Archives mensuelles : février 2026

climate-debate

Climate change computer projections are manifestly false and dangerously misleading

by W. Kininmonth, Feb 19, 2026 in Clintel.org

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6. Carbon dioxide has little influence on Earth’s surface temperature. Earth’s surface temperature is elevated because the radiation emissions from the greenhouse gases, clouds, and aerosols reaching the surface reduce the net longwave radiation loss from the surface. Additional carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has little impact on surface temperature because there is little change in longwave radiation reaching the tropical surface as carbon dioxide concentration increases. The calculations below are made using the MODTRAN radiation transfer model and are for the tropical atmosphere with no clouds and constant temperature. Since industrialisation, for each 100ppm increase in carbon dioxide concentration the increase in radiation emitted by the greenhouse gases and reaching the surface was about 0.6W/m2. That is an increase of 0.3 percent of the radiation emitted by water vapour. Note that from the last glacial maximum 20,000 years ago to preindustrial times the carbon dioxide concentration increased from near 200ppm to near 300ppm (an increase of only 100ppm). During this period the polar ice sheets covering much of North America and northern Europe melted and sea level rose about 130 metres. Since industrialisation the carbon dioxide has increased by more than 100ppm, but sea level rise has been insignificant. The evidence does not suggest carbon dioxide concentration is influential in changing Earth’s climate.

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energy and fields

India Doubles Down On Coal And Natural Gas As Climate Goals Recede

by V. Jayaraj, Feb20, 2026 in ClimateChangeDispatch

india coal mining
In 2022, Alex Epstein released “Fossil Future,” his treatise on why humanity requires more coal, oil, and natural gas to flourish. When the book appeared, the Biden administration was making extravagant pledges to fund global climate initiatives. [some emphasis, links added]

Executives of major financial institutions and energy firms were making theatrical commitments to reducing their use and production of fossil fuels.

But four years later, those same industry titans are scrambling for excuses to delay or abandon net-zero goals and seeking to develop the energy sources they had publicly disavowed.

Business leaders cite supply chain complexities, technological barriers, and cost overruns. Some even acknowledge that fossil fuels are a necessity of modern life.

However, for national governments, reversing course is complicated by entanglements in the bureaucratic web of international climate agreements.

Hence, they maintain the language of action – as though they could control something as huge and complex as the climate system, while systematically securing long-term supplies of fossil fuels and expanding hydrocarbon infrastructure.

No country displays this pragmatism better than India, which has quietly delayed its net-zero commitments to a distant 2070.

Behind a green veneer, India doubles down on every form of useful hydrocarbon available.

In doing so, it has emerged as a key export market for U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) and a bellwether for global energy reality.

Coal Reality Quashes Green Illusion

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climate-debate

Temperature of some cities could rise faster than expected under 2°C warming

by UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA, Feb 4, 2026 in EurekaAlert/AAAS

New research led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) shows how many tropical cities are predicted to warm faster than expected under 2°C of global warming.

Cities are often warmer than rural areas due to a phenomenon known as the urban heat island, which can be influenced by various factors, such as regional climate and vegetation cover. This can lead to increased heat-related health risks for some urban populations.

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the study combined state-of-the-art climate change projections with machine learning models to show how these urban heat islands can be amplified in many tropical and subtropical cities under climate change – mostly in monsoon regions such as India, China and Western Africa.

The researchers produced projections for 104 medium-sized cities with populations ranging between 300,000 and one million.

Their results show the day-time land surface temperatures in 81 per cent of these cities are predicted to warm more than surrounding rural areas. In 16 per cent, they may rise between approximately 50 to 100 per cent higher than surrounding areas under 2°C of global warming, a benchmark likely to be reached in the second half of this century.

The cities studied are in the warmer parts of the world, which the authors say makes these increases even more significant for human health and the urban environment. Medium-sized cities also represent a large proportion of global cities, with more than 2.5 times as many in this category than those with a population over one million.

Lead author Dr Sarah Berk, who did the work while a PhD student in UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences, said: “Under climate change, cities face not only the challenge of increasing temperatures in their surrounding areas, but also the challenge of potential changes in their heat islands.

“However, while global climate models are essential for projecting future temperature changes, they are limited in their ability to capture the trends of smaller cities. Even high-resolution global models can only predict changes for the largest urban areas or megacities.

“To bridge this gap, in our study we projected changes in land surface temperature in medium-sized cities, showing that in many of them, the urban warming rate is faster than rural surroundings,” added Dr Berk, now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Co-author Prof Manoj Joshi, from the Climatic Research Unit at UEA, said: “Urban heat stress under climate change is an increasing concern, as many cities in the tropics and subtropics can be warmer than their rural surroundings, heightening their vulnerability to rising temperatures.

“This analysis shows even state-of-the-art projections likely underestimate future urban warming. For example, our results suggest that several cities in North-East China and northern India are projected to warm by 3°C, despite Earth System Model projections of their hinterlands showing a warming of 1.5-2°C.

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climate-debate

When Real-World Data Contradicts The CO2–Temperature Climate Narrative

by L. Coleman, Feb 12, 2026 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Global warming policy has become the world’s most expensive bet. Governments have committed trillions of dollars on the assumption that carbon dioxide (CO2) from human activity is the principal driver of rising temperatures.

The story is simple: more CO2 in the air means higher global temperature. That simplicity proved politically convincing and underpins net‑zero targets, carbon pricing, and vast subsidies to decarbonize industry, energy, and transport within a generation.

But what if that core relationship is statistically less solid than advertised?

My new paper, published in the journal Science of Climate Change, probes that possibility with a disarmingly basic question: “Could CO2 be the principal cause of global warming?”

Instead of turning to climate models, I used my financial research experience to approach the problem the way economic analysts examine a market hypothesis: by testing how well data supports the assumed cause and effect.

This approach offers promise because climate and financial markets have a lot in common. Both are complex global systems with many feedbacks, incomplete data, and multiple plausible drivers. Both rely heavily on time‑series data, where establishing causality is notoriously difficult.

In finance, skeptical regulators and risk managers insist that models be stress‑tested against hard numbers. My analysis applied that toolkit to the CO2-temperature link to provide what Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman recommended as an outside view.

The starting point is familiar. Since the 19th century, atmospheric CO2 and global average temperature have both trended upward. This co-movement is widely taken as empirical support for a mechanistic link from CO2 to temperature.

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unclassified

Pollen Reconstructions Show The Last Glacial’s Warming Events Were Global, 10x Greater Than Modern

by Liu et al., 2026, Feb 11, 2026  in NoTricksZone 

“D–O signals [10-16°C warming events within decades to centuries] are not just seen in Greenland – they are registered globally.” – Liu et al., 2026

From 57,000 to 29,000 years ago, with Last Glacial atmospheric CO2 concentrations flatlining at ~200 ppm, there were 11 instances when Greenland abruptly warmed by 10-16°C within a span of just 50 to 200 years (Liu et al., 2026).

Wide-ranging pollen-based temperature and precipitation reconstructions affirm these Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events did not just occur in Greenland, they were realized across the globe.

Winter warming intervals of 2-5°C and up to 5-20°C within decades (centuries) also occurred at pollen sites in Asia, Europe, South and Central America, Africa, Middle East, and Australia.

Thus, there is nothing remotely unusual or unprecedented about the rate or magnitude of modern global warming.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Holocene Glacier Records

by A. May, Feb 13, 2026 in WUWT

Glacier length changes through time, they advance when the local climate around them is colder and retreat when it is warmer (Bray, 1968). Over century and greater time scales glacier length is considered a highly reliable indicator of both regional and worldwide warming trends according to Olga Solomina, Johannes Oerlemans, and the IPCC (Solomina et al., 2008), (Oerlemans, 2005) & (IPCC, 2001, pp. 127-130). While studying glacier lengths can illuminate long-term warming or cooling trends in glaciated areas is true, the idea that they can reveal hemisphere-wide or global climatic trends is somewhat speculative.

Advancing and retreating glaciers leave evidence of their fluctuations in length in glacial till deposits called moraines. Glacier moraines are easily identified and are distinct from other sediments and sedimentary rocks because they contain angular boulders, and they are unsorted and unstratified. Olga Solomina and colleagues in a 2015 review article, note:

“Studies of Holocene glacial geomorphic and sedimentological records provide the most direct means of determining the extent and timing of glacier oscillations. Until recently it has been difficult to define the ages of moraines in many regions because of the lack of appropriate dating techniques. Radiocarbon has been the most widely used and in some cases optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating has been implemented, but in most cases these can only be utilized to provide maximum and/or minimum ages on moraines by dating organic-rich deposits that are buried beneath moraines/tills, beyond the glacial limit (maximum ages), on top of moraines, or within the glacial limit (minimum ages). The development of terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide (TCN) dating, however, has provided a direct method of dating moraines and has led to a plethora of studies that are shedding new light on the nature of Holocene glacier fluctuations.” (Solomina et al., 2015)”

Dating Glacial Advances

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Why Climate Science Is Not Settle

by V. Jayaraj, Feb 10, 2026 in ClimateChangeDispatch 

model v actual world
The repeated claim that climate science is “settled” overlooks myriad uncertainties, competing mechanisms, and computer models that miss the mark when tested against reality. [some emphasis, links added]

Declaring finality in such a field reflects political confidence – even arrogance – not scientific maturity.

The Model-Reality Divergence

Computer models – based on faulty premises – are the bible for the modern climate movement. This, despite the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describing climate as a “coupled, non-linear, chaotic system” where long-term prediction is effectively impossible.

Policies costing trillions of dollars rely entirely on outputs of these digital simulations. But a model is only as good as its assumptions.

When those assumptions fail to match the physical world, an honest scientist discards the model. The climate establishment, instead, discards the data.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) July 2025 report, “Critical Review of Impacts of GHG Emissions on the US Climate,” exposed a hard truth: Fabricated scenarios supposedly representing future warming of the climate are exaggerations having little relationship to observed reality.

Dr Roy Spencer’s latest analysis in January 2026 looked at decadal temperature trends from 39 climate models compared to observations gathered from weather balloons, satellites, and analyses of meteorological information.

He confirmed that “all 39 climate models exhibit larger warming trends” than “observational data.”

Further, theories regarding the global warming potential (GWP) of so-called greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2)ignore the reality of atmospheric saturation, says Dr. William Happer.

At the current concentration of atmospheric CO2, there is only so much infrared radiation left to be influenced by additional amounts of the gas.

In other words, CO2’s warming effect is limited, and increasingly so as more is added. Yet the models assume a higher warming potential than nature exhibits.

Not Your Father’s Volcanic Eruption

The effect of the January 2022 Hunga Tonga underwater eruption exemplifies the climate system’s complexity. The volcano’s net outcome was not the cooling typically expected from such an event, but rather a complex interplay of competing factors that largely offset one another, with the effect on surface temperatures being nearly zero.

This outcome stands in sharp contrast to historical volcanic eruptions. Mount Tambora in 1815 cooled the globe by as much as nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit, producing the “Year Without a Summer.”

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Another Temperature Bias: The Shrinking Stevenson Screen = Warming

by A. Watts, Feb 8, 2026 in WUWT

Many of you may recall that I got my start in climate skepticism back in 2006 when I started looking at the paint on Stevenson Screens – because there was a change from the original lime-whitewash paint in the 1890s to modern latex paint. I figured there was a bias, and latex paint made the shelter warmer due its different IR signature. Temperature sensor tests over a month proved I was right. But in looking at temperature shelters in my area, I discovered an even bigger problem – most were sited near heat sources and heat sinks, in contradiction to NOAA’s own published siting standards. This started my journey to uncover just how bad the temperature observing network actually was. Comprehensive reports I made in 2009 and again in 2022 showed that surface measurements were a huge warm biased mess. This paper is over 10 years old, but I somehow missed it. I’m correcting that oversight.

Now, to add to that mess, comes this revelation – the Australian Bureau of Meteorology changed the size of Stevenson Screens to something that had just ~ 25% of the volume of the original, and did not run parallel tests to see if the conversion mattered. – Anthony

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climate-debate

True, Mother Jones, Polar Bears Are More Adaptable Than Alarmists Have Claimed

by L. Lueken,  Feb 6, 2026 in WUWT

A recent article at Mother Jones, “Something Unexpected Is Happening With Norway’s Polar Bears,” expresses surprise that polar bear populations in Norway are actually getting healthier amid declining sea ice. This is true, though it is not truly “news,” in the sense of something newly discovered, and should not have been unexpected. Previous research, including annual polar bear counts, show that polar bear populations as a whole have increased amid modest global warming.

Mother Jones says the message that polar bears would soon die out due to climate change “infiltrated the public psyche, perhaps more than any other about the scourge of global warming.” This is certainly true, polar bears became the poster children in many advertisements about climate change, and were featured prominently in former Vice-President Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The polar bear extinction theory, however, is another one of the claims from that film that have long since been debunked, as Mother Jones admits, “the reality for these iconic bears is more complicated.”

Mother Jones references two studies showing that polar bears in multiple locations are doing very well. A 2022 study looking at southeastern Greenland and a recent study in Scientific Reports looking at Norway’s polar bear populations, show bears in those locations have actually become healthier, with their population “stable or growing.”

They do emphasize that Hudson Bay bears are struggling, claiming that “researchers have tied melting ice to lower bear survival and a shortage of food, finding that the population has roughly halved since the 1980s.” But overall, “there are 20 distinct polar bear populations around the world, and they all behave slightly differently. Warming is not uniformly killing them.”

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better to know...?

Climate Scientist Who Predicted End Of “Heavy Frost And Snow” Now Refuses Media Inquiries

by P. Gosselin, Feb 3, 2026 in NoTricksZone 

More than two decades ago, renowned climate scientist Mojib Latif of Germany’s Max Planck Instiute for Meterology, based in Hamburg, warned the climate-ambulance chasing Der Spiegel that, due to global warming, Germany would likely no longer experience harsh winters with heavy frost and snow as it had in previous decades.

Spiegel reported climate scientist’s prediction of harsh winters disappearing due to man’s activities. Image cropped here. 

In light of the current severe winter weather in Germany, Latif’s statements are facing renewed scrutiny. An article appearing in the Berliner Zeitung here notes that Latif’s prophecy has “aged poorly” and he appears to want to have nothing to do with them.

Hiding from the media

According to the Berliner Zeitung, the former Max Planck Institute scientist has recently stopped responding to media inquiries regarding his past claims. Critics argue that such drastic predictions damage the credibility of climate science, while others point out that extreme weather events—including intense cold snaps—can still occur within the broader context of climate change.

No Easter snow as well

Latif also claimed he recalled snow in the past occurring at Easter time, implying this no longer happens today. But that too was a false claim. perhaps prof. Latif will answer phone calls in April?

climate and geology

Holocene Warming

by  A. May, Feb 5, 2026 in WUWT

I find it amazing that some papers still state:

“air temperatures in the [Arctic or globally] are now at their warmest in the past 6,800–7,800 y, and that the recent rate of temperature change is unprecedented over the entire Holocene.” (Lecavalier et al., 2017)

While it is remotely possible that current Arctic or global average temperature is higher than any seen in the past 6,800 years, it is very unlikely and can’t be demonstrated with data we have today. It is almost certainly true that the rate of change in global or Arctic temperature observed recently is not unprecedented in the Holocene Epoch. This modern myth has been thoroughly debunked in the literature and seeing it pop up in PNAS and elsewhere is disconcerting. I thought peer-review was supposed to catch such errors.

Warmest in the past 6,800-7,800 years

The first assertion in Lecavalier et al.’s paper is that the Arctic is now warmer than at any time in the past 6,800-7,800 years. The warmest time in the Holocene (12,000 years ago to the present) is generally accepted to be the Holocene Climatic Optimum or the Holocene Thermal Maximum, both names are used. Two of my favorite Northern Hemisphere Holocene temperature proxies suggest that today is only warmer than the past 1,000-2,000 years as shown in figure 1.

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