Category: Climate realism

A climate realist and long-time campaigner for climate sanity, Lord Lawson died on April 3. This is his last column.

By Nigel Lawson, The Spectator, Nov. 6, 2021

The British government’s COP26 targets are ambitious (and eye-wateringly expensive). Amid the debate, one important question seems to be missing. Are we really facing an existential threat? Or might the climate change “crisis” in fact be quasi-religious hysteria, based on ignorance?

It is true that, since the industrial revolution, when we began to use fossil fuels — first coal, then oil and gas — as our source of energy, this has led to a steady, albeit gradual, increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.… Read more

We are not going to drown, starve or die of thirst because of climate change. Rather, the most immediate danger lies in exaggerating the threats and rendering an entire generation incapacitated by fear.

By Ross Clark, The Times, March 31, 2023

Who are the greatest victims of climate change? People flooded out of their homes? Subsistence farmers affected by drought? I would suggest an alternative group: the 56 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds who, according to a 2021 poll, think humanity is doomed by a changing climate.

You can see it in tearful schoolchildren boycotting lessons, in Just Stop Oil activists earnestly telling us that billions of people are going to starve, in those who say they will never have children because, in the words of one 27-year-old woman quoted in The Guardian, “I feel I can’t in all conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try and survive what may be apocalyptic conditions.”… Read more

The IPCC reports have become “bumper sticker” climate science – making a political statement while using the overall reputation of science to give authority to a politically manufactured consensus

By Judith Curry, The Australian, March 28, 2023

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a new Synthesis Report, with fanfare from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. “The climate time bomb is ticking,” he told us over Twitter earlier this month, “but the latest IPCC report shows that we have the knowledge and resources to tackle the climate crisis. We need to act now to ensure a livable planet in the future.”… Read more

The UN supports Malthusian disinformation about climate and energy and censoring accurate information that debunks it because it fears overpopulation

By Michael Shellenberger, March 20, 2023

The United States government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), within the Department of Homeland Security, is raising the alarm about the threat of “foreign influence” that is “leveraging misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.”

CISA defines “malinformation” as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In 2021, CISA, along with the White House and private sector partners, successfully persuaded Facebook and Twitter to censor accurate information about the origins of the SARS-2 coronavirus and Covid vaccines.… Read more

No global problem is more exaggerated than climate change. At its current rates, climate change is less dangerous than efforts to mitigate it

By Michael Shellenberger, Unherd.com, Nov. 3, 2021

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No global problem has ever been more exaggerated than climate change. As it has gone from being an obscure scientific question to a theme in popular culture, we’ve lost all sense of perspective.

Here are the facts: in Europe, emissions in 2020 were 26% below 1990 levels. In the United States, emissions in 2020 were 22% below 2005 levels. Emissions are likely to start declining, too, in developing nations, including China and India, within the next decade.… Read more

The true conflict today is not between humankind and Mother Earth. It’s between the needs of ordinary people and the fantasies of a global elite that dolls up its loss of faith in industry and progress as ‘climate-change activism’

By Bren­dan O’Neill, National Post, March 23, 2023

Bren­dan O’Neill is chief po­lit­i­cal writer of Spiked and host of the Spiked pod­cast, The Bren­dan O’Neill Show.

Here we go again. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a new document — the final part of its mammoth sixth report — and we all know what that means. More doomsday porn in the papers.… Read more

‘Staggering rise in climate-related disasters’ due mainly to more people living in disaster-prone place. Even so, deaths from climate-related events are way down!

By Ronald Bailey, Reason.com, Oct. 14, 2020

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“We are turning our only home into an uninhabitable hell for millions of people,” assert the authors of “Human Cost of Disasters 2000-2019,” a new report issued on behalf of the United Nations (U.N.) Office of Disaster Risk Reduction. “This report focuses primarily on the staggering rise in climate-related disasters over the last twenty years,” the authors add. The report is based on data collected in the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) curated by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters located at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.… Read more

This article, appearing on Judith Curry’s Climate, Etc. website, assesses the probable costs and feasibility of the Net Zero by 2050 approach in the United States. Its conclusion? Net Zero is a pipe dream.

By Michael J. Kelly, Climate, Etc., March 4, 2023

In this article, I imagine that I have been appointed the first CEO of a new agency set up by the United States Federal Government with the explicit goal of actually delivering a Net Zero CO2 Emissions Economy by 2050.

My first task is to scope the project and to estimate the assets required to succeed. This is the result of that exercise, and includes a discussion of some consequences that flow from the scale and timescale for meeting the target.… Read more