Posts

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

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

Despite fears stoked by careless media, global area burned each year is trending downward, not up

By Bjorn Lom­borg, Wall Street Journal, August 01, 2023

One of the most common tropes in our increasingly alarmist climate debate is that global warming has set the world on fire. But it hasn’t. For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.

In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area.… Read more

The fixes for heat aren’t complex, or at least they don’t need to be as complex as having various government agencies quixotically redesign the U.S. economy. Amazon will drop a fan at your front door in a day or two at most.

By Mark Naida, Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2023

The summer weather in Texas is remarkably consistent, and on weather apps it is usually presented as a frightening shade of red. The current outlook is a high of 101 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit for the foreseeable future. I don’t prefer it to be this hot, but like tens of millions of Americans who choose to live in a place with an unreasonable climate, I make do.… Read more