Taking Stock: 5 Reasons to Resist the GreenMageddon, Part 3

Posted on by Ron Clutz

This post is the third of five to alert readers to a compilation of the scientific case against the claims of IPCC supporters and anti-fossil fuel activists. David Stockman provides the evidence and the arguments against the IPCC policy framework in a series of five essays published at International Man under the title The GreenMageddon and What It Means for You. I will state the five themes he develops in his essays, along with some excerpts and images to illustrate the main points. Here is an overview followed by the third theme.

Overview

The geological and paleontological evidence overwhelmingly says that today’s average global temperature of about 15 degrees C and CO2 concentrations of 420 ppm are nothing to fret about. Even if they rise to about 17–18 degrees C and 500–600 ppm by the end of the century, it may well balance or improve the lot of mankind.

After all, bursts of civilization during the last 10,000 years uniformly occurred during the red portions of the graph below. The aforementioned river civilizations—the Minoan, the Greco-Roman era, the Medieval flowering, and the industrial and technological revolutions of the present era. At the same time, the several lapses into the dark ages happened when the climate turned colder (blue).

And that’s only logical. When it’s warmer and wetter, growing seasons are longer, and crop yields are better—regardless of the agricultural technology and practices of the moment. And it’s better for human and community health, too—most of the deadly plagues of history have occurred in colder climates, such as the Black Death of 1344–1350..

Yet, the Climate Crisis Narrative employs two deceptive devices which are contradicted by earth’s climate history:

a. Planetary temperatures have been far higher than today, both long ago (over 600 million years) and recently (last 10,000 years) with no doomsday loop occurring.

b.It is claimed global warming is a one-way street from rising GHGs, when in fact higher CO2 concentrations are a consequence and by-product, not a driver and cause, of the current naturally rising temperatures.

W. J. Davis (2017)

Again, the now “canceled” history of the planet knocks the CO2-driver proposition into a cocked hat. During the Cretaceous Period between 145 and 66 million years ago, a natural experiment provided complete absolution for the vilified CO2 molecule. During that period, global temperatures rose dramatically from 17 degrees C to 25 degrees C—a level far above anything today’s Climate Howlers have ever projected.

Alas, CO2 wasn’t the culprit. According to science, ambient CO2 concentrations actually tumbled during that 80-million-year expanse, dropping from 2,000 ppm to 900 ppm on the eve of the Extinction Event 66 million years ago.

3. Climatists weaponize natural events to gain social control for a global agenda. It’s About Power, Not Truth or Humanity.

You would think that this powerful countervailing fact would give the CO2 witch-hunters pause, but that would be to ignore what the whole climate change brouhaha is actually about. That is, it’s not about science, human health and well-being or the survival of planet Earth; it’s about politics and the ceaseless search of the political class and the apparatchiks and racketeers who inhabit the beltway for still another excuse to aggrandize state power.

Indeed, the climate change narrative is the kind of ritualized policy mantra that is concocted over and over again by the political class and the permanent nomenklatura of the modern state—professors, think-tankers, lobbyists, career apparatchiks, officialdom—in order to gather and exercise state power.

The Obvious Exploitation of Natural Events

Indeed, fabrication of false problems and threats that purportedly can only be solved by heavy-handed state intervention has become the modus operandi of a political class that has usurped near-complete control of modern democracy.

In doing so, however, the ruling elites have gotten so used to such unimpeded success that they have become sloppy, superficial, careless and dishonest. For instance, the minute we get a summer heatwave, these natural weather events are jammed into the global warming mantra with nary a second thought by the lip-syncing journalists of the MSM.

Heatwaves

Yet there is absolutely no scientific basis for all this tom-tom beating. In fact, NOAA publishes a heatwave index based on extended temperature spikes, which last more than 4 days and which would be expected to occur once every 10 years based on the historical data.

As is evident from the chart below, the only true heatwave spikes we have had in the last 125 years were during the dust bowl heat waves of the 1930s. The frequency of mini-heatwave spikes since 1960 is actually no greater than it was from 1895 to 1935.

Hurricanes

Likewise, all it takes is a good Cat 2 hurricane and they are off to the races, gumming loudly about AGW. Of course, this ignores entirely NOAA’s own data as summarized in what is known as the ACE (accumulated cyclone energy) index.

This index was first developed by renowned hurricane expert and Colorado State University professor William Gray. It uses a calculation of a tropical cyclone’s maximum sustained winds every six hours. The latter is then multiplied by itself to get the index value and accumulated for all storms for all regions to get an index value for the year as shown below for the past 170 years (the blue line is the seven-year rolling average).

That is to say, hundreds of billions of dollars of insurance coverage were then and still is being written with ACE as a crucial input. Yet, if you examine the 7-year rolling average (blue line) in the chart, it is evident that ACE was as high or higher in the 1950s and 1960s as it is today and that the same was true of the late 1930s and the 1880–1900 periods. [See also Bill Gray: H20 is Climate Control Knob, not CO2]

If global warming were generating more hurricanes as the MSM constantly maintains, the increase would be uniform across all of these subregions, but it’s clearly not. Since the year 2000, for example,

  • the Eastern Caribbean has had a modest increase in both tropical storms and higher-rated Cats relative to most of the past 170 years;
  • the Western Caribbean has not been unusual at all, and, in fact, has been well below the counts during the 1880–1920 period; and
  • the Bahamas/Turks & Caicos region, since 2000, has actually been well weaker than during 1930–1960 and 1880–1900

The actual truth of the matter is that Atlantic hurricane activity is generated by atmospheric and ocean temperature conditions in the eastern Atlantic and North Africa. Those forces, in turn, are heavily influenced by the presence of an El Niño or La Niña in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño events increase the wind shear over the Atlantic, producing a less-favorable environment for hurricane formation and decreasing tropical storm activity in the Atlantic basin. Conversely, La Niña causes an increase in hurricane activity due to a decrease in wind shear.

These Pacific Ocean events, of course, have never been correlated with the low level of natural global warming now underway.

The number and strength of Atlantic hurricanes may also undergo a 50- to 70-year cycle known as the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation. Again, these cycles are unrelated to global warming trends since 1850.

Wildfires

As it happens, the same story is true with respect to wildfires—the third category of natural disasters that the Climate Howlers have glommed onto. But in this case, it’s bad forestry management, not man-made global warming, which has turned much of California into a dry wood fuel dump.

But don’t take our word for it. This comes from the George Soros-funded Pro Publica, which is not exactly a right-wing tin foil hat outfit. It points out that environmentalists had shackled federal and state forest management agencies so much so that today’s tiny “controlled burns” are but an infinitesimal fraction of what Mother Nature herself accomplished before the helping hand of today’s purportedly enlightened political authorities arrived on the scene.

“Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change.

We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres—an area about the size of Maine—to restabilize in terms of fire.”

Among other proofs that industrialization and fossil fuels aren’t the culprit is the fact that researchers had shown that when California was occupied by indigenous communities, wildfires would burn up some 4.5 million acres a year. That’s nearly six times the 2010–2019 period, when wildfires burned an average of just 775,000 acres annually in California.

Beyond the untoward clash of all of these natural forces of climate and ecology with misguided government forest and shrubland husbandry policies, there is actually an even more dispositive smoking gun, as it were.

To wit, the Climate Howlers have not yet embraced the apparent absurdity that the planet’s purportedly rising temperatures have targeted the Blue State of California for special punishment. Yet when we look at the year-to-date data for forest fires, we find that unlike California and Oregon, the US as a whole is now experiencing the weakest fire years since 2010.

You just can’t go from 2.7 million burned acres in 2010 to 7.2 million acres in 2012, then back to 2.7 million acres in 2014, then to 6.7 million acres in 2017, followed by just 3.7 million acres in 2020—and still argue along with the Climate Howlers that the planet is angry.

National fire data year to date:

On the contrary, the only real trend evident is that on a decadal basis during recent times, average forest fire acreage in California has been slowly rising, owing to the above-described dismal failure of government forest management policies. But even the mildly rising average fire acreage trend since 1950 is a rounding error compared to the annual averages from prehistoric times, which were nearly 6 times greater than during the most recent decade.

Nor is this lack of correlation with global warming just a California and US phenomenon. As shown in the chart below, the global extent of drought, measured by five levels of severity, with brown being the most extreme, has shown no worsening trend at all during the past 40 years.

Global Extent of Five Levels Of Drought, 1982–2012

Public Discourse Contaminated by Imaginary Climate Crisis Notion

This brings us to the gravamen of the case. To wit, there is no climate crisis whatsoever, but the AGW hoax has so thoroughly contaminated the mainstream narrative and the policy apparatus in Washington and capitals all around the world that contemporary society is fixing to commit economic hari-kari.

That’s because, contrary to the phony case that the rise of fossil fuel use after 1850 has caused the planetary climate system to become unglued, there has been a massive acceleration of global economic growth and human well-being. One essential element behind that salutary development has been the massive increase in the use of cheap fossil fuels to power economic life.

The chart below could not be more dispositive. During the pre-industrial era between 1500 and 1870, real global GDP crawled along at just 0.41% per annum. By contrast, during the past 150 years of the fossil fuel age, global GDP growth accelerated to 2.82% per annum–or nearly 7 times faster.

This higher growth, of course, in part resulted from a larger and far healthier global population made possible by rising living standards. Yet, it wasn’t human muscle alone that caused the GDP level to go parabolic, as per the chart below.

It was also due to the fantastic mobilization of intellectual capital and technology. One of the most important vectors of the latter was the ingenuity of the fossil fuel industry in unlocking the massive trove of stored work that Mother Nature extracted, condensed, and salted away from the incoming solar energy over the long warmer and wetter eons of the past 600 million years.

Yes, that dramatic rise in prosperity in generating fossil fuel consumption has given rise to a commensurate increase in CO2 emissions. But contrary to the Climate Change Narrative, CO2 is not a pollutant!

As we have seen, the correlated increase in CO2 concentrations—from about 290 ppm to 415 ppm since 1850—amounts to a rounding error in both the long-trend of history and in terms of atmospheric loadings from natural sources.

As to the former, concentrations of less than 500 ppm are only recent developments of the last ice age, while during prior geologic ages concentrations reached as high as 2400 ppm.

Likewise, the oceans contain an estimated 37,400 billion tons of suspended carbon, land biomass has 2,000-3,000 billion tons and the atmosphere contains 720 billion tons of CO2. The latter alone is more than 20X current fossil emissions (35 billion tons) shown below.

Of course, the opposite side of the equation is that oceans, land and atmosphere absorb CO2 continuously so the incremental loadings from human sources is very small. That also means that even a small shift in the balance between oceans and air would cause a much more severe rise/fall in CO2 concentrations than anything attributable to human activity.

But since the Climate Howlers falsely imply that the “pre-industrial” level of 290 parts per million was extant since, well, the Big Bang and that the modest rise since 1850 is a one-way ticket to boiling the planet alive, they obsess over the “sources versus sinks” balance in the carbon cycle for no valid reason whatsoever.

Previous Posts in Series: Part 1, Part 2

Taking Stock: 5 Reasons to Resist the GreenMageddon, part 2

Posted on by Ron Clutz

This post is the second of five to alert readers to a compilation of the scientific case against the claims of IPCC supporters and anti-fossil fuel activists. David Stockman provides the evidence and the arguments against the IPCC policy framework in a series of five essays published at International Man under the title The GreenMageddon and What It Means for You. I will state the five themes he develops in his essays, along with some excerpts and images to illustrate the main points. Here is an overview followed by the second theme.

Overview

The assembled governments of the world meeting in Glasgow for COP26 are fixing to declare war on the backbone of modern economic life and the abundance and relief from human poverty and suffering with which it has gifted the world. We are referring, of course, to its agenda to essentially drive fossil fuels—which currently make up 80% of BTU consumption—from the global energy supply system over the next several decades.

All of this is being done in the name of preventing global temperatures from rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius above “pre-industrial” levels.

But when it comes to the crucial matter of exactly which pre-industrial baseline level, you can see the skunk sitting on the woodpile a mile away. That’s because, as we showed in Part 1, global temperatures have been higher than the present—often by upward of 10–15 degrees Celsius—for most of the past 600 million years!

2.  During our Holocene epoch, for the past 11.6 thousand years, earth’s climate has changed often with multiple periods, both warmer and and cooler than the present. The modern warming period since 1850 was preceded by the Medieval, the Roman, and the Minoan warming periods–each was cooler than the previous, and all of them warmer than the present. The last 1.5C of warming has been a boon to human agriculture and civilization, and the next 1.5C is likely to also be beneficial.

Moreover, during the more recent era since the great extinction event 66 million years ago, the decline in temperatures has been almost continuous, touching lower than current levels only during the 100,000-year glaciation cycles of the last 2.6 million years of the Pleistocene ice ages. Not unsurprisingly, therefore, the Climate Howlers have chosen to ignore 599,830,000 of those years in favor of the last 170 years (since 1850) alone.

Still, the juxtaposition of the temperature record of the last 66 million years and the sawed-off charts of the climate alarmists tells you all you need to know: to wit, they have simply banished all the “inconvenient” science from the narrative.

 

Global Average Temperature Trend, 1850–2018 per the Global Warming Narrative

Needless to say, there is a reason why they start the graphs in 1850, and it is not just because it was the tail-end of the Little Ice Age (LIA), from which low point the temperature trend might well climb upwards for a time as climatic conditions normalized.

Actually, the intellectual deception is far more egregious. To wit, the Climate Howlers want you to believe the absolutely anti-scientific notion that the global climate was in general equipoise until the coal barons and the John D. Rockefeller’s of the mid-19th century set off a dangerous chain of climate dysfunction as they brought the stored solar energy embedded in coal and petroleum to the surface and released its combustion by-products–especially CO2—into the ambient air.

The Risible Myth Of Climate Equipoise

The global warming narrative is the most risible manifestation yet of this leap into self-righteous disregard for evidence, logic, and plausibility. For when you step back from the shrill, sanctimonious narrative that passes for the global warming catechism, the ridiculousness of its central claim that industrial society is destroying the climatic equipoise of the planet is self-evident.

For crying out loud, there has never been equipoise!

What there’s been is 4.5 billion years of wildly oscillating and often violent geologic evolution and climate disequilibrium owing to manifold natural causes, including:

  • plate tectonics that has sometimes violently impacted climate systems, especially the assembly and breakup of Pangaea between 335 million and 175 million years ago, and the continuous drift of the present-day continents thereafter;
  • asteroid bombardments;
  • the 100,000-year cycles of the Earth’s orbital eccentricity (it gets colder when it’s at maximum elongation);
  • the 41,000-year cycles of the Earth’s tilt on its axis, which oscillates between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees and thereby impacts the level of solar intake;
  • the wobble or precession of the earth’s rotation which impacts climate over the course of its 26,000 year cycles;
  • the recent 150,000 year glaciation and inter-glacial warming cycles;
  • the 1500 year sunspot cycles, where earth temperatures fall during solar minimums like the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715 at the extreme of the LIA when sunspot activity virtually ceased.

The natural climate change now underway is, therefore, the product of powerful planetary forces that long predated the industrial age and which massively exceed the impact of industrial era emissions. As we indicated in Part 1, that the present conflation of these forces has resulted in a warming cycle is nothing new—warming has happened repeatedly even in modern times.  Contrary to the false claims of the Climate Howlers,

Current mildly rising temperatures are in keeping with the historical truth that warmer is better for humanity and most other species, too.

Continued planetary equipoise requires no interventions whatsoever by the state to retard the use of prosperity-fostering fossil fuels or to subsidize and accelerate the adoption of high-cost renewable energy.

So the question recurs. What “pre-industrial” temperature baseline can be picked out of all these eras and all these climate change forces that would be anything but an arbitrary political, not science-based, choice?

After all, the science is agnostic. Mother Earth has weathered every kind of climate disequilibrium at both the colder and warmer ends of the spectrum and, crucially, experienced the eventual release of countervailing forces that took both temperature and CO2 levels back in the other direction.

We think the planet’s climatic resilience is especially evident in the fact that, after five major ice ages, warming forces returned with robust energy until they reversed again, thereby proving there is no doomsday loop that leads in linear fashion to inexorable catastrophe as is embedded in the climate models.

To enlarge, open image in new tab.

As we noted, during the Holocene Optimum, many of the Earth’s great ancient civilizations began and flourished because conditions were especially hospitable for agriculture and the generation of economic surpluses. The Nile River, for instance, had an estimated three times its present volume, indicating a much larger tropical region. In fact, 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was far more fertile than today and supported large herds of animals, as evidenced by the Tassili N’Ajjer frescoes of Algeria.

That is to say, warmer and wetter was far better for mankind than prior bouts of cold.

Indeed, prior to the post-1850 warming, there had been five distinct warming periods (red areas) since the last glaciers with temperatures above current levels. Never, of course, does this chart see the light of day in the mainstream climate change narrative.

Also, during this period, the Vikings established settlements in Iceland and Greenland. Long before the industrial era, Greenland was so warm, wet, and fertile that major colonization occurred after AD 980. At its peak, it included upward of 10,000 settlers, extensive farming, numerous Catholic churches, and a parliament that eventually voted for union with Norway.

Nor was the reversal from the hospitable climate of the Viking era settlements in Greenland merely a regional anomaly has some Climate Howlers have claimed. During the Medieval Warm period, great civilizations flourished in many other areas, which then became uninhabitable.

For instance, a great drought in the American southwest occurred between 1276 and 1299. Grand settlements like those in Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde were abandoned. Tree-ring analysis has identified a period of no rain between 1276 and 1299 in these areas.

Needless to say, these extreme weather perturbations were not caused by industrial activity because there was none, and they occurred during a period when it was getting colder, not warmer!

From 1550 to AD 1850, global temperatures were at their coldest since the beginning of the Holocene 12,000 years ago. Hence the designation of this period as the Little Ice Age (LIA).

Self-evidently, when the LIA finally ended around 1850, global temperatures were at a modern nadir (no wonder the Climate Howlers start their charts in the middle of the 19th century).

Mann’s Attempt to Erase Pre-Industrial Warming

But the significance of this fact goes well beyond cropping the temperature charts at 1850. Actually, in order to erase the above-described oscillations of the modern climate, climate change advocates have actually gone so far as to literally attempt to airbrush them out of existence.

We are referring to what we call the climate “Piltdown Mann,” named for one Michael Mann, a newly minted Ph.D. (1998) who became the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) lead investigator and advocate for what famously became the “hockey stick” proof of global warming.

The latter, of course, was the blatant fraud embedded in the image that Al Gore made famous in his propagandistic movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. Suffice to say, the purpose of the hockey stick was to wipe out all the evidence summarized above.

That is, in lieu of the planet’s long-term and recent severe climate oscillations, the IPCC posited an entirely opposite thesis. Namely, for the pre-industrial millennium before 1900, global temperatures were nearly as flat as a board.

The only problem is that Mann’s graph was as phony as the Piltdown Man itself—the latter famously being confected in England in 1912 and conveniently “discovered” by an amateur anthropologist who claimed it was the missing link in human evolution. At length, it was shown that the fossil was a forgery; it consisted of a modern human cranium and an orangutan jaw with filed-down teeth.

In the case of the graph, Professor Mann and his accomplices at the IPCC doctored the evidence, used misleading data from southwestern US tree rings in lieu of abundant alternative data showing the contrary, and jiggered their computer models to generate pre-specified results.

That is, the models were produced by goal-seeking on the part of Mann and his associates to prove the man-made warming thesis. In essence, this was accomplished by simply pasting modern temperature records showing steady increases on top of a pre-industrial baseline that never happened.

The phony pre-industrial baseline is depicted by the yellow area in the graph for the period 1400–1900. The hockey stick-like eruption of the yellow space after 1900, of course, allegedly depicts the man-made temperature rise since the onset of the hydrocarbon age.

By contrast, the corrected version is in blue. In this version—which comports with the history of climate oscillations cited above—there is no hockey stick because the shaft never happened; it was invented by computer model manipulations, not extracted from the abundant scientific data on which the Mann study was allegedly based.

So the question is answered. The mid-19th century is exactly the wrong baseline from which to measure global temperature change during modern times.

The blue area of the chart, in fact, is the smoking gun that obliterates the whole predicate on which COP26 is being foisted upon the everyday people of the world.

Part 1 is here

Background:  See Rise and Fall of the Modern Warming Spike

The first graph appeared in the IPCC 1990 First Assessment Report (FAR) credited to H.H.Lamb, first director of CRU-UEA. The second graph was featured in 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) the famous hockey stick credited to M. Mann.

Taking Stock: Five Reasons to Resist the GreenMageddon, Part 1

Posted on by Ron Clutz

This post is the first of five to alert readers to a compilation of the scientific case against the claims of IPCC supporters and anti-fossil fuel activists. David Stockman provides the evidence and the arguments against the IPCC policy framework in a series of five essays published at International Man under the title The GreenMageddon and What It Means for You. I will state the five themes he develops in his essays, along with some excerpts and images to illustrate the main points. Here is an overview followed by the first theme.

Overview

With COP26 now underway, it’s not too soon to start clanging the alarm bells—not about climate catastrophe, of course, but about the stupidest act of the assembled nations since Versailles, when the vindictive WWI victors laid the groundwork for the catastrophes of depression, WWII, the Holocaust, Soviet tyranny, the Cold War and Washington’s destructive global hegemony, all of which followed hard upon the next.

Politicians and their allies in the mainstream media, think tanks, lobbies and Big Business (with its cowardly sleep-walking leaders) are fixing to do nothing less than destroy the prosperity of the world and send global life careening into a modern economic Dark Ages.

And worse still, it’s being done in the service of a bogus climate crisis narrative that is thoroughly anti-science and wholly inconsistent with the actual climate and CO2 history of the planet.

1. During the past 600 million years, the earth has rarely been as cool as at present, and almost never has it had as low CO2 concentrations as the 420 ppm level that today’s climate howlers decry.

In fact, according to the careful reconstructions of actual earth scientists who have studied ocean sediments, ice cores and the like, there have been only two periods encompassing about 75 million years (13% of that immensely long 600 million year stretch of time) where temperatures and CO2 concentrations were as low as it present. These were the Late Carboniferous/Early Permian time from 315 to 270 million years ago and the Quaternary Period, which hosted modern man 2.6 million years ago.  You might say, therefore, that the possibility of a warmer, CO2-richer environment is a case of planetary “been there, done that”.

And it is most certainly not a reason to wantonly dismantle and destroy the intricate, low-cost energy system that is the root source of today’s unprecedented prosperity and human escape from poverty and want.

But that’s hardly the half of it. What actually lies smack in the center of our warmer past is a 220-million-year interval from 250 million years ago through the re-icing of Antarctica about 33 million years ago that was mainly ice-free.

As shown by the blue line in the chart below, during most of that period (highlighted in the brown panels), temperatures were up to 12C higher than at present, and Mother Earth paid no mind to the fact that she lacked polar ice caps or suitable habitats for yet un-evolved polar bears.

Global Temperature And Atmospheric CO2 Over Geologic Time

Moreover, the science behind this isn’t a matter of academic armchair speculation for the simple reason that it has been powerfully validated in the commercial marketplace. That is, trillions of dollars have been deployed in the last century in the search for hydrocarbons, based on immensely complicated petroleum engineering research, theory and geologic models. Oil drillers weren’t throwing darts at a wildcatter’s wall but were coincidentally proving these “facts” of climate history are correct, given that they led to the discovery and extraction of several trillions of BOEs (barrels of oil equivalent).

Consequently, it is solidly estimated by industry experts that today’s petroleum deposits were roughly formed as follows:

    • About 70% during the Mesozoic age (brown panels, 252 to 66 million years ago) which was marked by a tropical climate, with large amounts of plankton in the oceans;
    • 20% was formed in the dryer, colder Cenozoic age (last 65 million years);
    • 10% were formed in the earlier warmer Paleozoic age (541 to 252 million years ago).

Indeed, at the end of the day, petroleum engineering is rooted in climate science because it was climate itself that produced those economically valuable deposits.

And a pretty awesome science it is. After all, billions of dollars have been pushed down the wellbores in up to two miles of ocean waters and 40,000 feet below the surface in what amounts to an amazingly calibrated and targeted search for oil-bearing needles in a geologic haystack.

Yet during the Cretaceous, CO2 levels actually went down while temperatures were rising sharply. That’s the very opposite of the Climate Alarmists’ core claim that it is rising CO2 concentrations which are currently forcing global temperatures higher.

Moreover, we are not talking about a marginal reduction in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Levels actually dropped sharply from about 2,000 ppm to 900 ppm during that 80 million year stretch. This was all good for hydrocarbon formation and today’s endowment of nature’s stored work, but it was also something more.

To wit, it was yet another proof that planetary climate dynamics are far more complicated and ridden with crosscurrents than the simple-minded doom loops now being used to model future climate states from the current far lower temperature and CO2 levels.

W. J. Davis (2017)

It is surely one of the great ironies of our times that today’s fanatical crusades against fossil fuels are being carried out with not even a nod to the geologic history that contradicts the entire “warming” and CO2 concentration hysteria and made present energy consumption levels and efficiencies possible.

That is to say, the big, warm and wet one (the Mesozoic) got us here.

True global warming is not the current and future folly of mankind; it is the historical enabler of present-day economic blessings. Yet, here we are on the eve of COP26, manically focused on reducing emissions to the levels required to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels.

If your brain is not addled by the climate change narrative, the very term rings a resoundingly loud bell. That’s because there have been on the order of 20 distinct “ice ages” and interglacial warming periods during the Pleistocene, the latest of which ended about 18,000 years ago and from which we have been digging out ever since.

In contrast to today’s climate models, Mother Nature clearly did not go off the rails in some kind of linear doomsday loop of ever-increasing temperatures and without any hectoring from Greta, either. Actually, Greenland got all frozen up and thawed several more times thereafter.

Needless to say, the Holocene Optimum 8,000 years ago is not the “preindustrial” baseline from which the Climate Howlers are pointing their phony hockey sticks. In fact, other studies show that, even in the Arctic, it was no picnic time for the polar bears. Among 140 sites across the western Arctic, there is clear evidence for conditions that were warmer than now at 120 sites. At 16 sites for which quantitative estimates have been obtained, local temperatures were on average 1.6 °C higher during the optimum than they are today.

Say what? Isn’t that the same +1.6 degrees C above current levels that the COP26 folks are threatening to turn off the lights of prosperity to prevent?

In any event, what did happen was far more beneficent. To wit, the warmer and wetter Holocene Optimum and its aftermath gave rise to the great river civilizations 5,000 years ago, including the Yellow River in China, the Indus River in the Indian subcontinent, the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile River civilizations among the most notable.

Stated differently, that +1.6 degrees C was reflective of the climate-based catalyzing forces that actually made today’s world possible. From the abundances of the river civilizations, there followed the long march of agriculture and the economic surpluses and abundance that enabled cities, literacy, trade and specialization, advancement of tools and technology and modern industry—the latter being the ultimate human escape from a life based on the back muscles of man and his domesticated animals alone.

As it happens, when one of the previous “preindustrial” warming eras (the Roman Warming) was coming to an end in the late 4th century AD, St. Jerome admonished the faithful “never look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Yet that’s exactly what the assembled nations will be doing at COP26.

 

 

September 2026 Arctic Ice Beats Expectations

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Figure 1. Distribution of SIO contributions for July estimates of September 2026 pan-Arctic sea-ice extent.

SIO (Sea Ice Outlook) July 2026 report shows the predicted September average Arctic Ice Extent from various contributors to the Sea Ice Prediction Network (SIPN) before the actual September monthly extent is reported by NOAA Sea Ice Index (SII). The report (link in red) gave this overview.

2026: July Report from Sea Ice Prediction Network

Pan-Arctic Extent Forecasts

The July 2026 Outlook received 23 pan-Arctic September sea ice extent contributions (Figure 1), with a median of 4.45 million square kilometers and an interquartile range of 4.20 to 4.67 million square kilometers. We received 12 statistical/ML based predictions for pan-Arctic September sea ice extent. The statistical models have a median of 4.44 million square kilometers and an interquartile range of 4.30 to 4.55 million square kilometers (Figure 2). There are nine dynamical model contributions. The dynamical models have a median forecast of 4.47 million square kilometers with an interquartile range of 4.15 to 4.75 million square kilometers, over twice the range of statistical forecasts. Last year’s observed September extent (4.75 million km2) is at the high end of the dynamical forecasts, and higher than all but one of the statistical forecasts (Figure 2).

Above are predictions as of Mid-July for the September 2026 monthly average ice extent reported by NOAA Sea Ice Index (SII). This post provides a look at the 2026 September monthly averages comparing MASIE and SII datasets. (20-year average is 2007 to 2026 inclusive).

To enlarge, open image in new tab.

SIP network predicted SII would be 4.45M km2, and the actual result is 4.81M, while MASIE reported 5.04M km2.

The table below provides the monthly Arctic ice extent averages for comparisons (all are M km2)

Monthly MASIE 2026 SIIv.4 2026 MASIE–SII MASIE–20yr AVE SIIv.4–20yr AVE
Jan 11.365 11.222 0.143 -2.395 -2.355
Feb 13.322 13.107 0.215 -1.315 -1.319
Mar 14.348 14.098 0.250 -0.484 -0.558
Apr 13.601 13.569 0.032 -0.482 -0.432
May 12.173 12.151 0.022 -0.437 -0.504
June 10.543 10.422 0.121 -0.257 -0.426
July 8.045 7.708 0.338 -0.224 -0.309
Aug 6.009 5.563 0.446 0.136 -0.034
Sept 5.041 4.810 0.230 0.334 0.113

The first two data columns are the 2026 YTD shown by MASIE and SII, with the MASIE surpluses in column three.  Column four shows MASIE 2026 compared to MASIE 20 year averages, while column five shows SII 2026 compared to SII 20 year averages.   MASIE started the year with sizable deficits to average then recovered steadily in spring and summer to surpass average in August, and now 334k km2 above average. SII was also well below its averages throughout and much lower than MASIE in August, that gap reduced to -230k km2 in September.

Animation shows strongly recovering ice extents last two weeks of September.

Current Arctic Ice Extent Conditions

The September average month shows the annual dip in arctic ice extents, then recovering to end slightly higher than the beginning.  Note MASIE 2026 started 350k km2 above average and ended 595k in surplus. SII v.4 began 629k km2 in deficit to MASIE, then gained steadily closing the gap, ending only .053k lower.

The table below shows the distribution of ice over the Arctic regions yesterday September 30, 2026, in comparison with the MASIE average and the same day in 2007.

Region 2026273 Day 273 Ave. 2026-Ave. 2007273 2026-2007
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 5531029 4963064 567965 4086883 1444146
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 732729 547541 185188 498743 233986
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 421657 228860 192797 51 421606
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 389374 309478 79897 311 389063
 (4) Laptev_Sea 236581 171732 64850 235245 1337
 (5) Kara_Sea 18 34515 -34497 15367 -15349
 (6) Barents_Sea 0 12802 -12802 4851 -4851
 (7) Greenland_Sea 270410 236177 34232 353210 -82801
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 57131 56398 733 42247 14883
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 420912 371062 49850 307135 113777
 (10) Hudson_Bay 16 3155 -3139 1936 -1921
 (11) Central_Arctic 3001059 2990096 10963 2626511 374548

The massive surpluses in Eurasian basins of Chukchi, E. Siberian, Laptev, along with Beaufort and Canadian achipelago, more than offset small deficits in Atlantic basins Kara and Barents seas. The overall surplus was 568k km2 or 11%, and exceeded 2007 by 1.4 wadhams of ice extents.

Summary

The experts involved in SIPN expected SII 2026 September to be somewhat lower than recent years, but Arctic ice extents greatly exceeded the 20 year averages.

Footnote:

Some people unhappy with the higher amounts of ice extent shown by MASIE continue to claim that Sea Ice Index is the only dataset that can be used. This is false in fact and in logic. Why should anyone accept that the highest quality picture of ice day to day has no shelf life, that one year’s charts can not be compared with another year? Researchers do this, including Walt Meier in charge of Sea Ice Index. That said, I understand his interest in directing people to use his product rather than one he does not control. As I have said before:

MASIE is rigorous, reliable, serves as calibration for satellite products, and continues the long and honorable tradition of naval ice charting using modern technologies. More on this at my post Support MASIE Arctic Ice Dataset

MASIE: “high-resolution, accurate charts of ice conditions”
Walt Meier, NSIDC, October 2015 article in Annals of Glaciology.

Conrad Black on Carney’s Europe Adventure

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Conrad Black’s article at Brussels Signal is Carney tells Europe what it wants to hear.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The response to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s address at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on September 17, a day after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen opened the door to Canada becoming the EU’s first “associate member”, has reflected and aggravated the public policy and psychology gap between Western Europe and the United States. The federal European institutions began as an admirable attempt by Jean Monnet and others to bury once and for all the profound and sanguinary hostility between the principal European states. These were tariff reductions in the facilitation of cooperation at the economic level, especially between France, Germany and Italy. The original six-nation group, including Benelux, gradually intensified cooperation to a political union and expanded steadily to 28 states, from which the United Kingdom has withdrawn.

It was far from a smooth and constant progress. Several countries required consecutive referenda to accede to the goal that was defined as “an ever closer union”, which clearly indicated ultimately a single senior government for all of Western and much of Central Europe. Britain had only voted for a common market and never to have the political institutions that it had developed fairly consistently for nearly 800 years subsumed into the well-intentioned but comparatively untried government machinery of Europe in Brussels. And when finally consulted, the British voted “no”. This was the first major post-Cold War geopolitical abrasion between Europe and America. President Trump offered the British a fast-track into the North American free-trade area, but Theresa May chose to define leaving Europe as in fact confirming its adhesion to it. Boris Johnson was more receptive but too disorganised and preoccupied with resolving the status of Northern Ireland in Europe to address Trump’s invitation, and soon found himself dealing with the irresolute Biden administration.

Trump, like previous Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, saw that a federal Europe was in some measure a revolt against the primacy of the United States in the West, based on the romantic delusion that the European powers, having squandered their world leadership in the world wars and totalitarian movements that Europe inflicted upon the world, could now stand on each other’s shoulders and regain the headship of the planet. American Democratic presidents have tended to view Europe more positively as potentially a welcome equal partner in Western leadership.

Carney has moved Canada past Britain as another important country
purporting to straddle between Europe and the United States.

When he was the governor of the Bank of England, he made short work of any notion of an independent central bank by joining the fear-mongering campaign of the British government to the effect that if Britain seceded from the European Union, grass would grow in the streets of the City of London. Having returned to his native Canada and become prime minister, he won an upset re-election victory for the Liberal Party which under Justin Trudeau had scandalously misgoverned the country as it tumbled down the comparative tables of the world’s most prosperous states, hobbled by an obsession with climate change and generating discontent through excessive but almost entirely legal immigration. (This is a relatively simple matter for Canada since its only substantial land border is with the United States, a country that almost nobody ever flees away from, and illegal entry by sea requires crossing a great ocean.)

The usual anti-American or naïvely globalist organs of the European and British media, such as The Guardian and The Economist, have grappled Carney to their bosoms as someone who validates the beleaguered European project. The United States economy has been growing more than twice as fast as the European Union’s for 20 years, and where Trump has been somewhat bumptious, he has been effective in reducing absurd trade deficits and warning inconstant allies. The principal European powers have floundered and only Italy can now be said to have a serious government. Germany, France and Spain, as well as the United Kingdom, are waiting for firm government from the civilised Right as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is asserting in Rome.

In Strasbourg, Carney revealed more vividly than he has to
his own countrymen his authoritarian, Davosian leftist biases.

He flattered his audience by rewriting modern history and current economic statistics. Freedom was won in Europe “thanks to the heroism of the European resistance during the war”. Of course, this is rubbish: Europe was liberated by the Americans and British and Canadians and protected by the United States until the Soviet Union, under the American containment strategy, disintegrated. Europe is wallowing economically and its enfeebled response to the Chinese penetration of more than a third of its hybrid car market is to ask, unsuccessfully, for China voluntarily to restrain its presence to 15 per cent. Anyone, including apparently the majority of the citizens of the major European countries, can see that a sharp policy change is called for, and the insane climate change bugbear is being put to death at last.

Carney did not mention in Strasbourg that Canadian exports to the United States are 10 times as much as its exports to Europe, or that the United States represents more than a third of the entire economy of Canada while Canadian trade represents about 2% of the US economy. In Strasbourg, both speaker and audience were dreaming and to this end Carney quoted Goethe misleadingly and inflicted a number of hollow bucolic metaphors on his listeners to promote the notion of a reciprocal magnetic interest between Canada and Europe. It is a complete fantasy and it will not last long.

Addendum: Commentary from Europe

Also at Brussels Signal, Karl Pfefferkorn writes: An empire built on sand. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

After the billing and cooing is over, what does the new partnership between Carney and von der Leyen have to offer their respective citizens? The official announcement suggested greater cooperation in defence, artificial intelligence and the provision of energy. Canada, which once earned its own invasion beach at Normandy, has only the ghost of a military these days and can contribute little to Europe’s efforts to deter Russia. In any case, Canada and the major European powers are guided by NATO’s defence planning, and not any EU attempts to supplant it. Carney clearly hopes to claim a share of Europe’s defence spending bonanza as a preferred partner, but has far less expertise and capacity to offer than the UK, which despite these attributes has yet to earn equal access to the EU’s common defence funds.

Neither Canada nor the EU has sired artificial intelligence companies capable of challenging China or the United States. Cooperation between also-rans is not likely to benefit either. Given their governing tendencies, they are far more likely to cooperate in suffocating their nascent AI industries through overregulation.

Canada does have immense energy resources, but lacks the infrastructure to supply much of it to Europe. Canadian pipelines run west to the Pacific in the service of Asian markets, or east to Ontario, by way of the United States. Any help solving Europe’s energy problems will require the construction of oil and gas loading facilities on Canada’s Atlantic coast, in violation of the environmental orthodoxies espoused by Carney’s Liberal Party. Canada’s oil resources are concentrated in the Alberta oil sands, which are the dirtiest and most carbon intensive of fossil fuels. Large-scale imports of Canadian oil will require a significant relaxation if not the outright abandonment of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

Carney is reluctant to reveal his country’s most attractive
quality to the EU: a potential net payer into EU coffers.

If Canada can be lured into a bespoke arrangement, complete with new sinecures in Brussels for civil servants desperate to escape Ottawa, she will pay at least as much as Norway, which remits over half a billion dollars a year for its EEA status. Good for EU finances, but what will Canada get in exchange? Relaxed work rules and membership in the Erasmus study programme will benefit young Canadians, but visa reciprocity will also lure ambitious Europeans toward greater opportunities in North America. Industrial tariffs are already minimal under the CETA agreement, and there is no chance the EU will open the Single Market to increased Canadian agricultural imports.

None of this will offset the risks of alienating Canada’s biggest market, the United States. The prosperity of 40 million Canadians is dependent on the trade surplus they run with 340 million American consumers. Canadian industry is comprehensively integrated into the American market in everything from car parts to advertising. The EU cannot offer anything close to a replacement should the US retaliate against any Canadian deal with Europe.

Carney walked away from a good trade offer from Washington
in a fit of performative hubris, preferring to risk the economic
well-being of his people for the accolades of his European peers.

Given her fraught relations with the White House, Ursula von der Leyen sees little downside in her flirtation with Carney. She is empire-building, not in the old way of territorial conquest, but in the post-modern sense of attaining greater elite regard. The average Commission bureaucrat hopes to make the EU into a workable federal state, but von der Leyen sees it as a citadel of self-regarding virtue for affluent Western elites besieged by angry populists. Granting titles of privilege to loyal servants like Carney elevates her office to the status of a royal court in the realm of the global elect, an objective far more important than the tawdry material needs of factory workers in Duisburg or coal miners in Silesia.

Her neglect of the sources of Europe’s prosperity and her failure
to mobilise the resources of the Commission in their service
will expose her true achievement: an empire built on sand.

 

About Those Electric Buses

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Addis Ababa Welcomes Electric City Buses

With all the hoopla about EV being the future of public transit, let’s have a roundup how this experiment is working out.

Canada

Electric buses are a disaster for every Canadian city that tries them

Jamie Sarkonak catalogs the Canadian experience in his National Post article with the subtitle: Regina is just the latest city to report problems with unreliable battery-powered transit. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The news slipped out during Regina city council’s Monday budget hearing, when transit union president Sukhwinder Singh was asked whether electric buses have impacted costs.

Aside from being more expensive to run — defeating their original purpose of saving on gas money — Singh said they were “not for the Saskatchewan weather.” He added that four buses had to be pulled off the line and re-charged the previous Friday, as they had fallen to 15 per cent battery. “I’m not in favour of electric buses at all,” he said.

“For the winter, their battery dies very quickly, and they can just run for two, three hours, that’s all. The buses weren’t good for the summer either, because the charge couldn’t reliably last.”

And over in Saskatoon, city council has been trying to grow the electric fleet. It’s unclear why: city staff have warned that electric buses can’t last a full day of service on one charge, and that it takes 1.2 electric buses to replace a single diesel bus.

This was always a predictable outcome, particularly since Edmonton already wasted millions on the same kind of failed project. In 2018, back when climate was the issue du jour, the city came up with a plan to spend $43 million on electric buses.

Fast forward to today and Edmonton has 60 of these buses in its fleet of 1,000. In December 2023, it was reported that only one quarter of these were in working order due to a range of problems. The company that built them, Proterra, filed for bankruptcy. Edmonton joined in on the bankruptcy proceedings, claiming that it was owed $82 million for the bus fiasco. Edmonton lawyers claimed:

“None of the buses have ever achieved 328 km on a single charge,” and “On average, the bus range has been approximately 165 km in the winter and, at best, 250 km in warmer weather.”

These same lessons are learned again and again. In 2022, the feds and the government of Manitoba helped Winnipeg purchase 40 electric buses, which the city claimed would drive for “10 to 15 hours.” Earlier trials in Winnipeg showed that heating the cabin resulted in “performance losses”; adding a diesel heater limited those losses to 20 per cent or less. In extreme cold, electric bus batteries lost as much as 25% of their capacity, and snow increased energy usage by an additional 15%. The city’s first electric buses began operating over the summer; it remains to be reported how their first winter is going.

Finally, Toronto, which also started its electric bus journey in 2017, is also reporting failure. A city report from July buries the unflattering figures under a deluge of emissions-reduction statistics: from the beginning, these buses had shorter ranges than diesel units, which renders them unusable for many existing bus routes. And because of their finicky charging requirements and limited range, the electric buses “face challenges in responding to emergency subway closures, route diversions, and other unexpected events.”

The Magic School Bus

In 2021, Quebec mandated that all new school buses purchased in the province be electric as part of a goal to electrify 65 per cent of its bus fleet by 2030.

in September 2025, 1,200 Lion electric school buses were abruptly withdrawn from Quebec roads, prompting renewed criticism of the provincial government’s approach to electrification — and of its decision to give one local company a virtual monopoly.  Many school bus routes in Quebec remained cancelled following the government’s decision to pull all Lion buses out of service after a bus in Montreal caught fire last week.  Lion has sent instructions to school bus operators for the required inspections and repairs, apparently related to possible wiring issues. Three Lion buses have caught fire in the last year, though nobody has been injured and the buses’ batteries were not involved.

Andrew Jones, a Montreal-area school bus operator, said he has since cancelled orders for 20 new Lion buses, and has ordered diesel buses instead. He said:

“The eight Lion buses I already own are unreliable, in part because when they break down, it can take weeks to get the necessary parts or technicians from Lion.” “We’re subject to waiting on them 100 per cent of the time.”

United States

Electric buses are sitting unused in cities across the US; here’s why

FoxBusiness reports: Cities coast-to-coast grappling with broken-down e-buses that cannot be fixed

Between the federal government, states and municipalities, untold billions in taxpayer dollars have been spent adding electric buses to transit fleets across the U.S. in an effort to reduce carbon emissions.

Officials in Asheville, North Carolina, recently expressed frustration that three of the five e-buses the city purchased for millions in 2018 are now sitting idle due to a combination of software issues, mechanical problems and an inability to obtain replacement parts.

Earlier this month, The Denver Gazette reported two of the four e-buses Colorado Springs’ Mountain Metropolitan Transit acquired in 2021 are not running. They cost $1.2 million a piece, mostly paid for by government grants.

In 2020, The Philadelphia Tribune reported SEPTA’s entire $24 million fleet of Proterras had been pulled out of commission. A spokesperson for the transit agency would not get into the specifics of why the 25 buses – the third-largest fleet of all-electric buses in the U.S. at the time – were put on ice, but suggested the issues might be covered under the manufacturer’s warranty.

Attorneys representing Broward County, Florida, regarding Proterra’s bankruptcy, told the court Broward County purchased 42 buses from Proterra for $54 million, and the first batch only operated for an average of 600 miles before breaking down, while the second batch averaged 1,800. For comparison, the county’s diesel buses average 4,500 between failures, the filing said.

In New York City Battery Drain: MTA Trims New Flyer Electric Bus Order Amid Tech Growing Pains

The MTA will buy 85 fewer electric buses as its manufacturer tries
to sort out a way to keep them in service without breaking down.

MTA officials briefed the board in June on the problems plaguing the five-dozen electric buses the authority currently has in service, which cover only about 2,500 miles on the road before a mechanical breakdown takes them out of service, compared to 8,500 miles for diesel buses.

Officials have previously sounded the alarm in 2025 that the batteries that power the buses overheat or fail hold a full day’s charge, and that electric components that power systems like the air brakes were failing while buses were in service.

International

Electric Buses Are Struggling to Gain Traction Worldwide

Linda Poon provides a global picture in her Pacific Standard article, with this summary:

What prevents cities from adopting electric buses en masse is a mix of
technological, financial, and institutional challenges, according to
reports looking at efforts in 16 cities at various stages of adoption.

With the goal of curbing carbon emissions in mind, municipal leaders all over have pledged to partially, if not fully, replace their city’s fleet with e-buses over the next decades. A number of cities, from large metropolises like Mexico City to more modest ones like Philadelphia, have started pilot tests. One report from World Resource Institute focuses on three major types of barriers.

The cities studied range from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia—where there’s been “no substantial planning” around electric buses—to cities like Philadelphia and Campinas, Brazil, which, respectively, are running a pilot test and expanding its number of e-buses, to successful cases in Shenzhen and the nearby Zhengzhou. They vary geographically, with some in developed nations like Chile and Spain, and other in emerging countries like India.

It means that when cities consider adopting electric buses, they need to understand the power grid upgrades and charging infrastructure required, and challenges associated with that. Failure to do so is the most common mistake, according to Gorguinpour. Many cities just set up their charging stations thinking that things would “work themselves out.”

That’s why he says one of the most overlooked stories from Shenzhen’s experience is the city’s long process in setting up the charging infrastructure to support more than 16,000 electric buses. Each bus has a range of about 124 miles on a single charge of 252 kilowatt hours (KWh). In total, the fleet can eat more than 4,000 megawatt-hours (MWh). For comparison’s sake, 1 MWh is enough to power about 300 homes for an hour. “That’s an insane amount of power required, not to mention real estate,” he says. “And the process to identify what land is available, then to work with the utilities—even just figuring out the optimal location—is a hugely important task, and incredibly challenging.”

That gets into the financial barriers. Cities across the globe often cited higher expenses as the primary challenge to procuring a fleet. While cities that adopt e-buses do end up saving money over the longer term in things like fuel (not to mention the harder-to-quantify value of cleaner air and fewer greenhouse emission), the upfront costs represent significant challenges. In the case studies, the price of a new e-bus ranged between $300,000 and $900,000 per bus, with the report noting that the prices vary dramatically depending on the manufacturer, specifications, and the location of the transit agency. In the United States, an electric bus averages around $750,000, while a conventional diesel bus is around $435,000.

When cities decide to implement electric buses, Gorguinpour says the cities focus too much on those upfront costs and not enough on the “life cycle cost.” Or, in the case of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, to get operators on board with full adoption. In some cases—as in Chile’s capital city of Santiago, which has the largest e-bus fleet outside of China—it’s utility companies, not transit agencies, that have stepped up to finance the projects.

Footnote:  And It Is All So Unnecessary

The Vatican’s Green Gospel

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Dr Roger Watson reports on how Roman Catholic leaders have ventured into climatism wilderness by trusting the wrong proponents.  His Daily Sceptic article is The Vatican’s Green Gospel. Excerpts in italics with my bold and added images.

Under Pope Francis and now Leo the Catholic Church has drunk deeply
of the climate Kool-Aid. It’s about time it quit the pseudo-scientific
scaremongering and got back to saving souls.

How the Roman Catholic Church moved from its great commission to save souls to its current obsession with saving the planet is not clear. But it is obvious that the hierarchy of the Church has drunk deeply of the climate change Kool-Aid and, and while it would be unfair to say that it has abandoned saving souls, its mission has certainly drifted considerably into an area which is not exactly within its area of expertise. Wherever it is getting its advice on climate change from, it is most definitely listening to the wrong people.

The problem, as some Catholics see it, is demonstrated amply in a column in the September issue of Middlesbrough Diocesan Catholic Voice – known locally as the Voice – which is distributed to and through parish churches in the Middlesbrough Catholic Diocese. It is always with trepidation that I take a copy from the pile at the back after Sunday Mass.

The Voice, while it contains useful diocesan information, dates of events and news from the parishes, almost always has at least one article which, for me, is an ‘occasion of sin’ as to read it conjures up thoughts which are far from Christian. My only justification being that this is engendered by reading content that is far from Christian. Inevitably, if we do not have a report on the oxymoronic concept of the Diocesan LGBT Masses it will be an article on the so-called climate emergency.

Blessed are the carbon conscious

The September issue of Middlesbrough Diocesan Catholic Voice contains an article by Sir John Battle, former Labour MP for Leeds West and a minister in the Blair government titled ‘Stop taking a climate change gamble’. A Roman Catholic and made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory by Pope Benedict XVI – who clearly didn’t get everything right – Sir John hinges his argument on the gambling industry and the obvious love of gambling among the British people.

The first quarter of the article, on the popularity of gambling and its possibility of easy returns for one’s money, is rather tenuously linked to the gamble that we are taking over climate change. This expectation of quick profit is blotting out people’s minds to the realities of what we can do to mitigate the damage of global warming.

The customary superlatives are used to support his argument. Thus “wildfires rage” across Europe and “devastating floods” hit Bangladesh. Never mind that the fires in Europe were almost certainly deliberately caused by arsonists and that there have been floods in Bangladesh for as long as anyone can remember. Add to that the news that, far from melting, the polar caps are increasing in size, the polar bears and penguins are thriving and coral reefs are growing. The facts must not stand in the way of a good argument.

After all, there is a “scientific consensus” on the issue and
“daily news reports of worldwide extreme climatic events”. So, it must be true.

Sins of emission

Sir John explains that the much bandied Net Zero mantra “does not mean producing zero emissions but rather taking action to reduce emissions as much as possible”. If so, then why call it ‘Net Zero’ and why does the UK have a target of Net Zero by 2050? According to the University of Oxford’s Net Zero Centre, Net Zero means “balancing the greenhouse gases put into the air with an equal amount taken back out”. That is a subtlety I have never heard any of the zero carbon fanatics explain on BBC Radio 4 Today  programme.

Sir John refers to the “merchants of doubt”, pointing the finger at Big Carbon (not Sir John’s description) who have “financial interests” in not reducing our use of hydrocarbon sources. This leads people to doubt anything untoward will happen to them because of climate change due to the gambling mentality referred to in the initial paragraphs of his article. These “powerful vested interests” – spoken like a true socialist Sir John – then try to shift the blame on to consumers and society. But the consumers in turn think ‘why bother?’ when places like China and America carry on emitting greenhouse gases like there is no tomorrow.

Having seemingly criticised Big Carbon and such vested interests in trying to offload their responsibilities for the planet onto the little people, Sir John then quotes arch climate catastrophist Gabriel Winslow-Yost, who reckons climate change to be a “crime” and that we are all “implicated”. Winslow-Yost, clearly a lover of dramatic prose, says, “car rides and plane trips, coffees and burgers, heating and cooling and clothing are paid for in blood, contributing every moment to the suffering and destruction global warming brings”. My goodness, but he sounds like he’d be a regular hoot on a night out, doesn’t he?

The catechism of climate change

As if to give his article some theological clout he quotes Pope Leo who “insists” that climate change is “a scientific reality and a moral responsibility”. I think you’ll find, Pope Leo, that you are wrong on both counts there. Laudato Si’, the late Pope Francis’s execrable encyclical letter, is quoted twice, including his ridiculous exhortation to “ecological conversion”. We Catholics had all hoped for better from Pope Leo, but he seems to have fallen for the climate change catastrophe agenda as much as anyone, referring to concepts such as “environmental justice” and how it is part of the Church’s mission to “promote human dignity, peace and care for creation”.

It is hard to know what lies behind all this nonsense being spouted by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and by senior Catholics who should know better. Are they – as I fear they might be – genuine believers in the climate change catastrophe? Perhaps they are trying to be ‘relevant’ and ‘relatable’ by addressing topical concerns in a vain attempt to fill the pews. If so, why would that work? If people want to hear scientific social justice based gobbledygook, there is always the Anglican Church, the BBC or the Guardian.

The Catholic Church rightly encourages Christians to be good stewards of creation, but has that stewardship begun to eclipse salvation? Reducing carbon emissions seems to be a greater priority than reducing sin. The Church’s unique mission is to proclaim the Gospel, administer the sacraments and prepare souls for eternity. If it chooses to become just another voice in the chorus of climate activism, it should not be surprised if people conclude that it has become more interested in saving the planet than in saving the souls of the people who inhabit it.

Scary MIT Study: Climate Change Inflates Household Costs

Posted on by Ron Clutz

File this under “They Have No Shame.”  Desperate to regain momentum for Agenda 2030, activists’ new meme is that costs of living are rising because of global warming/climate change.  It’s an obvious attempt to deflect from Greenflation due to the so-called “Energy Transition” and to blame realists who dissent from “consensus Climate Science.”  Here’s the study from MIT disciples: Why climate change is costing U.S. households hundreds of dollars a year.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds,

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 7, 2026 – As extreme weather becomes more frequent, climate-related costs are creeping into everyday expenses, adding hundreds of dollars a year to U.S. household expenses. From higher insurance premiums to rising utility bills and disaster-related income losses, climate change contributes to expenses at a time when Americans are already worried about rising food and energy costs. While their list of climate-related expenses is not exhaustive, the researchers found that climate change is already costing U.S. households between $400 and $900 a year, on average. In some places, the burden is far higher: in around 10% of U.S. counties, annual climate-related costs exceed $1,300 per household.

Coauthor Catherine Wolfram:

“A lot of the ways in which we discuss climate now are kind of abstract and in the future — maybe these impacts happen in 2050 or 2100 — but we really wanted to emphasize that this is already occurring and it’s having negative financial implications for households.”

Energy expenses are one important driver in household climate costs.

To estimate the growing household costs of energy from increased use, production disruption, and damage to electric companies’ infrastructure, the researchers compared energy use in 2020 to 2024 with that of 1981 to 1990. Recently, more utility companies have been increasing their rates in response to wildfires and hurricanes, either to fund recovery or to mitigate future damage.

Insurance costs represent another piece of households’ growing financial burden.

The researchers estimate climate change contributed to an average $360 increase in homeowners’ insurance premiums between 1990 and 2023. In some cases, households may be hit twice: by rising utility bills and higher insurance premiums at the same time.

Government climate-related costs are passed on to households

These typically include having to pay to repair schools, roads, bridges, and airports after natural disasters. They found that the annual average per household cost from these expenses from 2017 to 2021 was nearly $150. Other costs, including higher home prices in lower-risk areas and rising food prices from crops damaged during disasters, are likely contributing as well, but are outside the study. Migration costs could also play a role, as people move away from areas experiencing more frequent disasters.

Summary of Costs incurred by households due to climate change

Cost Factor Estimated  Annual Cost
Home insurance premiums  Over $600
Disaster recovery expenses Varies by region
Increased utility bills About $35
Health impacts from air quality  Exceeds $100

What They Are Not Telling You

Insurance Companies Making Record Profits Off Climate Change Panic

US insurers’ profits double as price rises exceed extreme weather claims (Source Financial Times)

US property and casualty insurers nearly doubled their earnings between 2023 and last year despite costly extreme-weather events, according to research that highlights the pay-off from several years of rising customer prices.

A survey of companies that account for at least 97 per cent of US property and casualty cover by rating agency AM Best, found that the aggregate after-tax profits of the industry surged to $171bn last year, compared with $92bn the previous year.

Hurricanes, fires and other disasters caused an estimated $320bn of losses around the world in 2024, about a third more than the year before. In the US alone, five big hurricanes as well as other severe storms struck.

However, the data showed insurers more than offset larger losses by increasing premiums. Helen Andersen, an AM Best research analyst, told the Financial Times that the strong earnings figures were the result of “an aggressive push for significant rate and pricing increases” by insurers.

But some consumers — particularly in states historically less affected by wildfires and extreme weather such as hurricanes — have questioned the justification for price rises that have sometimes outstripped inflation.

Unreliable Wind and Solar Power Drives Higher Electricity Bills

EPA Reports US Air is Clean of Unhealthy Pollutants

Costly Government Emission Schemes

Carney’s Industrial Carbon Tax imposes real costs on Canadians

The economic cost is more than $1,100 per person, while employment is 50,000 lower than it would be under the 2025 policy status quo

See Also:

Insurers Playing the Climate Card

Solar Activity Linked to Ocean Cycles

Posted on by Ron Clutz

An active sun affects the stratosphere which in turn changes conditions underwater.

H/T to Jo Nova for her blog article Looks like solar activity can change the Pacific ocean…Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The most powerful and enigmatic forces on our weather are the Pacific El Nino and La Nina phenomena which cause floods and droughts on opposite sides of the Pacific. Unfortunately, climate modelers can’t predict them much more than three to five months ahead, which tells us there’s some big driver they are missing. But a new paper from Chinese researchers suggests that a large blob of water in the North Eastern Pacific is responding to something in solar cycles.

This vast slab has the catchy name of The North Pacific eastern subtropical mode water (NPESTMW). It sits about 100m below the surface and grows and shrinks as the solar cycles rise and fall. It appears to be a very important blob. A different paper last year found that changes in the NPESTMW volume led the El Nino events by about 9 months.(Liu, 2025)

Remarkably, they found in the 1991–2022 record, seven of eight
large drops in this water volume were followed by El Niño,
while eight of nine large increases were followed by La Niña.

If they are right, it would confirm what skeptics have been saying for years — that climate modelers need to pay a lot more attention to solar cycles in their big models and that one day we might even learn to predict El Ninos (by crikey) a whole year ahead. Finally, the experts might be able to tell us if next summer really will be a barbecue summer, and the farmers might get a bit more warning on whether to plant seed early or sell off the cattle.

Awkwardly for 4,000 UN climate experts, the more solar factors we add to the climate models, the smaller the role is for CO2. (It’s even more awkward for nations that spent a trillion dollars on climate control before we understood the climate.)

The mechanism

The researchers suggest (see the top image) that it’s the solar UV which probably creates this effect on the oceans from the top down. High energy UV rays hit the oxygen molecules in the stratosphere and split them into ozone. Ozone then absorbs more UV and warms up that part of the atmosphere. This changes the jet streams and winds below. And winds close to the ocean can take energy or heat out of the water as it evaporates, but they also stir it up (or not). Peak solar activity seems to suppress the orderly settling of the NPESTMW blob. Once the blob forms and sinks to 100m to 300m down, surprisingly it is very stable and carries the temperature, salinity and other chemistry for a long time. This is what is called “the ocean memory” in the paper’s title.

To enlarge, open image in new tab.

After solar activity peaks, for the next year or two in every cycle, the formation of the NPESTMW block is suppressed. This may be due to cyclonic wind stress anomalies that drive upwelling. However, at the solar minima the winds change creating the opposite downwelling effect and the water flows into the blob.

Complicating everything, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) acts like a gate. During warm phases of the AMO, it amplifies the solar cycle effect on the NE Pacific, which is why after looking at eight decades of data, the effect has been strongest since 1990.

The Paper is Solar-Cycle Modulation of Subsurface Ocean Memory via the North Pacific Eastern Subtropical Mode Water by J. Wang et al.

Plain Language Summary

The Sun’s energy output follows an approximately 11-year cycle of stronger and weaker activity. Although this variation is small, it can nonetheless produce detectable effects on Earth’s climate. Here, we show that the solar-cycle consistently modulates the volume of a subsurface water mass in the North Pacific Ocean: the North Pacific Eastern Subtropical Mode Water, which forms at the ocean surface in winter and sinks, transferring heat and carbon to the deep ocean and influencing climate variability on timescales of years to decades. We find that during periods of high solar activity, anomalous cyclonic circulation over the formation region weakens surface winds and reduces ocean heat loss, suppressing winter mixed layer deepening and mode water formation, while the associated upwelling inhibits the sinking of this water mass; the opposite occurs during low solar activity. However, the strength of this solar influence is not constant over time: it is further amplified by a long-term natural climate fluctuation in the Atlantic Ocean, helping explain why the Sun’s imprint on climate has been particularly pronounced since the 1990s. These findings reveal a new mechanism through which the Sun may influence climate predictability via the ocean’s subsurface memory.

Figure 5

Schematic diagram illustrating the pathway from enhanced solar irradiance to reduced NPESTMW formation during solar-active periods. Enhanced solar forcing induces negative SLP anomalies over the North Pacific through “top-down” stratospheric-tropospheric coupling, producing anomalous cyclonic circulation and reduced air-sea heat loss. These atmospheric changes suppress winter mixed layer depth, preventing the water mass from penetrating enough to ventilate the thermocline and form mode water. Additionally, cyclonic wind-induced upwelling anomaly opposes downward subduction (shading schematic), further hindering NPESTMW formation and ventilation. Critically, this solar-driven pathway is strongly modulated by the AMO phase: during positive AMO phases, stronger atmosphere-ocean coupling and enhanced mixed layer sensitivity to atmospheric forcing amplify the solar-NPESTMW relationship, whereas during negative AMO phases, weaker coupling and sensitivity damp this signal, rendering the solar imprint less detectable.

Solar Cycle Progression September 15, 2026


Footnote: Oceans Oviously Drive Global Warming

Going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4.  This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C.  Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C.  Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.

Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate.  On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles. And in 2024 we saw an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean air warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, then dropping well below its peak.

Arctic Ice Aplenty at Annual Dip September 2026

Posted on by Ron Clutz

After a sub-par March maximum, 2026 Arctic ice in ensuing months closed the gap with the 20-year average.  In August MASIE showed Arctic ice extent surplus to average.  September Arctic ice added to the surplus and now during the annual minimum month of September 2026 there is Arctic ice aplenty at the day 260 average daily minimum.

During the annual dip in Arctic ice extent, the average year since 2006 is lowest on day 260 at 4.54M km2.  It then rises to 4.8M km2 ten days later.  The cyan line shows 2026 well above average throughout, its lowest extent at 4.74M km2 on day 257 and now up to 4.85M km2.  SII v.4 was lower than MASIE throughout, but drew closer in recent days before ending 219k km2 in deficit. So far MASIE September average is 4.97M and SII is 4.64M, with 13 more days remaining in the month. Note 2007 was ~600k km2 in deficit to average at day 270, while last year was matching this one.

The regional distribution of ice extents is shown in the table below. (Bering and Okhotsk seas are excluded since both are now virtually open water.)

Region 2026260 Day 260 ave. 2026-Ave. 2007260 2026-2007
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 4852660 4544944 307716 4045776 806884
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 550955 480711 70244 481384 69571
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 320625 183714 136911 22527 298099
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 268872 267297 1575 311 268561
 (4) Laptev_Sea 208038 141784 66254 235869 -27831
 (5) Kara_Sea 18 28526 -28508 44067 -44049
 (6) Barents_Sea 0 13149 -13149 7420 -7420
 (7) Greenland_Sea 217002 185684 31318 333181 -116179
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 51076 32165 18910 26703 24373
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 321919 273658 48261 225526 96393
 (10) Hudson_Bay 16 4458 -4442 2270 -2254
 (11) Central_Arctic 2912997 2932816 -19819 2665244 247753

The table shows large surpluses in Eurasian basins  Laptev, Chukchi and Beaufort, more than offsetting smaller deficits in Central Arctic, Kara and Barents seas. Hudson Bay is mostly open water at this time of year. 2026 exceeds the average ice extents by 308k km2, or 7%, and is nearly a wadham greater than 2007 with a surplus of 0.808M km2 of ice extent.

September monthly average ice extent is considered the annual minimum for climate purposes.  Note also that typically the lowest daily value occurs mid September, with a small positive gain between the end of August and end of September.

Why is this important?  All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher  temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels.  The lack of additional warming prior to 2023 El Nino is documented in a post SH Drives UAH Temps Cooler July 2025.

The lack of acceleration in sea levels along coastlines has been discussed also.  See Observed vs. Imagined Sea Levels 2023 Update

Also, a longer term perspective is informative:

post-glacial_sea_level

Footnote Regarding  SII v.4

NSDIC acknowledged my query regarding the SII (Sea Ice Index) dataset. While awaiting an explanation I investigated further. My last download of the SII Daily Arctic Ice Extents was on July 30, meaning that the most recent data in that file was day 210, July 29. The header on that file was Sea_Ice_Index_Daily_Extent_G02135_v3.

Then on August 1, the downloaded file had the heading Sea_Ice_Index_Daily_Extent_G02135_v4. So it appears that these are now the values from a new version of SII. As I wrote in my query, since March 14 all of the values for Arctic Ice Extents are lower in this new record. The graph above shows the implications for August as an example of estimates from SIIv.4.

In the past, SIIv.3 tracked MASIE with slightly lower values.  But with v.4, larger monthly average deficits to MASIE were reported in July 2025 ( -282k km2) and in August (-440k km2).

The change started in January 2025 and will be the basis for future reporting.  The logic for this is presented in this document: Sea Ice Index Version 4 Analysis

In June 2025, NSIDC was informed that access to data from the Special Sensor Microwave
Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) onboard the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP)
satellites would end on July 31 (NSIDC, 2025). To prepare for this, we rapidly developed version
4 of the Sea Ice Index. This new version transitions from using sea ice concentration fields
derived from SSMIS data as input to using fields derived from the Advanced Microwave
Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) sensor onboard the Global Change Observation Mission – W1
(GCOM-W1) satellite.  On 29 July 2025, we learned that the Defense Department decision to terminate access to DMSP data had been reversed and that data will continue to be available until September 2026.

We are publishing Version 4, however, for these reasons:

• The SSMIS instruments are well past their designed lifespan and a transition to
AMSR2 is inevitable. Unless the sensors fail earlier, the DoD will formally end the
program in September 2026.
• Although access of SSMIS will continue through September 2026, the Fleet
Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC), where SSMIS data
from the DMSP satellite are downloaded, made an announcement that “Support
will be on a best effort basis and should be considered data of opportunity.” This
means that SSMIS data will likely contain data gaps.
• We have developer time to make this transition now and may not in the future.
• We are confident that Version 4 data are commensurate in accuracy to those
provided by Version 3.