Earthquakes release blistering heat that can melt rock in an instant

by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sep 19 in ScienceDaily


Based on mini “lab-quakes” in a controlled setting, MIT findings could help researchers assess the vulnerability of quake-prone regions.
MIT scientists have unraveled the hidden energy balance of earthquakes by recreating them in the lab. Their findings show that while only a sliver of energy goes into the shaking we feel on the surface, the overwhelming majority is released as heat—sometimes hot enough to melt surrounding rock in an instant

The ground-shaking that an earthquake generates is only a fraction of the total energy that a quake releases. A quake can also generate a flash of heat, along with a domino-like fracturing of underground rocks. But exactly how much energy goes into each of these three processes is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to measure in the field.

Now MIT geologists have traced the energy that is released by “lab quakes” — miniature analogs of natural earthquakes that are carefully triggered in a controlled laboratory setting. For the first time, they have quantified the complete energy budget of such quakes, in terms of the fraction of energy that goes into heat, shaking, and fracturing.

Europe: AI Development or Net Zero?

by  S. Goreham, Sep 18, 2025 in CornwallAlliance


This year, European nations announced plans to pursue artificial intelligence. National leaders announced AI spending goals totaling hundreds of billions of euros in efforts to catch up to the United States. But AI requires huge amounts of electrical power, conflicting with Europe’s commitment to achieve a Net Zero power grid.

Since ChatGPT released their AI chatbot in November of 2022, artificial intelligence has exploded. In only two years, the AI revolution became the driving force in the US high-tech industry. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other firms will spend over $100 billion this year building and upgrading data centers to run AI. Nvidia, the dominant supplier of AI graphics processor units (GPUs), became the most valuable company in the world, its market capitalization soaring from $300 billion to $4.3 trillion in less than three years.

Artificial intelligence requires vast amounts of electricity. AI processors run 24 hours a day, enabling computers to think like humans. When servers are upgraded to support AI, they consume 6 to 10 times more power than when used for cloud storage and the internet. Data centers consumed 4% of US power at the start of 2024 but are projected to consume 20% within the next decade.

The need for new generating capacity for AI now drives US electricity markets. Coal-fired power plant closures have been postponed in Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and other states. Nuclear plants are restarting in Iowa, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Dozens of small modular reactors are on the drawing board. More than 200 gas-fired plants are in planning or under construction, including more than 100 in Texas. Companies building AI data centers are constructing their own on-site power plants, unwilling to wait for grid power. The pursuit of artificial intelligence is rapidly replacing obsolete US Net Zero policies.

Lomborg: Environmental Doomsday Predictions Collapse As World Becomes Richer And Greener

by B. Lomborg, Sep 16, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch 


Fearmongering climate change forecasts keep falling apart.

Climate protest
Over the past half-century, environmentalists have predicted countless calamities. Their extreme predictions were typically wrong, their draconian countermeasures turned out to be mostly misguided, and we should be grateful we didn’t follow their harmful advice. [emphasis, links added]

We need to keep this history in mind as we are inundated with stories of climate Armageddon.

This summer, headlines about the Great Barrier Reef painted a dire picture of climate-driven devastation, with environmental journalists claiming the reef was on the brink of collapse.

In reality, data shows the reef has its fourth-highest coral cover since records began in 1986, revealing these alarmist narratives to be vastly misleading.

Truth and Scares

Sensible, life-improving environmental policies over recent decades were rarely sold with fearmongering. Rich countries have dramatically reduced air and water pollution through technological advances and then through regulation.

Poorer countries are starting to do the same thing, as they emerge from poverty and can afford to be more environmentally concerned. Forests have expanded globally, with this growth clear in rich countries and increasingly across the world.

This isn’t the scary future environmentalists promised us.

A recent peer-reviewed study counts almost a hundred environmental doomsday predictions that environmentalists have made over the past half-century.

Two-thirds of them predicted doom before August 2025, and all of these have turned out to be false.

Koonin: DOE Climate Report Finally Brings Clarity, Challenges Alarmist Narrative

by S.E. Koonin, Sept 09, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch 


Empirical data shows CO2 boosts growth, extreme weather events are overblown, and policy costs outweigh any benefits.

Protest on a dead planet
A recent Energy Department report challenged the widespread belief that greenhouse-gas emissions pose a serious threat to the nation. It likely soothed Americans irked by forced energy transitions, but you would be wrong to assume it reassured many alarmed by hypothetical climate catastrophes. [emphasis, links added]

There is a disconnect between public perceptions of climate change and climate science—and between past government reports and the science itself.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright understands this. It’s why he commissioned an independent assessment by a team of five senior scientists, including me, to provide clearer insights into what’s known and not about the changing climate.

Collectively, our team brought to the task more than 200 years of research experience, almost all directly relevant to climate studies.

The resulting peer-reviewed report is entirely our work, free from political influence—a departure from previous assessments.

It draws from United Nations and U.S. climate reports, peer-reviewed research, and primary observations to focus on important aspects of climate science that have been misrepresented to nonexperts.

Among the report’s key findings:

■ Elevated carbon dioxide levels enhance plant growth, contributing to global greening and increased agricultural productivity.

■ Complex climate models provide limited guidance on the climate’s response to rising carbon dioxide levels. Overly sensitive models, often using extreme scenarios, have exaggerated future warming projections and consequences.

■ Data aggregated over the continental U.S. show no significant long-term trends in most extreme weather events. Claims of more frequent or intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and dryness in America aren’t supported by historical records.

■ While global sea levels have risen about eight inches since 1900, aggregate U.S. tide-gauge data don’t show the long-term acceleration expected from a warming globe.

■ Natural climate variability, data limitations, and model deficiencies complicate efforts to attribute specific climate changes or extreme events to human CO2 emissions.

■ The use of the words “existential,” “crisis,” and “emergency” to describe the projected effects of human-caused warming on the U.S. economy finds scant support in the data.

■ Overly aggressive policies aimed at reducing emissions could do more harm than good by hiking the cost of energy and degrading its reliability. Even the most ambitious reductions in U.S. emissions would have little direct effect on global emissions and an even smaller effect on climate trends.

Our report is the first from Washington in years that deviates from the narrative of a climate headed for catastrophe. That these findings surprised many speaks to a governmental failure to communicate climate science accurately to the public.

The UK is going back to coal

by A. Montford, Sept 12,2025 in NetZeroWatch


When the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, we rely on so-called ‘firm capacity’ to step in and keep the lights on. In the UK, that means gas-fired and nuclear power stations and pretty much nothing else – the giant wood-burner at Drax is the only significant exception.

Unfortunately, both the gas-fired and nuclear fleets are now very old, and much of the capacity is nearing the end of its life. Regulators have granted extensions to some of the nuclear units, but after 2028 permanent closures are likely. Meanwhile, as much as a third of our gas-fired capacity is expected to retire over the next five years.

Unless these units can be replaced, or their lives extended, we face a capacity crunch by 2030 at the latest. At best that means sky-high prices, and at worst, brownouts – electricity rationing in other words. That is a horrific prospect. As the Spanish found out to their cost during the recent Iberian blackout, when the power supply goes down, people die.

However, replacement is currently looking unlikely. With so much wind and solar on the grid, nobody wants to put money into new power stations, either gas-fired or nuclear. The financial numbers simply don’t add up any longer, either for new units or for overhauls of existing ones.

In theory, we could subsidise our way out of this. Although little or no new capacity has emerged from the government’s capacity market auctions, if caps on prices were removed, in theory someone might take the risk.

However, in practice this won’t happen. That’s because a surge in power demand from new datacentres means that the lead time for a new gas turbine is now eight years. Lead times for nuclear are mostly even longer – the Koreans have delivered in as little as eight years, but everyone else takes much longer. And this is the United Kingdom, where building anything takes an eternity.

Either way, new gas turbines or nuclear will arrive too late to help the UK avoid a capacity crunch.

UK Poll Shows Rising Climate Skepticism, Opposition to Net-Zero Policies

by O. Wright et al., Sept 12, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch 


New research finds a sharp rise in climate change skepticism as Brits reject net-zero policies

Ed Miliband's wind farm fantasy
The number of Britons who think the dangers of global warming have been exaggerated has jumped by more than 50 percent in the past four years, new research for The Times reveals today. [emphasis, links added]

One in four voters now believes that concerns over climate change are not as real as scientists have said, amid growing public concern about the cost of the government’s net-zero policies.

Less than a third of the public (30 percent) are in favor of banning new petrol and diesel cars — down from 51 percent in 2021.


Only 16 percent of voters said they would be prepared to pay higher gas bills to encourage the switch to electricity.

Experts said the findings showed that growing climate skepticism within mainstream politics in both Britain and the US was cutting through with voters, as the broad consensus on climate action breaks down.

“Climate change is being politicised [in the UK] in the same way that has been done in the United States,” said Professor Wouter Poortinga, an environmental psychologist at the University of Cardiff.

New Study: ‘CO2 Does Not Precede Temperature, Nor Does It Control Temperature’

by K. Richard, Sept 5, 2025 in NoTricksZone 


More evidence is unleashed undermining the CO2-drives-climate narrative.

A comprehensive correlation analysis (Grabyan, 2025) utilizing the last 2000 years of temperature and CO2 data affirms CO2 changes lag temperature changes by ~150 years throughout the 1 to 1850 C.E. era.

This Common Era (C.E.) lead-lag sequencing – with temperature changes leading and CO2 changes lagging by centuries to millennia – is wholly consistent with the paleo CO2 and temperature proxy (ice core, stomata, borehole, etc.) record spanning the last 20,000 years (Demezhko and Gornostaeva, 2014), 400,000 years (Fischer et al., 1999, Mudelsee et al., 2001, Monnin et al., 2001, Uemura et al., 2018), 66 million years (Frank, 2024), and 420 million years (Koutsoyiannis, 2024).

It is notable that the CO2 changes can be shown to be driven by temperature changes over not only the long-term (centuries), but over short-term periods (months, years) as well (Koutsoyiannis et al., 2023, Humlum et al., 2013).

New Scientist: “We could get most metals for clean energy without opening new mines”

by  E. Worrall, Aug 25, 2025 in WUWT


Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2493449-we-could-get-most-metals-for-clean-energy-without-opening-new-mines/

This seems a strange claim, or at least an odd take on the issue. Most mining engineers I’ve met could recite from memory exactly what is in the waste product of the last mine they worked on. And reprocessing waste from past mining operations is big business, in cases where the waste is valuable.

Those minerals will be extracted when the time is right. But until the value of extraction makes it profitable, a significant strategic need arises, or technological advances bring down the cost, why would anyone bother?

As for the claim such extraction could cover the entire needs of battery, solar panel, wind turbine manufacture, most of the estimates for the required minerals I’ve seen are so gigantic, lets just say expert or not, I’d like to see Elizabeth Holley’s calculations.

Graph of the Week – Temperature of ocean air-sheltered stations

by A. Watts, Aug 26, 2025 in WUWT


I somehow missed this, but I find it very interesting. From the 2018 paper: “Temperature trends with reduced impact of ocean air temperature” by Frank Lansner*Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen

Abstract

Temperature data 1900–2010 from meteorological stations across the world have been analyzed and it has been found that all land areas generally have two different valid temperature trends. Coastal stations and hill stations facing ocean winds are normally more warm-trended than the valley stations that are sheltered from dominant oceans winds.

Thus, we found that in any area with variation in the topography, we can divide the stations into the more warm trended ocean air-affected stations, and the more cold-trended ocean air-sheltered stations. We find that the distinction between ocean air-affected and ocean air-sheltered stations can be used to identify the influence of the oceans on land surface. We can then use this knowledge as a tool to better study climate variability on the land surface without the moderating effects of the ocean.

We find a lack of warming in the ocean air sheltered temperature data – with less impact of ocean temperature trends – after 1950. The lack of warming in the ocean air sheltered temperature trends after 1950 should be considered when evaluating the climatic effects of changes in the Earth’s atmospheric trace amounts of greenhouse gasses as well as variations in solar conditions.

Another New Study Suggests Most – 80% – Of The Modern CO2 Increase Has Been Natural

by K. Richard, Aug 29, 2025 in NoTricksZone 


An independent researcher (Robbins, 2025) has reviewed recent research that suggests at least “80% or more of the [modern CO2] increase is of natural origin.”

This is because “changes in atmospheric temperature are an ‘effect’ of changes in SSTs and not a ’cause’ as some might advocate.”

Similar conclusions are found in a paper published in the same peer-reviewed journal last year (Ato, 2024).

“SST [sea surface temperature] has been the determinant of the annual changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and […] anthropogenic emissions have been irrelevant in this process…”

Media Falsely Claim Antarctica On Brink Of Climate Doom, Ignore Contrary Data

by A. Watts, Aug 29, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch 


Why abrupt Antarctic ‘climate shifts’ aren’t new or necessarily catastrophic.

 

Emperor Penguins
A recent CBS News article, “Abrupt Antarctic climate shifts could lead to ‘catastrophic consequences for generations,’ experts warn,” claims that Antarctica is on the brink of irreversible collapse due to climate change, warning that sea levels could rise by meters and that “catastrophic consequences for generations” are looming. [emphasis, links added]

This is false or, at best, deeply misleading.

The actual data and history of Antarctic ice show that “abrupt changes” are neither unprecedented nor a reason to panic. Natural variability and cyclical shifts are being ignored in favor of sensational headlines pushing the increasingly untenable climate crisis narrative.

CBS was not alone in pushing the Antarctic climate crisis narrative.

On August 21, 2025, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) joined the chorus of media outlets with alarming headlines warning of a pending ice collapse, publishing a report claiming Antarctica is undergoing “rapid, self-perpetuating changes” that are “potentially irreversible.”

Each of the reports cited a new Nature review led by Professor Nerilie Abram as the source of the information for their alarming articles.

ABC’s article presents Antarctica as being in a state of runaway decline, with imminent threats to emperor penguins and global sea levels, parroting language from the Abram paper as if it were an observed fact, rather than the speculative synthesis of research papers that the Nature study cites.

CBS, ABC, and other media outlets are covering this story as if a tipping point is upon us—but a closer look at the evidence reveals otherwise.

NYT Falsely Blames Climate Change For Hurricane Erin Despite No Evidence

by L. Lueken, Aug 28, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch


Rapid intensification of Hurricane Erin isn’t unusual, and attribution studies don’t prove climate change caused it.

The New York Times (NYT) published an article titled “How Climate Change Affects Hurricanes Like Erin,” in which they rely on rapid attribution analysis to claim that climate change is making rapidly intensifying hurricanes more likely, implying that the storm was worsened by global warming. This is false. [emphasis, links added]

Attribution studies are generally not based on solid scientific evidence and, therefore, not provable. Plus, there is a lack of evidence to support the notion that rapid intensification is becoming more common.

At the outset, the NYT claimed that hurricane Erin’s effects, such as they are, “are made worse by global warming,” even though the storm stayed offshore. The storm intensified quickly from a Category 1 to a Category 5 hurricane, and NYT claims that “[a]s the planet warms, scientists say that rapidly intensifying hurricanes are becoming ever more likely.”

First, it is important to note that just because a storm is among the most rapidly intensifying on record, it does not mean that there were not similar storms that went unrecorded.

As mentioned in a previous Climate Realism post about hurricane Erin, hurricane measurement technology is far advanced today than it was even a few decades ago.

Before the widespread use of Hurricane Hunter flights starting in the 70s where offshore storms were first closely monitored and directly measured throughout their lifespan, other rapidly intensifying storms would not have made the record.

So there is uncertainty about the record there.

Beyond that, attribution researchers and the NYT would like to blame hurricane intensification all on warm sea surface temperatures, but rapid intensification occurs in response to a variety of factors lining up just right.

Similar claims were made two years ago concerning Hurricane Otis. That storm also intensified rapidly over a single day, turning into a Category 5 before hitting the west coast of Mexico.

Otis did not intensify under expected conditions; thunderstorm bursts that forecasters were unable to predict are now believed to have been responsible for its rapid intensification.

Just as some scientists say more intense storms are more likely with warming, other scientists say that they will become less likely to form or less likely to strike land.

The NYT neglected to mention these perspectives, focusing its story on the scarier opinions that support the narrative that climate change is responsible for worsening extreme weather events.

In fact, as Climate at A Glance: Hurricanes details, there is no data suggesting hurricanes are becoming more frequent or more intense.

Study Finds Extreme Weather Database Exaggerates Global Disaster Trends

by Climate Discussion Nexus, Aug 28, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch 


Disasters don’t count if you don’t count them.

City flood aftermath
According to its publishers, a dataset called EM-DAT, which stands for Emergency Events Database, so it’s not even an acronym, lists “data on the occurrence and impacts of over 26,000 mass disasters worldwide from 1900 to the present day.” [emphasis, links added]

Which makes it perfect for studying long-term trends. And what’s even better, for the climate change crowd anyway, is that, as the authors of a 2024 study noted, “There are very strong upward trends in the number of reported disasters.”

But as the same authors noted in the very next sentence, “However, we show that these trends are strongly biased by progressively improving reporting.” Simply put, before 2000, reporting of small disasters that caused fewer than 100 deaths was hit-and-miss.

So, historically, the record of giant disasters that killed hundreds or more persons is reasonably complete, but not the record of small ones.

And the authors of the recent study argue that once they adjust for the effect of underreporting, the trends in disaster-related mortality go away.

The paper, “Incompleteness of natural disaster data and its implications on the interpretation of trends,” by a group of scientists in Sweden, began by noting that they are not the first to point out the problem.

The weird thing is that many authors who have pointed out this massive flaw have then gone ahead and used the data anyway, as though it did not exist, or at least they had not noticed it:

“Various authors (Field et al., 2012; Gall et al., 2009; Hoeppe, 2016; Pielke, 2021) have noted that there are reporting deficiencies in the EM-DAT data that may affect trends then proceeded to present trend analyses based on it without correction. Even the EM-DAT operators themselves discourage using EM-DAT data from before 2000 for trend analysis (Guha-Sapir (2023)). Yet recently, Jones et al. (2022) investigated the 20 most cited empirical studies utilising EM-DAT as the primary or secondary data source, and found that with only one exception the mention of data incompleteness was limited to a couple of sentences, if mentioned at all.”

Having made that point, their study then digs into the records and shows that in the post-2000 period, there is a steady pattern relating the frequency of events to the number of fatalities (F) per event.

It follows something that statisticians call “power-law behaviour” in which the more extreme an outcome, the rarer it is, not in a straight line but in an inverse exponential relationship, where extreme things, [like] large numbers of fatalities in a disaster, are a lot rarer than small numbers on a logarithmic curve. (For instance, in boating accidents, there are tens of thousands of individuals falling out and drowning for every Titanic.)

Hydrological, meteorological, and geophysical disasters all follow power-law behaviour in recent decades. But in earlier decades, the relationship doesn’t appear to hold because of a deficiency of low-fatality disasters in the data, rather than because it wasn’t still true then..

Finally, an Unbiased and Objective Climate Science Report

by T. Gallaudet, Aug 26, 2025 in TheEpochTimes


The recent report released by Energy Secretary Chris Wright on the climate impacts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the U.S. has caused quite a stir in the climate science arena. “Outrage,” “pushback,” and “criticized” are the words used in many of the headlines about it.
To better gauge the overall opinion of the report, two journalists from the Associated Press asked members of the climate science committee if they believed that it accurately portrayed the current “mainstream view of climate science.”

The Medieval Warm Period: A Global Phenomenon?

by M. Wielicki, Mar 06, 2025 in IrrationalFear

The debate over the characteristics and impact of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), roughly dated from 950 to 1250 AD, lies at the heart of discussions on historical climate variability and its implications for understanding current climate change.

Following the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)Third Assessment Report in 2001, the MWP was essentially erased from the paleoclimatological record in favor of the ‘hockey stick’ graph. This disappearance remains a point of contention that has been particularly prominent in public and scientific debate.

The ‘hockey stick’ graph, first published by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes in 1999, depicted temperature anomalies over the past millennium. It showed relatively minor temperature fluctuations for most of the last millennium (the “shaft” of the hockey stick) and a sharp rise in temperatures in the 20th century (the “blade” of the hockey stick). This presentation suggested that the modern warming period has been unprecedented over the last millennium. This finding has been at the core of calls for robust measures aimed at addressing climate change.

A warming pulse in the Antarctic continent changed the landscape during the Middle Ages

by E. Forte et al., Apr 11, 2025 in Nature (OPEN ACCESS)


Abstract

The Antarctic landscape is one of the most stable environments on the Earth, at least since approximately 14 million years ago when most glaciers in continental Antarctica changed from temperate to cold-based, and previous extensive fluvial activity disappeared. Here, we detected a large landscape change on a coastal glacier in continental Antarctica (Boulder Clay Glacier) that occurred in the Medieval Warm Period. Such change consists in a glacial unconformity marked by a continuous sediment layer and an erosion channel on the past glacier surface. This channel, more than 4 kilometers long, represents a local deepening of a glacial unconformity that cuts the underlying glacial strata and was clearly imaged and mapped by Ground Penetrating Radar data. Four boreholes were allowed to calibrate the sediment layer so identified because it was observed in all boreholes at depths between 1.85 and 3.07 m. Moreover, the occurrence at a depth of 11.11 meters of mosses suitable for the dating through radiocarbon dating provided the age of 1050 calibrated years before the present, implying that the erosion event occurred during the Medieval Warm Period between 900 and 989 before the present.

Trump Unsettles Supposedly Settled Climate Science

by H.S. Burnett, Aug 26, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch 


DOE climate report shows rising CO2 has limited impact on temperatures and isn’t catastrophic as alarmists claim.

 

Donald Trump’s presidency has seemingly unsettled the supposedly settled science of climate change, disrupting 40 years of “climate change is killing us” dogma in seven short months. [emphasis, links added]

For nearly four decades, scientists with a reputational and financial stake in the game, and compliant, uninquisitive mainstream media, have told the public one thing consistently concerning climate change: there is a consensus, there is no debate, human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous climate change. The end, roll credits, The Science is settled.

The Consensus Climate Cabal (CCC) of scientists, activists, and politicians attempted to enforce the settled climate science orthodoxy because they profited from it in one way or another, in part by shutting down continued debate and discussion about the causes and consequences of climate change.

For example, the Climategate emails showed scientists suppressing or lying about inconvenient data, undermining climate concerns, having open-minded journal editors removed from their positions or reined in by journal publishers (nefarious activity that continues to this day, unfortunately).

In Climategate’s aftermath, climate skeptics were increasingly shut out of the peer review process, and papers openly skeptical of the anthropogenic climate disaster narrative were nearly impossible to get published in top journals.

The mainstream media then piled on. It began to shut dissenting voices out of climate change stories.

The media concluded that since “the science was settled,” the debate was over, and publishing the views of climate skeptics/climate realists was tantamount to allowing Holocaust deniers a voice in stories about Nazi death camps.

Those not in the consensus group were labeled as climate deniers and disenfranchised in polite company.

A recent article in Nature acknowledged that the DOE’s report has at least a modicum of validity.

“Predictions of global warming are uncertain,” writes Tim Plamer, D.Phil., in a recent article in Nature. “That’s why we need to keep finding out how the climate system works.”

Palmer admits, for example, that climate change is not catastrophic, and “its authors are correct in one respect: the most important uncertainty in our ability to predict how much global temperatures will increase as carbon emissions continue is related to how cloud coverage will change over time.”

The response of global temperatures to rising CO2 is the most critical question in the climate debate. If that question is unsettled, then we can’t really know how the climate will respond to rising temperatures and whether it endangers humans or the environment. Score one for the DOE report.

The science is not “settled,” after all. It never was!

INTERVIEW. Dr. Judith Curry on Global Warming: Where Is the Danger?

by Clintel Foundation, Aug 24, 2025


“People used to call the warm periods the optimums, the climate optimums, because ecosystems and people thrived in these warmer climate optimums,” says Dr. Judith Curry, professor emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We talk about two degrees of warming, things like that, but the part that they don’t tell you is that the baseline is the period between 1850 and 1900. Since that period, we’ve already seen 1.3 degrees of warming,” she says. And each of us can see for ourselves if human life on planet Earth has gotten better or worse during that time, while the population has been increasing along with agricultural productivity. “The lives lost per 100,000 people from weather and climate extremes have dropped by two orders of magnitude. So, you know, we’ve managed to do quite well during the first 1.3 degrees of warming. So if we were to see another 1.3 degrees of warming, which is the current best estimate from the UN climate negotiators by 2100, is there any reason to think that would be any worse than the first 1.3 degrees of warming?” Curry asks a simple question.

Many widely held beliefs, such as the notion that a climate crisis or global warming is causing more extreme weather, are simply false. The sea level rise is insignificant. “So where is the danger?” Curry asks.

Curry also points out that until we better understand natural climate variability, we can’t be very confident about stating how much of the warming is human-caused. According to her we don’t have a good enough understanding of a number of issues, e.g. how big is the Sun’s influence on climate, or what is the effect of ocean circulations etc. Therefore the widely used narrative of 97% of scientists agreeing that we are facing a man-made climate crisis is, according to Curry, simply a joke. “Scientists do not agree on the most consequential issues,” she explains.

There is a popular claim. It is still alive, pretty much. I think that there is a scientific consensus that 97% of scientists agree that human-caused climate change exists. Many interpret this to mean there’s no room for any discussion. But where does this claim actually come from?

Well, where it comes from is that there was an activist scientist who had a blog, and he had some of his blogger buddies do a search of scientific abstracts, and they classified the abstracts as either for or against human-caused global warming. Most of them didn’t directly confront the issue. And they counted papers that included cook stove technology being used in India, for example. And they counted that as in favor of the global warming narrative. So, it’s actually a big joke.

What climate scientists actually agree on is very little. Everyone agrees that it’s been warming since about the middle 19th century. Everyone agrees that we’re adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And everyone agrees that carbon dioxide has an infrared emission spectra that, all other things being equal, acts to warm the planet.

But scientists do not agree on the most consequential issues, such as how much of the recent warming has been caused by humans. How much warming can we expect for the remainder of the 21st century? Is warming dangerous? Will humanity and human welfare overall be improved by a rapid transition away from fossil fuels? There’s a huge debate, scientific and political debate on these issues, and pretending that we shouldn’t have this debate and pretending that there’s some sort of agreement by all scientists on these issues where there’s a lot of disagreement is not only bad for science, but it misleads policymakers. So it’s not good for anybody other than for the activist scientists who want attention, fame, fortune, whatever – who knows what drives them.

In your book Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response (2023), you write that in 2017, you resigned from your faculty position at the Georgia Institute of Technology because academia increasingly felt like “wrong trousers” due to climate consensus enforcement and free speech issues. Could you please elaborate on this? What did you mean?

Germany’s Green Economy Collapse… Q2 Economy Shrinks 0.3% …AI Stalls

by P. Gosselin, Aug 24, 2025 in NoTricksZone


Germany is not just falling behind – it risks collapsing. 

Germany’s energy woes, brought on by its failed attempt at transitioning to green energies, continue to mount. Blackout News here reports on how the expansion of AI data centers is facing a significant slowdown due to a global lack of sufficient power supply.

In Frankfurt, Germany, industry experts report a critical shortage of grid capacity, leading to stalled projects. The massive energy needs of AI are outpacing the development of power grids and severely hindering growth. In the second quarter of 2025, the German economy shrank 0.3%, worse than expectations.

In contrast, China appears to have a competitive advantage due to its long-term, strategic energy planning and decades of extensive investment in all sectors of power supply. This centralized control has created massive energy reserves, positioning the country favorably for AI expansion. However, this advantage is not rooted in sustainable practices.

China’s energy mix still heavily relies on coal, with renewables making up a much smaller percentage.

German industry continues eroding

Blackout News also reports, “DAX companies are cutting jobs on a massive scale – 30,000 lost within a year”, thus confirming the country’s industrial decline.

“DAX companies are under enormous pressure. Within a year, the largest listed companies lost around 30,000 jobs,” writes Blackout News. “This corresponds to a decrease of 0.9 percent. ‘The demand for employees is likely to continue to decline,’ industry experts emphasize.”

Pielke Jr. –A Takeover of the IPCC

by C. Rotter, Aug 24, 2025 in WUWT


Roger Pielke Jr.’s “A Takeover of the IPCC” offers a timely post-mortem on what’s left of scientific rigor in the world’s most influential climate assessment body, of which Pielke Jr. has long been a supporter. The article chronicles not just a change in personnel at the IPCC, but a seismic shift in methodology and purpose—a transformation best described as a hostile takeover by advocates of “Extreme Event Attribution” (EEA). The implications for public policy, scientific integrity, and even the basic credibility of climate science are staggering, and long overdue for public scrutiny.

Pielke’s article, in short, is a wakeup call. The so-called “settled science” is more unsettled than ever, and the very structures meant to provide honest assessment are being repurposed for advocacy. The cost, inevitably, will be paid in public trust, misallocated resources, and a continued failure to address the real drivers of disaster risk.

There’s an old saying in science: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The new IPCC, sadly, seems content to settle for extraordinary press releases. The public deserves better. It’s time to ask, loudly, whose interests are really being served by this shift—and to demand a return to genuine scientific skepticism before the last shreds of credibility are gone for good.

Michael Mann’s Social Media Rants Turn Anger Into Alienation

by R. Bradley Jr.,  Aug 23, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch 


Michael “ClimateGate” Mann cannot get out of his own way.

His arrogant, condescending social tweets speak for themselves—just as the words, sentences, and paragraphs of the East Anglia emails did. [some emphasis, links added]

“And yes, there is empirical, peer-reviewed support for the conclusion that climate deniers, in general, are truly awful human beings.” (–Michael Mann, via X)

He is not the kind of person you would want in just about any endeavor, much less as a climate scientist trying to present a case.

This post traces Mann’s angst on X and then at BlueSky, his successor to X:

Final Comment

This is enough to keep a psychologist busy. Mann stepped into his own manhole, and he kept digging down.

Like Al Gore, he hurts his cause more than he helps it, as 97 percent of his colleagues (just an estimate) are more rational and quieter than he is on the same subject.

Another Study Affirms Anthropogenic CO2 Does Not Drive Climate Change

by K. Richard, Aug 22, 2025 in NoTricksZone 


Utilizing AI’s evidence-streamlining capabilities, a new study (with “Grok” literally positioned as the lead author) summarizes a few of the key counterpoints undermining the CO2-drives-climate narrative.

For example, consider that humans contribute just 10 GtC per year to the carbon cycle, whereas nature’s sources (ocean outgassing and soil respiration, primarily) contribute 220 GtC annually. The combined total (230 GtC/year) does not distinguish between sources, and thus natural sinks that remove carbon from the atmosphere proportionately absorb human as well as natural emissions, with the human percentage (4%) insignificant and the natural predominant (96%).

But even if the last century of rising CO2 was 100% anthropogenic, the empirical data indicate the residence time for atmospheric CO2 is just 3-7 years. This necessarily precludes the possibility for anthropogenic CO2 in particular to be the driver of presumed radiation imbalances, or radiative forcing. This is because the tiny anthropogenic component is too quickly removed from the cycle to have more than a negligible impact. Nearly 90% of CO2 derived from human emissions sources since 1750 has already been removed, absolving humans of the alleged responsibility for (allegedly CO2-induced) climate change.

The atmospheric CO2 residence time would need to last centuries for the presumed effects of anthropogenic CO2 to have the dominant impact the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims it has. So what has the IPCC decided to do? Of course, the IPCC (and those hoping to blame humans for climate change) rely on modeled assumptions that the atmospheric CO2 residence time is, yes, over 100 years. There is no empirical basis validating these assumptions. To put it crudely, the IPCC’s 100-year CO2 residence time model is made up. Fake.

The study also addresses the causality problem that the CO2-drives-temperature narrative has, as there are many studies affirming CO2 changes follow, rather than lead, temperature changes. This T→CO2 directionality is not only observed in the short-term (months), but in paleoclimate studies (an 800-year CO2 lag) as well.

In sum, there is ample evidence available to support the conclusion anthropogenic CO2 does not drive climate change.

Chart: What Powered the World in 2024?

by D. Neufeld, Aug 22, 2025 in VisualCapitalist


The Global Energy Mix in 2024

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

 

Key Takeaways

  • Global energy demand increased 2% to reach an all-time high of 592 exajoules (EJ) in 2024.
  • Non-fossil fuels grew 7% year-over-year, bringing their share of the global energy mix to 13.5%.

Global energy use rose to 592 EJ in 2024, marking a new record in demand.

While cleaner technologies continue to expand, traditional energy sources still form the backbone of the global energy system. At the same time, the Asia Pacific region drove 68% of demand growth, reflecting the region’s rapid economic momentum and industrialization.

This chart shows the global energy mix in 2024, based on data from the Energy Institute.

Fossil Fuels Underpin the Global Energy Mix

Last year, oil, coal, and natural gas together supplied 86.7% of global energy needs.

Oil remained the dominant energy source, accounting for 199 EJ, or 33.6% of global supply. In 2024, average oil prices declined by 3%, though they were still 27% higher than in 2019. The U.S. held its position as the world’s largest producer, contributing roughly one-fifth of total output.

Coal followed at 27.9%, supported by increased consumption in emerging economies. Natural gas, though cleaner than coal, supplied 25.2%, rounding out the fossil fuel trio.

Energy Source 2024 Total Energy Supply (EJ) Share
Oil 199 33.6%
Coal 165 27.9%
Natural gas 149 25.2%
Nuclear energy 31 5.2%
Hydroelectricity 16 2.7%
Other renewables 33 5.6%
Total 592

It’s also worth noting that low-carbon energy sources are growing at a meaningful pace.

In 2024, their combined share rose to 13.5%, supported by a 7% annual increase. Wind and solar stood out in particular, growing by 16% to remain the fastest-rising energy sources worldwide.

Moreover, nuclear energy accounted for 5.2% of supply, with France and Japan responsible for nearly two-thirds of its growth as long-idled plants were brought back online.

Trump DOE Gives Coal Plant Lifeline Despite Seething Enviro Rage

by A. Streb, Aug 22, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch 


Activists warn the move will raise costs and pollute while officials cite grid reliability and energy security.

Campbell coal plant
The Department of Energy (DOE) on Thursday issued an emergency order that will keep a Michigan coal plant [pictured above] running to reduce the risk of blackouts while summer heat strains the power grid and despite environmental protests fighting to shutter the plant. [emphasis, links added]

DOE’s order directs the major grid operator for the central U.S. — the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) — to continue running a coal-fired plant in Michigan to stave off power shortages, which has sparked ire from some environmental activists who claim the plant will pollute the area.

The order follows a similar May emergency directive to keep the same Michigan J.H. Campbell plant running, which was soon followed by a major blackout in New Orleans, an event that DOE Secretary Chris Wright hailed as proof of why the Trump administration prioritizes energy abundance.

“The United States continues to face an energy emergency, with some regions experiencing more capacity constraints than others. With electricity demand increasing, we must put an end to the dangerous energy-subtraction policies embraced by politicians for too long,” Wright said Thursday.

“This order will help ensure millions of Americans can continue to access affordable, reliable, and secure baseload power regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.”

DOE noted that the May order to keep the coal plant open has allowed it to function as a critical power generator on the grid during periods of high energy demand.

The J.H. Campbell plant was set to close on May 31, a full 15 years before reaching the end of its design life, the agency said.

Dramatic slowdown in melting of Arctic sea ice surprises scientists

by D. Carrington, Aug 20, 2025 in TheGuardian


La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse