Climate

“Climate Change”: What Can’t It Do?

Featured image 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 »

It’s All About the Money

Featured image 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 »

Lost in the rainforest

Featured image 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 »

The Hierarchy of Democratic Deceit

Featured image 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 »

That Was Then, This Is Now

Featured image 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 »

Observations on Hurricane Helene

Featured image 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 »

The Daily Chart: Climate Confusion

Featured image 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 »

Net Zero Is a Zero

Featured image 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 »

Full Text of “The Strange Death of Environmentalism”

Featured image As a follow up to my post last night with the video of my Breakthrough Dialogues presentation last night, I thought I might as well post up my complete text, about half of which I had to leave out of my talk for time reasons, and most especially the point I make at the very end, which I wasn’t able even to hint at in my summary talk.   Remarks »

Climate Justice—At Last!

Featured image Here’s your Feel Good Story of the Day: Just Stop Oil co-founder Roger Hallam is jailed for five years and four other activists for four years over plots to block the M25 motorway Five Just Stop Oil protesters, including one of its co-founders, have been jailed for conspiring to organise protests that blocked the M25 motorway. Roger Hallam, an environmental activist who was one of the founding members of the »

A Fresh Embarrassment for the Climate Cult

Featured image Remember how we’ve been told for years now that climate change, and hence rising sea levels, were an imminent threat to islands and island nations around the world? Well, the New York Times reported a few days ago, oops: The Vanishing Islands That Failed to Vanish [W]hen the world began paying attention to global warming decades ago, these islands, which form atop coral reefs in clusters called atolls, were quickly »

Dumbest Protest Ever?

Featured image I know, the competition is stiff. But this is definitely a contender: Six climate protesters stormed the 18th green while the leaders were lining up their putts for the final hole of regulation at the PGA Tour’s Travelers Championship on Sunday, delaying the finish for about five minutes. The protesters came from all directions around the green and waved smoke bombs that left white and red residue on the putting »

The Climate Cult Is Nothing New

Featured image Time for a periodic reminder from P.J. O’Rourke that “At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.” Today’s news brings fresh evidence of this, as a pair of climate cultists defaced the Stonehenge monument in England. (I admit to being a little confused by this gesture, since  returning us all »

Facebook Censoring Climate Dissent Again

Featured image We’ve often cited the work of Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado, whose science Substack, The Honest Broker, is essential reading. What you should know about Roger (whom I know quite well) is that he is a centrist-liberal Democrat, believes climate change is a genuine future risk, and supports a carbon tax and other measures to fight it. But he also calls bull—- on a lot of climate »

Down Go the Greens

Featured image As Steve noted earlier, today’s elections to the European Parliament were a disaster for the Left and a triumph for the Right (the “far right” in European parlance). And as Steve said, the Greens were hardest hit. The consequences could be far-reaching. This article in the Telegraph preceded but predicted the conservative victory. It focuses on the consequences for Europe’s climate policies: “Rise of the Right threatens EU net zero »

Is There Science Behind “Climate Science”?

Featured image Not much, actually. A number of arguments relevant to the global warming debate are raging, and generally, the realists–as opposed to the hysterics–are winning. There simply isn’t a sound scientific basis for the claim that CO2 threatens our civilization (not that liberals like our civilization, but that is another matter). A good example of how the global warming debate is going comes from Watts Up With That?, where Andy May »

Down Memory Lane

Featured image This CBS News report from 1982 features a mini-rogues gallery: Dan Rather and Al Gore. It gives a crude account of the greenhouse effect, without mentioning that the greenhouse effect makes life on Earth possible. It is a relatively early version of the false predictions we have been seeing for close to 50 years now: 1982 CBS News report—featuring a 34 year old Al Gore—predicts the "widespread disruption of agriculture", »