Category: Climate realism

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

By Paul MacRae

A June 13 Times Colonist article from Associated Press, “Phoenix hits record as scorching heat grips American southwest,” informs readers that “excessive heat causes more deaths in the U.S. than other weather-related disasters, including hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined.”

As usual with so many “global warming” disaster stories, the article has its facts wrong, in this case the claim that heat kills more people than cold. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website has the following on deaths due to hot weather in the U.S.:

“Between 1979 and 2018, the death rate as a direct result of exposure to heat (underlying cause of death) generally hovered between 0.5 and 2 deaths per million people….

Below is a screenshot of the latest roundup of articles found in Britain’s Net Zero Watch daily email. As you will see, in Great Britain, Europe, and even Australia, the cost of “green” energy has been devastating, while offering little or no actual benefit in terms of “fighting” climate change. Energy bills for a pub of almost £30,000 ($47,224 CDN) every three months? And aren’t we in Canada experiencing the same pain with record gasoline prices that, to add insult to injury, include a carbon tax? And it’s only going to get worse….

The climate alarmist/Green idea that the conversion to “sustainable” energy will be mostly painless is complete nonsense.… Read more

By Dr. Henry Geraedts, Adjunct Prof. Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan, July 22, 2021

In November 2020, the federal government signaled its intention to move Canada’s economy to net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050, tabling the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act in the House of Commons. This is a daunting challenge, as Canada is not on track to meet even its softer, non-binding Paris Climate Accord target of a 30 per cent reduction in GHG emissions from 2005 levels by 2030.

Assuming that setting a goal will therefore make it inevitable involves considerable wishful thinking. In practice, achieving Net Zero 2050 requires changing both the structure and modus operandi of our societies, forcing systemic electrification and eliminating hydrocarbons.… Read more

By Francis Menton, May 3, 2022

Today I trekked out to Brooklyn to testify at a public hearing on New York’s plans to achieve “net zero” electricity by 2030 or so, and a “net zero” economy by 2050. The organization holding the hearing was the New York Climate Action Council. This body was created under New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019 (Climate Act), and is tasked with figuring out how to achieve the statutorily mandated net zero targets.

The first statutory target is 40% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, which as a practical matter means that fossil fuels must be almost completely eliminated from the electricity sector by that date.… Read more

By Paul MacRae, March 15, 2022

Weatherstats.ca is a website that offers data on weather conditions in Canadian cities now and over time since 1913. The site draws its data from Environment and Climate Change Canada and so should be fairly reliable.

Astonishingly, as economist Ross McKitrick pointed out in a 2019 Vancouver Sun article ¹, the site shows that for more than a century the average temperatures for most Canadian cities have been pretty much flat. Yes, flat.

If you are looking for the IPCC’s “hockey stick,” which is flat for centuries with massive temperature zooms in recent times (Figure 1), you won’t find it in the Canadian city data, or in the data for most of the world’s cities.… Read more

By Jeffrey E. Foss

Note: This is a slight update of a lecture by our Climate Realists colleague Dr. Jeffrey Foss, philosophy professor emeritus at the University of Victoria, given in December 1999. The talk caused a controversy—as Foss notes, he was attacked by environmentalists for embracing science rather than nature, and by scientists for not embracing environmentalism.¹ In fact, as you will see below, Jeff proposed an environmentalism that embraced humanity as a creation of and friend of nature, rather than, as so many environmentalists believe, nature’s enemy. Jeff died in March, 2022. He will be missed by all of us.… Read more