Climate
December 29, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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December 19, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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December 13, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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December 10, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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December 4, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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November 9, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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October 28, 2023 — John Hinderaker
After more than 11 long years, jury selection in Michael Mann’s defamation case against Mark Steyn and others begins on Monday. I had lost track of this case as it wended its tortuous way through the courts, and tried to catch up with it by watching Mark’s deposition, the two short halves of which you can see here and here. The deposition does not lack for entertainment value, but as
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October 22, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Statistics Norway, the government agency that produces official statistics for that country, released a report last month titled “To what extent are temperature levels changing due to greenhouse gas emissions?” The report concludes: [T]he results imply that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be sufficiently strong to cause systematic changes in the pattern of the temperature fluctuations. In other words, our analysis indicates that with the
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October 2, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Global warming hysteria may have given rise to more craziness than anything in the last several centuries. And as bad as it is here in the U.S., it is even worse in Europe. Thus, this astonishing finding from France: On May 30, engineer Jean-Marc Jancovici, an expert on climate change, once again called for drastically limiting plane travel, and declared the need to establish a quota of 4 flights per
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September 20, 2023 — Steven Hayward
We’ve periodically debunked the way the climatistas jump on every notable weather event as proof of the imminence of the climate apocalypse, but our friends at Kite & Key Media have put together this nice seven-minute summary of what’s wrong with these claims. Among other things, the video cites Steven Koonin, whose book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters is the best overall
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September 19, 2023 — John Hinderaker
It has gotten to the point where Joe Biden can’t make a public appearance without embarrassing himself–and, worse, us. Speaking to the U.N. General Assembly this morning, Biden stressed the need to “accelerate the climate crisis.” He then caught himself and went on to spin a web of falsehoods: Biden retailed the usual climate myths: Noting “record breaking” heatwaves in the US and China, along with wildfires in America and
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September 11, 2023 — Scott Johnson
President Biden held a press conference for the ages in Hanoi yesterday. The White House has posted the transcript here. The site of the press conference and Biden’s mental nullity reminded me of the comment frequently attributed to the late Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy about George Romney. I first heard it incorporated in comedian Mort Sahl’s routine in 1970 and I’m attributing it to him. I’m not sure that McCarthy
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September 7, 2023 — John Hinderaker
This story has been around for a couple of days, but I don’t think we have mentioned it. Dr. Patrick Brown, co-director of the climate and energy team at The Breakthrough Institute at Berkeley, got an article on California wildfires published in Nature magazine. He then admitted that he had fudged the facts to get his article in line with global warming hysteria, so as to get the article published:
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September 7, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Admittedly, the 21st century is still young, but so far the most annoying people on the planet during this century, hands down, are climate hysterics. And of that group, the worst are climate criminals who block traffic and engage in other types of illegal activity. We haven’t seen too much of this in the U.S., but it has been a real problem in Germany and other European countries. Here, a
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September 4, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Joe Biden’s main point of his brief visit to the Florida panhandle in the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia was climate change uber alles, despite the fact that the “consensus” science of the IPCC, not to mention actual hurricane data for the last 50 years, justifies no such claim. So Plan B is to display the rising costs of weather-related disasters, which the financial press (I’m looking at you Barron’s) laps
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September 4, 2023 — John Hinderaker
As always, the Democrats are trying to make political hay out of a natural disaster, in this case Hurricane Idalia. The fact is that hurricanes have not increased in either frequency or severity, but that doesn’t stop the ghoulish liberals. A reporter asked Governor Ron DeSantis about Joe Biden’s politicization of Idalia, and DeSantis responded beautifully: NEW: DeSantis scathes blaming climate change for #Idalia, saying the most powerful storm for
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September 3, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Climate science is a wild and woolly multi-disciplinary field in which virtually every proposition is controversial. It is only the politics that is settled; the science is up for grabs. A recent study in Climate illustrates the point, not by introducing new concepts but by measuring the obvious: A new study published in the scientific peer-reviewed journal, Climate, by 37 researchers from 18 countries suggests that current estimates of global
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