Category: Climate change
2025 Unfiltered: Politics, Pandemonium, and Peculiar Peace
January. Donald Trump officially returns to the White House. The global left assures us that this will bring death, war,…
Tom Steyer’s Affordable Energy Promises to California Are Unaffordable
Tom Steyer, the billionaire climate activist running for California governor, promises to cut electric bills by 25 percent by breaking…
Two Retractions Raise the Question: Is Climate Science Really Settled?
Sometimes papers are published that overturn the conventional wisdom. Other times papers are retracted since what they purported to be…
Five Not-So Quick Things: The Green Shoots Which Will Only Get Greener
Maybe it’s the natural contrarian in me. Or maybe it’s my irrepressible optimism (if you know me, you’ll know that’s…
The First Snowfall’s Bitter Welcome
The first snowfall isn’t magical; it’s a mess and always has been. Clean roads turn grimy overnight, coated with cinder,…
The Welcome Demise of Climate Change Catastrophism
Is the American Left finally waking up from its decades-long climate catastrophism stupor? For years, climate alarmism has reigned as…
Finland’s Globalist President Lectures the United States About a New World Order
Like an Ivy League university professor, Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, takes to the pages of Foreign Affairs to…
Climate hucksters wrong again: Study claiming climate change would make you poorer retracted over major flaws
German climate alarmists claimed in a study published last year in the journal Nature that even if carbon dioxide emissions were radically cut down, so-called climate change would still drive the world economy toward a global GDP reduction of 19%.
The alarmists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research suggested further that not only would global annual climate-change damages hit $38 trillion by 2049, but that under a high-emissions scenario, global GDP would be lowered around 60% relative to the baseline in 75 years — an impact reportedly three times larger than previous estimates.
‘Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20% reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number. So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60% is off the chart.’
According to the U.K.-based Carbon Brief, this was one of the most-cited climate papers by the media, including the Associated Press, CNN, Deutsche Welle, and Reuters.
Just the News highlighted that numerous activists and institutions also cited it, including Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) and the World Bank.
The problem for the climate alarmists and those who believed them was that the study’s conclusions were bogus.
A team of American economists pointed out in a commentary published by Nature in August that “data anomalies arising from one country in [the German researchers’] underlying GDP dataset, Uzbekistan, substantially bias their predicted impacts of climate change.”
The economists revealed that if the questionable data pertaining to Uzbekistan were excluded, projected global losses in 2100 would be 23% as opposed to 60%, which is more in line with previous estimates.
RELATED: Al Gore wrong again: Study delivers good news for Arctic ice trends, bad news for climate hucksters
Photo by ALEX KENT/AFP via Getty Images
The economists noted further that the Germans underestimated “statistical uncertainty in their future projections of climate impacts.”
“Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20% reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number,” Solomon Hsiang, a Stanford University professor who co-authored the August commentary, told the New York Times. “So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60% is off the chart.”
‘We have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately — if not, economic losses will become even bigger.’
The paper, which was originally published on April 17, 2024, was retracted on Wednesday.
The retraction notice indicates that “the results were found to be sensitive to the removal of one country, Uzbekistan, where inaccuracies were noted in the underlying economic data for the period 1995-1999.”
While the German alarmists attempted to correct the data for Uzbekistan and make other adjustments, they found that “these changes led to discrepancies in the estimates for climate damages by mid-century, with an increased uncertainty range (from 11-29% to 6-31%) and a lower probability of damages diverging across emission scenarios by 2050 (from 99% to 90%).”
In other words, the original conclusions hyped by the liberal media were worthless.
When the now-retracted paper was first published in April 2024, the German researchers made no secret of the point of the exercise: justifying societal and industrial upheaval coded as “adaptation.”
“Our analysis shows that climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly developed ones such as Germany, France, and the United States,” Leonie Wenz, lead scientist on the study, said in a release.
“These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions. We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them,” Wenz continued. “And we have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately — if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100.”
Wenz and her team are hardly the first climate alarmists to have their conclusions proven to be as incorrect as they are outlandish.
Failed presidential candidate Al Gore, for instance, concern-mongered in 2009 that in addition to the significant rise in the global sea level that was supposed to happen “in the near future” but never did, the entire polar ice cap was likely going to be seasonally ice-free, perhaps by as early as 2014.
Gore told the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference that then-new research indicated there was “a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”
In September, a paper published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters revealed that Gore was dead wrong — that over the past 20 years, “Arctic sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005.”
Rather than wait to be proven horribly wrong, Bill Gates — who has spent years fear-mongering about the calamities that would supposedly visit humanity unless governments neutralized certain industries and regulated into extinction certain behaviors — admitted in October that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise.”
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Left-Wing Dark Money Giant Funds Dem Lawsuits Against Oil Companies—and Trainings for Judges on How To Handle Those Cases
The New Venture Fund (NVF), a behemoth left-wing dark money charity, wired $2.3 million last year to the law firm that dozens of Democratic prosecutors have contracted to spearhead high-stakes climate litigation against oil companies, according to its latest tax filings. At the same time, it bankrolled a group that advises judges on how to handle those cases.
The post Left-Wing Dark Money Giant Funds Dem Lawsuits Against Oil Companies—and Trainings for Judges on How To Handle Those Cases appeared first on .
Give thanks for the sun, the CO2, and the farmers — not the climate scolds
What if, this Thanksgiving, we offered a small tribute to global warming and the relative abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? An apparently scandalous idea. Global elites and their media partners insist that these forces promise catastrophe. Yet sound thinking demands the opposite conclusion.
Fifty years ago, the story was reversed. In the 1970s, major outlets warned of a coming ice age. Some scientists called for immediate action to stop the planet from plunging into widespread glaciation.
Abundance is not an accident. It reflects a climate far friendlier than the one our ancestors endured — and a modern economy powered by fuels that make global agriculture possible.
The fear of cold had at least a historical basis. Unlike today’s speculative climate models, past civilizations suffered through genuine cold-driven crises.
The Little Ice Age, from roughly 1300 to 1850, brought centuries of persistent chill. Historical accounts describe crops withering, growing seasons collapsing, and communities starving as food systems failed. The Thames froze solid. Frost fairs became a tradition because the cold was relentless. Entire regions fell into poverty and instability.
People living through those centuries would have welcomed the warmth we enjoy today.
Modern Americans rarely think about that history as they prepare Thanksgiving meals sourced from every climate zone on Earth. Our abundance depends on a long supply chain anchored in one fundamental reality: Plants grow best in warmth, not cold.
Warm periods fed civilizations
Warm eras have repeatedly aligned with human flourishing. During the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period, farmers cultivated crops in regions that are too cold for them now. Warmer temperatures didn’t bring disaster; they supported prosperity.
The present is no exception. Earth has quietly greened since the late 20th century. Satellite data shows expanding vegetation, especially in arid regions. The drivers are straightforward: increased carbon dioxide and a slightly warmer global climate.
CO2 is not a toxin. It’s plant food — an essential input for photosynthesis. Higher concentrations allow crops to use water more efficiently and grow more robustly. This is one of the greatest environmental improvements of the past century, though you would never know it from the coverage.
RELATED: ‘Green Antoinettes’ live large, preach small
Julia Klueva via iStock/Getty Images
The other indispensable ingredient is modern fertilizer, made largely from natural gas. High-yield crops require nitrogen, and synthetic fertilizers supply it.
Energy-dense fuels — coal, oil, natural gas — power nearly every part of modern agriculture. Irrigation pumps, fertilizer plants, harvesters, delivery trucks, and refrigeration systems depend on them. Remove these fuels, and global food systems collapse. The return of famine would be swift.
A simple truth
Climate alarmists warn that warming will devastate global food security. Actual yields say otherwise. For 40 years, production of wheat, corn, rice, and other staples has climbed dramatically. Most food shortages today result from war or corrupt governance, not climate.
Earth’s climate has always shifted. Mega-droughts, severe floods, heat waves, and cold snaps have occurred throughout history. Treating every anomaly as evidence of imminent collapse ignores the long record of natural variability.
So as Americans gather around Thanksgiving tables, remember a simple truth: The feast depends on warmth, carbon dioxide, and the affordable energy that moves food from field to plate.
This abundance is not an accident. It reflects a climate far friendlier than the one our ancestors endured — and a modern economy powered by fuels that make global agriculture possible.
