Quotulatiousness

October 27, 2026

Counterproductive climate fearmongering

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Maarten Boudry on Substack Notes:

Climate scientist: “The world is a Japanese warrior committing a slow harakiri. The knife is already in his belly, the blood is running down his body“.

I am, quite frankly, fed up with this. This kind of extreme fearmongering is not only scientifically unfounded; it is actively harmful. It breeds paralysis and defeatism, fuels mental health problems, and leads young people to decide against having children.

For a long time, I tried to maintain the utmost respect for climate scientists. But it’s time we confronted a paradox: experts are often not the best guides when it comes to assessing the dangers within their own field—and even less so when it comes to deciding which policies should address them.

The same goes for AI, where even the field’s pioneers are now recklessly speculating about their “p(doom)” — the probability of human extinction.

Years of specializing in a single domain can narrow your perspective until everything else pales in comparison. Climate change — or AI — becomes the existential threat to humanity, eclipsing every other danger we face.

Self-selection plays a role, too. If you choose to specialize in a field because you believe humanity’s future depends on it, you’re hardly a representative sample of people who think the threat is manageable, or that the real dangers lie elsewhere. Those people are less likely to pursue a career in climate science or AI safety in the first place.

And, I’m sorry to say, there’s also a certain narcissism inherent in this kind of doomsday rhetoric: the belief that the fate of the entire world hinges on your particular area of expertise. That you possess privileged knowledge and occupy a central role in humanity’s existential drama.

October 26, 2026

Canada’s economic plight is largely self-inflicted

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to a Substack Notes post by Jasmin Laine:

I agree with Jasmin. What Carney calls a “global rupture” is, in many respects, the accumulated consequence of political decisions made right here in Canada.

For more than a decade, Liberal governments have pursued policies whose economic consequences deserve far more scrutiny.

Climate mandates and regulatory costs have made investment and industrial development more difficult. Immigration expanded faster than housing, infrastructure and public services could reasonably accommodate. Rather than addressing why young Canadians struggle to afford homes and raise families, Ottawa increasingly relied on immigration to sustain population and labour-force growth.

High taxes, regulatory uncertainty and unfair foreign competition have weakened the conditions for domestic manufacturing. Government employment expanded much faster than private-sector employment, while productivity and business investment remained persistent concerns.

And years of public frustration over repeat violent offenders exposed serious weaknesses in our bail and justice systems.

These problems have different causes, and global pressures are real. But governments must accept responsibility for the consequences of their own decisions.

Carney speaks about rebuilding Canadian sovereignty, competitiveness and economic security. Those are worthwhile objectives. The question is whether his government is prepared to reconsider the policies that contributed to Canada’s vulnerabilities.

You cannot spend years weakening the foundations of an economy and then describe the resulting cracks as an unexpected global rupture.

Jasmin is asking the question every government should face: How much of the problem are you actually responsible for creating?

October 25, 2026

Penguins, man

Filed under: Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Penguins may be the reason we can’t have nice things … or they would be if they hadn’t gone extinct. You didn’t hear that? That’s because it didn’t happen, like so many events predicted by climate scientists over the last few decades. John Robson has the details:

Emperor Penguins on Snow Hill Island, Antarctica.
Photo by Ian Duffy via Wikimedia Commons.

We read in Phys.org that “Penguin poop is melting Antarctic snow by keeping algae green”. And of course we ask: Haven’t penguins lived there for millions of years? Answer: yes. Penguins evolved some 60 million years ago but Antarctica has only had significant ice coverage for 34 million. Yet they never kept it green, or turned it green, despite their predilection for dramatic defecation, until we invented climate. A story that caught our eye not just for the notion that a long-standing natural process could suddenly transform a continent but because we’d just also been told by National Geographic that climate change is driving penguins to extinction. But climate science is not like other kinds.

Despite waddling around looking comically unfit to survive in nature red in tooth and claw, penguins, with the very cool scientific name Sphenisciformes, actually flourish from the equator to the South Pole, with larger and thus better-insulated ones obviously being more common where it’s colder. It’s all part of the marvel of nature, including that having first developed the power of flight, which seems to us terrestrials like the A1 supreme deluxe way of avoiding being eaten, getting to food fast etc., some birds then chucked it to go back to running around but with fewer legs, like ostriches and emus but also kiwis and, in the good old terrifying days, the “terror birds” who ran up to 30 mph, stood up to 9 feet tall and “ripped the flesh from the body of other animals” and whose very name “Phorusrhacidae” is already frightening.

Others even decided running was also not for the birds, and walking was barely tolerable, so they jumped back into the water from which their ancestors had emerged during the Devonian. And it worked. Indeed, speaking of penguins’ evolution, Wikipedia adds that:

    There was a great diversity of species in subantarctic regions, and at least one giant species in a region around 2,000 km south of the equator 35 mya, during the Late Eocene, a climate decidedly warmer than today.

Warmer than today? Say it ain’t so! But it is. And a giant penguin, due to the fact that life likes warmth and struggles in cold. (There’s a reason Emperor Penguins are as lonely as they are hardy.) Now however we are doing them in. The NG article starts:

    In the storm-driven wilderness between South America’s southern cape and the frozen boundary of mainland Antarctica, the South Sandwich Islands form an isolated, crescent-shaped archipelago of rock and ice. Its rugged, northernmost isle, Zavodovski Island – where chinstraps and macaroni penguins blanket the hillsides that surround an active volcano – has held the title of the largest penguin colony on Earth.

And we know what you’re thinking. If the place is bristling with penguins, they must have pooped away the snow long ago. Unless they all died, which apparently they did:

    as chinstrap penguins began facing steep decline across the Antarctic Peninsula starting in the 1980, scientists wondered whether this remote island was faring any better. Through an analysis combining aerial drone surveys and manual population counts, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have discovered that in fewer than fifteen years, the island’s chinstrap population has plummeted by 63 percent – a loss of over half a million penguins.

And not for climate biologists the boom-and-bust cycle we learned about back in ye day in high school biology. Heck no:

    Their findings, published today in the journal Current Biology, identifies the island as home to the fastest-declining chinstrap population in the world, with climate-driven losses documented continuously since 2011. The decline wipes out more than a quarter of the total penguin population on Zavodovski, ceding the island’s title of world’s largest penguin colony to Cape Adare in Antarctica’s Ross Sea.

Note the phrase “climate-driven losses”. Since we don’t know what climate is driving or how it’s untestable. But it’s taking us with the penguins:

    The Southern Ocean is no stranger to loss. This news comes just six months after Emperor penguins and Antarctic fur seals were officially declared endangered with declining sea ice levels cited as a leading culprit. Acting as the planet’s primary climate buffer, the Southern Ocean absorbs nearly three-quarters of global ocean warming and a fifth of man-made carbon.

Again, how you’d test any of those assertions is anyone’s guess, though whether they’re going to ask for and get grants to test them is a certain no.

Come to think of it, we’ve discussed the plight of the Emperor Penguin before. Even if you don’t read the old post, I do encourage you to watch the embedded video.

October 5, 2026

There’s never any good news on the climate front

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

John Robson calls out the extreme rhetoric employed by environmentalists and their journalist flappers to try to keep climate anxieties as high as possible, especially if there haven’t been any new alarming climate-related events to build on:

The New York Times engages in some classic yellow journalism with “Climate: Disaster Survivors Sticking Together” teasing to a column by David Gelles that starts “Extreme weather is hitting more people with each passing year”. But it’s not, even though there are more people for it to hit with each passing year as the climate crisis coincides strangely with unprecedented human material flourishing and a 99 percent drop in climate-related fatalities. We accept that there is room for intelligent and well-meaning debate about facts as well as their meaning. But the drumbeat of assertions by climate fanatics that the weather is getting worse when it’s just not crosses the line into bad-faith bellowing ignorance.

Another Times story titillates with a “CALCULATOR” of:

    Is Your City Prepared for Climate Disaster? A new report ranks the world’s large cities on how well they have adapted to face climate risk.

What exactly “climate risk” is, unless they mean bad weather, is not explained. Why the Times thinks bad weather is new is also not explained. What the Times thinks of the fact that even as global population soars, the number of people killed every year by bad weather has plummeted, not the proportion but the absolute number, is apparently nothing. Instead they lead off:

    When it comes to the effects of hostile climates – flood, fire and more – what matters isn’t just inherent risk, but rather the ability of a place to withstand that risk.

Well, duh. And clearly wealthier societies are far better able to withstand that risk, so even if you believe that fossil fuels make the weather a bit worse, the tradeoff is well worth making. But so is the effort to see if the weather is getting worse.

Now we don’t deny that “fire” is a hostile climate. But if it’s an “effect” of hostile climate, then the climate has always been hostile since what evidence we have says there were a lot more wildfires two and three hundred years ago than there are now. Don’t wait for them to credit CO2 with the decrease though … since they didn’t bother looking it up.

That story also blathers about how things from “early warning systems” to “governance” can “significantly mitigate the effects of climate change” although climate change is not a causal force it’s a statistical description of how the weather has altered in some place over at least 30 years. And it says Chicago is the most resilient city with “low hurricane risk” due, we point out, not to them building a big windbreak or something but it not being in the path of the hurricanes that regularly sweep through other parts of the US and have for as long as there have been observers to flee them shouting “Whoa Nelly a twister!” Moreover:

    Many of the least resilient places were South Asian cities with extreme exposure to floods and monsoons to which they were poorly adapted.

And if the Times seriously thinks monsoons are a new and horrible consequence of the gasoline-powered automobile you should cancel your subscription before it puts some other nonsense in your head. Like that floods and mudslides in rural Nepal and Tibet are relevant to urban resilience.

Media outlets have always had a strong bias toward reporting bad news, “If it bleeds, it leads!” but on the climate beat, there’s never any good news to report because everything — warming, cooling, precipitation, seasonal change — has to be presented in a negative light.

September 29, 2026

The “meta-crisis” that isn’t

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Anthony Watts refutes the media claims of climate change driving a large group of unrelated issues into a “meta-crisis” that — as these things always seem to do — requires co-ordinated central control of all human activity (the answer always, always seems to be an all-powerful world government, doesn’t it?).

Image from Watts Up With That

Euronews claims climate change has evolved into a “meta-crisis” threatening food security, energy supplies, economies, water resources, and international security. This is misleading because the article largely substitutes predictions and assertions for measurements of what is actually happening. The data show global crop production and yields reaching record levels, deaths from extreme weather collapsing over the long term, and many of today’s energy and economic problems arising from political choices and geopolitical conflicts rather than changes in climate.

Euronews builds its case primarily around an interview with Emmanuella Doussis, UNESCO Chair on Climate Diplomacy at the University of Athens. Doussis declares climate change an economic, social, political, and geopolitical problem, linking it to competition for resources, migration, water shortages, food insecurity, and the energy transition.

Those are sweeping claims. Curiously, Euronews provides remarkably little observational evidence demonstrating that climate change is actually causing the worldwide “meta-crisis” its headline announces.

Perhaps the most obvious contradiction concerns food.

Doussis predicts, “We will face a very large, serious problem with food security.” But predictions about what might happen cannot erase what is happening.

Climate at a Glance: Crop Production summarizes data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showing that global crop production and yields have risen dramatically during the period of modern warming. Its latest summary reports that the 2023 and 2024 global crop years produced the two highest global crop yields per acre on record.

Climate Realism has documented the same trend repeatedly. Global production of staple crops has increased substantially, and yields have repeatedly set records during recent decades. Even where individual crops suffer poor regional seasons because of drought, floods, pests, or other causes, that is not evidence of a deteriorating global food supply.

There are good reasons for this improvement. Agricultural technology, irrigation, fertilizers, improved crop varieties, mechanization, and better pest control have transformed farming. Modest warming can also lengthen growing seasons and reduce damaging frost events in some regions, while additional atmospheric carbon dioxide generally stimulates plant growth and improves water-use efficiency.

None of this means weather cannot damage crops. It always has. It means that portraying climate change as presently creating a global food-security crisis conflicts with the direction of observed agricultural production.

August 31, 2026

The unerring predictions of climate doom

Filed under: Environment, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Wright provides a useful timeline of climate catastrophism in response to someone posting “projected” sea rise in Florida due to global warming:

For those of you keeping track:

1. 1958 New York Times: Ice-free Arctic within 70 years.

2. 1967 Salt Lake City Tribute, quoting Paul Ehrlich: Global famine by AD 1975. Involuntary mass sterilization needed to curtail population growth.

3. 1970 Boston Globe, quoting James Lodge: Ice Age by the 21st Century.

4. 1971 Washington Post, quoting NASA: Ice Age within 50 years.

5. 1972 Brown University: Global climate deterioration due to Global Cooling.

6. 1974 Guardian: Ice Age coming fast.

7. 1974 Time Magazine: New Ice Age.

8. 1978 New York Times: No end in sight to cooling trend.

A year later, the same paper with the same somber urgency, was reporting the opposite.

9. 1979 New York Times: Global climate catastrophe. Ice-free Arctic within 70 years.

10. 1982 New York Times, quoting UN: Environmental catastrophe by AD 2000.

11. 1988 AP: Global Warming: Maldives drowned by rising sealevel within 30 years (AD 2019).

12. 1989 San Jose Mercury, quoting UN: Global Warming: nations drowned AD 2000.

13. 2000 Independent: Snowfalls a ‘thing of the past’ in England within ‘a few years’.

14. 2001 Albuquerque Journal, quoting George Hurt: Climate-change to kill New England maple syrup industry.

15. 2004 Guardian, quoting secret Pentagon report: Climate change will trigger nuclear war, submerge major European cities, Britain ‘Siberian’ by AD 2020.

16. 2006 AP, quoting Al Gore: Greenhouse gas. Point of no return in 10 years (AD 2016).

17. 2007 New York Times, quoting UN: Point of no return by 2012.

18. 2007 Canwest News: Ice-free Arctic by AD 2010 or 2015.

19. 2007 AP, quoting NASA: Ice-free Arctic by AD 2012.

20. 2007 BBC: Ice-free Arctic before AD 2013.

21. 2008 Xinhua (Chinese News), quoting Norwegian official: Ice-free Arctic.

22. 2008 New Scientist Magazine, quoting director National Snow and Ice Data Center: Ice-Free Arctic by AD 2008 (that year).

23. 2008 National Geographic, quoting scientist: Ice-Free Arctic by AD 2008 (that year).

24. 2008 AP, quoting NASA: Ice-Free Arctic by AD 2013 to 2018.

25. 2009 USA Today, quoting Al Gore: Ice-Free Arctic by AD 2014.

Note that on or about this time, circa 2010, the Glacier National Park erected signs warning that all glaciers would be melted entirely away by AD 2020

26. 2012 Australian: Snow gone by AD 2020.

27. 2013 Guardian: Ice-Free Arctic by 2015, will trigger methane catastrophe.

28. 2017 Sydney Morning Herald: Climate Changes to curtail Australia’s ski industry.

29. 2018 Forbes, quoting Harvard University: Ice-Free Arctic by AD 2022. Chance of any permanent ice remaining is “essentially zero”. (Despite these odds, 5.6 million square miles remain.)

30. 2018 Greta Thunberg, autistic schoolgirl, quoting ‘Top Climate Scientist’: Humans to go extinct if Climate Change not fixed by AD 2023. All humanity to perish unless fossil fuel use stopped within five years.

31. 2021 LA Times: No Snow in California by “sooner than you think”.

32. 2022 Bloomberg: End of Snow threatens to upend 76 million American lives.

Please note that in AD 2020, Glacier National Park (see above) removed the signs predicting the glaciers clearly looming above the sightseers were to have had vanished by now.

August 26, 2026

QotD: Putting US power generation in perspective

Filed under: Environment, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A critical assumption of climate alarmism is that the ecosystem is fragile and we naughty, mighty humans can easily overwhelm it. So we were surprised to hear, at the recent Heartland Institute International Conference on Climate Change, that one single hurricane contains more energy than the US generates in a year. And not just surprised, we were skeptical. So we checked, and, by golly, it’s true and then some. As one website gushed, “any way you slice it, hurricanes release a phenomenal amount of energy. If we start by looking at just the energy generated by the winds, we find that for a typical mature hurricane, we get numbers in the range of 1.5 x 10^12 Watts or 1.3 x 10^17 Joules/day (this is according to the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.) This is equivalent to about half of the total electrical generating capacity on the planet! For a single hurricane! But that’s not all, we’re just getting started. A hurricane also releases energy through the formation of clouds and rain (it takes energy to evaporate all that water). If we crunch the numbers for an average hurricane (1.5 cm/day of rain, circle radius of 665 km), we get a gigantic amount of energy: 6.0 x 10^14 Watts or 5.2 x 10^19 Joules/day! This is equivalent to about 200 times the total electrical generating capacity on the planet! NASA says that ‘during its life cycle a hurricane can expend as much energy as 10,000 nuclear bombs!’ And we’re just talking about average hurricanes here, not Katrina.” But sure, a few puffs from a human chimney and all those hurricanes are dancing to our Promethean tune.

John Robson, “Tidbits”, Robson on Climate Nonsense, 2026-05-24.

August 4, 2026

China attacked the sparrows, Britain will attack the cows

Filed under: Britain, China, Environment, Food, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

People make mistakes based on insufficient information, mistaken causes, biases, and many other distorted ways of reasoning. Governments do the same thing, but when governments screw up it’s a problem for everyone:

In 1958 the Chinese state worked out that sparrows were eating the grain, and organised six hundred million people to kill every one of them.

It did not take bullets. Villages, schools and factory units turned out with pots, pans, drums and gongs and made continuous noise so that no bird could land anywhere. Nests were pulled down, eggs smashed, chicks killed. The sparrows flew until their hearts gave out and dropped into the streets, where children collected them and the totals were reported upward as achievements. The toll ran into the hundreds of millions.

The arithmetic was sound as far as it went. A sparrow eats grain. Fewer sparrows, more grain, more people fed. Nobody in the room was wrong about what the bird took.

They were wrong about what it did.

Sparrows eat insects, in enormous quantity, and most of all in the breeding season when the chicks need protein. Take them out of a farmed landscape and the locusts and grain borers they had been holding down are handed the whole country. Which is what happened. Crop losses to insects rose sharply, and by 1960 the ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng had made the case well enough that Mao ordered sparrows struck from the list and replaced with bed bugs.

Far too late, and never the whole cause. The famine of 1959 to 1961 was principally a policy famine, driven by collectivisation, grain requisition and the diversion of farm labour to backyard steel furnaces, and the dead are counted in tens of millions.

But the sparrow campaign is the purest thing in the episode, because it is the reasoning stripped to bone. A committee looked at a living system, isolated the one animal it could measure as a cost, and calculated the gain from removing it without ever asking what that animal was holding up.

Now look at what is being proposed for grassland.

The ruminant is measured the same way, on one ledger line, the methane it emits and the land it stands on. What is left off the ledger is everything it does. The grazing that keeps grassland grassland instead of scrub. The dung that feeds the beetles that feed the birds. The hoof that breaks the surface so seed can take. The mouth that removes the standing dead matter which otherwise cures into wildfire fuel. The manure that returns phosphorus and nitrogen to the soil so nobody has to mine it and ship it in.

Grasslands and grazing animals co-evolved over tens of millions of years. Remove the animal and you do not get the same field minus some methane. You get a different system, and it will not be the one on the spreadsheet.

The men who ordered the sparrows killed were not stupid, and they were not cruel. They had a number, and the number was correct, and they were praised for acting on it decisively. It took two years for the second half of the equation to arrive, and by then nobody could put the birds back.

We are eighteen months into the herd reduction schemes.

The grass has not sent its invoice yet.

Update, 6 August: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

July 29, 2026

Britain’s new PM is yet another Net Zero fanatic

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Daily Sceptic, Chris Morrison points out that moving from Manchester to Downing Street has not changed Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s devotion to the climate change agenda and Net Zero fanaticism:

Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s official MP portrait, July 2026.
© House of Commons via Wikimedia Commons.

Praise the Lord, a Saviour from the North walks amongst us. The UK’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has apparently hinted that a tad more oil and gas might be taken from Britain’s remaining treasure trove lying undisturbed in the North Sea. Is this a push back on fanatical Net Zero treason as some commentators have suggested? Probably not. As always there is no need for conspiracy theories – just look at what they supported and said in the past. The new Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh is a green blob-funded whack job straight out of central climate casting, while the new tee-shirt wearing top dog is all signed up to the evil, society-destroying Climate and Nature (CAN) Bill.

It didn’t take long for the bill promoter Zero Hour (ka-ching, Green Blob money) to list the new Prime Minister as one of 193 MPs who support the proposed private member’s CAN legislation that will cut the country’s entire use of hydrocarbons – domestic and overseas – to just 10% within 10 years. Zero Hour notes of Burnham: “In 2024, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, he backed the Climate and Nature Bill because he recognised that Britain needed bold, science-led action to tackle the climate and nature crisis”.

Other more accurate interpretations are available along the lines that the bill is an abominable neo-Marxist Trojan horse that would lead to mass starvation, death and almost immediate industrial and societal collapse. With little or no hydrocarbons available from any source, food supplies would be cut in half due to a lack of fertiliser, while most medicines would be unavailable. In the regular periods of wind and solar drought, particularly in the winter, thousands would die in their blacked-out and unheated homes. Thankfully, the bill failed in the House of Commons when it was debated last year, but a terrifying 200 MPs agreed with its vile contents. Over 90 Labour MPs, all the Greens and LibDems plus two crackpot Tories said they supported the bill.

We can but pray that the two unhinged Tories, Sir Roger Gale and Simon Hoare, are currently receiving sympathetic re-education treatment as the Kemi Badenoch-led Conservative party now rushes towards the Net Zero exit. Similar classes of course are required for wayward Tories who believe that men can become women, and open borders lead to civilisation contentment.

Just three reasons come to mind to explain the heavy support for the House of Commons horror show.

  1. Rank stupidity: If the IQ score of any supporter was much lower, steps might have to be taken to ensure regular watering.
  2. Blinding ignorance: Five decades of dumbed-down education must take some blame, but the inability not to use at least one critical-thinking brain cell is worrying.
  3. Tunnel-vision zealotry: Overwhelming desire to re-order society along State-controlling communist lines – and if the majority kulaks get it, too bad. Inventing a climate crisis without a scintilla of conclusive proof is justified to create an equal, virtuous, brave new post-truth world.

Of course, allowing the two North Sea fields Rosebank and Jackdaw to open is little more than re-arranging the deckchairs on the Net Zero Ship of Fools. Thanks to the 2008 Climate Change Act and later amendments made by the Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, Britain is legally committed to short-order Net Zero destruction. Unless the legislation is torn up, new drilling is likely to be challenged in the courts. As 2050 looms closer, lawfare will likely stop almost all new projects where emissions are likely to arise from using hydrocarbons.

The small Burnham North Sea relaxation, along with the removal of 5% VAT on electricity bills, is an obvious electoral ploy to disguise the fact that Britain now has some of the highest energy costs in the industrial world – and they are likely to get a great deal higher in the future.

July 22, 2026

Sensible climate spending

Filed under: Environment, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, John Robson suggests some spending on environmental issues where we actually can make positive changes as opposed to the spending on climate change which is mostly wasted:

As noted in our latest Green Money Machine, there’s no question that humanity faces real environmental problems and that some worthwhile organizations and people are trying to do something about them. It’s an important reason why we oppose, and even resent, the way the overwhelming focus on “climate change” drains off so much effort, time, and even money. So let us tell you about some actual environmental issues that have caught our attention lately. For instance “the Mediterranean Sea’s critically endangered population of great white sharks”. Of course we also recognize that some ecologists may be taking a worldly, not to say cynical, approach and leveraging concern about climate to raise money for other actually more useful activities. But in the long run cunning isn’t a good plan any more than obtuseness is.

When it comes to great white sharks it is also of course easy to imagine that anyone planning to swim in the Mediterranean might regard their scarcity as a plus. But the fact that such a comment would be controversial today reminds us of just how far the environmental movement has come since the 1960s, and frequently in good ways.

Indeed, being historically minded, we even recall a jibe by the New York Times after US president Franklin Roosevelt’s crushing 1936 reelection victory (he won every state but Maine and Vermont) that “If he were to say a kind word for the man-eating shark, people would look thoughtful and say perhaps there are two sides to the question”. But just in case you were frightened by Jaws in your youth, we could also mention (also from National Geographic) efforts to save the Mekong River’s “megafish”, a catfish bigger than a person that … no, wait. Poor choice. Also scary.

Satellite photo of the Great Salt Lake from August 2018 after years of drought, reaching near-record lows. The difference in colors between the northern and southern portions of the lake is the result of the Lucin Cutoff, a railroad causeway. The image was acquired by the MSI sensor on the Sentinel-2B satellite (Resolution: 20m, RGB Composites: True color, Band 4-3-2).
Wikimedia Commons

OK then. How about the shrinking Great Salt Lake? Because according to National Geographic (yes again they do serve a useful purpose when not banging on about climate):

    Since 1850, the lake has lost 73 percent of its water and 60 percent of its surface area, and as more people move to the region, the water that typically feeds the lake is increasingly being diverted for agricultural, municipal, and industrial needs. What’s more, over the past few decades, a series of challenges – including climate change and the worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years – has impacted the cyclical climatic conditions that have sustained the lake for millennia.

Aaaargh. Banging on about climate. It’s a hard habit to break. And a bad one to keep, because it’s ridiculous to describe the loss of water going back to 1850, attribute it to human folly diverting the flow, and throw in the worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years (which necessarily means there was a horrific one 1,200 years ago which can’t have been our fault) and then toss in “climate change” which again is a description of alterations in weather not a causal force, and then speak of all these things having “impacted the cyclical climatic conditions that have sustained the lake for millennia”.

Bosh. In the first place, they cannot possibly know what cyclical climate conditions were like thousands and thousands of years ago. Nor what kind of pattern of megadroughts occurring millennia apart is natural, especially since interglacials don’t last that many millennia. Second, it isn’t possible that diverting water to agriculture, or swimming pools, has disrupted climate cycles. It just isn’t. Critical thought seems to be among the first and worst victims of “climate change”. The mind virus not the weather thing.

Especially as we regard it as intensely desirable that our fellow human fools stop draining the lake. Really. Take some of the tens of billions governments squander on trying to fix the weather, which honestly has always been bad, frequently dreadful, and put it to sensible uses.

July 20, 2026

Markets reject Carney’s official carbon price, so Canadians have to pay more

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canada is one of the last remaining bastions of Net Zero zealotry … in fact, Prime Minister Mark Carney may be the only national leader trying to turn back the tide of economic reality over this:

AI image posted by L. Wayne Mathison on X.

Mark Carney wrote a book called Value(s) lecturing the world about fairness, responsibility, sustainability and humility. His real governing value appears to be this: when markets reject his climate scheme, force Canadians to rescue it.

Carney now admits the official carbon price is supposedly above $100 while actual credits have traded near $20. Any honest banker would recognize the message. The market does not believe these credits are worth the imaginary price politicians assigned to them.

Carney’s response is classic central-planner arrogance. He will not reconsider the product. He will rig the price, tighten the rules, compel companies to buy it and call the resulting coercion “investment certainty”.

He praised carbon pricing in Value(s) as one of the most important and effective ways to reduce emissions. Then the consumer carbon tax became politically poisonous, so he scrapped it. The industrial version survives because its costs are easier to bury inside electricity, transportation, groceries, construction materials, wages and lost investment.

Carney also boasts that Canada continues sending climate-finance money abroad while other G7 governments pull back. Canadian families are struggling with food, housing and energy, yet our philosopher-banker remains determined to finance his international reputation with their money.

His book preached humility. His government practises price fixing.

His book preached responsibility. His government transfers the risk to taxpayers.

His book preached fairness. His policies protect the climate-finance class while ordinary Canadians absorb the costs.

Carney spent years wrapping political ideology in the language of banking. Now the numbers are exposing the sales pitch. When a theoretical $100 asset trades for $20, the market has delivered its verdict. Ottawa can falsify the price, but it cannot manufacture genuine value.

Value(s) may be hundreds of pages long. Carney’s philosophy fits into one sentence:

When reality refuses to validate the climate fantasy, force Canadians to pay until it does.

July 11, 2026

Governments should not have easy access to emergency powers

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As we found out in Canada in 2022, when the government gives itself emergency powers unrestricted by normal legal procedure and due process, they abuse those powers. The UK government is eager to grant itself similar powers due to a “climate emergency” that will, among other things suspend habeus corpus and the 1689 Bill of Rights:

Emergency, d’ye see? National security emergency.

But here’s the problem if the government declares a national security emergency:

    Part 1 of the act establishes a new and broad definition of “emergency”. The definition includes war or attack by a foreign power, which were defined as emergencies under previous legislation, as well as terrorism which poses a threat of serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom and events which threaten serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom or to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom.

Damage to the environment in the UK. So, that matches. And if they then declare such an emergency, under the act, then the following laws — among others — no longer apply:

    The only primary legislation which may not be amended by emergency regulations is the Human Rights Act 1998 and part 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act itself

That is, all other laws no longer apply. It’s an Enabling Act, allowing rule by decree for the length of the emergency. Absolutely everything is up for grabs. These laws are not, repeat not, protected:

    The peers tried to protect the following laws from emergency regulation:

    Habeas Corpus Act 1679

    Bill of Rights 1689

    Section 7 of the Parliament Act 1911 which limited the duration of a parliament to five years[e]

    Act of Settlement 1701

    House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975

    Life Peerages Act 1958

    House of Lords Act 1999

Seriously, it wipes out the entire legal and constitutional structure.

So, you know, no. Not because there is, or isn’t, a climate change emergency. But because of the powers they’ll take if one is declared.

No.

It’s not November yet, but this sign seems rather appropriate:

July 5, 2026

Canary in a Climate World

Filed under: Books, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, John Robson begins a series looking at a new book that covers the skeptic view of the great climate change debate, Canary in a Climate World:

Today we start a series looking at the new bestselling book Canary in a Climate World: Climate Realism vs. the Net Zero Myth. From the title you can guess the slant, but you may not expect the sheer number (38) of well-credentialed contributors. And we begin where they did, with the first chapter called “A Personal Awakening: from Covid to Climate” by Dr. Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at University of London. What’s an expert in cancer research doing writing about climate? Well, he doesn’t claim to be a climate scientist in the narrow sense (though he certainly understands statistics). Instead he writes about how his experience as a medical expert during Covid opened his eyes to the way science can be politicized and hijacked to serve an agenda. Once he saw the same pattern in climate, he realized it was essentially the same story, with many of the same characters, just being played out on a much slower time scale.

Dalgleish is a man who understands how science is done, or should be. He’s an expert in cancer immunotherapy and virology, who has made award-winning contributions to the fight against HIV, among other diseases. When Covid broke out he found himself at the forefront of research on the unfolding pandemic. But soon his suspicions were aroused.

    I was surrounded by experts and doctors who believed every word they were being told. What first shook me was work done with my close collaborator Birger Sorensen, with whom I had been helping to improve an already effective HIV therapeutic vaccine, Vacc-4X. Sorensen spotted that the sequence of SARS CoV-2 published in Nature in February 2020 contained several highly positively charged inserts that one simply did not see in natural viruses.

So, a scientific discovery to be shared, right? Dalgleish explains why the six sequences in question could not be natural, and moreover two of them matched ones published earlier by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But when he pointed this non-coincidence out to colleagues he was told, basically, to shut up. In a revealing echo of the “not a climate scientist” trope, people with far less training than him told him he wasn’t an expert and wasn’t qualified to comment on the matter. And in another revealing echo, when he took his findings to the government he was accused of spreading misinformation for saying something true.

It gets worse. He then watched the official response to Covid break all the rules. China could have stopped the spread within days by preventing people from leaving Wuhan, but instead they and the WHO allowed daily flights to leave the city, sending the pandemic around the world. The data began to show that only the elderly or people with comorbidities were at risk of death, yet governments around the world imposed universal lockdowns, urged on them by incompetent and narrow-minded scientists whose computer models consistently overpredicted infection rates, painting an alarmist picture of catastrophe that went unchallenged.

Dalgleish was also dismayed to see that standard symptomatic treatments, such as vitamin D3 and inhaled steroids, that he was using successfully on his patients, were being cast aside by the General Medical Council in favour of dangerous alternatives including ventilators which, he says, “in many cases certainly killed rather than saved lives by pushing secretions back into the lungs and effectively drowning the patients.” He accused the GMC of:

    prosecuting good doctors for looking after their patients and not slavishly following official guidelines, which often had more in common with what I can only describe as highly coercive and authoritarian behaviour.

Then the vaccines arrived. Dalgleish and his colleagues reviewed all the available literature and concluded that no coronavirus vaccine had ever succeeded. Instead the vaccines were likely to program the immune system against obsolete variants and impair its ability to recognise the current one. The demand that everybody everywhere take the shot, despite the knowledge that it was a futile treatment and posed serious risks to people who were not at risk of dying, convinced Dalgleish that what was happening was a scam or worse.

June 12, 2026

The mystical powers of climate change, is there anything it can’t do?

Filed under: Environment, Media, Soccer — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Canada, all problems are now blamed on US President Donald Trump. It’s a fantastic get-out-of-trouble move for politicans like Prime Minister Mark Carney, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and even mayors of towns and cities across the Demented Dominion. But even the malign powers of the Bad Orange Man seem puny in comparison to the amazing powers of — gasp! — CLIMATE CHANGE:

Every now and then I suspect there is a game played by bored elites to see which of them can get away with the most asinine “climate change” claim. There have been some doozies: lack of UFOs, “climate change” anxiety, increased sugar consumption, engineering short people. On and on and on ad infinitum.

Today we meet what could be the winner in the contest. Experts are claiming World Cup matches could be slower. Now instead of ninety-plus minutes running around ending in zero-zero ties and dramatic shootouts, we’ll get ninety-plus minutes of somewhat slower running around ending in zero-zero ties and dramatic shootouts. Because “climate change”.

Seems to me, though, that if we really wanted to save time, we could have all matches begin at the shootouts. The whole tournament could be over in a day. Take that, “climate change”!

Here’s the claim, appropriately announced on a PR site, a site whose specialty is juicing dull and dubious headlines: “Climate Central finds climate change has increased the likelihood of heat that could slow players for 97 of the 104 matches, threatening game speed and fan safety.”

What will happen to the other 7 matches they don’t say. Probably they will end in shootouts.

Details:

    Previous research shows temperatures above 82.4°F can reduce sprint frequency, total distance covered, and recovery time, impacting not only player performance and safety, but also match tempo, tactics, and overall style of play.

Previous researchers discovered — and stay with me, here — that when it’s hot outside people outside in the heat act like people act when it’s hot out.

Where would we be without previous researchers?

[…]

As you have surmised, we don’t have to believe any of this: the scenarios are all silly, proving that the stunning new research is purely performative, a way to signal the vices and predilections of the researchers. As proof, we oblige the PR site which asks us to quote this:

    As global temperatures continue to rise, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, the 2026 World Cup could become another example of how climate change can disrupt sports and traditions people cherish, forcing a reevaluation of how the game is played.

This is all ridiculous, and only saved by the charge of falsity by adding that “could.” Meaning might, which also means might not.

They also provide this quote they ask us to re-quote:

    Alex Jacobs, professional player formerly with the Jamaican Premier League:
    Heat is not new. But extreme heat — made more likely by heat-trapping pollution driving climate change — might just be a difference maker in this summer’s edition of the biggest sporting event on the planet.

Way these quotes work is that either the PR firm, or the organization employing the PR firm, write them for victims, who are sought out and asked to sign on. The people allowing their names to be used are, of course, fully responsible for the words used, and even often believe them. But there’s no mistaking that stilted prose of the manufactured quote. Nobody talks like this. This prose is not conclusive, but whenever you see it, it’s a darn good reason to dismiss the claims made.

Of course, using a highly visible public event to advance the climate change agenda is nothing new, they’ve literally been doing it for decades now. Media outlets have always had a bias toward the most dramatic outcome, if only for marketing purposes — “if it bleeds, it leads” — but even the more skeptical outlets have drifted in the climate hysteria direction over time:

We have complained many times that the public is presented with a picture of climate science systematically biased towards alarmism. And it’s not just our anecdotal impression. We have data, in the form of a new study from the US National Bureau of Economic Research saying the government delegates who write the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) overstate the science in the underlying report, and then the media further overstates what’s in the SPM. The study authors used multiple AI systems to extract key scientific statements in every IPCC Assessment Report since 1990, track how they were summarized and what the accompanying media coverage said. Using a statistical model they measured the way the statements get changed or twisted at each stage. There were some surprising results and some unsurprising. Unsurprisingly the data showed the UK Guardian has by far the most climate coverage of all major media outlets and is also the most biased. Another unsurprising result is that the overall media bias regarding the severity of climate change has been consistent over time. A surprising result (to many, but not to us) is that the only major media outlet exhibiting precisely zero bias was Fox News. Otherwise most right-leaning outlets adopted the left-leaning outlets’ alarmist bias as of 2007, again unsurprising to us. And there’s much more.

The authors identified three forms of bias: severity, in which a summary picks the upper end of a range of claims, uncertainty, in which a summary downplays caveats and qualifiers, and scenario in which worst-case scenarios get foregrounded. They used a numerical scale from -2 to +2 that captured bias in either direction: a positive number indicated that the summary was biased towards alarmism and a negative number indicated a bias in the opposite direction. Then they averaged the bias measures together and measured them at two stages in the game of telephone. The “TS-to-SPM” stage compared statements in the author-written Technical Summary to how they were worded in the government-written Summary for Policymakers. The “SPM-to-media” stage looked at how statements in the SPM were then reported in the press. The authors examined the TS-to-SPM stage for every IPCC Assessment Report from 1990 to 2023. They only looked at the SPM-to-media stage from the 2001 Third Assessment Report (AR3) because that’s as far back as their media library went.

[…]

That’s right, folks. Even the right-leaning outlets have also gone in for alarmist bias, at least since 2007. Indeed, the media’s bias converged in size and direction over time, as shown in this chart:

For the AR3 in 2001, right-leaning outlets on average understated the climate findings while left-leaning outlets overstated them. But thereafter both sides shared the alarmist bias. Which reflects the success of alarmist activists in the post-An Inconvenient Truth era (2006) driving skeptical voices out of the media. That campaign didn’t eliminate bias, it only replaced one form by another, with the result that the overall media landscape became entirely one-sided.

The uniformity of the bias can also be seen in this chart:

The right-leaning outlets in red are about as bad as the lefties in blue, except for Fox News which is the only outlet with no measurable bias and the Wall Street Journal which had an overall negative (anti-alarmist) bias.

May 24, 2026

The British Climate Change Committee report is “full of howlers”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matt Ridley expands on a recent Daily Mail article on the antics of the Climate Change Committee’s latest “findings”:

The British public has been propagandized to believe the most extreme risks are far more common than they really are … even in the way the weather is reported.

In my Daily Mail essay on the @theCCCuk‘s new report, I point out that they have a vested interest in exaggeration.

“Between the moment when these climatecrats wake in the morning and the moment they lay their overworked brains to rest on feather pillows at night, they have one all-consuming ambition: to maximise their own budget.

They achieve this goal by being as alarmist as possible.

Imagine if they found evidence that climate change was no big deal or even good news: would they want to publish this? Of course not. It would be disastrous for their (taxpayer-funded) income.

The committee has never produced a report on global greening: the remarkable 15-20 per cent increase in green vegetation on the planet over the past four decades, caused mostly by carbon dioxide emissions.

Nor do its members talk about falling deaths from cold weather anywhere near as much as they do about the smaller number of deaths from hot weather.

Good news for us, in short, is no news for them.

The report is full of howlers. It states emphatically that, by 2050, ‘sea levels will be [not “could be” or “may be”] 20–45 cm higher around UK coasts than today.’

That implies sea levels rising over the next 24 years by 8mm to 19mm per year.

But over the 35 years we have had satellites measuring it, sea levels have risen on average by just 3.4mm per year. There was a little acceleration in 2015-2020 and there has in fact been a deceleration since then: 4.5mm increase per year since 2010 and 3.7mm per year since 2015. (In some parts of the country, such as East Anglia, the land is sinking, a different effect.)

So to assume that the rate of sea-level rise could more than quadruple within the next quarter-century is completely unscientific. Neither Greenland nor Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate — and they are the only possible sources for such a huge increase.

How, then, does @theCCCuk justify this hysteria over sea levels?

It bases its sea-level prediction “on a high-emissions scenario (RCP8.5), using the upper-end estimate (95th percentile)”.

RCP8.5 is an economic scenario that was produced in 2011 for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by a team of mathematical modellers.

Their instruction was to find out what it would take to increase CO2 emissions at a rapid rate to a very high level by the end of the century.

First, the modellers said, the world would have to massively increase the use of coal at the expense of oil and gas — using coal to make fuel for cars and planes, burning eight times much coal in 2100 as the world did in 2000, and projecting that fully half of all the world’s energy would be supplied by coal by the end of this century.

Yet even this back-to-coal fantasy was not enough to achieve the gargantuan emissions the modellers were tasked with producing. So they assumed both that the world’s population growth would also reverse its current slowdown, surging to 12 billion people by the end of the century, that innovation to make our lives more fuel-efficient would largely end, and also that we wouldn’t even try to cut emissions.

None of these are going to happen.

Scientists have been saying for more than a decade that the apocalyptic RCP8.5 scenario is extremely unrealistic, and even the alarmist BBC said in 2020 that it was “exceedingly unlikely”.

The IPCC has recently announced that it is abolishing RCP8.5 altogether, while one of the Climate Change Committee’s own members, Professor Piers Forster, wrote an article just last week “on the death of RCP8.5”.

Nobody, at all, ever, under any circumstance, should be using RCP8.5 to forecast climate. Yet the CCC is still using it to terrify the government and the British people – and even taking its “upper-end estimate”!

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