough that I thought I’d post it anyway: So far economic growth has gone hand in hand with the growth of greenhouse gas […]

False Alarm

In case you missed it: Actual Climate Scientist Judith Curry posted an item a few weeks ago linking to a forceful essay by Mario Loyola on climate-change activism. The Loyola essay is behind a paywall at The American Interest, but that publication offers non-subscribing visitors one free article a month, so you ought to be […]

Energy Is Life

I’ve mentioned the fossil-fuels advocate Alex Epstein several times in these pages, most recently back on April 13th. Here he is making his case last week before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Note in particular the odious, and evidently wholly unlettered, Senator Barbara Boxer mocking Mr. Epstein (at 7:20, and again at the […]

Nature Vs. Nurture

Over the transom today came a link (thank you, Bill K.) to Diplomad’s latest salvo: At War with the History of Mankind. Dip makes the point that a central tenet of modern Leftist ideology (which is, as I and others have argued at length, essentially a cryptoreligious belief-system) is to make Nature sacred, and mankind […]

The All-Union Academy Of Climate Sciences

Yesterday the United States Senate held a hearing on the magnitude of human impact on climate change. Giving testimony were some Actual Climate Scientists. I would like very much for you to read and carefully digest their testimony. I will excerpt some of it here, in what will be a longish post — but please, […]

Heaven’s Gate

When I was a boy, there was a mawkish and immensely popular television program called “Queen For A Day“. Each episode featured a panel of miserable women, who vied for the prize by telling a plangent tale of woe. (The poor things wept, sobbed, and wailed as they pleaded for money, appliances, etc.; it’s easy […]

You Can Never Be Too Virtuous

Following on our previous post, I”d be remiss not to bring to your attention a white-paper from the French-based Société de Calcul Mathématique, which specializes in complex mathematical modeling, on the “climate change” cryptoreligion. In the paper’s summary, we read: All public policies, in France, Europe and throughout the world, find their origin and inspiration […]

Ice, Ice, Baby

If you’ve been reading the news carefully, you may have noticed some stories about something that used to be called “global warming”, and is now, I think, referred to as “climate change”. The idea, if I understand it correctly, is that the Earth is getting warmer — which of course it has done often in […]

Go Figure

Well, it looks like Hurricane Joaquin is going to give the mainland a miss. That means a remarkable streak will continue: it’s been almost ten years since a major hurricane last struck the continental United States, higher levels of CO2 notwithstanding. Just sayin’.

Science, Unsettled

Here. May I also recommend to you an excellent book: The Neglected Sun, which makes a persuasive case that the effect on the Sun on Earth’s climate is significantly underestimated in mainstream climate models and the IPCC’s reports and predictions.

The Peter Principle

A timely passage: [P]olitics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character […]

Man Of The People

Here is the French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius: M. Fabius seeks an international arrangement to impose strictures upon the sovereign nations of the world in an attempt to control the Earth’s climate. (That such an arrangement will also transfer aspects of that sovereignty to gentlemen such as himself and his professional colleagues is, I believe, […]

When One With Honeyed Words But Evil Mind Persuades The Mob, Great Woes Befall The State

Yesterday President Obama gave a commencement address to the Coast Guard Academy. He devoted much of it to brazen propaganda about “climate change”, including even going so far as to make it a scapegoat for Islamic violence and political chaos in the Mideast and Africa. We’re all well-accustomed (perhaps “inured” would be a better word) […]

Cathar-sis

Having mentioned secular religion in our previous post, this seems an apt moment to catch up with the latest heresies on the global-warming front (environmentalism being the most transparently religious liberal piety of them all). Here we have a wide-ranging roundup of “damned facts” from the Arch-Vile himself, Christopher Monckton. Here, too, is Steve Goddard, […]

Sky Still Not Falling

Here’s a roundup of recent climate science from the Cato Institute. (One quibble: although the article correctly notes that there has been no “major hurricane” strike on the U.S. mainland since 2005, I think it might at least have mentioned Hurricane Sandy. Although Sandy was not officially a hurricane when it made landfall in New […]

Ice, Ice, Baby

Well, golly gee whillickers. Whoever could have imagined such a thing?

Hot Air

It’s Earth Day, so President Obama took a Boeing 747*, helicopters, and an SUV to the Florida Everglades, there to scold us about global warming. We learned that the Everglades are threatened — which indeed they are, by aquifer depletion, land subsidence, residential and agricultural overdevelopment, and invasive species. The President, however, restricted his focus […]

How Insensitive

Here’s a significant item: a new study from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology has found that that anthropogenic aerosols have been causing much less cooling than prior models had assumed. This means that these aerosols are doing less to offset putative warming caused by carbon dioxide, which means in turn that temperature sensitivity to […]

Q.E.D.

A few weeks back I noted that global warmism was, in many cases, a secular repurposing of the religious impulse, and that its narrative is a near-perfect parallel of the Christian Fall-and-Redemption mythos: In the beginning, there was only God. From God arose Man. Before his Fall, Man lived simply, and in perfect harmony with […]

Getting Hot In Here

I understand President Obama said some things today about ‘extremism’. I haven’t read what he said, so I won’t comment for now. I’m sure I’m going to love it. I did, however, get not one, but two nice little notes from Mr. Obama’s ministry of propaganda today, telling me that it was time to “beat […]

Adeste Fidelis

In a post written earlier this month, after a conversation about global warming with an intelligent and well-educated friend, I remarked on the similarity between secular environmentalism and religion: I was struck once again by the clarity with which global-warmism reveals itself as a secular repurposing of the religious impulse — a deep and universal […]

May Cooler Heads Prevail

You’d have had to have been trapped in a snowdrift somewhere not to have heard by now that NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has announced that 2014 was the warmest year in the history of Planet Earth (likely the whole solar system, if you’re an MSNBC viewer, though I’ll confess I haven’t tuned […]

But Let Us Persevere In What We Have Resolved, Before We Forget

As far as the RSS data are concerned, the Great Pause continues. More here.

Old Wine, New Bottle

The New Yorker‘s essayist Adam Gopnik — whom I have always considered to be quite lavishly talented, despite his dainty and epicene style — beclowned himself one minute into this New Year with a stupendously mawkish item on gun control. It is so bad, in fact — so completely barren of fact, rational argument, or […]

“Greenhouse” Warming In Pacific Northwest? Just Hot Air

The Pacific Northwest has been getting a little warmer over the past century or so. As reported by the New York Times, however, a new (“and”, the Times hastens to add, “most likely controversial”) study shows that this appears not to have been due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Story here.