Climate
September 24, 2025 — John Hinderaker
It has been a while since we have checked in on polar ice. I’m sure you remember the hysteria of a few years ago–Arctic sea ice is melting! Al Gore predicted, in 2009, that the Arctic would be “completely ice-free” by 2014. Far from having disappeared, there are still 1.8 million square miles of ice floating in the Arctic Ocean. The annual Arctic sea ice minimum has arrived once again,
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September 8, 2025 — John Hinderaker
That is the title of Bjorn Lomborg’s article in the Wall Street Journal on the current hysteria over the Great Barrier Reef: Last month, headlines shouted in unison: Great Barrier Reef suffers worst coral decline on record. Environmental journalists paint a picture of immense devastation driven by climate change. *** Australian scientists have meticulously tracked the reef’s coral cover since 1986. For many years, they published an annual average coral
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September 7, 2025 — John Hinderaker
The Associated Press is one of the world’s worst sources of disinformation. The AP’s self-description is the opposite of the truth: While others may tell you how to feel about the headlines, AP tells you what actually happened. No spin. No agenda. Just journalism that respects your intelligence. A case in point is this story on agriculture: “To get that perfect ear of corn, weather has to cooperate. But climate
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September 2, 2025 — Bill Glahn
Every time Trump, or more accurately, the Trump Administration, loses a ruling in federal district court, every news outlet puts out front page news. But you have to search hard to find news coverage of when he wins these cases on appeal. You may recall the case of the $20 billion (with a “b”) in EPA “climate grants” that the outgoing Biden Administration tried to shove out the door in
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July 21, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Governments around the world are not responding to climate change hysteria as activists have hoped they would. It is one thing to make commitments at international conferences, something else to impoverish your voters when pretty much everyone understands that, with China and India not on board, no one else’s actions matter, even if you buy the hype. What to do? Use the force of law to compel undemocratic obedience: The
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July 10, 2025 — John Hinderaker
This graphic recently came across my Instagram feed: Is that true? Yes, if gun deaths are homicides. In the most recent year available, there were 17,927 firearm homicides in the U.S. Meanwhile, there were 43,700 deaths in Europe caused by heat. (Vastly more deaths are caused by cold.) So: Europe should undertake an emergency effort to install universal air conditioning. If it saves just one life, it will be worth
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July 9, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Tragic flash flooding in Texas has prompted an outpouring of sympathy, as well as, regrettably, ghoulish responses from some quarters. So it may be a good time for a reality check. Are we living in an era of natural disasters, as some allege? In fact, happily, deaths from severe weather and other natural disasters are at an all-time per capita low. This is because weather in general has been relatively
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May 28, 2025 — Bill Glahn
Mixed results from a lawsuit in Germany. The BBC reports, A court in Germany has rejected a lawsuit brought by a Peruvian farmer against German energy giant RWE in a long-awaited decision. RWE is a large German electric utility which, for whatever reasons, is particularly hated by climate change activists. The Peruvian farmer sued the German utility for something under $20,000, representing RWE’s share of the alleged climate “damage” done
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March 12, 2025 — John Hinderaker
My wife and I attended several days in court, near the end of the Michael Mann v. Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg trial in Washington, D.C. We witnessed a dramatic moment, when Mann’s lawyers had introduced into evidence a document, which was blown up for the jury and about which Mann testified, that contained a list of grants that Mann allegedly didn’t get as a result of the defendants’ purported
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November 30, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Leftists shifted from global warming to climate change because they wanted to keep their options open. The nice thing about climate change is that it can be applied to any adverse weather phenomenon. And the world is big enough, and weather is variable enough, that it is a virtual certainty that somewhere, the weather is inconvenient. Wherever adverse weather exists, voilà: it’s climate change. Even though, obviously, bad weather has
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November 23, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Climate conferences are mostly dreary boondoggles, but every now and then things come into focus. Like when they talk about money. The “green” scam is all about the money. Global warming warriors are trying to pull off the greatest transfer of wealth since the Industrial Revolution. Mostly is this is from industry to industry, but it also applies from country to country. Thus, the “developing” countries try to shame the
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November 22, 2024 — Scott Johnson
In a brutal allusion to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, Matt Taibbi declares in a paywalled Racket News post that “The emperor has no brains.” He’s referring to Joe Biden. Less tartly, Byron York observes in his Examiner column “With raging wars and an addled president, it’s a perilous moment.” They both cite Biden’s public statement in the Amazon (White House transcript here, video below). According to Biden, “History
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October 23, 2024 — Steven Hayward
It is a well-known pattern going back decades now that Democratic candidates conceal their leftist views from the voters, running as moderates, and sometimes, like Democratic Senator Bob Casey in Pennsylvania right now, practically denying they are even Democrats! We’ve seen how Kamala Harris has disavowed her previous far-left issue statements wholesale, while winking to the progressive base that “my values haven’t changed.” I’m not sure it is working. Last
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October 5, 2024 — John Hinderaker
In Memories of Hurricane Katrina, I contrasted press coverage and Democratic Party hysteria over Hurricane Katrina, which effectively destroyed George W. Bush’s second term and contributed to the Democrats’ 2006 election victories, with the muted (if not altogether silent) reaction to Hurricane Helene and the vastly more problematic governmental response thereto. It is a theme worth returning to. On CNN, Scott Jennings makes the point effectively: Joe Biden was at
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September 27, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Hurricane Helene has been tremendously destructive, mostly, I believe, on account of flooding. Areas as far from the coast as Asheville, North Carolina, are seeing what is described as a 1,000-year flood. Why is Helene depositing so much water across several Southeastern states? One possibility is Hunga Tonga, the underwater volcano eruption of early 2022 that shot something like 100 million tons of water vapor into the air. Some sources
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September 23, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The Washington Post has published a possibly major story about how climate scientists have recreated the earth’s temperature record for the last 485 million years. Paleoclimatology, as it is called, is based on a wide range of ingenious “proxy” measures (fossil records, ice core samples, geology, astrophysics, etc) to estimate temperatures in the distant past up to the present. How solid are these measurements? I have no idea, and I
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August 18, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Our government, and a number of other Western governments, are committed to a goal of “net zero.” That is, our countries will add nothing further to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Any emissions of CO2 (e.g., breathing) will be balanced by absorption of CO2 by, e.g., plants. Various dates are specified in these aspirational statements, none of them realistic. And of course, the world’s main sources of atmospheric
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