Alarmists play long game at COP30

by D. Wojick, Nov 11, 2025 in WUWT


Climate alarmism has been seriously stalled by a combination of President Trump and unfavorable economic conditions. So, the diplomats laboring at COP30 are working on long-term issues, hoping for better “weather,” as it were. They are still very busy negotiating the future.

Major policy initiatives often take a decade or more, so while subdued, the work has not slowed down. Rumors of the death of alarmism are greatly exaggerated. The greens are just biding their time.

Most of the issues are about money, of course, although the call for increased 2030 emission reduction targets is also on the table. The money issues mostly have to do with long-term objectives and mechanisms. This includes various global taxes such as on shipping emissions and airfare.

An unavoidable, immediate money issue is raising the supposed $100 billion annual payment by “developed” countries to “developing” countries. (This distinction between donor and recipient countries is based on two lists from 1992 that are long out of date.)

But even here, what was once talk of trillions has moderated to a mere hundreds of billions in the short term. Instead, they are supposed to develop a roadmap to get to $1.3 trillion a year some time from now.

On the new emission targets, there has been a distinct lack of ambition. Many developing countries have yet to submit theirs. One reason may be that these grand plans are all written as being contingent on funding from the “developed” countries. Raising these numbers could be a bad move politically.

The Curious Case of the Missing Data

by I. Williams, Nov 09, 2025 in WUWT


I shall end with two unanswered questions. The reason for that lies in a story with eight decimal places of recondite mystery and scarcely believable deductions. One last glimpse of reality: the mean temperature of the world at the moment (early November) is hovering around 14 deg C, which is never used because it does not convey a sufficient element of danger in the global warming message. Fourteen degrees Celsius or fifty-seven Fahrenheit are not messages of imminent doom. Either one is the annual mean temperature of Bordeaux, San Francisco or Canberra.

Therefore the Wise Ones have decided that any global temperature given to the masses must always be shown as a difference from the mean of the half-century 1850-1900, which, they say, is representative of our world in smoke-free pre-industrial times. That period also happens to be towards the end of the Little Ice Age, which, the Met Office says, had ‘particularly cold intervals beginning in about 1650, 1770 and 1850.’ Cold spell beginning in 1850? Interesting.

Thus it was that on 10 January this year the Met Office told us that ‘The global average temperature for 2024 was 1.53±0.08°C above the 1850-1900 global average,’ This  is an extraordinarily accurate figure but the World Meteorological Organisation has much the same: ‘The global average surface temperature [in 2024] was 1.55 °C … ± 0.13 °C … above the 1850-1900 average, according to WMO’s consolidated analysis.’ Ignore the scarcely believable accuracy of those second decimal places, there’s worse to come.

The obvious question is: Why were those fifty years chosen as the fundamental reference period? The answer is easily found: ‘Global-scale observations from the instrumental era began in the mid-19th century for temperature,’ says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their Fifth Assessment Report (Section B, page 4.) An associated IPCC Special Report (FAQ1.2 para 4) explains that ‘The reference period 1850–1900 … is the earliest period with near-global observations and is … used as an approximation of pre-industrial temperature.’ Note the categoric statements that sufficient data is available in that nineteenth century fifty-year period to calculate the global mean temperatures.

In 1850, may I remind you, Dickens was writing David Copperfield, California was admitted to the Union as the 31st state and vast areas of the earth were still unexplored. 1900 brought the Boxer Rebellion (China), the Boer War (South Africa) and the Galveston hurricane (USA). There were still quite large areas awaiting intrepid explorers.

I was curious about how in olden times those global temperatures were actually measured, but after a painstaking search of websites and yet again proving that AI-derived information can be both wrong and misleading, I turned in despair to the Met Office enquiry desk. Their reply was long and very detailed. No actual data, but several clues as to where to search. Very interesting clues.

Consensus, likelyhood and confidence

by WUWT, Nov 10, 2025


Is the scientific confidence on climate change greater than 99% or less than 1%? And does the IPCC truly have confidence in its own conclusion? At first glance these questions may seem trivial and pointless. Even a bit embarrassing. Yet, upon closer examination, it turns out that only 0.6% of peer-reviewed scientific papers explicitly endorse the IPPC’s central position – namely, that there exists a consensus that human activities, especially by the emission of greenhouse gases,  are the dominant cause  of recent global warming. Yes, there is a general consensus that humans influence the climate, but only in an explicitly unquantified sense and probably rather small. And that is something quite different.

The IPCC deserves credit for indicating in most of its assessments, the degree of “likelyhood” of their statements and the degree “confidence” the author’s have in their own conclusions. However, those reported levels of likelyhood and confidence are notably low, and often fall below what might be considered appropriate for statements presented with scientific authority. It seems that for most of the author’s of the IPCC Assessment reports the science is not settled.

You probably don’t believe this right away. So please read the article below.  It is largely adapted from the paragraph’s 1 and 3 of Chapter 3 of my book “Crisis or Hoax”. Published by Bookbaby (printed) and Amazon (e-book). An earlier version of this article was published on the Dutch website “Climategate”.

Consensus, likelyhood  and confidence

 1. A consensus of 97%  or more?

On May 16, 2013, U.S. President Obama tweeted, “97% of scientists agree. Climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”

The tweet became extremely important and may have been the most quoted tweet ever. His successor, Twitter fanatic Donald Trump did not even come close. At first glance, it seems an odd time for such a tweet. In May 2013, the average global temperature had barely risen for 14 years. But Obama wasn’t reacting to the weather or the climate either; he was reacting to an article by John Cook (et al.) that had appeared the previous day (!), on May 15, 2013, in the peer-revied journal Environmental Research Letters It was entitled “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature”. (J.Cook et al, 2013). The lead author was an assistant professor of communication sciences.

2025 Hurricane Forecast Was Overly Alarmist (Again)…Atlantic Season Ending Near Normal

by P. Gosselin, Nov 08, 2025 in NoTricksZone


The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted that an above average Atlantic huricane seacon for 2025.

Now that the season is winding down, we are able to start concluding and summarizing the season: it’s going to come in as near normal activity. The forecast made earlier this year was a bit on the hyped side.

Huricane season forecasts have not really improved, despite all the claims that models are better than ever:

“In my 30 years at the National Weather Service, we’ve never had more advanced models and warning systems in place to monitor the weather,” said NOAA’s National Weather Service Director Ken Graham. “This outlook is a call to action: be prepared. Take proactive steps now to make a plan and gather supplies to ensure you’re ready before a storm threatens.”

NOAA’s outlook for the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, which goes from June 1 to November 30, predicted a 60% chance of an above-normal season, and a 10% chance of a below-normal season. The agency forecast a range of 13 to 19 total named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher). Of those, 6-10 were forecast to become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including 3-5 major hurricanes (category 3, 4 or 5; with winds of 111 mph or higher).

Near average season

Greenland Continues To Defy Alarmist Warming And Ice Melt Narratives

by K. Richard, Nov 06, 2025 in NoTricksZone 


According to a new study, Greenland temperature stations indicate there was an abrupt 2.9°C warming trend from 1922-1932 (10 years) that was almost identical to the 3.1°C warming trend from 1993-2007 (14 years).

Between the two warming periods (identified as WP1 and WP2 in the study) was an overall ~3°C cooling from 1933-1992.

Thus, as the temperature charts from the study illustrate, there has been almost zero net warming across Greenland in the last century.

This temperature trajectory is consistent with the Box (2009) analysis that said “the annual whole ice sheet 1919–32 warming trend is 33% greater in magnitude than the 1994–2007 warming.”

“The course of the AT [air temperature] anomaly between 1900 and 2015 relative to the reference period (1986–2015) at the stations UPV, ILU, NUK, QAQ and TAS, the 20CRv3 area average for the globe, the Arctic, Greenland as well as 20CRv3 interpolated to WEG_L shows two distinguished WPs [warm periods]. These two periods are observed at all stations and show a continuous increase over more than 5 years. Based on this, we determine WP1 between 1922 and 1932, and WP2 between 1993 and 2007. During WP1, the AT anomaly increased on average by 2.9 °C across stations, while in WP2, it increased by 3.1 °C, though WP2 spans a longer period (14 years compared to 10 years for WP1). The average annual increase for both WPs across all stations is 0.2 °C yr−1.”

Interestingly, the authors estimate Greenland ice sheet (GIS) melt has added just 1.08 cm to global sea levels since 1900. This is too small to justify alarmist narratives about dramatic warming and ice melt contributions to sea level rise.