Tag Archives: The Science

Net Zero Will Prevent Almost Zero Warming, Say Three Top Atmospheric Scientists

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From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

Recent calculations by the distinguished atmospheric scientists Richard Lindzen, William Happer and William van Wijngaarden suggest that if the entire world eliminated net carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 it would avert warming of an almost unmeasurable 0.07°C. Even assuming the climate modelled feedbacks and temperature opinions of the politicised Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the rise would be only 0.28°C. Year Zero would have been achieved along with the destruction of economic and social life for eight billion people on Planet Earth. “It would be hard to find a better example of a policy of all pain and no gain,” note the scientists.

In the U.K., the current General Election is almost certain to be won by a party that is committed to outright warfare on hydrocarbons. The Labour party will attempt to ‘decarbonise’ the electricity grid by the end of the decade without any realistic instant backup for unreliable wind and solar except oil and gas. Britain is sitting on huge reserves of hydrocarbons but new exploration is to be banned. It is hard to think of a more ruinous energy policy, but the Conservative governing party is little better. Led by the hapless May, a woman over-promoted since her time running the education committee on Merton Council, through to Buffo Boris and Washed-Out Rishi, its leaders have drunk the eco Kool-Aid fed to them by the likes of Roger Hallam, Extinction Rebellion and the Swedish Doom Goblin. Adding to the mix in the new Parliament will be a likely 200 new ‘Labour’ recruits with university degrees in buggerallology and CVs full of parasitical non-jobs in the public sector.

Hardly any science knowledge between them, they even believe that they can spend billions of other people’s money to capture CO2 – perfectly good plant fertiliser – and bury it in the ground. As a privileged, largely middle class group, they have net zero understanding of how a modern industrial society works, feeds itself and creates the wealth that pays their unnecessary wages. All will be vying to save the planet and stop a temperature rise that is barely a rounding error on any long-term view.

They plan to cull the farting cows, sow wild flowers where food once grew, take away efficient gas boilers and internal combustion cars and stop granny visiting her grandchildren in the United States. On a wider front, banning hydrocarbons will remove almost everything from a modern society including many medicines, building materials, fertilisers, plastics and cleaning products. It might be shorter and easier to list essential items where hydrocarbons are absent than produce one where they are present. Anyone who dissents from their absurd views is said to be in league with fossil fuel interests, a risible suggestion given that they themselves are dependent on hydrocarbon producers to sustain their enviable lifestyles.

Unlike politicians the world over who rant about fire and brimstone, Messrs Lindzen, Happer and van Wijngaarden pay close attention to actual climate observations and analyses of the data. Since it is impossible to determine how much of the gentle warming of the last two centuries is natural or caused by higher levels of CO2, they assume a ‘climate sensitivity’ – rise in temperature when CO2 doubles in the atmosphere – of 0.8°C. This is about four times less than IPCC estimates, which lacks any proof. Understandably the IPCC does not make a big issue of this lack of crucial proof at the heart of the so-called 97% anthropogenic ‘consensus’.

The 0.8°C estimate is based on the idea that greenhouse gases like CO2 ‘saturate’ at certain levels and their warming effect falls off a logarithmic cliff. This idea has the advantage of explaining climate records that stretch back 600 million years since CO2 levels have been up to 10-15 times higher in the past compared with the extremely low levels observed today. There is little if any long term causal link between temperature and CO2 over time. In the immediate past record there is evidence that CO2 rises after natural increases in temperature as the gas is released from warmer oceans.

Any argument that the Earth has a ‘boiling’ problem caused by the small CO2 contribution that humans make by using hydrocarbons is ‘settled’ by an invented political crisis, but is backed by no reliable observational data. Most of the fear-mongering is little more than a circular exercise using computer models with improbable opinions fed in, and improbable opinions fed out.

The three scientists use a simple formula using base-two logarithms to assess the CO2 influence on the atmosphere based on decades of laboratory experiments and atmospheric data collection. They demonstrate how trivial the effect on global temperature will be if humanity stops using hydrocarbons. After years wasted listening to Greta Thunberg, the message is starting to penetrate the political arena. In the United States, the Net Zero project is dead in the water if Trump wins the Presidential election. In Europe, the ruling political elites, both national and supranational, are retreating on their Net Zero commitments. Reality is starting to dawn and alternative political groupings emerge to challenge the comfortable insanity of Net Zero virtue signalling. In New Zealand, the nightmare of the Ardern years is being expunged with a roll back of Net Zero policies ahead of possible electricity black outs.

Only in Britain it seems are citizens prepared to elect a Government obsessed with self-inflicted poverty and deindustrialisation. The only major political grouping committed to scrapping Net Zero is the Nigel Farage-led Reform party and although it could beat the ruling Conservatives into second place in the popular vote, it is unlikely to secure many Parliamentary seats under the U.K.’s first-past-the-post electoral system. Only a few years ago the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who thinks some women have penises, and his imbecilic Deputy Leader Angela Rayner, were bending the knee to an organisation that wanted to cut funding for the police and fling open the borders. The new British Parliament will have plenty of people who still support Net Zero and assorted woke woo woo, and the great tragedy is that they will still be found across most of the represented political parties.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

BBC Hails Green Election Letter From “408 Climate Scientists” Signed by Psychologists, Accountants and Landscape Designers

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From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

An open letter to all political leaders currently fighting a General Election in the U.K. calling for an “ambitious” programme of green policies has been signed by 408 climate activists. The BBC refers to “the most distinguished of the country’s” climate scientists; Bob Ward, who organised the petition through the billionaire-funded Grantham operation, tweeted, “be ambitious on climate, scientists urge parties”, while James ‘the climate clock is ticking’ Murray from Business Green stepped up a gear by referring to “top scientists“. Scientists, you say? The first ‘scientist’ in the alphabetical list is an Associate Professor of Accounting, the second is a geographer specialising in “disaster risk reduction”, while the third is an archaeologist.

The green Grantham stunt is of course the latest in a long line of attempts to suggest that most ‘scientists’ believe humans control the climate. The letter refers to “growing damage to lives and livelihoods” in the U.K. caused by increases in the frequency and intensity of many extreme weather events. This evidence-lite but ubiquitous assertion is not even backed up by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which finds there has been no human involvement in most natural events such as floods, droughts, wildfires and cyclones to date. Nor is human involvement detected in forecasts stretching to 2100.

There are some academics who have signed the letter who can be fairly described as scientists, but the vast majority would struggle to justify such a title. The list is littered with lawyers, psychologists, philosophers, landscape designers, engineers and computer modellers. One interesting take from the letter is to note how many ways a university Geography Department can be renamed to capitalise on the climate zeitgeist.  A similar ‘scientists’ stunt was pulled last month by Damian Carrington in the Guardian, who polled 400 so-called scientists and in an ocean of emotional guff concluded the world is heading towards a “semi dystopian” future. Signed up for both agitprop operations is Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, who is described as the Director for U.K. Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation. A more enlightening CV might note that she is an “environmental psychologist” whose first degree was in theology and religious studies with French.

Perhaps Marco Silva, the BBC Verify climate ‘disinformation’ specialist, could cast a critical eye over the Ward letter when he returns at the end of the month from his six-month re-education sabbatical at the billionaire-funded Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN). One or two signing names might be familiar to him, including Saffron O’Neill, described as a Professor of “Climate and Society”. She is a past speaker at the OCJN and is noted for speculating on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for expressing scepticism about “well supported” science.

Would any scientist seriously sign up for such a policy knowing that it would destroy the ongoing scientific process? A process, it might be noted, that has served humanity so well, certainly since the time Pope Urban VIII played the ‘well supported’ argument and cut up rough with Galileo and his heretical view that the Earth orbited the Sun.

The Ward letter is a Grantham operation and is ultimately funded by the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham. Two Grantham Institutes are funded at the London School of Economics and Imperial, where a computer model ‘attribution’ operation is used to garner headlines with implausible claims that humans have caused individual weather events. Investigate science journalist Ben Pile has tracked some of the major contributions made by Grantham up to 2021.

As well as significant sums paid to LSE and Imperial, there are major contributions dispersed to other green foundations that crop up all the time when there are global Net Zero collectivisation narratives to be spun in the media, politics and academia. Jeremy Grantham has a long track record of preaching about the coming apocalypse, asking a 2019 meeting in Copenhagen, “what should I do, you say?” He met his rhetorical question by advising:

You should lobby your Government officials – invest in an election and buy some politicians. I am happy to say we do quite a bit of that at the Grantham Foundation… any candidate as long as they are green.

Ward is employed by Grantham at LSE to “communicate” climate science, notes journalist Matt Ridley. For years he complained to the newspaper industry’s self-regulator IPSO about climate articles that took a sceptical line. It was part of a campaign of “sustained and deliberate” pressure put on editors to toe the alarmist line, states Ridley. Ward tied journalists down in a time-consuming process in the hope it deterred them and their editors from writing and commissioning work. It worked, observed Ridley, noting, “he has frightened away some journalists and editors from the vital topic of climate change, leaving the catastrophists with a clear field to scare children to their heart’s content”.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Twelve Reasons Why I Don’t Believe There’s a Climate Emergency

From The Daily Sceptic

BY RUSSELL DAVID

I’m not a scientist. But I have reasons why I don’t fully trust the ‘climate emergency’ narrative. Here they are:

  1. Looking back through history, there have always been doomsday prophets, folk who say the world is coming to an end. Are modern-day activists not just the current version of this?
  2. I look at some of the facts – CO2 is 0.04% of the atmosphere; humans are responsible for just 3% of CO2; Britain is responsible for just 1% of the world’s CO2 output – and I think “really“? Will us de-carbonising really make a difference to the Earth’s climate?
  3. I have listened to some top scientists who say CO2 does not drive global warming; that CO2 in the atmosphere is a good or vital thing; that many other things, like the Sun and the clouds and the oceans, are more responsible for the Earth’s temperature.
  4. I note that most of the loudest climate activists are socialists and on the Left. Are they not just using this movement to push their dreams of a deindustrialised socialist utopia? And I also note the crossover between green activists and BLM ones, gender ones, pro-Hamas ones, none of whom I like or agree with.
  5. As an amateur psychologist, I know that humans are susceptible to manias. I also know that humans tend to focus on tiny slivers of time and on tiny slivers of geographical place when forming ideas and opinions. We are also extremely malleable and easily fooled, as was demonstrated in 2020 and 2021.
  6. I have looked into the implications of Net Zero. It is incredibly expensive. It will vastly reduce living standards and hinder economic growth. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I know that economic growth has led to higher living standards, which has made people both safer and more environmentally aware.
  7. Net Zero will also lead to significant diminishment of personal freedom, and it even threatens democracy, as people are told they must do certain things and they must not do other things, and they may even be restricted in speaking out on climate matters.
  8. What will be the worst things that will happen if the doomsayers are correct? A rise in temperature? Where? Siberia? Singapore? Stockholm? What is the ideal temperature? For how long? Will this utopia be forever maintained? I’m suspicious of utopias; the communists sought utopias.
  9. If one consequence of climate change is rising sea levels, would it not be better to spend money building more sea defences to protect our land? Like the Dutch did.
  10. It’s a narrative heavily pushed by the Guardian. I dislike the Guardian. I believe it’s been wrong on most issues through my life – socialism, immigration, race, the EU, gender, lockdowns and so on. Probably it’s wrong about climate issues too?
  11. I am suspicious of the amount of money that green activists and subsidised green industries make. And 40 years ago the greenies were saying the Earth was going to get too cold. Much of what they said would happen by now has not happened. Also, I trust ‘experts’ much less now, after they lied about the efficacy of lockdowns, masks and the ‘vaccines’.
  12. I like sunshine. I prefer being warm to being cold. It makes me feel better. It’s more fun. It saves on heating bills. It saves on clothes. It makes people happier. Far few people die of the heat than they do the cold.

Russell David writes the Mad World blog.

Chris Packham Packs on the Pseudoscience to Promote Climate Collapse “Terror”

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

By the final programme of his five-part Earth series, broadcast last year by the BBC, Chris Packham had perfected the art of taking imprecise proxy data from the geological record and comparing it to more accurate modern measurements to draw dubious conclusions about imminent climate collapse. One sudden spike in temperatures about 56 million years ago over “just a few thousand years” is said to be “incredible but sobering”. Scientists, he says, regard this as “analogous” to what is happening today. Some might, but a lot of others are more circumspect about relying on geological data that has a resolution of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and comparing it with today’s measurements.

Packham draws conclusions from events in the PETM, or Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a warming period that began sometime around 56.3 million to 55.9 million years ago. Briefly, it appears global temperatures shot up to around 25 or 26°C, compared with about 14.5°C today. In a published essay, science writer Andy May studied the evidence around the PETM and noted the proxy temperature measurements with lengthy resolutions “are not comparable to today’s monthly averages”.

But this lack of temporal precision does not stop Packham waxing lyrically about the PETM. “Violent storms ravaged the planet with flash floods and protracted drought,” he says. “What is scary is how it happened – each event triggering the next until it pushed the Earth past some serious tipping points,” he claims.

The ‘tipping point’ trope is the go-to climate-modelled message for today’s Armageddonists. Alas, there doesn’t appear to have been time in the programme to state what these ancient tipping points were, but in case the viewer doesn’t pick up on this current fashionable scare, Packham claims “and that is our nightmare”. Towards the end of the programme, he doubles down on his own claimed scientific precision and states: “Today, climate is changing faster than at any time in the last 66 million years.” This might what Packham understands ‘the science’ to say, but there is no way that anyone can know this, let alone prove it. He later told the Guardian that he hoped the “terror factor” generated by the series would “spur us to do something about the environment crisis”.

So what caused this spike in temperatures in the PETM? Since this is a propaganda film aimed at persuading the viewer that burning hydrocarbons and releasing ‘greenhouse’ gases like carbon dioxide into the air is potentially catastrophic, the answer Packham provides is simple. In this case methane, which he says started venting from deep within the Atlantic ocean. Again, the lack of precision around dates is a problem when it comes to attributing a rise in temperature over an imprecise period to a gas that has warming properties but stays in the atmosphere as briefly as 84 months. Marine geophysicist Professor Tim Minshull is less sure that methane release was the main cause of the global warming at this time. In a study published in 2016, he suggested methane release was slower and more modest than some researchers have hypothesised.

About 40 million years ago, ‘hothouse’ Earth, when alligators basked under palm trees in the Arctic, started to cool, a process that Packham attributes to falling levels of CO2. The rocks in newly-formed mountain ranges started to weather and react with the air to remove the gas from the atmosphere – or something. There are a number of problems with this hypothesis, not least the fact that CO2 levels had already been falling steadily for 150 million years from the end of the Jurassic, while temperatures remained as high as they had ever been in the geological record going back 600 million years. As the graph below shows, temperatures remained high, while CO2 levels began their long descent to the low, near denudation, levels seen today.

Meanwhile, scientists dispute the notion that rock weathering only acts as a carbon sink, suggesting that the process also releases amounts of CO2 to rival volcanoes. In a paper published last year, a group of Oxford University scientists led by Dr. Jesse Zondervan said their work on the carbon release had important implications for modelling climate scenarios. At the moment, the CO2 released from rock weathering is not included in the modelled work. Neither it seems are such inconvenient findings included in the Net Zero promotional work of Chris Packham.

The Earth presenter is a green activist and naturalist who holds the view that eight billion humans are wrecking the natural world in their attempts to sustain life on a difficult, dangerous planet. Some of his efforts to draw attention to the fragility of natural habitats are laudable. But as we have seen, he uses something called ‘the Science’ to promote the view that humans should stop industrial progress and return to a mythical natural state. The fact that the unexploited natural world could not sustain anything like eight billion souls is just one of the many reasons why his fantasies will never be adopted. His science starts with a pre-determined narrative, unlike the scientific process which draws conclusions after a ruthless examination of all the available evidence. Mainstream media such as the BBC have largely given up on the scientific process when it comes to climate change, and simply promote political messaging around the Net Zero project. In doing so, they ignore large swaths of scientific knowledge that are likely to trouble the ‘settled’ opinion. But then, this knowledge lacks the “terror factor” so beloved by Packham.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor

There’s Nothing “Scientific” About Climate Models

From The Daily Sceptic

BY PAUL SUTTON

On Sunday’s BBC Politics, Luke Johnson asked for evidence that the recent Dubai flooding was due to climate change. Chris Packham glibly responded: “It comes from something called science.”

This simply highlighted his poor scientific understanding. The issue is his and others’ confusion over what scientific modelling is and what it can do. This applies to any area of science dealing with systems above a single atom – everything, in practice.  

My own doctoral research was on the infrared absorption and fragmentation of gaseous molecules using lasers. The aim was to quantify how the processes depended on the laser’s physical properties. 

I then modelled my results. This was to see if theory correctly predicted how my measurements changed as one varied the laser pulse. Computed values were compared under different conditions with those observed. 

The point is that the underlying theory is being tested against the variations it predicts. This applies – on steroids – to climate modelling, where the atmospheric systems are vastly more complex. All the climate models assume agreement at some initial point and then let the model show future projections. Most importantly, for the projected temperature variations, the track record of the models in predicting actual temperature observations is very dubious, as Professor Nicola Scafetta’s chart below shows. 

For the climate sensitivity – the amount of global surface warming that will occur in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations over pre-industrial levels – there’s an enormous range of projected temperature increases, from 1.5° to 4.5°C. Put simply, that fits everything – and so tells us almost nothing about the underlying theories. 

That’s a worrying problem. If the models can’t be shown to predict the variations, then what can we say about the underlying theory of manmade climate change? But the public are given the erroneous impression that the ‘settled science’ confirms that theory – and is forecasting disastrously higher temperatures.

Such a serious failing has forced the catastrophe modellers to (quietly) switch tack into ‘attribution modelling’. This involves picking some specific emotive disaster – say the recent flooding in Dubai – then finding some model scenario which reproduces it. You then say: “Climate change modelling predicted this event, which shows the underlying theory is correct.”  

What’s not explained is how many other scenarios didn’t fit this specific event. It’s as if, in my research, I simply picked one observation and scanned through my modelling to find a fit. Then said: “Job done, the theory works.” It’s scientifically meaningless. What’s happening is the opposite of a prediction. It’s working backwards from an event and showing that it can happen under some scenario.

My points on the modelling of variations also apply to the work done by Neil Ferguson at Imperial College on catastrophic Covid fatalities. The public were hoodwinked into thinking ‘the Science’ was predicting it. Not coincidentally, Ferguson isn’t a medical doctor but a mathematician and theoretical physicist with a track record of presenting demented predictions to interested parties.

I’m no fan of credentialism. But when Packham tries it, maybe he needs questioning on his own qualifications – a basic degree in a non-physical ‘soft’ science then an abandoned doctorate.

Paul Sutton can be found on Substack. His new book on woke issues The Poetry of Gin and Tea is out now.

Climate Change is Class Warfare

From The Daily Sceptic

BY MARTIN DURKIN

The climate is up the spout and we’re to blame. The planet is boiling like a pan of porridge. We face the possible extinction of all life on earth. ‘Science’ says so. Anyone who questions it is a demonic scoundrel. The climate catastrophe is a 100% solid-gold, slam-dunk irrefutable fact.

Hmm. And yet, it is clear to anyone who has paid the slightest attention, that the tired, hysterical predictions of the climate alarmists (made repeatedly over four decades and based on their hypothetical computer-models) have proved to be spectacularly wrong, again and again and again. It does not take much digging (we have the internet these days) to discover that the outlandish claims of climate alarmists are flatly contradicted by lots and lots of perfectly good scientific evidence and data. We’re not talking here about fringe science put about by whackos. We’re talking about official data – mainstream science, published in respected journals. (Some of it is featured in my ‘climate-denier’ film, Climate: The Movie, available for free online).

The world is not boiling. We are, as any geologist will tell you, in an ice age – one of the coldest periods in the last 500 million years. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere is not unnaturally or frighteningly high. Compared to the last half billion years of earth’s history it is extremely low. And there is no evidence that changing levels of atmospheric CO2 (it has changed radically many times in the past) has ever ‘driven climate change’. If there had been, Al Gore would have said so in his silly film, but he didn’t. Hurricane activity is not increasing, nor are the number of wildfires, nor are the number of droughts, and so on and so on. This is what the official data say. You can look it up.

Of course this is all a bit embarrassing for the science establishment. The climate alarm is worth billions to them in climate-related funding. A lot of jobs depend on it. A lot of reputations are at stake. And it’s deeply awkward for the renewables industry, which turns over around a trillion dollars a year.

The climate alarm is not supported by scientific evidence. It is supported by bullying, intimidation and the censorship of anyone who dares to question it. Climate catastrophism is politics, shamelessly dressed up as science.

The climate scare was the invention of the environmentalist movement, which stands opposed to vulgar, dirty, free-market capitalism. They say there are too many people, consuming too much. We must be restrained and contained, for the sake of Gaia. The solution to the global, existential climate problem is higher taxes and more regulation.

At any social gathering, you can pretty confidently predict who will think what about climate, by asking them about taxes and regulation. People who love the Big State can’t get enough of climate chaos. People who want lower taxes and less regulation will roll their eyes and say rude things about little Greta.

Across the Western world, the state has grown enormously over the last century, vastly increasing the number of people whose livelihoods depend on state-spending, and whose jobs are related, directly or indirectly, to government control. In the U.K. and U.S. both, more than twice as many people now work in government as work in manufacturing. And this does not include all those (in the third sector etc.) who rely indirectly on government largesse. 

These people depend on government. They are paid for out of taxation. In such circles to proclaim the joys of a small state, lower taxes and less government is a breach of social etiquette. You have crossed a moral line. You will be suspected of liking Donald Trump, of voting Brexit, of hating lockdown and compulsory vaccination, of defending the Second Amendment, of being a climate denier.

And indeed all this may well be true. These views tend to hang together. As do the views of those on the other side. To repeat, the climate alarm is in fact politics dressed up as science. We are, as more people are beginning to realise, engaged in a class war. On one side, the tax-consuming regulating class that feeds from taxation and bosses us about. On the other, the rest of us in the private sector, who rather resent paying taxes and being told what to do and how to live our lives.  

This is the real basis for the consensus on climate change. The consensus exists among our sprawling, tax-consuming establishment. This is not a small group of people. It is an entire class. It is, if you will, the ruling class. It controls our civil service, our schools and universities, large parts of our arts and science establishments and much of the media. It is an intolerant class, deeply aware of its own interests. The taboo that surrounds climate scepticism is a reflection of its power.

It would be nice to think that politely pointing to the actual scientific data might put an end to all the climate chaos nonsense.  Sadly it won’t. Because this ain’t about science.

Watch the Game-Changing New Film That Explodes Climate Change and Net Zero Lies

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

A potentially game-changing film on the fraudulent climate change narrative and the collectivist Net Zero project hits global social media screens today. “Climate change is an invented scare of self-interest and snobbery, cynically promoted by a parasitic, publicly-funded establishment hungry for power and money,” says writer Martin Durkin. The attitude of middle class environmentalists can be summed up as “how can we stop people buying cheap things in shops”, observes Baroness Claire Fox. On the science side, the 2022 Nobel Physics laureate Dr. John Clauser asserts: “There is no correlation between temperature change and carbon dioxide – it is all a crock of crap.”

The new film is a long-awaited sequel to Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle film shown on Channel 4 in 2007. The outcry from activists at the time led to the banning of sceptical climate science views across most mainstream media, bans that continue to this day. The new film is called Climate: The Movie and features many top sceptical climate scientists. It lays out the politically-supressed views surrounding natural climate variation in riveting and persuasive detail. As Durkin notes at the beginning, his new film is the story of how an eccentric environmental scare grew into a powerful global industry. “When I hear people pontificating about a rise of one and a half degrees, I think what have they been smoking,” says Emeritus Professor William Happer of Princeton.

“There is no climate emergency. There is no evidence of one,”  comments Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the original founders of Greenpeace. Around 20,000 years ago, CO2 was at the lowest level it has ever been in the history of the Earth. The gas is currently 420 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere and has recovered from 180 ppm. “If it had gone down another 30 ppm, we would all be dead,” observes Moore. The film quotes other scientists noting that CO2 levels were much higher in the past at times of very high biodiversity levels on the planet. One of the numerous ‘scams’ identified in the film is that there is little correlation between CO2 and temperatures across the 500 million year record. In fact, recent ice core evidence shows periods when temperatures rose ahead of increases in CO2. The opinions and hypotheses surrounding unproven anthropogenic climate change simply do not stand up to past scientific observations.

“We should be very grateful that CO2 levels are beginning to go back up – there is not enough fossil fuel to get to historical levels, but at least we can make a start,” observes a mischievous Professor Happer. “CO2 is quite unimportant in controlling Earth’s climate,” says Dr. Clauser. For him, the behaviour of clouds is “hundreds of times more powerful than the trivial effect of CO2”.

The science of climate features heavily in the film and clear explanations are provided throughout. “Compared to the last 500 million years the Earth is exceptionally cold,” explains Durkin. The reason there is ice at the poles is that we are in an ice age, observes Moore. “We are at the tail end of a 50 million year cooling period, and they say it is too hot,” he adds. As regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will be aware, recent surface measurement have been badly corrupted by growing urban heat. Former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer, who has studied the urban heat effect in great detail, calculates that most of the measured urban warming since 1880 is due to the urban heat effect.

Many of the issues discussed in the film will be familiar to Daily Sceptic readers – from the biased UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change only considering human involvement in the climate (it would be out of a job if it found humans were not that important) to the trillions of dollars spent on Government-mandated inferior green technologies.

The corruption of ‘settled’ science is widely discussed with click-bait, well-funded scientists feeding doomsday climate predictions into the public space via the unquestioning mainstream media. Few corruptions are more blatant than attaching bad weather events to long-term changes in the climate. Science writer Tony Heller calls it “absurd”, adding, “there is no basis to it, it is biased propaganda”. The capture of scientific journals is almost complete with any scientist questioning the ‘settled’ narrative unlikely to be published. Starting out in their careers, academics from numerous disciplines are more or less advised to keep their mouths shut about the narrative or lose students, grant funding, the ability to publish work and ultimately their jobs.

Universities and science bodies around the world have lost their hard-won reputations for the unbiased pursuit of truth through the scientific process. In its place is a grubby rush for cash in the interest of promoting an ideological fad. The Durkin film shows in clear detail that the science attributing all climate change to humans using hydrocarbons is far from settled, and is disputed by many distinguished academics of considerable scientific standing. Net Zero and the stories about the climate that accompany it is a political project. “If you are a climate activist, you are actually facilitating a huge validation of the Government running our lives,” says Claire Fox. Net Zero demands on governments mean they can “interfere in every nook and cranny”, she argues.

But it is towards the end of his excellent film that Durkin shows the true wickedness of the Net Zero agenda. In Africa, diseases and early deaths are widespread as developed countries refuse to sanction investment in hydrocarbon energy. Women still cook on dung fires causing lung disease and blindness. Agriculture suffers from a lack of tractor power and fertiliser. Meanwhile, diarrhoea is endemic and billionaires send pills to mask the symptoms. But Western banks will not lend money to provide hydrocarbon-powered refrigeration and clean water infrastructure. The greens think that Africans should not use hydrocarbon resources, and this sums up the “ruthlessness and depravity” of the agenda, says Dr. Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Climate: The Movie is available on YouTube, Vimeo, X, Rumble, BitChute and other social media sites from today. It is written and directed by Martin Durkin and produced by Tom Nelson.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

The “Insane” Plan to Save the Arctic’s Sea Ice

From The Daily Sceptic

BY SALLUST

Anyone who watched the movie Snowpiercer, set in 2031, or the follow-up TV series will recall its premise: an experiment to arrest climate change with a stratospheric aerosol injection goes hopelessly wrong and ends up with the world condemned to a new ice age.

Perhaps that’s what’s inspired Cambridge University’s Centre for Climate Repair. It has a team in the high Arctic busily experimenting with spraying seawater over a hole they’ve cut in the ice. The BBC’s Mark Poynting has the story:

The ultimate goal of the Arctic experiment is to thicken enough sea ice to slow or even reverse the melting already seen, says Dr Shaun Fitzgerald, whose team at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Climate Repair is behind the project.

Will it work or is it, as one scientist put it, “quite insane”?

“We don’t actually know enough to determine whether this is a good idea or bad idea,” admits Dr. Fitzgerald. They are drilling a hole in the sea ice that naturally forms in winter and pumping around 1,000 litres of seawater per minute across the surface.

Exposed to the cold winter air, this seawater quickly freezes, helping to thicken the ice on top. The water also compacts the snow. As fresh snow acts as a good insulating layer, now ice can also form more easily on the underside in contact with the ocean.

Like most self-respecting climate change panic projects, cranking this up to scale will have vast energy needs, to say nothing of manufacturing the pumps, quite apart from the possibility that the whole scheme might be insane:

“The vast majority of polar scientists think this is never going to work out,” cautions Martin Siegert, an experienced glaciologist at the University of Exeter, who is not involved in the project.

One issue is that the saltier ice may melt more quickly in the summer.

And then there’s the huge logistical challenge of scaling the project up to a meaningful level – one estimate suggests that you could need about 10 million wind-powered pumps to thicken sea-ice across just a tenth of the Arctic. 

A number of scientists – including the UN’s climate and weather bodies – have warned that these approaches could pose grave risks, including disrupting global weather patterns. Many researchers want to see them banned altogether.

“Geoengineering technologies come with enormous uncertainties and create novel risks for ecosystems and people,” explains Lili Fuhr, director of the Fossil Economy Programme at the Centre for International Environmental Law.

But if that scepticism sounds reassuring, don’t be fooled. Some of the critics remain dedicated to total decarbonisation. However, perhaps what we’re seeing here is the climate change industry beginning to fragment into feuding factions?

Still, surely all we need to do is ‘follow the science’. What could possibly go wrong?

The Arctic researchers are acutely aware of these concerns. They stress that they are simply testing the technology, and wouldn’t unleash it more widely until the risks are better known.

Where have we heard that before?

Worth reading in full.

No Significant Warming in One of the Most Climate-Sensitive Parts of the Planet, Ice Core Data Show

From The Daily Sceptic

BY STEPHEN ANDREWS

There has been no significant warming in one of the most climate-sensitive parts of the planet, analysis of Greenland ice core data shows, casting further doubt on the alarmist climate narrative.

We are all familiar with the climate change scare narrative. Red coloured maps of the globe, polar bears stranded on ever diminishing ice floes, extreme weather events etc. When you read a climate change related article or scientific paper it nearly always opens with a statement underlining the severity of the situation facing mankind. What is usually lacking is perspective.

I am not interested in ‘expert’ opinion unless it is supported by empirical data and perspective. Selected sources must be reliable and have ample past data to encompass solar cycle variation. Ideally these data need to come from a region of the planet that is sensitive to global warming. What data from the world of paleoclimatology fit that criteria?

When snow falls, it contains a mix of oxygen isotopes. During warm periods, more heavy oxygen isotopes are found in the snow, while cold periods have more light oxygen isotopes. By analysing these ratios in ice cores, scientists can learn about past temperatures and climate conditions. The ice is laid down in annual layers which can be dated accurately. Consequently, we can construct an accurate temperature record where sufficient ice accumulation exists, such as in polar regions.

If anthropogenic climate change is a real threat, due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels, then we are expecting to see a clear rise in temperature above and beyond the normal variation. This was attempted and published by Michael Mann et al. and is widely known as the hockey stick graph. The main problem with this graph is that it was constructed using 12 sets of proxy measurements which included three sets of ice core data. The ice core data went back only 500 years and the remaining extrapolation relied on tree ring data. There was considerable uncertainty of measurement which was highlighted in his original paper (Figure 1), and a period of 1,000 years provides us with limited perspective in relation to the impact of solar cycles.

Note the light grey area is an estimate of the uncertainty of measurement and extrapolation.

There seems to be a dearth of records that provide temperature proxies for recent times that are relevant to the sudden rise in carbon dioxide levels (1860 to current). However, I did locate data from two overlapping periods from Renland peninsula in Eastern Greenland. The two studies that reported the results from these ice core measurements had quite different themes. The first, which covered the period from 1960 to 10,000 BC, commented on the high temperatures in the Holocene period and the impact on the ice sheet. The second covering 1801 to 2014 examined local site variability. The creation of these datasets was a gargantuan effort. It remains a mystery why these papers did not comment on the temperature trends or indeed try and link the two datasets. Below is a graph combining these two isotope ratio data sets (Figure 2). The black line (far right) is the key as it is a 20 year rolling average of the more recent dataset (brown dots). The first dataset (blue dots) has data points every 20 years, so this rolling average enables a more valid comparison.

These data tell us we’re in one of the coldest spells in the approximately last 9,000 years. Was the only way up? Virtually all global records indicate a steady warming in recent times. I have added green lines to help visualise the ‘normal’ variation in the last 9,000 years. Clearly recent warming is within this normal variation.

I have added another graph (Figure 3) with linear trend lines to each of the datasets to demonstrate how important perspective is in assessing climate change. If we take the trend from 1801 to 2014 (purple dashed) and compare it with that from the last 10,000 years (green line) it seems alarming. But from the longer trend the reader can see that variation in both sets of data is quite normal.

There is also a serious lack of agreement between the Mann hockey stick graph (Figure 1) and these data. It should be borne in mind when making this comparison that the Mann graph attempted to reconstruct temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere whereas the data I have cited here are from a specific area of Eastern Greenland.

The next graph (Figure 4), focusing on the overlap period (1800 to 2014), provides the degree of validity of aligning these two datasets. There appears to be excellent correlation when comparing the black and red lines, implying the data are good proxies for temperature.

In summary, these data indicate there is no significant global warming signal coming from one of the most sensitive parts of the planet. Any warming may be latent, but this seems to be a bit of a stretch.

This absence of a signal could be explained by the fact that the relationship of carbon dioxide to global temperature is logarithmic and above a certain concentration there is minimal direct impact relative to solar cycles.

There are many climate scientists who have devoted their lives to saving mankind but unless these data are invalid, they need to return from the chill winds of the polar regions. Is it game over for the climate change scare narrative?

First published on Stephen’s Substack page. Subscribe here.

The Climate Alarmist Attack Dog Who Was Wrong About Everything

From The Daily Sceptic

By RICHARD BURCIK

The journalist Ross Gelbspan, who led the fight against what he called “climate denialism”, has passed away. Mr. Gelbspan who wrote for the Boston Globe and other mainstream outlets died of COPD (likely from smoking). He championed the idea that global warming results in the spread of disease and rising sea level. In 1995 he wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post:

We’re all familiar with future-horror stories about global warming – that in some distant era, the glaciers will melt, the oceans will rise and Florida will disappear beneath the waters. But a much more imminent – and deadly – threat from climate change is already upon us and could be felt in North America as early as this summer. Scientists call it a worldwide redistribution of disease ‘vectors’ – the animals, insects, microorganisms and plants that transmit disease to humans. To the layman, it means a global spread of infections.

Let’s examine our planet’s rising sea level first. A recent NASA satellite study found that:

The average global sea level rose by 0.11″ (0.27cm) from 2021 to 2022, according to a NASA analysis of satellite data. Since satellites began observing sea surface height in 1993 with the U.S.-French TOPEX/Poseidon mission, the average global sea level has increased by 3.6″ (9.1cm), according to NASA’s Sea Level Change science team. The annual rate of rise – or how quickly sea level rise is happening – that researchers expect to see has also increased from 0.08″ (0.20cm) per year in 1993 to 0.17″ (0.44cm) per year in 2022. Based on the long-term satellite measurements, the projected rate of sea level rise will hit 0.26″ (0.66cm) per year by 2050.

That’s right, less than four inches over a 30-year interval, which is not enough to get anyone’s shoes and socks wet. Context matters!

Another NASA satellite study covering 25 years found that the rate of sea level increase was speeding up: “Global sea level rise is accelerating incrementally over time rather than increasing at a steady rate, as previously thought, according to a new study based on 25 years of NASA and European satellite data. If the rate of ocean rise continues to change at this pace, sea level will rise 26 inches (65 centimeters) by 2100.”  Two feet instead of the 30+ feet by 2100 that climate change advocates have been predicting.

Finally, a third NASA satellite study uncovered the fact that roughly 50% of the sea level increase along the U.S. East Coast was due to subsidence and not increasing water levels. Ergo, the other two NASA satellite studies may have overestimated the real increase in sea level by as much as 100%. Perhaps, only a one foot increase in sea level by 2100. 

Interestingly, James Hansen in a 2023 published paper repeated his prediction that a dramatic sea level rise remains in our planet’s future. But he made a similar forecast in 2007, stating that the Earth would see serious sea level increase within 10 years. Six years after his deadline we still have a quiescent water level in our planet’s oceans. Since 1988 Dr. Hansen has been only wrong. Perhaps in the distant future he may turn out to be correct, but so far he has been solely incorrect.

Turning to the idea of spreading infections, diseases, pandemics and plagues, which Mr. Gelbspan predicted would spread to North America as soon as the summer of 1995, this has not happened even after over 25 years have passed.

According to the World Atlas there were six deadly epidemics during the 20th century: HIV/AIDS that killed almost 40 million people worldwide and is still killing 2.5 million per year, the 1918 Spanish Flu that resulted in 50 to 100 million deaths, the 1950s Asian Flu which killed 70,000 Americans, the 1968 flu with one million demises worldwide, the 6th cholera outbreak at the turn of the 19th century to which 800,000 succumbed, and the 1974 smallpox outbreak in India with 15,000 deaths. There have been no recurrences during the 21st century except the 2020 Covid pandemic that had zero connection with climate change.

According to the CDC there have only been a total of 496 cases of plague (that is spread by fleas) in the U.S. (almost all were in the South West) over the past 20 years. As of 2019, Our World in Data reported that only 3.2% of worldwide deaths were attributable to malaria and other infectious diseases. And almost all of these illnesses occurred in the tropics.

The bottom line is that Gelbspan has so far been only wrong about everything.

Richard Burcik is the author of two short books, The DNA Lottery and Anatomy of a Lie.