You might not think so, with time running out for deniers (again) except perhaps as psychiatric patients. But there are signs of fatigue with it in the political system. In Australia, a senior Labour figure has caused turmoil in his party by suggesting they not run in the next election on the hugely ambitious plans that cost them the last one. And when CNN and the New York Times sponsored the 4th, 3-hour debate among contenders for the Democratic nomination, the moderators didn’t ask a single question about climate and the candidates didn’t make it an issue. You might think it’s because everyone agrees. But what if it’s because nobody has anything useful to suggest and most people secretly don’t care?
Voters claim to be anti-global-warming, of course. But as we learned including from the Yellow Vest upheaval in France, and Canadians’ views on carbon taxes, and any number of similar issues in other countries, citizens aren’t willing to pay any significant price to take action against greenhouse gases, suggesting they don’t really think there’s a problem.
Except when all-in politicians push the agenda too far. For instance deep blue California’s governor is now in big political trouble over high gas prices and unreliable power. And remember, high prices for less available energy is a feature not a bug of the climate alarmist movement, soothing talk of wind power notwithstanding.
The problem isn’t really the cost of alternative energy, because except by accident politicians are not willing to raise the price of energy to levels that would discourage its use. There was some kerfuffle over a study finding that green energy policies cost Britain £9 billion per year, or £340 per household. But while an increase in energy bills means hardship to the poor, Britain is rich, and most households may resent the extra cost but are not unable to pay it. The problem is how much more it’s going to cost to try to get renewables up from their current trivial share… or what happens when you just can’t. (Wind farms, like solar farms, have thus far been cherry-picking sites.) On which politicians have little to say that is not both stale and unconvincing.
The hardcore believe that if voters are not willing to pay high carbon taxes and otherwise do without the conveniences of modern life, they are short-sighted idiots and democracy itself must give way in this climate emergency. Meanwhile most voters are happy just to virtue-signal, if only to avoid fights with their grade-schoolers trained to correct their pronunciation of Thunberg (it’s Toon-BUIY not THUN-berg). But they simply aren’t convinced that it’s the end of the winter and the world as we know it because out their window things are going pretty much as they always have. And since politicians are repeating implausible mantras about what’s supposedly happening and how to fix it painlessly, a lot of them just tune it out and go about their business.
Passionate opposition to climate change coupled with timid or nonexistent proposals to fight it must inevitably become a stale punchline.
Some climate models say greenhouse gases cause a lot of warming and others don’t. Yet they all fit 20th century temperature data equally well. How is that possible? Simple: They all have an offsetting fudge factor based on the cooling effects of tiny pollution particles called aerosols. Not the observed effects, you understand. The high-sensitivity models simply assume aerosols do a lot of cooling by promoting extra cloud formation, and the low sensitivity models assume they don’t. So the key question is how much cooling aerosols actually do. If it’s not much, then greenhouse gases can only cause a little warming, given how little warming happened over the 20th century. And now we know it’s not much.
New evidence published in July is truly devastating. It doesn’t just say the cloud response to aerosols is very weak, though it does say so. It says aerosols do the opposite of what has been assumed and what they must do to make the models work. Instead of bundling liquid water up inside the clouds, which would lead to strong cooling of the Earth’s surface that might counteract a hypothetical strong impact of warming from GHGs, extra pollution aerosols cause clouds to expel water, weakening their overall cooling properties. Here is the authors’ exact wording (emphasis added).
The cooling of the Earth’s climate through the effects of anthropogenic aerosols on clouds offsets an unknown fraction of greenhouse gas warming. An increase in the amount of water inside liquid-phase clouds induced by aerosols, through the suppression of rain formation, has been postulated to lead to substantial cooling, which would imply that the Earth’s surface temperature is highly sensitive to anthropogenic forcing. Here we provide direct observational evidence that, instead of a strong increase, aerosols cause a relatively weak average decrease in the amount of water in liquid-phase clouds compared with unpolluted clouds. Measurements of polluted clouds downwind of various anthropogenic sources—such as oil refineries, smelters, coal-fired power plants, cities, wildfires and ships—reveal that aerosol-induced cloud-water increases, caused by suppressed rain formation, and decreases, caused by enhanced evaporation of cloud water, partially cancel each other out. We estimate that the observed decrease in cloud water offsets 23% of the global climate-cooling effect caused by aerosol-induced increases in the concentration of cloud droplets. These findings invalidate the hypothesis that increases in cloud water cause a substantial climate cooling effect and translate into reduced uncertainty in projections of future climate.
If this study is correct, and science we remind everyone proceeds skeptically by challenging findings including congenial ones, it is one more piece of evidence that most climate models predict too much warming in response to greenhouse gas emissions. The models with high sensitivity only get to stay in the game by having a big cooling offset in the form of aerosol-induced cloud formation, otherwise they’d have predicted so much warming over the 20th century we’d be fried to a crisp by now.
Up to now no one has been sure how much cooling happens from aerosol pollution because it is hard to measure (although there has previously been research showing that aerosol cooling is weaker than modelers usually assume). This new study knocks the legs out from under the modelers who want to keep a high climate sensitivity in their models.
And since the paper was published in Nature magazine, it will be hard for the IPCC folks to dismiss, though we don’t doubt they’ll try to find a way.
Much of what we read, online and elsewhere, is incorrect. That’s life. But Facebook, a platform that helps people socialize, thinks it’s in the business of setting the record straight. It calls this process fact checking, but its fact checkers don’t know what they’re talking about.
Facebook inserted two “related articles” directly after that Natural News story in my feed, describing it as “incorrect” and “false” (see the screengrab at the top of this post). The first was from ClimateFeedback.org, which talks loftily about accurate information being “the foundation of a functioning democracy.”
Some news outlets are publishing articles stating that this claim is based on a new study. In reality, there is no new published study. The claim comes from a six-page document uploaded to arXiv, a website traditionally used by scientists to make manuscripts available before publication. [my italics]
Ideas exist independently of whether or not they’ve been published somewhere. They exist even if people dismiss them as a six-page document. Peter Ratcliffe, one of three individuals who shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine, had his research rejected because a reviewer didn’t think his findings were sufficiently significant.
click to enlarge
Was his Nobel-quality research wrong just because Nature chose not to publish it? Of course not.
ClimateFeedback neglects to mention that the availability of the Finnish research on ArXiv.org is a good sign. That platform is used by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, and others who are seeking feedback from the wider community. People post their work there specifically so that others can help them strengthen and sharpen it prior to submission to a scientific journal.
ClimateFeedback carries on:
This means that this article has not been peer-reviewed, so there is no guarantee to its credibility. [my bold]
I’m sure they intended to say there’s no guarantee of its accuracy. But either formulation is nonsense. I recently wrote about research that navigated the peer review process and got published in Nature. A mere 19 days later, the authors conceded it contained multiple errors. It has since been fully and formally retracted.
RetractionWatch.org provides ongoing coverage of faulty and fraudulent research that nevertheless made it through the peer review process. In other words: PEER REVIEW IS NOT A GUARANTEE. Not of credibility. And not of accuracy. Fact checkers who say otherwise are profoundly misleading the public.
Facebook labels the Natural News article false – and then promulgates a gigantic falsehood of its own.
But since we’re on the topic of unpublished research, this is a good time to recall that, when James Hansen delivered his famous global warming testimony back in 1988, he cited unpublished research. The larger scientific community had been given no opportunity to scrutinize his work, to decide if it was brilliant or bollocks. It had been accepted by a journal, but it hadn’t yet appeared.
Similarly, the anti-aerosol movement was kick-started by a 1974 New York Times front page story. It quoted a Harvard scientist who claimed aerosol products were destroying the Earth’s ozone layer. Lots of people apparently didn’t notice the sentence that said no one had yet taken “a hard look at the Harvard calculations,” since the research was still in the process of being submitted to a scientific journal.
Then there’s the world’s most influential climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has long relied on unpublished research when writing its reports (see here, here, here,here, and here).
There is a history, in other words, of taking research findings seriously before they’ve been published in scientific journals. But this only seems to apply when people are preaching doom, gloom, and alarm.
According to Facebook and ClimateFeedback.org, those Finns are just too audacious. No one should pay them the slightest attention. Heavens, their work is still unpublished!
I recently wrote about Susan Crockford, a world-renowned Canadian zoologist. After serving 15 years as an unpaid Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria (UVic), her adjunct status has now been revoked. First she was banned from participating in UVic’s Speakers Bureau. Then she was excommunicated from UVic altogether.
In an era in which others bite their tongues and keep their heads down, Crockford courageously disputes the claim that polar bears are at risk from climate change. She has now paid a heavy price.
It’s time to remind ourselves that UVic is a public institution funded by tax dollars. According to its most recent budget document, it spends more than half a billion a year. 52% of its general operating revenue comes directly from provincial and federal government grants. An additional 37% of its revenue comes from student fees – which themselves rely heavily on government grants.
The UVic budget document says a great deal about government funding, but not once does it use the word taxpayer. This institution appears to have forgotten that it owes its very existence to ordinary Canadians. Money is taken away from ordinary people, in the form of taxes, and handed over to UVic to spend.
Publicly funded entities have a special obligation to be transparent. Under British Columbia law, for example, they must publish the salaries of everyone earning above $75,000 a year (see UVic’s annual Financial Information Act report, posted online here).
Crockford was purged even though she didn’t cost UVic one red cent. Compare that to the $188,510 in salary plus $14,583 in expensesAnn Stahl earned last year. While serving as chair of the Anthropology Department, Stahl stopped Crockford from giving free lectures via UVic’s Speakers Bureau.
Compare Crockford’s pricetag to the $145,532 plus $17,272 in expensesApril Nowell earned last year. Nowell was chair of the Anthropology Department when it excommunicated Crockford altogether.
We can also compare Crockford’s unpaid position to the $85,851 salary of Paul Marck, the UVic spokesperson I dealt with. He advised me that UVic department heads earning the salaries mentioned above aren’t allowed to speak to journalists working on stories for national newspapers. Everything has to go through Media Relations and Public Affairs, he said, inviting me to e-mail him written questions. That was on September 13th.
I submitted questions the same day. Two dozen of them. Do you know how many Marck answered? Zero. Zip.
I began by asking him to confirm that Crockford had been an adjunct professor for 15 years. He refused to say. After a ridiculous delay of 18 days, a man who’s paid $85,000 annually replied to my long list of questions with a single paragraph. Here’s his October 1st response, in its entirety:
Hello Donna;
Yes, you are correct that Dr. Susan Crockford held an appointment as a non-remunerated, adjunct assistant professor with the University of Victoria’s Department of Anthropology. Under the constraints of provincial privacy legislation, the university is unable to provide personal information relating to the status or renewal of adjunct appointments. For clarification, those who hold adjunct positions are neither faculty members nor employees of the university. As to your remaining questions, the university does not disclose identifying or personal information about our faculty members, staff or students including information about internal processes. We respect the privacy rights of all members of our campus community.
Sincerely,
Paul
My first group of questions merely attempted to verify dates and basic information. Double-checking facts with both sides of a story is important, but UVic made that impossible. If my understanding of events was inaccurate, this was UVic’s opportunity to let me know. Instead, it chose to stonewall, refusing to say if the Speakers Bureau had ever given Crockford negative feedback, or if anyone in the Anthropology Department had advised her she was at risk of losing her adjunct status.
My next six questions were emphatically not about identifiable individuals. I asked how many people had been on the committee that revoked Crockford’s adjunct status. How many had voted for her versus against her. How many were zoologists? How many adjuncts had the Anthropology Department severed ties with over the past decade? How many adjuncts had UVic as a whole severed ties with? I also asked about safeguards that would prevent adjuncts from being punished for politically incorrect views.
Answering those questions would have violated the privacy of absolutely no one. It’s hilarious that, when I then asked how many UVic professors had matched Crockford’s achievement by being recently published in a prestigious scientific journal, UVic declined even to answer that. University PR people spend their days boasting about this sort of thing. They normally send journalists press releases begging for celebratory coverage.
My final group of questions concerned Crockford’s banishment from the Speakers Bureau. The first one asked why Stahl had refused to endorse – and had therefore silenced – Crockford. This clearly involved identifiable individuals, but the eight questions that followed did not. Here are four of them, typo and all. I’ve inserted the italics here:
ii. Since 2017, how many other UVic adjunct professors (within and beyond the Anthropology Department) are no longer participating in the Speakers Bureau due to a similar refusal on the part of their department chair?
iii. Since 2017, what percentage of UVic graduate students participating in the Speaker’s Bureau have been similarly required to secure written endorsement from their department chair?
iv. How many of these graduate studetns have been refused? [sic]
ix. What mechanisms exist to vet the content of Speakers Bureau presentations, particularly regarding controversial topics such as climate justice, renewable energy, Israeli-Palestinian relations, restorative justice, and so forth?
That last issue is of particular importance. Either there’s a system to vet presentations or there isn’t. I was seeking basic information, trying hard to understand what’s normal, sincerely trying to sort out what had transpired. UVic felt absolutely no need to explain, to reassure Canadian taxpayers that it had behaved honourably and fairly.
Let me repeat. The University of Victoria was given ample opportunity – 18 bleeping days. Like an untouchable and unaccountable monarch, it chose not to answer a single question.
Some thoughts in response to a query from a reporter.
I received the following questions today from a reporter, related to climate change and ‘timelines.’ These questions are good topics for discussion.
My answers are provided below:
From your perspective, have the early warnings about how hot the Earth is getting turned out to be accurate? Have they been adjusted higher or lower than expected?
Early predictions of warming were 0.2 to 0.3 degrees Centigrade per decade are too high relative actual observations. Further, blaming all of the recent warming on carbon dioxide emissions is incorrect, in my opinion. Solar indirect effects and multi-decadal oscillations of large scale ocean circulations have been effectively ignored in interpreting the causes of the recent warming.
What is the best figure that explains how we will know when things are really irrevocably bad? Is it the 2ºC limit, as some have reported?
‘Bad’ is a value judgment, and regions are affected differently by climate variations and change. Most of the so-called ‘bad effects’ of climate change relate to the natural variability of weather, and there is little to no evidence that extreme weather events have been worsening, against the large variations of natural climate variability.
The single adverse impact that is unambiguously associated with warming (whatever the cause) is sea level rise. Since 1900, global sea level has risen about 8 inches. There is substantial temporal and spatial variations of sea level rise, associated with large scale ocean circulation patterns, glacial rebound, weather and tides. Projections of sea level rise by 2100 beyond several feet require: implausible scenarios of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, climate models that have implausibly high warming sensitivity to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and invocation of scenarios of collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet associated with speculative and poorly understood processes.
The 2C limit relates to expectations for long-term (many many centuries) melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The issue of the 2C limit is better described as ‘planetary diabetes’ rather than extinction or other dire characterizations. Another way of thinking about the so-called 2C limit is by analogous to a high-way speed limit. If the speed limit is 65 mph, exceeding that by 10 or even 20 mph is not guaranteed to cause a crash, but if you exceed the limit by a lot, your risk of a fatal crash certainly increases.
How do the actions (or inactions) of the Trump administration, such as withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, affect that timeline? If Democrats win the government in 2020, would implementing the Green New Deal (if it even passed) be too little, too late?
The political actions of President Trump have essentially made no difference to this timeline. Most of the signatories to the Paris Agreement are falling far behind in their commitments (the U.S. has been doing relatively well in terms of its emissions cuts.) Any future success of the Green New Deal relies on both politics and technology. Overwhelming Democratic control of the U.S. government wouldn’t necessary help with the needed technology developments.
Excerpts from the IPCC Special Report on 1.5C, Summary for Policy makers.
B1. Climate models project robust differences in regional climate characteristics between present-day and global warming of 1.5°C, and between 1.5°C and 2°C. …
B1.1. Evidence from attributed changes in some climate and weather extremes for a global warming of about 0.5°C supports the assessment that an additional 0.5°C of warming compared to present is associated with further detectable changes in these extremes (medium confidence). …
B1.3. Risks from droughts and precipitation deficits are projected to be higher at 2°C compared to 1.5°C global warming in some regions (medium confidence). …
B2. By 2100, global mean sea level rise is projected to be around 0.1 metre lower {4″} with global warming of 1.5°C compared to 2°C (medium confidence). …
B2.1. Model-based projections of global mean sea level rise (relative to 1986-2005) suggest an indicative range of 0.26 to 0.77 m by 2100 for 1.5°C global warming, 0.1 m (0.04-0.16 m) {4″} less than for a global warming of 2°C (medium confidence). …
B3. On land, impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems, including species loss and extinction, are projected to be lower at 1.5°C of global warming compared to 2°C. …
B3.1. Of 105,000 species studied,9 6% of insects, 8% of plants and 4% of vertebrates are projected to lose over half of their climatically determined geographic range for global warming of 1.5°C, compared with 18% of insects, 16% of plants and 8% of vertebrates for global warming of 2°C (medium confidence). …
B3.2. Approximately 4% (interquartile range 2–7%) of the global terrestrial land area is projected to undergo a transformation of ecosystems from one type to another at 1ºC of global warming, compared with 13% (interquartile range 8–20%) at 2°C (medium confidence). …
B4. Limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to 2ºC is projected to reduce increases in ocean temperature as well as associated increases in ocean acidity and decreases in ocean oxygen levels (high confidence). …
B4.1. There is high confidence that the probability of a sea-ice-free Arctic Ocean during summer is substantially lower at global warming of 1.5°C when compared to 2°C. With 1.5°C of global warming, one sea ice-free Arctic summer is projected per century. This likelihood is increased to at least one per decade with 2°C global warming. Effects of a temperature overshoot are reversible for Arctic sea ice cover on decadal time scales (high confidence). …
B4.4. Impacts of climate change in the ocean are increasing risks to fisheries and aquaculture via impacts on the physiology, survivorship, habitat, reproduction, disease incidence, and risk of invasive species (medium confidence) but are projected to be less at 1.5ºC of global warming than at 2ºC.
Larry Kummer’s comments:
“Most of the findings in the SPM of this Special Report are of two kinds. First, stating that the effects of 1.5°C warming are less than those of 2.0°C warming. Pretty obvious, but it means little unless we know the effects of 2°C warming. It seldom quantifies the difference in effects from that extra 0.5°C warming, which is the key information necessary to know when assessing the cost-benefit of limiting the coming warming.
Second, there are more specific findings – bad but not disastrous – given at a “medium” level of confidence. The IPCC uses five levels of confidence: very low, low, medium, high, and very high. “Medium” is a weak basis for extreme measures to restructure society and the global economy. Especially since it is human nature to overestimate confidence more often than to underestimate it.”
“There is nothing in this Special Report justifying belief that the world will end, that the world will burn, or that humanity will go extinct. It has been misrepresented just as past reports have been (e.g., the 4th US National Climate Assessment). The disasters described the Climate Emergency and Extinction Rebellion activists are those of RCP8.5, the worst-case scenario in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment report – or even beyond it. RCP8.5 is, as a worst-case scenario should be, a horrific but not apocalyptic future that is improbable or impossible.”
Bottom line is that these timelines are meaningless. While we have confidence in the sign of the temperature change, we have no idea what its magnitude will turn out to be. Apart from uncertainties in emissions and the Earth’s carbon cycle, we are still facing a factor of 3 or more uncertainty in the sensitivity of the Earth’s climate to CO2, and we have no idea how natural climate variability (solar, volcanoes, ocean oscillations) will play out in the 21st century. And even if we did have significant confidence in the amount of global warming, we still don’t have much of a handle on how this will change extreme weather events. With regards to species and ecosystems, land use and exploitation is a far bigger issue.
Cleaner sources of energy have several different threads of justification, but thinking that sending CO2 emissions to zero by 2050 or whenever is going to improve the weather and the environment by 2100 is a pipe dream. If such reductions come at the expense of economic development, then vulnerability to extreme weather events will increase.
There is a reason that the so-called climate change problem has been referred to as a ‘wicked mess.’
An accomplished scientist and role model for young women has been expelled from the academic community. Like geologist BobCarter before her, Susan Crockford has been stripped of her Adjunct Professor status by a university with which she has a long history. Why? Because she promotes facts and eschews climate activism.
In May, Canada’s University of Victoria (UVic) advised Crockford that an internal committee had voted to end her 15-year stint as an Adjunct Professor. Having undergone hip surgery in the interim, only now is she going public.
When the matter was last considered, the committee voted unanimously in her favour. What changed? Talks she was invited to give to schools apparently “generated concern among parents regarding balance.” That concern was “shared with various levels of the university,” according to an April 2017 e-mail from Ann Stahl, then chair of the Anthropology Department.
These vague accusations, leveled by an unknown number of unknown individuals who may or may not have been garden variety climate activists, were first used to expel Crockford from the UVic Speakers Bureau. They then became the impetus to expel her from the UVic academic community altogether.
I’ve written about this scandalous development in today’s Financial Post, the business section of Canada’s daily newspaper, the National Post.
On the subject of balanced presentations, please see my recent commentary, U of Victoria’s Speakers Bureau. Many of the talks it promotes are one-sided, activist, and controversial. Someone with no science background has, for years, been giving lectures about ocean chemistry. Yet the eminently qualified Crockford was purged.
While UVic has deprived its students of her expertise, this weekend Crockford begins a European speaking tour. Audiences in Oslo, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Munich will have the opportunity to hear her firsthand.
This story was huge news worldwide. Fortune magazine quoted Laure Resplandy, the Princeton University oceanographer who was the research paper’s lead author. “The planet warmed more than we thought,” she said. “It was hidden from us just because we didn’t sample it right.”
In fact, the problem wasn’t hiding in the ocean, but in the paper’s own mathematical calculations. Within days Nic Lewis, a UK private citizen and math whiz, had published the first of four detailed critiques of the paper’s statistical methodology (see here, here, here, and here).
We’re told that research published in prestigious scientific journals is reliable, and that peer review is meaningful. Yet 19 days after those Halloween headlines, the journal announced the authors had acknowledged a number of errors.
Two weeks ago, presumably after months of attempting to rescue the paper, the journal threw in the towel and retracted it wholesale.
What happened in between? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a 1,200-page report about oceans. Chapter 5 of that report cites this now-retracted research (see pages 5-27 and 5-183 here).
In fairness, this single citation may just be a typo. There’s a good chance the IPCC meant to cite a different 2018 paper, in which Resplandy was also the lead author.
But the matter doesn’t end there. The UK-based Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is now pointing out that a crucial conclusion of the IPCC’s report relies heavily on a second paper titled How fast are the oceans warming?
Written by Lijing Cheng and colleagues John Abraham, Zeke Hausfather, and Kevin Trenberth, it was published in January 2019 in Science. The journal calls it a ‘Perspective,’ because rather than being a research paper, it’s more of an argument.
In three places, the Halloween research is cited to support its conclusions. Nowhere do Cheng and his colleagues acknowledge that the statistical methodology of the Halloween research had already been torn to shreds, that the paper’s authors had already conceded it was flawed.
The bottom line? Chapters 4 and 5 of the IPCC’s ocean report rely on the 2019 Cheng ‘Perspective.’ The Cheng ‘Perspective’ relies on research that has now been officially retracted.
The even worse bottom line? Lijing Cheng – an academic who concealed vital information in an article published in Science this year – was intimately involved in the preparation of the IPCC’s ocean report. He was a lead author for Chapter 1. He was a contributing author for Chapters 3 and 5. And he helped draft the Summary for Policymakers.
In 1986, NASA’s James Hansen made some projections about how global warming was going to affect eight cities.
Mintzer distributed a chart showing a 1986 projection made by NASA climatologists of the likely impact of global warming on eight major U.S. cities in the year 2030.
Memphis, according to EPA statistics, would experience 145 days annually with temperatures surpassing 90 degrees, compared to 65 days now, and 42 days above 100 degrees, com-pared to four now.
Covington is the closest Tennessee USHCN station to Memphis. The frequency of 90 and 100 degree days has plummeted.
Denver, which almost never registers temperatures above 100 degrees, would do so on 16 days a year under the projection, and its 90-phis days would rise from 33 to 86.
Boulder is the closest USHCN station to Denver.There has been no trend over the past 65 years, and it almost never gets above 100 degrees.
In Chicago, the number of over-90 days would jump from 16 to 56, while six days would see temperatures above 100 degrees, a rarity today.
Aurora is the closest USHCN station to Chicago, and the frequency of 90 and 100 degrees days has dropped sharply since the 1930s.
Dallas, which already gets 100 days over 90 degrees and 19 over 100, would see the first figure grow to 162 and the second to 78
Weatherford is the closest USHCN station to Dallas, and the number of 90 and 100 degree days has dropped sharply.
Los Angeles would see the number of 90-plus degree days move up from five to 27, while four days would register more than 100 degrees, compared to one day a year currently.
Downtown LA is much hotter than those numbers, so I assume he meant the airport. The closest USHCN station to LAX is Newport Beach, which shows no trend in hot days.
In New York, four days would exceed 100 degrees annually, while in most years no days are that hot now. The number of over-90 days would rise from 15 to 48.
The frequency of hot days at New York City has dropped sharply since Hansen made his forecasts in 1986.
One hundred degree days in New York peaked in the 1950’s, so the Orwellian New York Times has tried to erase them.
Omaha would see 86 days hotter than 90 degrees, compared to 37 today. Days over 100 degrees would jump from three per year today to 21 in 2030.
The closest USHCN station to Omaha is at Ashland, and the number of hot days has plummeted to record lows.
Washington. D C , the number of days above 90 degrees would rise from 36 to 87 per year, while over-100 days would jump from one annually today to 12 in 2030
Purcellville is the closest Virginia USHCN station to Washington D.C., and the number of hot days there has plummeted. I used to live across the river in Maryland, and never needed air conditioning.
Hansen was wrong, because his CO2 climate model was based on superstition rather than science. But undaunted by their past failures, the New York Times continues to push the same nonsense.
In most professions there are consequences for being wrong, but not if you are employed by the climate religion – where facts simply don’t matter. There is no possible way for you to be wrong.
Throughout recorded history dooms day cults attract thousands of gullible people. Charismatic cult leaders of the Order of the Solar Temple or Heaven’s Gate convinced their followers to commit suicide due to a coming “environmental apocalypse”. To prevent environmental collapse, a recent mass shooter justified his killings as reducing over-population, while a Swedish scientist has suggested cannibalism. Thus, it’s worrisome that charismatic congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez similarly warns our world is doomed in 12 years. Equally disturbing is the carefully orchestrated fear-mongering, such that the United Nations gave ill-informed, 16-year old Greta Thunberg center stage to rage that CO2 is causing ecosystem collapse. Terrifying children with ‘the sky is falling’ fears will only bring about dire, unintended consequences.
Who is filling our children’s heads with stories of ecosystem collapse?
For one Al Gore wrote in 2012, “The fate of the Adelie Penguins, A message from Al Gore”: “As temperatures rise along the West Antarctic Peninsula and the winter sea ice blankets the ocean three months fewer per year than 30 years ago, the local ecosystem is in danger. Everything from the base of the food chain – the phytoplankton (microscopic plants and bacteria) and krill (shrimp like creatures), to one of the continent’s most iconic inhabitants, the Adelie penguins, are under threat… There is an important lesson for us in the story of the Adelie penguins.”
Indeed, Adelie penguins provide an “important lesson”. Don’t trust apocalyptic hype!
Adelie penguins may be the best studied bird on earth. In 2009, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimated between 4 and 5 million adults, happily listing them as a species of “Least Concern”. However, using dubious IPCC climate models, scientists led by ornithologist David Ainley predicted the most northerly Adelie colonies would soon disappear as ice-melting warmth crept southward. They predicted between the years 2025 and 2052, 70% of the total Adelie population would be lost. Bullied by that virtual death count, the IUCN downgraded Adelies from “Least Concern” to “Near Threatened”.
Ice Age glaciers had forced Adelies to abandon most of Antarctica’s coast. With warming, glaciers retreated and Adelies rapidly returned to breed and multiply. However, there was one exception. For over 5,400 years Adelies avoided ice free coastlines along Antarctica’s northwestern peninsula. Scientists dubbed this the “northern enigma”. Due to the region’s unfavorable weather, breeding Adelies still avoid much of that region, currently labeled the “Adelie Gap”. As might be expected, breeding colonies adjacent to the “Adelie Gap” are the least stable with some colonies experiencing population declines, and those declining colonies were enough to confirm some scientists’ climate fears.
In the 1990s, the northwestern sector of the Antarctic peninsula coincidentally experienced rising temperatures and declining sea ice. Although Antarctica sea ice was not decreasing elsewhere, researchers believed the melting ice and warmer temperatures were just what CO2-driven climate models predicted. But then the peninsula’s winds shifted. The peninsula’s sea ice has now been growing and temperatures have been cooling for over a decade. Furthermore in contrast to Ainley’s models, colonies at the most northerly limits of the Adelies’ range are not disappearing. Those colonies are thriving and increasing such as the Sandwich Island colonies, and northerly colonies on the Antarctic peninsula’s east side.
Media headlines are guided by the maxim ‘if it bleeds it leads.’ Likewise, scientific journals. Good news about thriving colonies, or no change, fail to capture headlines. But the addiction to eye-catching catastrophes misleads the public and scientists alike. Despite no warming trend at an Emperor penguin colony, David Ainley was so inebriated by global warming fears, he fabricated a warming temperature graph to falsely explain the colony’s decline! Similarly, extreme researchers of polar bear populations wrongly argued, “we’re projecting that, by the middle of this century, two-thirds of the polar bears will be gone from their current populations”. Again, in reality polar bear abundance has increased.
By perpetuating bogus claims of a world ending in 12 years, the Chicken Littles are doing far more harm than blinding children to scientific evidence that many species, from polar bears to Adelie penguins, are thriving. Our children miss the “important lesson” that a “climate crisis” is only a theory supported by scary narratives, not facts. So how do we protect our children from Chicken Littles who seek to enroll vulnerable minds into their doomsday cults? How do we motivate our children to be good critical thinkers, and not blind group thinkers mesmerized by fear and ‘end of the earth’ scenarios?
Yesterday, in London, I witnessed an eerie, chilling sight: I saw a death cult holding a ceremony in public.
The men and women gathered outside King’s Cross station and formed a circle. They swayed and chanted. They preached about End Times. ‘What will you do when the world gets hot, what, what?’, they intoned, conjuring up images of the hellfire they believe will shortly consume mankind. They sang hymns to their god – science. ‘We’ve got all the science / All that we need / To change the world / Hallelujah’, they sang, rocking side to side as they did so.
They demanded repentance. ‘Buy less, fly less, fry less’, said one placard. Catholics only demand the non-consumption of meat on Fridays, as an act of penance to mark the day of Christ’s death. This new religion demands an end to meat-consumption entirely, as penance for mankind’s sins of growth and progress.
And like all death cultists, they handed out leaflets that contained within them ‘THE TRUTH’. The leaflets foretell floods and fire: ‘We are in trouble. Sea levels are rising… Africa and the Amazon are on fire.’ The only word that was missing was locusts. They can’t be far behind these other ghastly visitations to sinful mankind.
And if you question their TRUTH? Then, like those heretics who were hauled before The Inquisition 500 years ago, you will be denounced as a denier. A denier of their revelations, a denier of their visions. ‘Denial is not a policy’, their placards decreed. Spotting me filming their spooky, apocalyptic ceremony, one of the attendees waved that placard in my face. A warning from the cult to a corrupted outsider.
This was, of course, Extinction Rebellion. Let us no longer beat around the bush about these people. This is an upper-middle-class death cult.
This is a millenarian movement that might speak of science, but which is driven by sheer irrationalism. By fear, moral exhaustion and misanthropy. This is the deflated, self-loathing bourgeoisie coming together to project their own psycho-social hang-ups on to society at large. They must be criticised and ridiculed out of existence.
Yesterday’s gathering, like so many other Extinction Rebellion gatherings, was middle-aged and middle-class. The commuters heading in and out of King’s Cross looked upon them with bemusement. ‘Oh, it’s those Extinction freaks’, I heard one young man say. It had the feel of Hampstead and the Home Counties descending on a busy London spot to proselytise the cult of eco-alarmism to the brainwashed, commuting plebs.
It was a gathering to mark Extinction Rebellion’s week of disruption. The group is asking people in London and other cities around the world to ‘take two weeks off work’ and join the revolt against the ‘climate and ecological crisis’. You can tell who they’re trying to appeal to. Working-class people and the poor of New Delhi, Mumbai and Cape Town – some of the cities in which Extinction Rebellion will be causing disruption – of course cannot afford to take two weeks off work. But then, these protests aren’t for those people. In fact, they’re against those people.
Extinction Rebellion is a reactionary, regressive and elitist movement whose aim is to impose the most disturbing form of austerity imaginable on people across the world. One of the great ironies of ‘progressive’ politics today is that people of a leftist persuasion will say it is borderline fascism if the Tory government closes down a library in Wolverhampton, but then they will cheer this eco-death cult when it demands a virtual halt to economic growth with not a single thought for the devastating, immiserating and outright lethal impact such a course of action would have on the working and struggling peoples of the world.
Extinction Rebellion says mankind is doomed if we do not cut carbon emissions to Net Zero by 2025. That’s six years’ time. Think about it: they want us to halt a vast array of human activity that produces carbon. All that Australian digging for coal; all those Chinese factories employing millions of people and producing billions of things used by people around the world; all those jobs in the UK in the fossil-fuel industries; all those coal-fired power stations; all that flying; all that driving… cut it all back, rein it in, stop it. And the people who rely on these things for their work and their food and their warmth? Screw them. They’re only humans. Horrible, destructive, stupid humans. … continue
No one like to be on the losing side of a political battle. Until recently the emotional reaction of a loser was expressed through frustration or anger. Now we’re told that the experience of political defeat can make you ill!
According to sections of the medical profession, people do not simply get angry at political outcomes they don’t like. They claim that events like the Brexit referendum can make you anxious and ill.
Last week the British Medical Journal reported that anxiety about Brexit may have triggered a patient’s psychotic episode. The author of the report, “Acute transient psychotic disorder precipitated by Brexit vote,” claims that “political events can be a source of significant psychological stress.” According to this report, the mental health of a 40-year old man deteriorated rapidly following the announcement of the result of Brexit.
A closer inspection of this report raises questions about the legitimacy of the claim of a Brexit induced psychosis. Apparently, the man has previous history of a similar episode, related to stress at work. So it is likely that the main connection between the man’s psychotic disorder and the Brexit vote is that they occurred at the same time.
What’s important about the BMJ report is that it legitimizes the pre-existing campaign to blame Brexit for people’s mental health problems. It has been evident for some time that sections of the hard-core Remain community have decided to play the illness card.
During the past two years I have encountered numerous acquaintances who reported that their mental health has been severely compromised by the outcome of the Referendum. This sentiment is continually communicated through the media. “Brexit has triggered my anxiety and depressions – and I am not the only one” – declared a journalist in the pro-Remain Metro.
And the numbers of Brexit sufferers never ceases to grow. In case you did not known it: one in three of us is now suffering from Brexit anxiety, according to a recent study by the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Predictably, numerous so-called experts and therapists have jumped on the ‘Brexit makes-me-sick’ bandwagon. It is difficult not to feel ill after reading Elle’s “9 Ways to Beat Brexit Anxiety: According To two Psychologists.” With headlines like, “Brexit Anxiety: How To Look After Your Mental Health During Political Chaos,” it is not surprising that some of their readers will reinterpret their political disappointment as a mental health condition.
Advice directed at mentally disturbed millennials is far from neutral. It communicates the idea that if you have not been made ill by Brexit then there is something really wrong with you. So what we have here is a case of political messaging masquerading as helpful advice. Elle’s “9 Ways to Beat Brexit Anxiety” assumes that if you are a millennial then you are likely to have been messed up by Brexit. Either wittingly or unwittingly, publications raising concern about Brexit induced mental illness are actually inciting people to become ill.
Confusing political problems with medical ones has a corrosive impact on public life. It assumes that people lack the intellectual and psychological resources to deal with setbacks and defeats.
A mature democracy should help its citizens to deal with the difficult challenges that they will encounter in the course of their political life. Unfortunately, sections of British society have opted to medicalize it instead, turning citizens into potential patients.
Professor Frank Furedi is a sociologist and author. His ‘How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear In the 21st Century’ is published by Bloomsbury.
The ruthless businessman who financed coups in Central America and shaped Israeli statehood
José Niño Unfiltered | May 7, 2026
Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
Few figures in American business history wielded power as ruthlessly or as secretly as Zemurray. Born Schmiel Zmurri on January 18, 1877, to a poor Jewish family in Imperial Russia, this teenage immigrant would rise from peddling rotting bananas off railroad cars in Alabama to become the controlling force behind the United Fruit Company, the most powerful agricultural corporation on earth. Along the way he overthrew governments, bribed presidents, hired mercenaries, and played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in the creation of the State of Israel. … continue
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Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
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