Climate

John Kerry—GOP Double Agent?

Featured image I think it was Glenn Reynolds who posited that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is actually a Karl Rove plant inside the Democratic Party, but it seems equally plausible that this is the case for John Kerry. He has always been so pompously preposterous that you can’t take him seriously. And now he says we might “feel better” about Russia and the Ukrainian situation if only Russia would get on board with cutting »

Climate Activists Are Evil

Featured image We are far beyond the point where climate activists could be regarded as misguided but well-meaning. They are evil, pure and simple. Here, climate activists vandalize the United States Constitution display at the National Archives, bleating stupid pronouncements about “rich white men.” You have to go to college to become that dumb: BREAKING: Climate activists just ruined the display of the Constitution in the Rotunda of the National Archives in »

A Bitterly Disappointing Verdict

Featured image Today the jury returned its verdict in the defamation trial of Michael Mann v. Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn. The verdict was disappointing to those of us who followed the case and thought that Michael Mann presented a pathetically inadequate case. The jury actually agreed: it found that the defendants had defamed Mann, but awarded only a token $1 in damages, since Mann had failed to prove any. But it »

The Jury Is Out

Featured image It often happens that jury trials start slowly, then finish with a rush. That happened in the case of Michael Mann v. Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg. Evidence wrapped up rather quickly, and today the lawyers delivered their closing arguments. I assume that jury deliberations will begin tomorrow, as the arguments concluded late in the afternoon. John Williams, an elderly lawyer who is Mann’s senior counsel, argued first. I didn’t »

Free Speech and Arson

Featured image Mark Steyn has been trying the defamation case that Michael Mann brought against him in the D.C. Superior Court for the last three weeks–literally trying it, since Mark is pro se. Yet somehow he found time not only for an update on the trial proceedings, but for commentary on my visit to Washington last week and the firebombing of my organization’s offices a few days earlier. He included in his »

Whereabouts

Featured image I have been mostly AWOL the last few days, so I thought that I owe our readers an explanation. My wife and I have been in Washington, D.C. I have had a few meetings of various kinds, but mostly we are here to spend some time in the D.C. Superior Court, observing the trial of Michael Mann v. Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg, finally before a jury after 12 years »

The Daily Chart: How Warm Was It?

Featured image As you have no doubt heard, 2023 was the planet’s hottest year on record (a “record” that only goes back about 150 years, with more and more uncertainty and unreliability the farther back you go). Certain it is accurate to say last year was the hottest since we started measuring more precisely by satellites—starting 45 years ago. One of my gurus on this subject, Dr. Roy Spencer (who helped design »

The French Revolution

Featured image Farmers across much of Europe are protesting against their governments’ anti-agriculture policies. In France, farmers are shutting down access to Paris: Farmers set up roadblocks on eight motorways around Paris today as they made good their threat to place a stranglehold on the capital. “The siege of Paris is under way,” said Damien Greffin, vice-chairman of the country’s biggest farming union, the FNSEA. He said the plan was to “encircle” »

The Climate Models Are Wrong

Featured image Dr. Roy Spencer, a top scientist specializing in climate, wrote a report for Heritage which he summarized on his own web site. Spencer compared observed warming in the U.S. corn belt during the summer, between 1973 and 2022–a 50-year period–with the warming that was predicted by the major climate models. He found that all of the models yielded more warming than actually occurred, most to an absurd degree. This chart »

Mann v. Steyn Gets Under Way

Featured image After 12 years of wandering in the wilderness of the D.C. court system, Michael Mann’s defamation case against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg has finally gone to trial. Opening statements were delivered today. The trial is being live-streamed, and I got the court’s app to work just in time to hear Steyn’s opening. The case, as you likely recall, arises out of an internet post written by Simberg, which Steyn »

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

Featured image It is cold across most of North America, which links these three stories: After Big Tesla Bet, Hertz Selling One-Third of EV Fleet. Hertz is selling about a third of its global electric-vehicle fleet, a major reversal for the rental-car company after it positioned itself as a champion of the technology with plans to vastly grow its fleet of plug-in models. Hertz said Thursday that it would sell about 20,000 »

Putting Out the Wildfire Myth

Featured image These days, pretty much any inconvenient phenomenon is chalked up to “climate change.” What is climate change? Basically, anything you don’t like. So bad things being “caused” by “climate change” is more or less a tautology. Not long ago, when there was a spike in U.S. wildfires caused mostly, I believe, by lousy forest management practices imposed by California environmentalists, the world was said to be on fire–unprecedented wildfires caused »

Call Me Paranoid, But…

Featured image Environmentalists, and liberals in general, will sacrifice anything to fight–allegedly–global warming. So it makes me a little nervous to see that a scientific group in the U.K. has documented that humans contribute to “climate change” by breathing. Of course, kids used to be taught this in junior high school: humans breathe in air, burn the oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Plants take in carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. This is »

COP Who Cares?

Featured image The UN-sponsored COP28 has broken up, and hundreds of private jets are wending their way back to civilization from Dubai. COP28 was the subject of high drama during its closing days. Some said the conference was a disaster; Al Gore, for example: COP28 is now on the verge of complete failure. The world desperately needs to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but this obsequious draft reads as »

Global Warming: What Can’t It Do?

Featured image It was only a few years ago that global warming hysterics in Europe were predicting that snow would soon be a thing of the past. Children will grow up without ever seeing snow, they said. But it hasn’t turned out that way, and Europe is currently experiencing below-normal temperatures and heavy snowfall. (My wife and I got out of England a week ago, just ahead of the storm.) So you »

Genocidal Greta

Featured image Among the many leftists who have expressed support for Hamas, seemingly unconcerned with its outrages of October 7, is Greta Thunberg. Thunberg, now 20 years old, is regarded as a heroine by many for her uncompromising demand that the Western world (she hasn’t visited China, to my knowledge) stop using fossil fuels. Just the News reports (see original for links): Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is dividing the climate movement »

Thought for the day

Featured image Steve Hayward takes up “The Hamas wing of the ‘climate’ cult” in a column for The Pipeline. This is his conclusion: The open embrace of authoritarianism makes evident that climate change is only a pretext for their real object, which is revolution and the drive for power to achieve it. If climate change didn’t exist as a cause to be exploited, the deep left would find something else—any cause will »