Many of my posts include some high quality infographics produced by a colleague, Raymond Inauen of RIC-Communications. In 2024 because of other pressing time demands, Raymond discontinued the website he set up to host the infographics. This post is to announce that he has now reactivated the website up for the public to access a series of infographics regarding CO2 and climate science.
The Website content is:
The World of CO2
Readers will be aware of previous posts on the four themes to be discovered. Raymond introduces this resource in this way:
WELCO₂ME
Would you like to learn more about CO₂ so you can have informed conversations about climate policy and future energy investments? Or would you rather pass judgment on CO₂ after learning about the basics? Then this is the website for you.
There are 29 infographic images that can be downloaded in four PDF files. Thanks again, Raymond for your interest and efforts to make essential scientific information available to one and all. PDF links are in red.
There are 29 infographic images that can be downloaded in four PDF files. Thanks again, Raymond for your interest and efforts to make essential scientific information available to one and all. PDF links are in red.
At that website the high resolution infographic PDFs can be downloaded at no charge with no restrictions on use. There are also informative videos and FAQ pages, as well as links to contact with questions, comments or additional suggestions. There is also a link to support this work if you are so inclined.
Frank Clemente and Fred Palmer remind us how essential is coal power with their Real Clear Energy article What Coal Did Today. Text is below with my bolds and added images.
Coal has been the material foundation of industrialization, urbanization, modernization and technological development for more than two centuries. The examples are endless. It was coal that propelled the Industrial Revolution in England that spread throughout the world. It was coal that provided the electrification of virtually every society.
Progress of civilization through changing mixes of energy sources.
Coal was the foundational fuel for the electrification of the Tennessee Valley Authority and brought myriad associated benefits to the cities, towns and farms across the entire American landscape. It was coal that powered the Transcontinental Railroad and the steamships that traversed every ocean. Coal produced the steel that enabled the skyscrapers, bridges, hospitals, highways, dams. irrigation systems and power plants. Steel remains the backbone of practically every home, factory, school and hospital.
And it was coal that provided the means to lift millions upon millions out of poverty and extended human existence to enjoy a higher quality of life. It is no coincidence that the U.S. increase in life expectancy from 48 in 1900 to 77 in 2000 was highly correlated with the rise of coal-based electricity. No wonder that the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) identified “electrification” as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century.
But coal is far more than history. It is a current global reality,
improving the daily lives of billions of people throughout the world.
Consider the continuing role coal plays in the largest urbanizing society in the world—comprising 1.5 Billion people—nearly 20%% of the global population:
India: coal generates 75% of electricity, produces over 80% of steel and the vast majority of cement. India’s urban population is projected to grow by an incredible 400 million people by 2050, resulting in over 900 million living in cities, The World Bank has warned that 50% of the necessary urban infrastructure for 2050 has not yet built. Coal is the sine qua non of that growth.
As a result, India’s installed crude steel capacity of about 180 million metric tons in fiscal year 2025 is set to grow, reaching up to 280 million metric tons by 2035 alone.
And the beat goes on, By 2050, 68% of the world’s population is projected to live in urban areas, adding approximately 2.5 billion people to cities, some 80 million a year, 220,000 each day, 9,000 per hour and 190 new urbanites every single minute 24/7 for 24 years.
Milloy reads AI bias/climate riot act to IBM management at annual shareholder meeting. Here is the media release and audio presentation for the IBM shareholder proposal of the Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research. The annual shareholder meeting is April 28, 2026. Text of press release below with my bolds and added images.
Press Release: IBM’s AI Model: Garbage In, Garbage Out
Washington, D.C. – At next week’s IBM annual meeting, shareholders will vote on a proposal from the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) tackling potential bias within the company’s artificial intelligence models.
Proposal 7 (“AI Bias Audit”) requests “a report, within the next year, on the methods used to eliminate bias from the Company’s artificial intelligence (AI) models.”
At the April 28 meeting, FEP Executive Director Steve Milloy will cite climate alarmism as an example of where AI too often gets it wrong:
I am an AI user and it can be a great tool. But AI is subject to what 1950s IBM programmer George Fuechsel called “GIGO” – garbage in, garbage out. The Internet is full of amazing information. It is also full of amazing garbage. AI models often cannot distinguish between the two.
An example of garbage-in, garbage-out AI occurs in the controversial area of global warming and climate change. Here are three hardcore facts about climate:
♦ It cannot be scientifically demonstrated that greenhouse gas emissions have had
any effect on global climate.
♦ Emissions-driven climate models do not work.
♦ No emissions-based apocalyptic climate prediction has ever come true.
Despite these realities, if you query IBM AI on climate, you will get back gloom-and-doom climate hoax dogma. This happens because the Internet has been loaded for decades with bogus climate hoax claims and assumptions that are erroneous garbage.
Milloy believes IBM’s own website is partly to blame for this misinformation:
On IBM’s website, IBM’s chief sustainability officer says, for example, that:
Global warming is “leading to increased flooding, causing heat stroke and destroying farms and livelihoods. Insurance is becoming unaffordable.”
None of that is true. But it is what IBM AI is programmed with. Even IBM staff has been polluted with the climate. It is precisely the sort of garbage that George Fueschsel warned about.
The mindless parroting of climate hoax garbage to governments, businesses and the public has had devastating economic and societal impacts around the world – from wars to inflation to deadly energy failures to energy rationing to crop failures to deindustrialization to lost jobs to wasted taxpayer money to traumatized school children and beyond.
It has been estimated that world has wasted $10 trillion chasing the climate hoax narrative since 2015 alone. The list of harms from the climate hoax is endless. Yet IBM AI has learned the hoax and spreads the climate garbage on to users. Milloy will say:
“While IBM may be great at the computing part of AI, the world actually functions on realities that are often lost in the Internet dumpster,” “Management needs to be much more humble about all this. It needs to take the bias problem seriously. Touchy-feely videos on the IBM website just don’t cut it.”
IBM shareholders can support Proposal 7 by voting their proxies before Tuesday’s meeting.
The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:
The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
A major El Nino was the dominant climate feature in recent years.
Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated. This February report is based on HadSST 4, but with a twist. The data is slightly different in the new version, 4.2.0.0 replacing 4.1.1.0. Product page is here.
The Current Context
The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST 4.2 starting in 2015 through February 2026. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016, followed by rising temperatures in 2023 and 2024 and cooling in 2025, now with a mild rising in 2026.
Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes. That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period. A small warming was driven by NH summer peaks in 2021-22, but offset by cooling in SH and the tropics, By January 2023 the global anomaly was again below the mean.
Then in 2023-24 came an event resembling 2015-16 with a Tropical spike and two NH spikes alongside, all higher than 2015-16. There was also a coinciding rise in SH, and the Global anomaly was pulled up to 1.1°C in 2023, ~0.3° higher than the 2015 peak. Then NH started down autumn 2023, followed by Tropics and SH descending 2024 to the present. During 2 years of cooling in SH and the Tropics, the Global anomaly came back down, led by Tropics cooling from its 1.3°C peak 2024/01, down to 0.6C in September this year. Note the smaller peak in NH in July 2025 now declining along with SH and the Global anomaly cooler as well. In December the Global anomaly exactly matched the mean for this period, with all regions converging on that value, led by a 6 month drop in NH. Now in 2026 the first 3 months show a mild warming in all regions, in March approximately matching values 3 years ago, 03/2023 before the warming spike.
Comment:
The climatists have seized on this unusual warming as proof their Zero Carbon agenda is needed, without addressing how impossible it would be for CO2 warming the air to raise ocean temperatures. It is the ocean that warms the air, not the other way around. Recently Steven Koonin had this to say about the phonomenon confirmed in the graph above:
El Nino is a phenomenon in the climate system that happens once every four or five years. Heat builds up in the equatorial Pacific to the west of Indonesia and so on. Then when enough of it builds up it surges across the Pacific and changes the currents and the winds. As it surges toward South America it was discovered and named in the 19th century It iswell understood at this point that the phenomenon has nothing to do with CO2.
Now people talk about changes in that phenomena as a result of CO2 but it’s there in the climate system already and when it happens it influences weather all over the world. We feel it when it gets rainier in Southern California for example. So for the last 3 years we have been in the opposite of an El Nino, a La Nina, part of the reason people think the West Coast has been in drought.
It has now shifted in the last months to an El Nino condition that warms the globe and is thought to contribute to this Spike we have seen. But there are other contributions as well. One of the most surprising ones is that back in January of 2022 an enormous underwater volcano went off in Tonga and it put up a lot of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. It increased the upper atmosphere of water vapor by about 10 percent, and that’s a warming effect, and it may be that is contributing to why the spike is so high.
A longer view of SSTs
To enlarge, open image in new tab.
The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations. Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015. This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since. The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies. Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July. 1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino.
The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 was dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2.
SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8, a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12. Again SSTs are average 2013-14.
Now a different pattern appears. The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off. But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average. In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16. NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.
The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.) Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021. In 2021-22 there were again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, then in October to January 2023 by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.
Then in 2023 the Tropics flipped from below to well above average, while NH produced a summer peak extending into September higher than any previous year. Despite El Nino driving the Tropics January 2024 anomaly higher than 1998 and 2016 peaks, following months cooled in all regions, and the Tropics continued cooling in April, May and June along with SH dropping. After July and August NH warming again pulled the global anomaly higher, September through January 2025 resumed cooling in all regions, continuing February through April 2025, with little change in May,June and July despite upward bumps in NH. Now temps in all regions have cooled led by NH from August through December 2025. A mild warming in 2026 appears in all regions January through March.
What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH. The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before. After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.
Contemporary AMO Observations
Through January 2023 I depended on the Kaplan AMO Index (not smoothed, not detrended) for N. Atlantic observations. But it is no longer being updated, and NOAA says they don’t know its future. So I find that ERSSTv5 AMO dataset has current data. It differs from Kaplan, which reported average absolute temps measured in N. Atlantic. “ERSST5 AMO follows Trenberth and Shea (2006) proposal to use the NA region EQ-60°N, 0°-80°W and subtract the global rise of SST 60°S-60°N to obtain a measure of the internal variability, arguing that the effect of external forcing on the North Atlantic should be similar to the effect on the other oceans.” So the values represent SST anomaly differences between the N. Atlantic and the Global ocean.
The chart above confirms what Kaplan also showed. As August is the hottest month for the N. Atlantic, its variability, high and low, drives the annual results for this basin. Note also the peaks in 2010, lows after 2014, and a rise in 2021. Then in 2023 the peak reached 1.4C before declining to 0.9 August 2026. An annual chart below is informative:
Note the difference between blue/green years, beige/brown, and purple/red years. 2010, 2021, 2022 all peaked strongly in August or September. 1998 and 2007 were mildly warm. 2016 and 2018 were matching or cooler than the global average. 2023 started out slightly warm, then rose steadily to an extraordinary peak in July. August to October were only slightly lower, but by December cooled by ~0.4C.
Then in 2024 the AMO anomaly started higher than any previous year, then leveled off for two months declining slightly into April. Remarkably, May showed an upward leap putting this on a higher track than 2023, and rising slightly higher in June. In July, August and September 2024 the anomaly declined, and despite a small rise in October, ended close to where it began. Note 2025 started much lower than the previous year and headed sharply downward, well below the previous two years, then since April through September aligning with 2010. In October there was an unusual upward spike, now reversed down to match 2022 and 2016. The orange 2026 line continues downward and is visible on top of 2016 purple line, well below the peak years of 2023 and 2024.
The pattern suggests the ocean may be demonstrating a stairstep pattern like that we have also seen in HadCRUT4.
The rose line is the average anomaly 1982-1996 inclusive, value 0.18. The orange line the average 1982-2025, value 0.41 also for the period 1997-2012. The red line is 2015-2025, value 0.74. As noted above, these rising stages are driven by the combined warming in the Tropics and NH, including both Pacific and Atlantic basins.
The oceans are driving the warming this century. SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.” The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect. The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? And is the sun adding forcing to this process?
USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean
A comprehensive new study extending the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) record back to 1899 finds that both hot and cold temperature extremes across the contiguous United States have declined over the past 127 years. The research, performed by Dr. John R. Christy, Alabama State Climatologist (retired) and professor of atmospheric and Earth science at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, analyzed more than 40 million daily temperature observations to provide the most complete long-term view to date of U.S. extreme heat and cold. The paper is published in Theoretical and Applied Climatology. Excerpts below with my bolds and some added images.
Abstract
Knowledge of temperature extremes, and their potential changes within a climate system of increasing greenhouse gases, is of vital interest for humans and the infrastructure which supports them. To produce a better understanding of how daily extreme temperatures have changed over time in the conterminous US (CONUS), the United States Historical Climate Network (USHCN) database was extended back to 1899 and forward to 2025. The original 1,218 stations, selected in the 1980s by NOAA as capable of addressing climate concerns, have since been neglected – almost half of the stations have closed since 2000. Incomplete station records were supplemented with nearby stations with high correlation and removeable biases to provide time series for 1,211 of the stations with at least 92% of data present. Extreme temperature metrics for summer daily maximum temperatures and winter daily minimum temperatures were calculated. The general result is that metrics for extreme summer heat, e.g., hottest values, number of heatwave days, etc., show modest negative trends since 1899. Extreme cold temperature metrics also indicate a decline in their occurrences especially since the 1990s. In sum, instances of both hot and cold extreme metrics have declined since 1899. To demonstrate an application of this dataset we examined the claims of one source regarding changing temperature extremes, The National Climate Assessment 5.
This metric determines for each day of the season the particular year in which the hottest (coldest) TMax (TMin) occurred. There are 153 (122) days in the May-Sep (Dec-Mar, leap year) for which a daily record will be achieved. The number of extremes occurring in each year is calculated per station then geographically interpolated as discussed above. This metric is more robust than the single All-Time metric above as each station contributes 153 (122) values to the time series rather than just one. This also provides an indication of the incidence of multiple hot and cold records to help identify periods of excess heat (cold).
The expected value for a purely random process for the number of daily TMax (TMin) records would be 1.20 (0.96) in a given year per station for a 127-year record (i.e., 1.20 = 153/127 and 0.96 = 122/127). The results (Fig. 4) indicate again that 1936 contributed the most daily hot records for the CONUS at 6.7 per station but followed more closely by other years, with 1934 (5.3), 1931 (3.4) and 1911 and 1925 (3.3) completing the top five.
The number of coldest records occurred in 1899 (3.7) in association with February 1899 event. The following years experienced extreme cold as well, 1917 (3.3), 1989 (2.9), 1924 (2.4) and 1936 (2.4). Thus, 1936 was a year with many extremes on both ends of the thermometer.
Comparing the two metrics in Figs. 10 and 11 produces Fig. 12 which displays the sum and the difference, year-by-year of the 15-yr running means. The sum of days in extreme heat/cold declined from over 120 in the 1930s to about 75 since 1960. The conclusion here would be that the CONUS has experienced a decline of around 30% of these durative extreme events in the past 100 years. Along with this decline has been an increase in heatwave days vs. cold wave days since the 1970s, mainly due to the increase in heatwave days in the West (Fig. 10) and the decline in cold wave days overall.
Discussion
Overall, our project indicates that extremes in summer heat-related metrics for the CONUS as defined in the four questions above do not show increasing trends, but rather modest negative trends, and thus appear to be substantially affected by other forcings such as natural variability in addition to GHGs. There are positive TMax metric trends in western regions which are countered by larger negative trends elsewhere.
The number of cold extreme events has declined in the past 30 years too and this is likely, in part, related to the development of infrastructure around the stations which disturbs the nocturnal boundary layer, inhibiting the formation of the cold, shallow layer in which TMin is observed. Additionally, this result may be an early sign of atmospheric warming of the coldest air masses by the added GHGs (e.g., Krayenhoff et al. 2018), though this hypothesis has not been confirmed as a direct result of GHGs (e.g., Huang et al. 2023). Observations of the deep atmospheric temperature in the polar region north of + 60° latitude indicate a warming trend of + 0.47 °F (+ 0.26 C) decade− 1 since 1979 compared with a global trend of + 0.27 °F (+ 0.15 C) decade− 1 (Spencer et al. 2017). This would suggest Arctic air intrusions into the CONUS may be slightly warmer now than in the past century or so (for whatever reason) and thus consistent with the results shown here for a lessening of the magnitude of cold events in recent decades. However, we note the same area in the southern hemisphere shows virtually no warming (+ 0.05 °F (+ 0.03 C) decade− 1).
Conclusions
In the field of climate change, attention has been drawn to extreme metrics occurring in the last several years as evidence for human influences through increasing GHGs (e.g., USGCRP 2017; Seneviratne et al. 2021; Jay et al. 2023). Examining this aspect of climate and weather is appropriate since human thriveability is often constrained by the magnitude of the extremes that we experience. We describe here a dataset constructed to examine the occurrence through time of extreme temperature metrics in the CONUS for the coldest winter and hottest summer days since Dec 1898. The dataset is based on the 1,218 USHCN stations 1,211 of which have been supplemented to be “complete”, i.e., each station having at least 92% of days available for analysis.
The results indicate that extremes in heat-related metrics for daily TMax in the summer have not increased and in fact often show modest declines since 1899, due mostly to the early heat events during 1925–1954. This is consistent with Seneviratne et al. 2021 (IPCC AR6, their Fig. 11). Cold-related extreme events based on winter TMin show evidence of decreasing occurrences, two causes of which were proposed, (1) increasing human development around weather stations, and (2) an early response to increasing GHGs as they warm the coldest air first. When taken together, the occurrences of heat and cold extremes have declined over the past 127 years in the CONUS, i.e., the climate over the CONUS has become less impacted by temperature extremes to this point.
Relating this reduction of extreme events to increasing GHGs would be difficult
as the magnitude of the regional natural variability of weather and climate
is considerable in comparison to a small GHG-induced temperature rise.
Once the shifts were accommodated, the time series (Fig. 14) for Fresno 12-month running anomalies indicate very different results between TMax and TMin, which is a clear indication of the NCI of urbanization. The TMax time series indicates no trend through 2012 (slightly negative) but contains a relatively sudden rise in 2013 which is consistent with the entire western CONUS as seen in Figs. 5 and 10. The overall TMax trend is + 0.03 °F (+ 0.02 C) decade− 1. The trend in TMin is + 0.43 °F (+ 0.24 C) decade− 1.
The impact of Non-Climatic Influences (NCI) was considered in the temperature evolution of one USHCN station, Fresno California, as an example of a clear and large response to forcings unrelated to the increasing GHGs. In this case, the urbanization impact on TMin of 5 °F (~ 3 °C) is clearly apparent, while summer TMax (with urbanization) indicates a trend not significantly different from zero. Voluminous research has and will be performed on this aspect of surface temperature records as these types of influences need to be identified and removed so that changes in the background climate due to GHGs may be estimated with more confidence. We also demonstrated that one must be cautious when interpreting official statements about extreme weather events for the CONUS.
Jason Isaac and Steve Milloy bring tidings of great joy in 2026 in their Washington Examiner article with the title as above.
Every April, like clockwork, a predictable ritual unfolds. Earth Day rolls around with the same tired apocalyptic sermon from the climate catastrophe cult.
The routine never changes: The planet is dying, humans are to blame, and only surrendering your freedom, your car, and your paycheck to the green elites will save it. Fifty-six years later, they’re still wrong.
The planet is fine. It’s the climate cult that’s cracked.
You’d think after all the busted prophecies, they’d tone it down. Instead, they double down.
Remember when the “experts” said the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013? The ice is still there, just as thick and stubborn as ever.
We were told hurricanes would grow “more frequent and more powerful.” Instead, there were near-normal seasons in 2023 and 2024.
So now they move the goalposts: Every weather event, hot or cold, wet or dry, is “caused by climate change.” It’s not science. It’s superstition plotted on graphs. They said snow would vanish from ski resorts — remember that “End of Snow” panic? Instead, skiers in the Northeast this year were digging out from record blizzards.
The 2023-2024 warming spike was caused by a natural El Nino. When the El Nino ended, the spike ended. February 2026 was cooler, in fact, than February 1998 despite a trillion tons of emissions.
Time after time, the “experts” predict apocalypse. And year after year, Mother Nature refuses to corroborate their stories.
Cleaner Air Than Ever Before
Air Quality – National Summary EPA
Meanwhile, the actual data tell a different story. U.S. air quality today is the cleanest it’s been in 50 years.
My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT
Global deaths from natural disasters have plummeted over 90% since the early 20th century. Crop yields worldwide keep hitting records.
Humans are safer, wealthier, and more energy-secure than at any time in history.
The planet isn’t gasping for breath — it’s very healthy.
That’s exactly what George Carlin was getting at in his legendary bit, “The Planet Is Fine.” Over three decades ago, long before “climate anxiety” was a diagnosis, Carlin, perhaps the most famous comedian of his time, saw through the sanctimony.
The planet’s been through ice ages, asteroid strikes, and supervolcanoes — and it’s still spinning. Yet today’s enviroactivists think your SUV is going to do what Mount Tambora couldn’t? Please. Their arrogance is nauseating.
The self-appointed saviors of Earth don’t really care about the planet.
They care about control.
Earth Day has turned into a political holiday — a green May Day for those who want to remake society in their image. Their “solutions” invariably mean more regulation, higher taxes, and fewer choices.
Shut down the power plants, outlaw gas stoves, ban plastic straws while flying private jets to elitist conclaves dressed up as ‘‘climate conferences.”
It’s not about saving Earth. It’s about saving face.
When the predictions fail, the excuse shifts. Sea levels were supposed to swallow Manhattan, but the only thing underwater now is former Vice President Al Gore’s credibility.
Polar bears were “going extinct” until the population hit record highs. Every “climate emergency” gets debunked, but the headlines roll on because fear sells.
Carlin joked that people crave bad news. The legacy media just industrialized it.
And the public is getting wise. Net-zero mandates
are collapsing under their own absurdity.
Europe ran headfirst into the wall of “green reality” and came crawling back to coal and nuclear. Even California’s self-inflicted energy shortages have people asking whether energy policy should be based on cockamamie models or common sense.
The answer should be obvious: If your plan can’t keep the lights on, it’s not saving the planet — it’s sabotaging it.
“Follow the science” is their mantra. Fine.
The science says carbon dioxide is plant food.
The science says climate models have blown past reality for decades. The science says mankind thrives in warmer eras.
None of this fits the narrative, so it gets buried under the next climate scare of the month. The apocalypse never arrives — but the grant money does.
Here’s the part Earth Day activists really hate: The planet isn’t fragile — we are.
Nature doesn’t need our policies, our pledges, or our petitions. It will outlast every last panel discussion in Davos, Switzerland.
So instead of groveling over our collective “climate guilt,” maybe they should celebrate what we’ve actually accomplished: clean air, longer lives, record food production, and energy that works at the flick of a switch.
The planet doesn’t care about your compost bin or your latest electric car mandate. It’s been around for 4.5 billion years, and cooling for the last 485 million years, and it will still be here when the last climate model is rotting on an obsolete hard drive.
It’s humans who need perspective. As Carlin famously said, “The planet is doing great.” The hysterical people who keep screaming that it isn’t are the problem.
Two things happened in February that will change the world. The first is the Iran War.
The second is an event so obscure most Americans don’t even know it happened — the Feb. 12 repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding by the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This decision puts a knife into the kidney of all the major U.S. climate rules made under the Obama and Biden administrations. It was the legal underpinning for the Green New Deal.
Of the two events, the end of the Endangerment Finding is of a greater consequence, yet 21st Century conventional wisdom — curated and gatekept by social media, the most unwise medium ever invented — makes it hard to fit one’s head around this argument. But here goes.
The Iran War is costing about $1-2 billion a day in direct costs,and several times that in indirect costs from higher energy prices across most of Europe and Asia, though less so in the United States, which is increasingly energy independent.
Meanwhile, the 2009 Endangerment is one of those “regulatory state” workarounds when Congress doesn’t pass a law or the Supreme Court passes on a tough decision. This administrative decision is the foundation of ALL modern climate regulation and global climate diplomacy. Its reversal has the Trump administration crowing about the $1.3 trillion in savings over the next decade to American citizens through cheaper automobiles, among other things.
This has made a lot of the right people unhappy.
In an interview with The New York Times, Jody Freeman, director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, who happened to design the Endangerment Finding for the Obama White House, said the Trump administration wants “to not just do what other Republican administrations have done, which is weaken regulations. They want to take the federal government out of the business of regulation, period.”
Speaking as someone who worked at the EPA during the first Trump administration, I know Freeman is wrong. Republicans don’t mind environmental regulation based on good incentives that don’t penalize industries that are politically disfavored through no fault of their own.
But there is a human cost to all regulation that is essentially unpriced,
and it is something Freeman and the Left never acknowledge.
Federal regulation itself was invented by the government to improve human lives — think the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, or the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that ended child labor. The problem is that future choices forgone, which economists call opportunity costs, are nearly impossible to quantify and constrain, thereby stifling innovation and invention in almost unfathomable ways.
Consider the following counterfactual.
If the U.S. Supreme Court had made privacy laws stricter in the late 1990s, sharing pictures of strangers without their permission would have been illegal. This would have disincentivized early camera phone makers, Sharp and Sanyo, from including cameras in the first smartphones in the early 2000s and would have slowed or even undermined Apple’s decision to build the iPhone.
Less than 25 years after the first U.S. camera phone was released, the total value of mobile technologies and services globally exceeds $7 trillion, representing more than 6% of global GDP. Much of these trillions of dollars of newly created wealth exists in the share price of Silicon Valley firms, and the retirement savings of nearly 100 million Americans and the U.S. economy writ large.
What the Endangerment Finding did was create a domestic legal predicate
to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
That predicate, in turn, allowed Democratic administrations to commit America to the Paris Agreementand the broader U.N. climate regime that the U.S. Senate was fooled into accepting when it passed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992.
It’s quite possible that the global climate regime created under UN sponsorship had a similar effect on energy-intensive industries to that a strict privacy law would have had on smartphones, which became the entry point for billions of people into the digital economy.
And now it’s ending. By undoing the Endangerment Finding, you don’t just repeal a regulation; you repeal the regulatory superstructure that has saddled the United States with trillions of dollars in opportunity costs and billions in explicit costs every year.
Thus, however costly a short conflict with Iran would be, it hasn’t been
nearly as much as the unpriced opportunity costs of
the last 30 years under the UN Climate regime.
Once the U.S. is no longer legally bound at home, it can exit the international framework cleanly. And when America leaves, the dominoes fall in order. Russia, China, India, and Saudi Arabia — none of whom ever believed “the planet is dying” rhetoric anyway — will follow suit. They never saw the climate treaty as anything other than a wealth-transfer mechanism from the West, and now the jig is up for the American Left and the European establishment.
Instead of this transhumanist dystopia, we have the possibility of
returning meaningful heavy industry to the U.S.,
creating over a million good-paying craft jobs,
while still maintaining strong environmental laws.
Indeed, fears of environmental backsliding could be easily remedied by Congress if it were to pass the Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy Security Act (ARC-ES), introduced in Congress late last year by Rep. Troy Balderson (R-OH). The ARC-ES bill would codify into law clear definitions of key terms like “affordable,” “reliable,” and “clean,” ensuring that investment risks are limited to cost-effective infrastructure projects only.
The bill would help America’s most affordable, reliable, and environmentally-friendly energy sources, including nuclear and natural gas, remain part of the energy mix — a crucial requirement for American households and businesses.
The fact that neither the ARC-ES nor the Endangerment Finding’s reversal of fortune is anywhere in the news tells you everything you need to know about the current state of global journalism.
This is no slight to the news coverage concerning Iran, which is compelling, but all over the place. It just shows how incentives for informing the public in the 21st century about what truly matters in their lives are weak and getting worse. Perhaps one day someone will invent a better medium for information.
William Murray is a former speechwriter for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the past editor of RealClearEnergy from 2015 to 2017, and currently the chief speechwriter for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
The Biden administration’s obsession with climate change has contributed to the housing affordability challenges Americans face today, and there are many harmful green policies that need to be undone. The Trump administration is taking an ax to several of them, and it just received a big boost when a U.S. District Court repealed a measure burdening low-income and first-time home buyers.
Specifically, on March 5th, an Eastern District of Texas decision vacated a 2024 requirement from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that new homes qualifying for federally-backed mortgages must comply with the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). Thankfully, the court in Utah v. HUD found the agency’s actions in violation of the law.
The IECC is a spare-no-expense assault on residential energy use – for example, by requiring far more insulation than makes sense and necessitating costlier appliances. A number of environmental organizations advocated for the IECC’s building code dictates, saying they would ensure that “low-income homeowners and residents are prioritized in a climate-aligned future.”
And mind you, this was HUD – not the Environmental Protection Agency – an agency whose core mission is to make housing more affordable. Yet it was trying to impose these expensive environmental requirements on the very Americans who need federal help to qualify for a mortgage. In fact, over 80% of HUD-backed mortgages have gone to first-time buyers with lower credit scores and smaller down payments than those served by conventional lenders.
Physicist Donald Rapp retired from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and has authored many books including Ice Ages and Interglacials: Measurements, Interpretation and Models; Assessing Climate Change: Temperatures, Solar Radiation and Heat Balance; and Use of Extraterrestrial Resources for Human Space Missions to Moon or Mars (Astronautical Engineering). Most recently he published Revisiting 2,000 Years of Climate Change (Bad Science and the “Hockey Stick”)
Abstract
The widespread explanations of the greenhouse effect taught to millions of schoolchildren are misleading. The objective of this work is to clarify how increasing CO2 produces warming in current times. It is found that there are two contexts for the greenhouse gas effect. In one context, the fundamental greenhouse gas effect, one imagines a dry Earth starting with no water or CO2 and adding water and CO2 . This leads to the familiar “thermal blanket” that strongly inhibits IR transmission from the Earth to the atmosphere. The Earth is much warmer with H2 O and CO2 . In the other context, the current greenhouse gas effect, CO2 is added to the current atmosphere. The thermal blanket on IR radiation hardly changes. But the surface loses energy primarily by evaporation and thermals. Increased CO2 in the upper atmosphere carries IR radiation to higher altitudes. The Earth radiates to space at higher altitudes where it is cooler, and the Earth is less able to shed energy. The Earth warms to restore the energy balance. The “thermal blanket” is mainly irrelevant to the current greenhouse gas effect. It is concluded that almost all discussions of the greenhouse effect are based on the fundamental greenhouse gas effect, which is a hypothetical construct, while the current greenhouse gas effect is what is happening now in the real world.
Adding CO2 does not add much to a “thermal blanket” but instead,
drives emission from the Earth to higher, cooler altitudes.
Background
Were it not for the Sun, the Earth would be a frozen hulk in space. The Sun sends a spectrum of irradiance to the Earth, the Earth warms, and the Earth radiates energy out to space. This process continues until the Earth warms enough to radiate about as much energy to space as it receives from the Sun, reaching an approximate steady state. If for some reason, the Earth is unable to radiate all the energy received from the Sun, the Earth will warm until it can radiate all the energy received. It is widely accepted that rising CO2 concentration reduces the ability of the Earth to radiate energy to space. In a dynamic situation where the CO2 concentration is continually increasing with time, the Earth will continuously warm as it tries to “catch up” to the effect of increasing CO2 and reestablish a steady state. It is a conundrum that while it is widely accepted that rising CO2 concentration produces global warming, the exact mechanism by which warming is induced in the current atmosphere by rising CO2 is not widely understood. The concept of a “thermal blanket” imposed by greenhouse gases to warm the Earth has merit in some contexts but is mainly irrelevant to the question of how adding CO2 to the current atmosphere produces warming.
Before attempting to deal with the question of how rising CO2 concentration affects the current Earth’s climate, it is appropriate to first discuss the Earth’s energy budget. The exact values for each energy flow are not important, but the relative values are important to show which processes dominate.
Finally, we provide an explanation of how adding CO2 to the current atmosphere produces global warming in the current atmosphere. The mechanism is not widely known and is likely to be surprising to some. Warming does not occur by increasing the thickness of the thermal blanket but instead occurs by raising the altitude at which the Earth radiates to space.
IR radiation
A fundamental law of physics states that all bodies emit a spectrum of radiant power proportional to the fourth power of their absolute temperature. A body at absolute temperature T (K) emits power per unit area: P = σ T 4 = 5.67 x 10 -8 T 4 (W/m 2 ) For example, a body at T = 280 K is said to emit 348 W/m 2 . However, this law of physics is academic and not directly applicable to real-world experience. In the real world, we never have a single isolated body emitting radiation, instead, we deal with pairs of bodies where the warmer one radiates a net flux to the cooler one. (If you stand next to a body at 280 K, you don’t feel an incoming heat flux of 348 W/m 2 ). For example, if there is one body at 280 K and a second body at 275 K, the warmer body will radiate through a vacuum to the cooler body at a net of 24 W/m 2 . That is a real-world parameter that can be measured. But the academic model involves calculating the emission of the warm body as 348 W/m 2 and the emission of the cooler body as 324 W/m 2, and subtracting, the net transfer from the warm body to the cool body is 24 W/m 2 . But the calculated values are academic and cannot be measured in the real world with 348 W/m 2 in one direction and 324 W/m 2 in the opposite direction. Those values are only of academic use to infer the measurable net of about 24 W/m 2 . See the simple model in Figure 1 presented here for illustration.
Figure 1: Radiant heat transfer between warm and cool bodies
The two contexts of the greenhouse effect
We are all aware of the widely discussed greenhouse effectthat warms the Earth as the concentration of greenhouse gases increases. But just how does it work?Here, we define two contexts for greenhouse gas effects:
1) The fundamental greenhouse gas effectcan be described by a “gedanken experiment” in which one imagines a dry Earth starting with no water or CO 2 and begins adding water and CO 2 . The original atmosphere, lacking water and CO 2 , will transmit IR radiation completely. As a result, the Earth will be quite cool. As H 2 O and CO 2 are added to the atmosphere, the transmission of IR radiation from the Earth’s surface is increasingly inhibited, and the Earth warms. As the Earth warms, evaporation and thermals transmit more energy from the Earth to the atmosphere. By the time H 2 O and CO 2levels reach current levels, the atmosphere is almost opaque to IR radiation, and a “thermal blanket” greatly reduces IR transmission from the Earth to the atmosphere. The Earth cools primarily by evaporation and thermals, and it is much warmer than if CO 2 and water were absent. The notion of a “thermal blanket” of IR absorbing gases warming the Earth has validity in this context starting with a transmitting atmosphere and adding greenhouse gases. However, once the thermal blanket is established with ~ 400 ppm CO 2 , adding more CO 2 has only a small effect on reducing IR radiation from the surface.
2) The current greenhouse gas effectdeals with the question: How does the addition of CO 2 to the atmosphere affect the global average temperature in 2024 and beyond, with CO 2 around 400+ ppm? It was shown previously that starting with no water or CO 2 , adding H 2 O and CO 2 to the atmosphere generates a “thermal blanket” for radiation. But once that “thermal blanket” is well established and the lower atmosphere is very opaque to IR radiation, what is the effect of adding even more CO 2 ? Dufresne, et al. provide a detailed technical analysis to show how the current greenhouse effect works [7]. However, this reference is complex and written for expert specialists in IR transmission through the atmosphere. In the sections that follow, a simpler, qualitative interpretation will be presented.
Figure 3: Energy flows in the Earth’s system. (Based on LTWS references).
Energy budget of the earth
Energy transfer in the Earth system can take place by thermal transfers (“thermals”) where winds carry warm air up to colder regions, evaporation from the surface (removes heat), and condensation in the atmosphere (deposits heat) and radiation (further discussion follows).
After analyzing the data in the LTWS references (see Section 1.2), a rough estimate of key energy flows per unit time in the Earth system is given as follows. The exact numbers are not critical; only their relative values are important for this discussion.
These results can be visualized in Figure 3 which is based on the references LTWS. As shown in Figure 3, incoming solar irradiance (341 W/ m 2 ) is partly reflected by the lower atmosphere back out tospace (79 W/m 2 ), partly reflected by the Earth’s surface back out to space (23 W/m 2 ), partly absorbed by the lower atmosphere (76 W/m 2 ), and finally about 163 W/m 2 is absorbed by the surface.
Radiation from the Earth’s surface to the lower atmosphere requires further discussion. The LTWS references show high up and down radiation flows. For example, Trenberth, et al. did not show radiation transfer between the Earth’s surface as a simple 25 W/m 2 net radiative transfer from the surface to the lower atmosphere. Instead, they showed 356 W/m 2 radiated upward from the surface and 333 W/m 2 of “back radiation” from the atmosphere to the surface [2]. The figure 356 W/m 2 radiated upward from the surface corresponds to the theoretical radiation from a blackbody at 281.5 K. The claimed downward figure is difficult to explain. But both of these figures are academic. What is happening is that the warm Earth is radiating upward through an optically thick gas of H 2 O and CO 2 absorbers, and the radiant transfer through that thick gas is estimated to be only a mere ~25 W/m 2. This is the “thermal blanket” so often referred to in discussions of global warming. The thermal blanket is real. But the problem with so many discussions of the greenhouse effect is that there is a preoccupation with radiant energy transfer between the Earth and the atmosphere (which is “blanketed”) while neglecting the more important transfers of energy to the atmosphere by processes other than radiation.
Figure 4: Pressure, temperature, and relative humidity vs. altitude [8].
The terms “lower atmosphere” and “upper atmosphere” are defined next. Following Miscolczi, Figure 4 shows that the demarcation between upper and lower atmospheres occurs at an altitude of roughly 12 km above which H 2 O is frozen out and the temperature roughly stabilizes [8].
Energy transfer in the lower atmosphere takes place by conduction,
convection, and radiation. Energy transfer in the upper atmosphere
takes place primarily by radiation.
The greenhouse effect
The greenhouse effect can only be fully understood by comprehensive modeling of upward energy flows in the Earth system. Excellent studies by Dufresne, et al. and Pierrehumbert provide detailed physics [7,9]. Here, we interpret these results qualitatively.
Within the Earth system of land, ocean, atmosphere, and clouds, energy transfer is taking place continuously. There is a net energy flow upward toward higher altitudes. From the surface of the Earth, much of the upward flow of energy in the lower atmosphere is through evaporation and convection. The lower atmosphere is almost opaque to IR radiation due to water vapor and CO 2.
Figure 5: Qualitative sketch to show radiation is dominant at the highest altitude. By adding CO2 to the atmosphere, radiative energy transport is carried to a higher altitude where it is colder, reducing the radiant power emitted by the upper atmosphere.
Radiation energy transfer will persist out toward a high altitude until the CO 2 concentration diminishes. Each CO 2 molecule that absorbs an IR photon can reradiate in all directions, but in a thin atmosphere, some upward IR radiation will be lost, and on a net basis, this allows the Earth to radiate out to space. The presence of an IR transmitting/absorbing gas (CO 2 ) will allow energy transport to higher altitudes. The highest altitude where there is enough thin gas to maintain radiation is the region of the atmosphere that mainly radiates energy outward to space. This is illustrated on the left side of Figure 5. Figure 5 was created here to illustrate how the predominant energy transfer mechanisms gradually change to IR radiation at higher altitudes, and the presence of CO 2 carries the IR radiation to higher altitudes.
Conclusion
There are two different contexts for discussion of the effect of greenhouse gases on the Earth’s climate.
In one context, one can imagine an Earth with no water vapor or CO 2 in the atmosphere. This Earth can radiate effectively to space and is relatively cold. As water vapor and CO 2 are added to the atmosphere, the IR-opacity of the atmosphere increases and the Earth system warms. The greenhouse gases act as a “thermal blanket” to warm the Earth by impeding upward IR radiation. This is labeled the fundamental greenhouse gas effect. However, once the thermal blanket is established, adding more CO 2 has only a minimal effect on the thermal blanket, and reduced upward IR radiation from the surface does not produce significant warming. This is referred to by Dufresne, et al. [7] as the “saturation paradox”.
In the other context, we are concerned with the effect of adding more CO 2 to the current atmosphere where the CO 2 concentration is already 400+ ppm, and the thermal blanket is already in place, restricting upward IR-radiation. This is labeled the current greenhouse gas effect, and it is quite different from the fundamental greenhouse gas effect. In the current atmosphere, energy transfer from the Earth to the atmosphere is primarily by evaporation and thermals, and IR-radiant energy transfer is significantly impeded by an almost opaque lower atmosphere. The “thermal blanket” is in place, but it doesn’t change much as CO 2 is added to the atmosphere. Adding CO 2 to the current atmosphere slightly increases the opacity of the lower atmosphere but this is of little consequence.
In the upper atmosphere, CO 2 is the major means of energy transport by IR radiation. The greatest effect of adding CO 2 to the current atmosphere is to extend the upward range of IR-radiant transmission to higher altitudes. The main region where the Earth radiates to space is thereby extended to higher altitudes where it is colder, and the Earth cannot radiate as effectively as it could with less CO 2in the atmosphere. The Earth warms until the region in the upper atmosphere where the Earth radiates to space is warm enough to balance incoming solar energy.
My Comment:
The explanation above is clear and understandable in qualititative terms. It does not reference empirical evidence regarding a GHG effect from a raised effective radiating level (ERL). Studies investigating this theory find that the effect is too small to appear in the data.
The following diagram by Andy May shows the pattern of emissions by GHGs, mainly H2O and CO2.
Helpfully, it shows the altitudes where the emissions occur. As stated in the text above, the upper and lower tropopsphere shift occurs about 12km high, with variations lower at poles and higher in tropics. Note the large CO2 notch appears at 85km, which puts it into the thermosphere, where temperatures increase with altitude. Raising the ERL there means greater cooling, not less. The Ozone notch at 33km is in the stratosphere, where temperatures also rise with altitude. Otherwise almost all of the IR effect is from H2O.
Tilak Doshi explains how formerly empirical economists have been captured by climatist ideology, betraying their profession and public trust. His Clintel article is UK economist says high energy prices are ‘good for the climate’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
[Note: “In the old Soviet Union, the Communists allegedly used the term “useful idiot” to describe Westerners whose naïve political views furthered the Soviet agenda, even though these Westerners didn’t realize that they were being exploited in such fashion. It is in this context that I confidently declare that American economists have been useful idiots for the green socialists pushing extreme climate change policies.” Robert Murphy]
A UK economist recently said the quiet part out loud: high energy prices are ‘good for the climate’. This is not an aberration, says Tilak Doshi, but symptomatic of modern economists. “The barbarians did not storm the gates. The Western elites invited them in, gave them chairs, and asked them to redesign the curriculum.”
When petrol prices rocket because of supply shocks—such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the rerouting of oil tankers—one might have expected a discussion of geopolitics, market signals and the obvious supply-side remedies. Of which there has been plenty, some competent and even masterly, some not so competent by “instant expert” talking heads in social and mass media. But a recent article by an economist in The Conversationoffered a solution so perversely tone-deaf it could have been lifted from a Babylon Bee satirical script.
Citing research that a 10 per cent rise in UK petrol prices can cut demand by up to 5 per cent, the piece solemnly declared that “high prices are a way of adjusting consumption to cope with the lower supply.” The subtext was unmistakable: with refined products suddenly scarcer, the proper response is not to produce more fuel if the country were blessed with domestic fossil fuel resources (like the UK) or to import more from sources outside the Strait of Hormuz or both. Instead, the advice from Christoph Siemroth, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Essex, is to make what little remains even costlier—so that the hoi polloi drive less, take the bus and hasten the glorious transition to net zero.
Clueless and Insidious
One is reminded of Marie Antoinette’s famous cake remark, betraying aristocratic cluelessness. But The Conversation article is something far more insidious: the capture of economics itself by the green ideology that now rules our institutions from the BBC to the Treasury, from Oxbridge common rooms to the UK Met Office service. The discipline that once stood as the last redoubt against the Frankfurt School’s long march through the social sciences has fallen. Frank Knight, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Milton Friedman et al held the gates against postmodern gibberish for a generation. No longer. The barbarians are inside the citadel, wearing lanyards from the oxymoronically named Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, chanting “sustainability” like a secular rosary.
Consider the elementary logic that every first-year economics student once absorbed before the PPE types at Oxford and Cambridge began their higher education in Gaia worship. When the price of a good rises because of scarcity—whether from a blockade in the Persian Gulf or an OPEC production cut—the signal is unambiguous: produce more, explore more, innovate more. Britain sits atop some of the richest hydrocarbon resources in Europe. North Sea oil and gas reserves are not physically exhausted; they are made economic infeasible in the face of Miliband’s punitive tax rates.
Onshore shale, barely scratched after a decade of regulatory vandalism,
could transform our energy security if the
“precautionary principle” were not treated as holy writ.
Higher prices should, in any sane world, trigger precisely that response: more drilling, more fracking, more investment in refining capacity, more imports of oil and gas from diversified suppliers. Instead, our green economists prescribe the economic equivalent of putting a feverish patient into a sauna. Demand must fall. Prices must stay punishingly high. The suffering is the point.
Taxes
The Conversation piece is exemplary in its genre. Price caps are correctly dismissed as distortionary, leading to physical shortages and queues as a means of rationing. One needs to only remember the long lines at gas stations in the US under Jimmy Carter’s price controls after the 1979 oil price shock.
Roughly 50–55% of the UK retail price for both petrol and diesel currently go to the government as taxes.But fuel duty cuts are rejected because they are untargeted and cost the Exchequer revenue—fuel duty, after all, is nearly 2 per cent of government income, a nice little earner for the net-zero industrial complex.
The preferred remedy? One-off cash transfers to low-income car owners, modelled on Germany’s 2022 gas rebate which provided a temporary fuel tax cut in 2022 to ease soaring petrol and diesel prices during the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The beauty of this, we are told, is that it preserves the “price signal” while letting households “profit” by leaving the car at home. Translation: we will bribe you to stay poor and immobile, all in the name of the planet. Meanwhile, the authors of such wisdom never feel the pinch. They lecture the white van plumber, carpenter or electrician going about his work and the hard-pressed mother doing the school run that their higher fuel bills are a feature, not a bug.
Luxury Beliefs and Intellectual Corruption
These are luxury belief-inspired energy policies which “confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes”. As Victor Davis Hanson has so often pointed out, leftist policy elites in Democrat-run states suffer little from the consequences of their own policies. The metropolitan elite’s enthusiasm for open borders stops abruptly at the high walls of their own villas (Nancy Pelosi anyone?)
The same applies to energy. Inhabitants of the liberal metropolitan bubble can afford the £12-an-hour parking in Covent Garden, the retrofitted Victorian terrace with an air-source heat pump the size of a small car, and the Tesla whose real environmental cost is buried in Chinese lithium lakes and in artisanal cobalt mines using Congolese child workers. For them, “sustainability” is a lifestyle brand. For the rest of the country—pensioners choosing between heating and eating, hauliers facing bankruptcy, farmers unable to run their tractors—it is economic sadism dressed up as virtue.
Buddhist economist
The historical parallel is instructive. E.F. Schumacher — the “Buddhist economist” — told us, “small is beautiful” and that giant power stations were somehow spiritually corrosive. One wonders what he would make of the fact that a modern combined-cycle gas plant needs to be at least 200 MW to be remotely efficient, or that industrial civilisation runs on economies of scale, not backyard steel furnaces.
Yet today’s green establishment is repeating the Maoist folly in Western drag: decentralised “community energy”, intermittent wind and solar that require massive subsidies and backup gas plants, and an ideological insistence that the optimal size of an economy is whatever fits the carbon budget decreed by “climate modellers” in Exeter or East Anglia. The Soviet Union tried to create the New Soviet Man—selfless, collective-minded, liberated from base material desires. The project failed spectacularly. Its successor is the New Green Man, who measures his carbon footprint, cycles to the vegan restaurant, and cheers when Ed Miliband shuts down another North Sea field. The totalitarian impulse remains; only the Orwellian vocabulary has changed from “proletarian internationalism” to “just transition” and “climate justice”.
The intellectual corruption runs deep. Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate in trade theory, now produces columns that read like press releases from the Church of Climate. Marginal costs of natural gas? Not so relevant when policy costs—carbon taxes, renewable obligations, network charges, capacity market payments—make up some 60% of your bill. As Kathryn Porter,David Turver and others have documented with forensic clarity, the “energy price crisis” is largely a net-zero policy-induced crisis. The wholesale cost of electricity is only part of the story; the rest is the deliberate layering of green levies and taxes that no classical economist would recognise as market-based. Yet we are told, with straight faces, that the “97 per cent consensus” demands we accept this as settled science. The same consensus, one notes, that once assured us the pause in global temperature increase was impossible, that polar bears were doomed, and that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035.
Tyranny
Rupert Darwall’s Green Tyranny provides an insightful exploration into the origins of the climate industrial complex. The green movement’s roots lie not in empirical ecology but in a Malthusian revulsion against industrial modernity and a quasi-religious yearning for control. What to eat (less meat), how far to travel (fewer flights), what temperature your thermostat may reach (no more than 19°C if Whitehall has its way)—these are not technical questions but moral ones, policed by the new priesthood of economists who have traded the parsimony of Occam’s Razor for the abusive use of the precautionary principle (“better safe than sorry”). Uncertainty is weaponised asymmetrically so that minor or hypothetical risks (e.g., induced seismicity from fracking) trigger regulatory paralysis, while the far larger risks of alternatives are downplayed. The precautionary principle becomes a de-facto veto tool for ideological opposition to hydrocarbons, not genuine risk management.
Homo economicus, the rational maximiser embedded in cultural norms that Adam Smith understood in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, has been replaced by Homo Climaticus: a creature whose every decision must be subordinated to the carbon ledger.
The consequences are not abstract. Britain’s energy prices are among the highest in the developed world precisely because we have chosen ideology over geology. While China adds coal-fired capacity equivalent to the entire UK grid every few years and India builds out its fossil infrastructure without apology, the West hectors the Global South about net zero and wonder why BRICS+ nations hedge their “policy commitments” to UN forums such as the COP30 conference in Brazil last year. The multipolar realignment is not just geopolitical; it is energetic. The Rest have noticed that the West’s net-zero experiment is self-inflicted economic suicide. They intend no such folly.
Glimmers of Hope or Barbarians At The Gates?
Yet there are glimmers of hope. The tide is turning, as Matt Ridley explains in his recent Clintel lecture “The Climate Parrot is almost dead.” Mr. Ridley argues that public and political momentum behind the “climate emergency” narrative is weakening. Indeed, public tolerance for green virtue-signalling has limits when the bills arrive. The on-going protests in Ireland over the cost of fuel by farmers, contractors and others have been massive, leading the government to place the army on “standby” as nationwide fuel protests continue to cause significant disruption and threaten critical supplies across the country. The military’s potential involvement comes as blockades outside major fuel depots intensify, prompting a dangerous government shift towards an “enforcement” phase in response to the escalating crisis. There are indications that these protests are spreading to Norway and France, as farmers and truckers there block arterial roads with tractors and trucks.
Populist movements across Europe and the United States are demanding energy realism: all-of-the-above policies that include nuclear, gas, and yes, even beautiful, black coal, where geology and economics dictate. The Chicago School may have been breached, but it is not yet razed. Rigorous economists—those still willing to follow the data rather than the grants—continue to point out that adaptation and technological progress have always outpaced apocalyptic forecasts. The “climate emergency” that justifies Soviet-style rationing by price is, on closer inspection, a political choice, not a scientific imperative.
Barbarians
Economics was once the most parsimonious of the social sciences, cutting through trite views with marginal analysis and revealed preference. When it abandons that discipline for the higher calling of Gaia worship, it ceases to be economics and becomes propaganda. The article in The Conversation is not an aberration; it is a symptom of a discipline that has exchanged truth for tenure and rigour for righteousness. The barbarians did not storm the gates. The Western elites invited them in, gave them chairs, and asked them to redesign the curriculum.
The corrective will not come from more white papers or behavioural nudges. It will come when voters—those whose lived experience of green policy is higher bills, colder homes, and slower journeys—demand an end to the experiment. Ireland is in tumult as we speak. Energy abundance is not a luxury; it is the foundation of modern civilisation. To pretend otherwise is not sophistication. It is civilisational self-harm. And the bill, as always, lands on the people least able to afford the eco-crucifix.
The above video includes a conversation between Bjorn Lomborg and Scott Bessent at the annual IIF gathering (Institute of International Finance). The introduction by IIF CEO Tim Adams starts about 11 minutes in. For those who prefer reading, below is a lightly edited transcript of comments back and forth, along with some added images. TA refers to Adams, BL to Lomborg and SB to Bessent.
TA: Today we’re going to deepen the discussion with a conversation between Bjorn Lomborg who runs the Copenhagen Consensus and the author how to spend 75 billion to make the world a better place. I’ve had this book on my desk since it was published in 2014. It’s a great publication. If you haven’t read it, you should. I’m sure Bjorn will give you some copies. It really is how do we do development and a cost benefit assessment? How do we get the most bang for our buck? And that conversation is often missed in this town and other capitals. And of course, we’re delighted and honored to have the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent back today to join us at our spring meetings. So, ladies and gentlemen, please invite to the stage Bjorn and Secretary Scott Bessent.
BJ: Thank you very much. Tim, you kind of took away all our talking points. So, Mr. Secretary, it’s great to have a conversation here today about the World Bank and the IMF here at their spring meeting. The goals of these institutions, of course, is to accelerate global development, drive economic growth, and lift billions of people out of poverty. And these goals remain vitally important. Unfortunately, many development institutions now prioritize Western elite issues like gender, social topics, and climate change over what the world’s poorest people need and want: better education, healthcare, and reliable energy.
Nowhere is this disconnect more clear than in their climate fixation. In the latest year, 48% of the World Bank’s financing went to so-called climate finance, up from 44% the year before, exceeding their own uh 45% target. I suspect the reason why elites are so climate focused is because they correctly see the poor as more vulnerable to climate impacts. But remember, poor people are more vulnerable to every impact. They’re more vulnerable to disease, to hunger, to bad education, to corruption.
The World Bank and the IMF need to get back to making rational priorities. For instance, using cost benefit analysis. As Tim also just mentioned, these organizations used to lead the world in cost benefit analysis. As I’ve argued for a long time, and the reason I think we’re having this conversation now is that we need to scrap these climate targets and get the World Bank and IMF back to their core missions.
In your speech here last year at the IIF, you made this exact point and you called on the World Bank and the IMF to refocus on their core missions. In your view, how has the bank and the fund responded and what more do they need to do?
SB: Well, Bjorn, thank you and good good to be back here a year later to talk a little about a report card for the multilateral banks and to also say that the US leads the G20 this year and I can tell you that our agenda is growth. We believe in the US that the biggest risk to financial stability is a lack of growth.
When I look at the choices that Europe has made unable to follow the Draghy report from Mario Draghy on how to increase growth. The the EU was originally the European Economic Union and it was meant to facilitate trade among the members, make it more seamless, create more prosperity. And it turns out that it’s probably been a hint of the IMF and World Bank. I’m informed by Grace Hopper who was the first female Admiral in the US who was a big fan of it. She has some great sayings. Two of them, one is: The most dangerous words in the English language are “because we’ve always done it that way”. And the second is: “The way to get things done is to get things done.”
And I think we need to step back and look at the IMF and World Bank, their core missions. The IMF I believe the is global financial stability and stabilizing the countries that are in bad equilibriums and getting them back to a sustainable path an economically sustainable path. World Bank is to pull people out of poverty and we cannot have these kinds of elite beliefs get in the way. And I think a lot about this Nature magazine article that came out in April of 2024 that became the guiding principle for so much of the climate beliefs: that GDP was going to be 60% % lower by the turn of the century. So then it was the gospel for 18 months and then it was refuted.
So every everything was based on that. So you know I I don’t think that we can have this kind of short- termism. I think we have to stick with core principles and I do think we we are starting to see at at the World Bank. They are starting to take a tack more for energy abundance and all of the above. They have now gotten on board with nuclear energy. I’m not sure why it ever went away.
And then the IMF, I think, needs to lead by example, probably get rid of their golf course out in Maryland, which I said last year, and focus on global imbalances. Because I can tell you this slow motion buildup of global imbalances after a lack of sustainable growth, it is the the the biggest risk.
The the world cannot take a China with a trillion dollar trade surplus.
BL: And I think you’re absolutely right and one of those points that we we believe somehow that climate is so important that we need to do everything because the nature study that you mentioned that suggests that we could lose 60% of global GDP if we didn’t fix climate change. Which later turned out to be wrong, but of course the point is if that was really true, it should have been rich countries spending rich country money on dealing with climate change. But that’s not what’s happening. It’s mostly rich countries deciding to spend poor people’s money through the World Bank and the IMF badly. And this is not what the the world’s poor are telling us that they want.
So I I had the fortune to work together with Nobel laurate Tom Shelling and he often asked the very simple question, how do you best help poor people? Through development policy or through climate policy? Remember climate policy costs hundreds of trillions of dollars and it shaves off a tiny fraction of a degree in a century’s time. Development policy like avoiding death costs just billions or maybe even just millions of dollars and saves lives right now. And of course that is why development policy often is much much better if you actually want to help poor people.
And of course it also builds much more resilience. Look, a hurricane that hits poor Haiti kills hundreds of people. The same hurricane hitting rich Florida kills virtually no one because prosperity protects people. And so we need to get this conversation back and I think this is exactly where the IMF and the World Bank need to get back to their core missions.
SB: I think it has to be resiliency supply chains. Again, I think you know both the IMF and the World Bank have an important role in understanding this debt loop and downward spiral that many countries are in. Several countries, one in particular, have done the equivalent of a loan to own program. With a lot of these countries there’s a lot of undisclosed debt. There are a lot of tolling arrangements that are unfortunate and I think only the these multilateral banks can effectuate that.
But you know again I do want to congratulate them. The IMF was willing to say this time is different with Argentina and Argentina’s been a fantastic success. They’re accumulating reserves every day as we speak. Tens of millions of people there are being brought out of poverty. The government of Javier Milei, I’m very interested to see it was the poorest elements of Argentine society who voted for him this time around and the young people. So there there’s optimism there. And then you know that the IMF is working on bringing Venezuela back into making it look more like a normal economy, and I think will play a very important role there. And I think the World Bank leadership is back on a good trajectory in terms of energy and unlocking resources for the the very poorest countries.
BL: Yeah. If you don’t mind, I’ll pick you up on that energy point because last October you withdrew the United States from the Green Climate Fund. Because in your words, their goals run contrary to the fact that affordable, reliable energy is fundamental to economic growth and poverty reduction. I think that shows the general point we often forget, how energy really powers modern life. It warms us in the winter, it cools us in the summer, it transports us. I mean, look around this room and I think pretty much everyone is from somewhere else. And this is what energy does. Energy allows us to live better than kings of the past.
Energy really is prosperity. Yet, the climate fixation that we’ve been talking about means that both the World Bank and the IMF pushed for a rapid shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and for total ban fossil fuel investment. And I think they need a reality check. There is no transition that taking place globally. We use more renewables, yes, but we also use much more fossil fuels. The world still gets more than 80% of its total energy from fossil fuels. And the decline is so slow that on current trends, we will only get to 0% in 4 to 10 centuries.
Germany has spent famously 700 billion euros on its energy shift since 2002. Electricity prices more than doubled and yet Germany’s energy is still 79% fossil fuels. China produces most of the world’s solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars, but much of this of is produced with coal. China’s energy is still 87% fossil fuel. I would say a Chinese EV is a coal powered vehicle. Much of it is in China and of course especially in some places, for instance India, which are driven enormously on coal, they simply they emit more. But the real point is that poor countries want to get rich like China did. They want to use more energy and much of this will be fossil fuels. They don’t want to copy Germany and they don’t have 700 billion euros to blow on climate policies. So it is just simply hypocritical forcing poor nations into renewables that even rich Germany or China aren’t achieving.
In your IIF speech last year, you call on the World Bank to focus its efforts on expanding developing country access to reliable and affordable energy and you criticized its climate targets. You noted that the IMF devotes disproportionate time and resources on climate even though it’s not part of the fund’s mission. So, what have you seen from the bank and the fund in these areas since your speech? And what more do you expect from them?
SB: Again, as as I said earlier, I think the World Bank is has made a good pivot. They they are now pushing or they are a proponent of nuclear energy. I’m not sure how that wasn’t considered a renewable for for so many years. I mean, if if you look now, France is powering the European energy grid and their their reactors are running the full blast and it’s one of the cleanest. But when you think the Europeans got into this terrible recursive loop because they they decided to turn turn off their nuclear energy. The Germans became more dependent on Russian crude and then the Russians were selling them the crude to finance the war against them.
But you know I do think the World Bank is moving to an all of the above energy process and program and again is getting back to the core mission of lifting people out of poverty. And you know I would just say it’s very good to follow not only what people say but what they do. Bill Gates, who for a long time had pushed this climate agenda, has also changed tack. If you read his recent speeches he believes we’re going to innovate our way out of this. And the Gates Foundation has something like 13 billion of investment in energy innovation. Look no one’s expecting deos machina, one day and everything will be fixed. But in in the US we were going to run out of everything, going to run out of the crude and crude derivatives. And then fracking was invented and now that the the US larger reserves than Saudi and Venezuela.
On the other side, I think the IMF getting back to this message of stability, of monitoring global imbalances and stepping in early. You know I didn’t always agree with Ben Bernanke’s monetary policy, but I always admired Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke because he had a framework. And if you ask him a question, you could almost see him run it through his framework and everything was always consistent. And I think with the IMF and the World Bank the framework needs to always be consistent.
BL: On the Bill Gates point I think really two things stand out. First of all, the innovation point that you just made. I mean this is what has always solved the problem. Tim mentioned the green revolution that we had in the 1970s when we worried about running out of food. Remember, we didn’t fix the problem of the world not having enough food by telling everyone, “I’m sorry. Do you mind not eating as much?” And then we’ll send it down to whoever it is that we worry about. The point was that we innovated a way to generate much more food.
And of course, we’ll do the same thing with climate. We are going to solve big problems through innovation. That’s how we’ve always done it. But I think Bill Gates made another point which is incredibly powerful and useful when you talk about climate change. He said: “For so long we’ve been talking about climate as if the point is to cut carbon emissions or to reach a certain temperature limit. No, the point is to make the world better for humans. And there the question is do we make the world better for humans by cutting carbon emissions by whatever tons? Or do we make it better by for instance making it so small children don’t die or that in school there’s so many other ways we can also do this or that. This of course refers back on the IMF and especially the World Bank on what can be done and there are just so many incredible things that we can do first.
SB: Yeah, again, you know, I think keeping focus on the main thing and not getting distracted by what feels good, it’s convenient, it’s part of the the Davos consensus while much of the Davos consensus seems to have been shattered.
WEF’s Global Risks Perception Survey
BL: Yes. So I want to just take us to our third and and and last point and talk about tradeoffs. Because all international financial institutions need to get back to the core point of tradeoffs. Look,the money that the World Bank spent on a solar panels can’t be invested in healthcare or education. And the world’s poor tell us very clearly not to focus on climate first. When Africans are asked what worries them the most, climate change came almost at the bottom. A vast survey of more than 50,000 Africans across 39 countries found that climate change ranked 31 of 34. The top concerns are not surprising there. It’s unemployment, the economy, health, education, poverty, roads, electricity, hunger, and corruption. And then it goes on for a long time until you get to 31, which is climate change.
When your child might die tonight from a preventable disease, no family cares about shaving a fraction of a degree off global temperatures in a century from now. Elected leaders of poor countries tell us the same thing. In a large survey of low and low middle- income countries, they show climate ranks 12 of 16 issues. Even the World Bank’s own client surveys show climate ranks low. So international financial institutions should compact to focus on their strengths. As you’ve said, the World Bank should focus on poverty reduction and the IMF on macroeconomic stability, but the world’s poor are very clearly saying don’t focus on climate first.
So from your perspective as treasury secretary, how do you view the international financial institutions and their effectiveness in general and the bank and the fund specifically?
SB: You know I would also highlight that it’s not a unique survey item among the world’s poorest. Germany instituted very very strict remodeling and rebuild requirements for German households. So you had to spend I can’t remember it was 30 40 50,000 euros to upgrade to a a more green house and they’re all getting voted out. So like probation is not a good motivator. I do think,as I said last year, that we are determined with the multilateral financial institutions the US wants to be in it to win it. We want to be good partners. America first does not mean America alone. And we we want to go back to basics.
These banks were invented around Breton Woods which was post World War II Europe and Asia, and was a unique time in America and it led to incredible prosperity the across the world. So, you know, why can’t we do that again? And why can’t we focus on growth? Like what are the tools? What what what is hindering growth of these economies? Is it the unsustainable debt which is is the IMF concern?
Is it the poor infrastructure, health and hygiene, which is the World Bank role?
Because you know for a time we kind of skipped the foundational elements and tried to jump to something else, kind of luxury beliefs, instead of issues when a government was not able to fund itself or if people were not able to feed themselves. We’ve just got to get back to that. I I think Ajay and Kristalina have have gotten the message and are moving forward in a very very constructive way and I want to congratulate them.
BL: When you have to decide what to do obviously I’m I’m an advocate for cost benefit analysis so I’m going to be saying they should be looking at it. Really, if you think about it, the World Bank and IMF used to be world leaders in cost benefit analysis. And it makes sense if you only have limited money. If you have to think about trade-offs all the time, you have to ask yourself where can we spend scarce resources and do the most good in the world. And this is exactly what cost benefit analysis does for you. It allows you to pick out the really good policies and make it just much more likely that we can actually achieve all these goals that we’re talking about.
The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:
Science Matters 