Climate

Unprecedented Heat Wave?

Featured image More ignorance from the New York Times: “Without Climate Change, U.S. Heat Wave Called ‘Virtually Impossible.” Heat and humidity as severe, prolonged and far-reaching as this week’s would have been “virtually impossible” in the Northeast and eastern Canada before humans began warming the planet, a team of scientists said on Friday. *** To estimate how much climate change increased the likelihood of this week’s sweltering conditions, the scientists analyzed records »

Everything Is Political

Featured image Western Europe has been sweltering under a heat wave, and quite a few people have died as a result. The heat wave is unusual, but the phenomenon isn’t: every year, lots of Europeans die from extremes of heat and cold, far more than in the United States. And European climate deaths vastly exceed deaths in the U.S. from gun homicides, which many Europeans like to decry. A sane response to »

Heat Wave!

Featured image Sometimes it gets hot. Even in Northern Europe, currently in the midst of a heat wave. Many people don’t realize that London is farther north than anywhere in the contiguous U.S. It is at the same latitude as Calgary, Canada. Paris is at the same latitude as North Dakota and Montreal. So Northern Europe has not generally been home to high temperatures. Thirty-one years ago, my wife and I and »

A Climate Model That Works

Featured image The standard climate models that show skyrocketing temperatures in response to increases in atmospheric CO2 are well known to be wrong, as their predictions grossly exceed the amount of warming that is actually observed. But what can replace them? Willis Eschenbach has a fascinating post at Watts Up With That about a new, dynamic model. I will excerpt briefly, but you should check out the whole thing: To understand the »

On Climate, Theory vs. Observation

Featured image I think most people had already figured out that climate hysteria is a money-motivated scam by the time the U.N. threw in the towel on its most extreme forecasts. Lacking support at the federal level, climate fanatics are in retreat in the U.S., and around most of the world. This is largely due to the fact that observation–the ultimate criterion–consistently fails to verify the theories that are embodied in climate »

Include us out

Featured image Graham Greene designated his less serious fiction “entertainments,” though he eventually dispensed with the designation. One such “entertainment” was the thriller Ministry of Fear (1943, now with an introduction by Alan Furst), turned into the 1944 film of the same name directed by Fritz Lang. Greene’s novel comes to mind this morning in connection with the Brussels Signal daily newsletter Brussels Calling! From Brussels Calling! I learn that Spain has »

Laputa today

Featured image I studied Gulliver’s Travels in Jeffrey Hart’s course on early eighteenth-century English literature, from Dryden through Pope. Hart was a great teacher and this was a great course. In Part III of the book Gulliver recounts his voyage to Laputa. Laputa is an island levitating in the sky. This is Gulliver’s description of the men he first encounters in Laputa when he climbs up to the island: At my alighting, »

Global Warming: It’s Not Unusual

Featured image Hysteria about global warming stems from the fact that, as best one can estimate, the Earth’s average temperature has increased by around 1.1 degree C over the last century. Global temperatures have fluctuated widely in the past, and it has long been debated whether the current increase is anything unusual. At the Science of Climate Change, computer scientist Les Hatton recounts a relatively simple analysis that he conducted, using the »

Three Cheers for CO2

Featured image I have been following debates over global warming since the 1990s. In the early days, the oil companies defended themselves both by challenging the bad science underlying the global warming theory and by pointing out the benefits of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. At one time I had a VHS documentary called “The Greening of Planet Earth” on that topic. The benefits of CO2 are indisputable, as anyone who knows »

$16 Trillion and Counting

Featured image The supposed “green” transition is the biggest boondoggle in human history. Bjorn Lomborg calculates the amount spent globally, to date, at $16 trillion: Climate campaigners tell you green is cheap It isn't Global green transition cost is now $16+ trillion, rising with over $2 trillion/year (2% of global GDP) 113x our spending to avoid hunger Still, fossil CO₂ emissions set another record last yearhttps://t.co/ypTLqfQ2Hq… pic.twitter.com/xHqj9eFUXi — Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) February »

Headline of the day

Featured image The good news is that the Trump administration has announced its repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding.” As Matthew Hennessey puts it in the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression newsletter this morning, the finding is the “2009 determination that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. It was the legal basis for most federal climate regulation, allowing Washington technocrats to treat carbon dioxide, methane and four other »

Is Michael Mann Finished? [Updated]

Featured image Climate alarmist Michael Mann was for quite a few years the go-to “climate scientist” in the left-wing press. But the Associated Press’s sub silentio deletion of Mann from its story on the Trump administration’s revocation of the Obama administration’s CO2 endangerment finding suggests that Mann may have lost that status. The Associated Press is, of course, on the Democratic Party’s team on this issue. They are wrong, but that isn’t »

Impotence of the Elite

Featured image The world’s “leaders” have been fulminating against fossil fuels for decades now. Not only that, they have been agreeing with one another, in a series of solemn pacts, to do away with oil and gas (also nuclear, for no apparent reason) and transition the world to wind and solar, in order to reduce CO2 emissions. And they have backed their pledges with money; more than $10 trillion has been spent »

Climate Change: What Can’t It Do?

Featured image Global warming morphed into climate change so that liberals could complain about any inconvenient weather and blame it on free enterprise. Thus, we have the absurd situation where liberals claim that “climate change” causes both excessive heat and excessive cold, whichever happens to be occurring at the moment. This makes no sense. Saying that climate change causes warmer (or colder) weather is circular. It is like saying that my weight »

Michael Mann, Liar

Featured image The “green” movement is built on a foundation of lies. Climate change? Sure, the climate has been changing for millions of years. But Earth’s climate, over which we have little or no control, was politicized by, as much as anyone other than Al Gore, Michael Mann. Mann is the creator of the infamous “hockey stick” chart, showing Earth’s temperatures stable until the very recent future, and then spiking sharply upward. »

Hurricane Fern destroys U.S.

Featured image It had escaped my attention that the current winter storm is named “Fern.” From the New York Post, Massive winter storm Fern’s icy blast grounds thousands of weekend flights, entire state warned to stay home for days. It turns out that the state is Texas. Scroll down to paragraph 12 where the Post reports, Conditions were forecast to be so bad in some areas, particularly those pounded by ice, that »

There will be no survivors

Featured image From what I can discern from the latest weather forecasts, some two-thirds (66 percent) of America will be wiped off the maps by Monday morning. It reminds me of last fall’s hurricane hype, where not a single storm hit the continental U.S. From the Weather Channel, Massive Winter Storm With Damaging Ice In South, Heavy Snow From Texas To Northeast To Affect Over 230 Million Last I checked, the population »