Category: Climate realism

Europe’s voters want climate policies—until they discover how much they cost. No one wants to be the party that’s promising to take voters’ jobs and raise their energy bills

By Joseph C. Sternberg, Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2024

You know you’ve stumbled through the looking glass when European politicians start sounding saner on climate policy than the Americans do. Well here we are, Alice: Europeans are admitting the folly of net zero quicker than their American peers.

The latest example—perhaps “victim” is more apt—is Humza Yousaf, who resigned this week as Scotland’s first minister. That region within the U.K. enjoys substantial devolved powers over its own affairs, including on climate policy.… Read more

It would take Canada’s emissions 4,055 years to warm the globe by 1°C. The Conservative Party should use these figures to educate the public on folly of climate taxes

By Pav Penna, May 25, 2024

Which factually equivalent statement better communicates Canada’s impact on the climate?
 
a) “Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2022 were 548 Million tonnes.” 
 
or
 
b) “In 2022, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions warmed the globe by 0.000247°C, which is equivalent to 1°C in 4,055 years.”
 
Statement a) is a meaningless theoretical construct to the average citizen, whereas statement b) can be readily understood by all and gives voters desperately needed context on climate change. … Read more

IPCC has abandoned claims of more floods, droughts, storms, heat waves, etc., due to fossil-fuel emissions—but alarmists still beat the ‘extreme weather’ drum

By Tom Harris, America Outloud News, April 4, 2024

Climate campaigners and their political and media allies often tell us that their frightening forecasts are backed up by the best available science. In particular, they point to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that they tell us are the gold standard of climate science research. If the IPCC said it, it must be true, they proclaim!

The late Dr. Jay Lehr and I have often written about the serious flaws in the IPCC reports.… Read more

Federal and provincial governments have failed to provide cost-benefit analysis for costly climate policies that will have almost no effect on climate

By ROBERT LY­MAN, National Post, May 15, 2024

Among the many questions about the federal government’s policies to virtually eliminate Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050, one of the hardest to answer concerns the costs to governments, businesses and consumers. This is due partly to a serious failure of governance.

The federal and provincial governments have failed to provide Canadians with an inventory of the measures they have implemented, their costs, their intended beneficiaries and their effectiveness. Governments regularly pay homage to “transparency and accountability” but have largely ignored them in their climate policies.… Read more

Finding disproves climate alarmists’ claims that current temperatures are higher than periods going back thousands if not millions of years

By Chris Morrison, Daily Skeptic, May 14, 2024

Astonishing finds by a group of Scandinavian scientists have placed a number of animal species living north of the Arctic Circle 9,000 years ago, including African wildcats, dogs and frogs. The area in northern Norway is much further north than where these wild animals would survive today and indicates, yet again, that temperatures in what is known as the Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM) were much warmer than today. … Read more

Basic math shows that Net Zero is an impossible goal

By Roger Arthur, “Climate crisis? There is no climate crisis,” Facebook, April 28, 2024

There are over 1.5 billion cars globally and since 40 kilograms of lithium are required per battery, 60 million tonnes is required, i.e., 6 million tonnes each year on average over 10 years to reach the UN’s goal of producing only electric cars by 2035.

But the current rate of mining globally is less than 150,000 tonnes a year, at which rate it would take over 400 years to obtain the lithium needed to make batteries for 1.5 billion EVs.… Read more

Governments in Europe are scaling back climate-change policies. Canada should do the same before it’s too late

By Conrad Black, National Post, April 27, 2024

I have written here and elsewhere countless times before of the dangers of responding prematurely to alarmist concerns about climate change. Dr. Benny Peiser of the British Global Warming Policy Foundation spoke to the Friends of Science Society in Calgary earlier this month, warning that Europe’s extremist net zero carbon emission policies may get to Canada even though they are now running into extreme problems in Europe. The North American media has not much reported on the widespread and often violent farmer protests in Europe, which has caused every government that has been put to the test to scale back their aggressive climate-change policies.… Read more

The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more quickly nature removes the excess

by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D., Global Warming, April 18, 2024

The goal of reaching “Net Zero” global anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide sounds overwhelmingly difficult. While humanity continues producing CO2 at increasing rates (with a temporary pause during COVID), how can we ever reach the point where these emissions start to fall, let alone reach zero by 2050 or 2060?

What isn’t being discussed (as far as I can tell) is the fact that atmospheric CO2 levels (which we will assume for the sake of discussion causes global warming) will start to fall even while humanity is producing lots of CO2.… Read more

Man-made climate change exists, but how societies respond is still a matter of choice. When politicians tell us we must ‘follow the science’ toward extreme climate policies, they are really trying to shut down the discussion of enormous, unsustainable costs.

By Bjorn Lomborg, Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2024

More than one million people die in traffic accidents globally each year. Overnight, governments could solve this entirely man-made problem by reducing speed limits everywhere to 3 miles an hour, but we’d laugh any politician who suggested it out of office. It would be absurd to focus solely on lives saved if the cost would be economic and societal destruction.… Read more

Trend on drought, flooding, hurricanes and frost fires is down, not up—governments need to check the actual evidence before taking ‘climate action’

By Kenneth Green, Fraser Institute, April 14, 2024

Contrary to claims by many climate activists and politicians, extreme weather events—including forest fires, droughts, floods and hurricanes—are not increasing in frequency or intensity, finds a new study by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.

“Earth Day has become a time when extraordinary claims are made about extreme weather events, but before policymakers act on those extreme claims—often with harmful regulations—it’s important to study the actual evidence,” said Kenneth Green, a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute and author of Extreme Weather and Climate Change.… Read more