Category: Climate realism

By James Pethokoukis and Steven E. Koonin, AEIdeas, December 20, 2021

Is the world going to end in 10 years or 20 years? Absolutely not.

“The science is settled on climate change,” eco-pessimists tell us. But can science ever really be settled? In this episode, I’m joined by Steven E. Koonin to discuss the consensus within the climate science community, popular misconceptions about the climate, and how we should respond to warming global temperatures given the costs climate change will impose down the road and the costs of cutting our carbon emissions today.

Steve is a professor at New York University and a non-resident senior fellow here at the American Enterprise Institute.… Read more

On July 7, 2022, wind, solar and biofuels delivered only 3.3% of the province’s electricity needs

By Parker Gallant, National Post, July 12, 2022

Older readers will remember Frank Sinatra’s 1966 hit Summer Wind, with English lyrics by Johnny Mercer from the German original (Der Sommerwind). The song was about changeability and time passing. In the end, Sinatra/mercer concluded, the summer wind was a “fickle friend.”

It’s a tune Ontario power generators may be humming these days as they try to meet electricity demands with — an annual seasonal occurrence — wind falling off in the province.

Wind’s summer sag was evident on July 7, as Ontario’s industrial wind turbines (IWT), which have a total generating capacity of about 15.6 per cent of Ontario’s total supply when all sources of energy are operating flat-out, were at the bottom of the heap in respect to generation.… Read more

By Bryan Walsh, Vox, July 12, 2022

Germany’s decision to restart old coal plants rather than extend the life of its nuclear power facilities reflects a failure of environmental priorities

Peel away the politics and the passion, the doomsaying and the denialism, and climate change largely boils down to this: energy. To avoid the chances of catastrophic climate change while ensuring the world can continue to grow — especially for poor people who live in chronically energy-starved areas — we’ll need to produce ever more energy from sources that emit little or no greenhouse gases.

It’s that simple — and, of course, that complicated.… Read more

By Michael Shellenberger, July 12, 2022

Sri Lanka has fallen as, last week, thousands of protesters stormed the presidential palace and ousted President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

The proximate reason for the chaos is that the nation is bankrupt, suffering its worst financial crisis in decades. Millions are struggling to buy food, medicine and fuel. Between June 2021 to June 2022, food prices rose by 80 percent. Last month, annual inflation hit nearly 55 percent. Since the start of the pandemic, half a million people have fallen into poverty.

The underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders—starting with former President Maithripala Sirisena and continuing with his successor, the deposed Rajapaksa—fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture and “ESG,” which refers to investments made following supposedly higher Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria.… Read more

By Richard Alston

The Australian, June 29, 2022

Most people don’t have time to research issues, let alone complex and confusing ones such as climate change. They therefore become vulnerable to doomsday proclamations

The term existential was popularized in the 20th century by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who believed that because there was no god, existence was absurd, life had no meaning and the individual therefore faced an existential crisis. In psychology, existential crises are inner conflicts characterised by the impression that life lacks meaning.

But in the climate wars a word that once had settled harmlessly in the realm of philosophy has become weaponised, wheeled out by climate catastrophists to herald imminent doom.… Read more

From Net Zero Watch, another list of headlines showing how Europe’s flirtation with “green” energy has led that continent to economic and social disaster. Canada isn’t far behind, but not there yet if we smarten up…..

… Read more

A letter to the Victoria Times Colonist (June 21, 2022) by Steven Murray has the facts on the dreaded “heat dome”

Re: “Last year’s heat deaths? Stop blaming the heat,” editorial, June 17. The editorial argues that we should stop blaming the heat for the hundreds of deaths in last June’s heat dome. While there were some failures in planning and policy, the editorial ignores the exceptional nature of this event.

Many people, including your editorial writer, still don’t seem to grasp just how extraordinary and rare an event this was. Weather historian Christopher Burt described it as “the most anomalous regional extreme heat event to occur anywhere on Earth since temperature records began” roughly 150 years ago with the beginnings of modern meteorology.… Read more

By Dr. Roy Spencer, from his blog Global Warming, April 22, 2021.

Dr. Spencer is a curator of one of the four major climate monitoring sites, the satellite-based University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH). In this post, he discusses computer models that predict ocean warming at twice the warming that has actually occurred. He concludes that, based on the facts, claims of a climate crisis are exaggerated.

The claim by the Biden Administration that climate change has placed us in a moment of “profound crisis” ignores the fact that the energy policy changes being promoted are based upon computer model simulations which have produced average warming rates at least DOUBLE those observed in the last 40+ years.… Read more

Lennart Bengtsson is a Swedish climate scientist who has just published a book (in Swedish) against climate catastrophism and urging governments and others to look at the beneficial effects of global warming as well as the problems. This is part of an interview with Dr. Bengtsson by Die Welt (The World), a German newspaper, on June 15, 2022.

WELT: Mr. Bengtsson, are we living in a climate crisis?

Lennart Bengtsson: I don’t think the current warming should be called a crisis. Global food production, for example, is increasing. And despite a rapidly growing population and continuing warming, far fewer people die as a result of extreme weather than in the past.… Read more

Wall Street Journal editorial, June 14, 2022

Progressives first demanded that social-media platforms silence critics of climate alarmism. Now White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy wants them to censor content on the costs of a force-fed green-energy transition.

 A few years ago, Facebook enlisted third-party “fact checkers” to review news stories about climate. That didn’t satisfy Democratic Senators who howled about a “loophole” for opinion pieces. Facebook then began appending fact-checks to op-eds, including by Wall Street Journal contributors Bjorn Lomborg and Steven Koonin, that criticized apocalyptic climate models and studies. The goal was to restrict readership.

 Now progressives are moving to censorship phase two, which is shutting down debate over climate “solutions.”… Read more