Category: Climate facts

Solar and windmill plants are typically far from consumers, meaning we will need an additional 50 million miles of transmission lines, at a cost of trillions of dollars.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 20, 2023

The International Energy Agency said this week that 49.7 million miles of transmission lines—enough to wrap around the planet 2,000 times—will have to be built or replaced by 2040 to achieve the climate lobby’s net-zero emissions goal. This amounts to a plan for everyone to buy more metals from coal-fired plants in China.

Grid investment, the IEA report argues, is needed to carry additional renewable energy “as the world deploys more electric vehicles, installs more electric heating and cooling systems, and scales up hydrogen production using electrolysis.”… Read more

COP28 head says there is no realistic possibility of phasing out fossil fuels by 2050, unless we want to go back to living in caves

By Joe Oliver, National Post, Dec. 12, 2023

COP28, the 28th “Conference of the Parties,” the annual summit of climate-change catastrophists, spent much of its time debating the schedule for a fossil fuel phaseout. Its mission is to limit global warming to 1.5 C by 2050 compared to the start of the industrial age — which coincided with the end of the Little Ice Age, so temperature increases since then have been both natural and man-made.… Read more

Ending fossil fuel use will not keep temperatures below 1.5°C but could ruin our societies—it’s time politicians told the public the truth

By Tom Harris, National Post, Dec. 8, 2023

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre should take a page out of Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber’s playbook. Al Jaber is the president of COP28, currently underway in Dubai. Last month he laid bare important realities few conservative politicians dare bring up: though ending fossil-fuel use may well not prevent average global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, any quick phaseout of coal, oil and natural gas certainly would ruin our societies.… Read more

Pursuing Net Zero is all cost for almost no benefit

By Bjorn Lom­borg, National Post, Dec. 1, 2023

The spectacle of another annual climate conference has just got underway in the United Arab Emirates. Like Kabuki theatre, performative set pieces lead from one to the other: politicians and celebrities arrive by private jets; speakers predict imminent doom; hectoring NGOS cast blame; political negotiations become fraught and inevitably go overtime; and finally: the signing of a new agreement that participants hope and pretend will make a difference.

This circus has repeated since the 1990s. Despite 27 previous conferences with iterations of ominous speeches and bold promises, global emissions have inexorably increased, punctuated just once, by the economic shutdown of COVID-19.… Read more

Recent paper showing that temperature change comes before CO2 change disproves alarmist hypothesis

By Francis Menton, The Manhattan Contrarian, Oct. 24, 2023

It’s by far the most important scientific question of our age: Do human emissions of CO2 and other such “greenhouse gases” cause significant global warming, aka “climate change”?

Based on the belief that an affirmative answer to that question is a universally accepted truth, our government has embarked on a multi-trillion-dollar campaign to transform our economy by, among other things, eliminating hydrocarbon fuels from electricity generation (without any demonstrated workable plan for the replacement), outlawing the kinds of vehicles we currently drive, suppressing fossil-fuel extraction, banning pipeline construction, making all our appliances work less well, and much more.… Read more

Province is forging ahead with policies that its own modelling shows will make B.C.’s economy $28 billion smaller in 2030 and set prosperity back more than a decade.

By Ken Peacock and Denise Mullen, Business Council of British Columbia, August 9, 2023

According to the NDP government’s own modelling, implementing the CleanBC policy agenda to meet the province’s greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets will push B.C.’s economic growth down to the slowest pace on record, which in turn will substantially dampen economic prosperity and well-being by the end of the decade.

Yes, you read that correctly. While difficult to believe, the provincial government is forging ahead with a set of policies that its own modelling shows will make B.C.’s… Read more

When clouds are added to climate models, it’s clear that there is no ‘climate emergency,’ Dr. John Clauser argues

By Jan Jekielek, Mimi Nguyen Ly, Epoch Times, Sept. 13, 2023

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Nobel Prize laureate John Clauser has recently been in the spotlight for challenging prevailing climate models, which he said have ignored a key variable.

Dr. Clauser, who was a recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to quantum mechanics, holds degrees from Caltech and Columbia University. He has served in roles at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of California–Berkeley. In 2010, he was honored with a portion of the Wolf Prize in Physics.… Read more

The evidence is clear that natural forces and their feedbacks, not human-caused carbon dioxide, are the primary cause of today’s ‘climate change’

By Ken Wilson, P.Eng. (ret.), Sept. 14, 2023

Introduction

The IPCC has dominated the funding and development of the anthropogenic global warming narrative since its inception in 1988.  The IPCC’s work has been strongly supported by the UN Secretary-General, most Western governments and by most environmental advocacy organizations. 

So far, the IPCC has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in modeling studies and research on green energy measures.  With the investments that governments have already made in wind turbines and solar panels, the total expenditure to date is in the low trillions of dollars. … Read more

Lancet study shows 480,000 die each year from extreme heat, but nine times more—4.5 million—die from extreme cold

By Bjorn Lom­borg, National Post, August 26, 2023

As surely as temperatures rise during the summer, climate alarmism serves up more stories of life-threatening heat domes, apocalyptic fires and biblical floods, all blamed squarely on global warming. Yet the data to prove this link is often cherry-picked, and the proposed policy responses are enormously ineffective.

Heat waves are clearly made worse by global warming. But the non-stop media coverage of high temperatures in the summertime fails to tell the bigger story: temperature-driven deaths are overwhelmingly caused by cold.… Read more