Climategate in Review

From today's "It's funny 'cause it's true" files, we have an article in the Wall Street Journal titled:

Behind the Rise of U.S. Solar Power, a Mountain of Chinese Coal.

Here are a few observations from the article:

"Solar panel installations are surging in the U.S. and Europe as Western countries seek to cut their reliance on fossil fuels.

"But the West faces a conundrum as it installs panels on small rooftops and in sprawling desert arrays: Most of them are produced with energy from carbon-dioxide-belching, coal-burning plants in China.

"Concerns are mounting in the U.S. and Europe that the solar industry's reliance on Chinese coal will create a big increase in emissions in the coming years as manufacturers rapidly scale up production of solar panels to meet demand. That would make the solar industry one of the world's most prolific polluters."   [Emphasis added]

"For years, China's low-cost, coal-fired electricity has given the country's solar-panel manufacturers a competitive advantage, allowing them to dominate global markets.

"Chinese factories supply more than three-quarters of the world's polysilicon, an essential component in most solar panels [...] Polysilicon factories refine silicon metal using a process that consumes large amounts of electricity [...] Chinese authorities have built an array of coal-burning power plants in sparsely populated areas such as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia to support polysilicon manufacturers and other energy-hungry industries."

"Producing a solar panel in China creates around twice as much carbon dioxide as making it in Europe, said Fengqi You, professor of energy systems engineering at Cornell University"

And the not all that surprising conclusion?

"'If China didn't have access to coal, then solar power wouldn't be cheap now,' said Robbie Andrew, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo."   [Emphasis added]

In the following video titled, Extreme Fraud At NOAA And NASA, Tony Heller summarizes a number of old and new tricks being used to manipulate the temperature dataset by these government organizations in order to falsely back up claims about climate change.

Here is a summary of some of the more important points raised by Heller:

• NOAA claims that the US has experienced record high summer afternoon temperatures over the past decade. This is shown to be false by the national climate assessment which indicates that in the 1930s heat waves were longer, more intense and hotter.
• NOAA's own temperature data shows that much less of the US is getting as hot as it once did.
• Using 1,218 temperature stations located across the lower 48 states (i.e., the US Historical Climatology Network), NOAA takes raw temperature data that does not show any overall temperature rise and manipulates it in a number of ways to produce results that do show such a rise, principally by artificial lowering past temperatures and artificial raising recent ones.
• The number of USHCN stations still functioning and in use has declined over time. There were 1,201 still active in 1989, but only 804 active in 2020, with many active stations not reporting data every month of the year. This is a loss of 414 stations or 33% of the original data sources.
• Nevertheless, regardless of whether a station is inactive or whether it reports data in a given month, NOAA still generates a temperature record for all 1,218 stations in its final dataset based upon a computer model. For the summer of 2020, 42% of the data being used was originated by a computer rather than being an actual record of nature.
• For the non-reporting stations, NOAA's computer model shows about 3°C of warming over the past 50 years and this is the fraud which leads to the warming claims.
• When comparing the computer-generated temperature graphs against graphs of increased CO2, it becomes clear that NOAA is altering the temperature data to match its warming theory rather than altering the theory to match the real world data.
• NASA is also complicit in this fraudulent manipulation. In 1999 its US temperature chart showed 1934 as the hottest year with 1998 more than 0.5°C cooler. It also showed an overall cooling trend from the 1930s to the end of the century. Then NASA altered it's data and now shows 1934 cooler than 1998 and a warming trend to replace the previous cooling.
• All of this is the antithesis of the scientific process and the worst form of fraud.

In a follow-up to his NOAA/NASA temperature data manipulation report above, Tony Heller shows how these tricks are used by NOAA to lie and state that July 2021 was the Hottest Month Ever. Read the report or listen to this 7:21 minute video presentation.

Let's put things into perspective ...

As reported by Gale Pooley in an article titled The Collapse of Climate-Related Deaths, a study by Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg shows that:

"So, adjusted for population, we went from 255.3 deaths per million in 1920 to 1.9 per million in 2020, a 99.25 percent decrease. In other words, for every climate-related death in 2020, we had 133.6 deaths in 1920."

"The above numbers suggest that between 1920 and 2020, the world has become 13,260 percent safer from climate-related death (i.e., around 5 percent safer a year). Lomborg notes:

'This is clearly the opposite of what you hear, but that is because we're often just being told of one disaster after another — telling us how *many* events are happening. The number of reported events are increasing, but that is mainly due to better reporting, lower thresholds, and better accessibility (the CNN effect).'"

This is quite a remarkable achievement!

Well it's snowing in California and Hawaii again and there was a tornado in Kentucky, so business as usual for people who have a reasonable perspective on the state of the world. But not for everyone. In this article, Anthony Watts does a good job of putting the recent tornado into context, demonstrating with the government's own data that this is far from the "worst" in American history and that:

"While there's an upward trend in all tornadoes — due to increased reporting courtesy of millions of cellphone cameras, storm chasers, and expanding populations — violent tornadoes rated EF3 or greater, like the one in Kentucky, are down significantly."

In an article titled Temps should be 'slowly growing warmer, not colder' amid southern summer, the following is reported:

"Neptune's southern hemisphere has spent the last 17 years in its summer season, yet global temperatures have plummeted. It's a head-scratching finding that leaves astronomers with more questions than answers."

"Researchers actually know very little about Neptune's seasons, taking place over its 165-year orbit of the sun. They say the temperature variations could be linked to seasonal changes in Neptune's atmospheric chemistry. As the paper notes, per ScienceAlert, 'photochemically produced hydrocarbons — primarily ethane and acetylene — are powerful infrared emitters that serve to cool the stratosphere.' But the changes observed between 2018 and 2020 'appear surprisingly swift for seasonal response.'"

Of course, climate variability happening on other planets does not directly explain what happens on Earth, but as previously reported here, when there is a correlation in temperature rise on multiple planets, likely due to the sun, it is conveniently ignored. And when unexpected climate changes occur elsewhere as seen here, since man is inconveniently absent, natural factors are investigated — something often minimized when AGW supporters attempt to explains Earth's own variability.

Here is a link to the article in The Planetary Science Journal:   Subseasonal Variation in Neptune's Mid-infrared Emission

Thomas A. Troszak appears to have published a whitepaper in April of 2021 through the NATO Energy Security Centre of Excellence (ENSEC COE), titled: The Hidden Costs of Solar Photovoltaic Power [PDF]. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

"Despite many optimistic predictions, solar photovoltaic (solar PV) power still represents only a small fraction of the global electricity supply as of 2020. More than two decades of near-exponential growth and investment in solar PV development have taken place, yet the amount of fossil fuels being burned for power is still increasing. This apparent paradox has been attributed to a variety of economic or political issues, but a critically important factor may be missing from the discussion.

"All modern technologies are dependent upon the supply of fossil fuels and fossil energy that made them possible. Similarly, every step in the production of solar PV requires an input of fossil fuels — as raw materials, as carbon reductants for silicon smelting, for process heat and power, for transportation, and for balance of system components. Regardless of any intentions, no quantity of banknotes or any number of mandates can yield a single watt of power unless a significant expenditure of raw materials and fossil energy takes place as well.

"Therefore, the author of this article invites all interested parties including environmentalists, consumers and policy makers to consider the wider environmental impact, and the great debt of resources that actually must be paid before a PV system can be installed at any utility, workplace, or home. If we wish to recognize the hidden costs of this highly engineered industrial technology, we must first examine the non-renewable reality of the PV manufacturing process itself. To be even more realistic, we must also consider the additional consequences resulting from the fossil-fuel- powered global supply chains that are necessary for the mining, production, and implementation of PV power systems."

Troszak then proceeds to discuss the carbon-based energy-intensive processes used in the refining of required materials and the manufacturing and distribution of solar panels. It is important to have a realistic understanding of the true energy costs when evaluating proposed energy replacements such as this. Read the paper as it is filled with many interesting details.

Climate alarmists have been getting predictions regarding hurricanes wrong for a long long time, as previously reported: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

A recent study [PDF] published in the January 2022 issue of Marine Geology, discusses the historical record of hurricanes in the Bahamas, as recorded by sediment deposits in Hine's Blue Hole on Cay Sal Bank. From the abstract:

"Hine's Hole has an accumulation rate of 2-3.2 cm/yr, making it among the highest-resolution hurricane reconstructions to date. Unlike many paleo-hurricane reconstruction sites, Hine's Hole is not surrounded by coastal landmasses that can dampen currents and waves produced by hurricanes, so it archives most ≥Category 1 hurricanes passing within 115 km during the 170-year instrumental record (1850 CE-present) and may also document intense tropical or winter storms. Hine's Hole archives ~16 intense storms per century from 1850 to 2016 CE, but documents three periods from 1505 to 1530 CE, 1570 to 1620 CE, and ~ 1710 to 1875 CE with over twice as many intense storms per century. ... As such, this reconstruction provides unprecedented insight into changes in hurricane activity within the pre-industrial climate system and demonstrates that recurrence intervals based on the 170-year instrumental record can severely underestimate the threat hurricanes pose certain localities."

As summarized in a recent Hakai Magazine Article:

"The evidence that hurricane activity is at a historical low is hiding on the Caribbean seafloor."   [Emphasis added]

"'Over the last 170 years, we've had about five hurricanes per century on average,' Winkler says of the local record from Hine's Hole. 'But the rate has been almost eight times that in the past.'"   [Emphasis added]

As shown, like many other natural phenomenon, hurricane frequency and severity vary in a periodic fashion over time. Whatever conclusions can be drawn from this data, it is clear that man's industrialization efforts over the 20th and 21st centuries have not been a driving factor.

As reported by CarbonBrief, "Climate change has driven a 13% decline in the frequency of tropical cyclones since pre-industrial times, new research finds." The original research paper can be found here.

"The findings show a 13% decrease in tropical cyclones around the world between 1850-1900 and 1900-2000. More specifically, they find a drop from more than 100 tropical cyclones a year in pre-industrial times to around 80 in 2012. The study does not look at changes in the intensity — or damage — of cyclones over this period."

"Chand tells Carbon Brief that in past research on tropical cyclone frequency, there have been 'different trends noted in different studies' due to the high natural variability. This paper is novel, he says, because 'now we have got a long-term data set to properly remove the effects of natural variability and other external factors that may be affecting the trend.'"

"The North Atlantic is the one region to show an increase in tropical cyclone frequency in recent decades, bucking a declining trend in the first half of the 20th century. The study suggests two main reasons for this result. First, it points to a persistent positive (warm) phase of the naturally occurring Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which could be improving conditions for cyclone formation. Second, the passing of the US Clean Air Act in the 1970s saw pollution levels drop significantly, causing further localised warming. Nonetheless, the authors find that tropical cyclone numbers averaged over 1900-2000 were around 28% lower than during the 1850-1900 baseline period."

Tonga Eruption Blasted Unprecedented Amount of Water Into Stratosphere

On January 15, 2022, an unusual underwater volcanic eruption near the island of Hunga Tonga sending about 146 teragrams of water vapor — equivalent to the volume of 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools — into the stratosphere. This was equal to 10% of the water vapor already there. As water vapor is a significant greenhouse gas, this was a mechanism for increased earth temperatures.

Here are some of the NASA observations from the article:

"The excess water vapor injected by the Tonga volcano [...] could remain in the stratosphere for several years."

"This extra water vapor could influence atmospheric chemistry, boosting certain chemical reactions that could temporarily worsen depletion of the ozone layer. It could also influence surface temperatures."

This video shows the satellite image of the eruption captured by NASA.

Remember the 16-year pause in global warming that occurred between 1997 and 2012, reported here? Well, we are currently experiencing a new pause that has been now exceeded eight years and four months, as reported by Christopher Monckton in the article titled: The New Pause Lengthens: 100 Months with No Warming At All.

As Monckton reminds us:

"[T]he Pause graph does not constitute a prediction: it simply reports the longest period, working back from the present, during which the temperature trend is not positive."

He then follows this up with the graph showing the total global warming trend from December 1978 through December 2022 which indicates a total warming of 0.591° C (1.064° F) which is equal to 0.134° C (0.241° F) per decade.

As Monckton points out, the actual results continue to demonstrate the failure of the IPCC predictions. See the article for details.

Hottest Day Ever?  Don't Believe it

'Average global temperature' is a meaningless measure, and comparisons to 125,000 years ago are preposterous.

Steve Milloy reviews the recent claims that July 3rd and 4th were the hottest days on record. Here are the facts.

"The global-warming industry has declared that July 3 and 4 were the two hottest days on Earth on record. The reported average global temperature on those days was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, supposedly the hottest in 125,000 years. The claimed temperature was derived from the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer, which relies on a mix of satellite temperature data and computer-model guesstimation to calculate estimates of temperature.

"One obvious problem with the updated narrative is that there are no satellite data from 125,000 years ago. Calculated estimates of current temperatures can't be fairly compared with guesses of global temperature from thousands of years ago.

"A more likely alternative to the 62.6-degree estimate is something around 57.5 degrees. The latter is an average of actual surface temperature measurements taken around the world and processed on a minute-by-minute basis by a website called temperature.global. The numbers have been steady this year, with no spike in July."

[...]

"It isn't plausible to characterize Earth's warming in a single average number, especially when we don't really know what that number is today, much less from 125,000 years ago."   [Emphasis added]

As has been the case stretching back to at least 2009 and the revelations from the original East Anglia Climategate scandal, computer models can be rigged to produce desired outcomes and are completely suspect when they do not square up with real-world data.

Additionally, why are no climate alarmists or media reports referencing the fully anticipated temperature increases due to the 2022 Tonga volcanic eruption that are likely to remain in effect for a few years? Draw your own conclusions.

The Censoring of Nobel-Winning Physicist Dr. John Clauser

As reported in The Daily Sceptic (DS) and by Joanne Nova, Nobel Physics Laureate Dr. John Clauser is being "canceled" for his views on climate change. As DS reports:

"Earlier this month, the 2022 Nobel Physics Laureate Dr. John Clauser slammed the 'climate emergency' narrative as a 'dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world's economy and the well-being of billions of people'. Inevitably, the punishments have begun. A talk that Dr. Clauser was due to give to the International Monetary Fund on climate models has been abruptly cancelled, and the page announcing the event removed from the IMF site.

"Dr. Clauser was due to speak to the IMF's Independent Evaluation Office this Thursday under the title: 'Let's talk – How much can we trust IPCC climate predictions?' It would appear that 'not a lot' isn't the politically correct answer. Clauser is a longstanding critic of climate models and criticised the award of the Physics Nobel in 2021 for work on them. He is not alone, since many feel that climate models are primarily based on mathematics, and a history of failed opinionated climate predictions leave them undeserving of recognition at the highest level of pure science.  ..."

"Last week, Clauser observed that misguided climate science has 'metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience'. This pseudoscience, he continued, has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other related ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies and environmentalists. 'In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis,' he added.

"Clauser is the latest Nobel physics laureate to dismiss the notion of a climate crisis. Professor Ivar Giaever, a fellow laureate, is the lead signatory of the World Climate Declaration that states there is no climate emergency. It further argues that climate models are 'not remotely plausible as global policy tools'. The 1998 winner Professor Robert Laughlin has expressed the view that the climate is 'beyond our power to control' and humanity cannot and should not do anything to respond to climate change."

And as Jo Nove observes:

"Dr John F Clauser of quantum entanglement fame, leaves no doubt about his thoughts:

'...climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience'.

"Despite that, the ABC and BBC types won't pick up the phone to ask Dr John F Clauser why a man with his remarkable reputation would risk looking like an idiot, and speaking up as a climate skeptic. It's not that they are afraid he might bore the audience or sound like a kook. They won't ask him because they're afraid he'll have a good answer."

"How much damage would it do to the cause if the audience finds out that one of the highest ranking scientists in the world disagrees with the mantra? It would break that sacred spell. Suddenly, the unwashed masses will realize 'there is a debate', and that all the times they were told 'the debate was over', they were being lied too."

"The same team that tells us that we must 'listen to the experts', won't listen to any experts they don't like. They rave about 'UN Experts' that hide the decline, but run a mile to avoid the giants of science. They'll ask high school dropouts about climate change on prime time TV before they interview the Nobel Prize winners. It's a lie by omission. It's active deception. And the whole climate movement is built on it."

Data Misrepresentation Continues at the Highest Levels

Scientific institution after institution continue to destroy their credibility by manipulating data in service of propping up the political agenda of anthropogenic global warming. Here is an example from The Lancet, a weekly UK medical journal. In Volume 7, Issue 4, dated April 2023, under the heading of "Planetary Health," they published and article by Pierre Masselot, PhD, Malcolm Mistry, PhD, et al, titled:

Excess mortality attributed to heat and cold: a health impact assessment study in 854 cities in Europe.

The study was funded by:

the UK's Medical Research Council (MERC)
the UK's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
the EU's Horizon 2020
the EU's Joint Research Center.

Here are some excerpts from the opening Summary and Introduction:

"Heat and cold are now established health risk factors, [...] The associated health burden is expected to increase with climate change, especially under the most extreme scenarios of global warming."

"Around 40% of the EU population lives in cities of at least 50,000 inhabitants and the urban population experiences overall higher levels of temperature stress, particularly heat. [...] Better knowledge of the city-level mortality effects of climate change-related stressors is crucial for the design and implementation of adaptation policies."

"The objective of the present study is to provide a comprehensive and consistent assessment of the current mortality burden associated with non-optimal temperature across most European cities [...] The model and results can be applied for projections in future climatic conditions, accounting for shifts in the age distribution and various socioeconomic scenarios, and eventually be used to design adaptation policies".   [Emphasis added]

There is no ambiguity that heat, not cold is the real focus of the study, and that it is intended for purposes of supporting future governmental environmental policies, which is no surprise given who paid for it. That said, let's skip to the following chart that summarizes their findings concerning excess deaths attributed to cold and heat.

Take a close look. Notice anything strange? Well, Gregory Wrightstone did. As he reported in the Climate Change Dispatch, the scale for the cold side of the chart runs between 0-250 while the scale for the heat side is 0-40 over five times larger, which significantly magnifies the impact of heat deaths vs. cold deaths. Here are the two modified charts that Wrightstone constructed to illustrate the point.

When the scales are equalized as is the case in the right chart, it becomes obvious that excess deaths from cold are a much greater problem than those from heat. However, that doesn't look too good when your narrative is all about human-caused warming, so the data has to be manipulated to tell the right story — facts, truth, and human lives be damned!

Now, getting back to The Lancet, let's remember that this is a peer-reviewed journal. This supposedly "scientific" article passed through the review process of other professionals in the field in addition to the journal's editors without any flags being raised over this presentation of the data? This points to wide-spread corruption in the profession as well as the journal itself, calling into question everything that The Lancet publishes while destroying its reputation for scientific integrity.

Lying with graphics

As discussed frequently above, data manipulation is one method the climate alarmists use in order to fabricate the desired narrative when the simple facts will not comply. More recently the manipulation of graphics is being used in order to generate fear. Retired British scientist Don Keller recently posted the following image on Twitter showing two screen shots of televised European weather reports from 2017 (top) and 2022 (bottom). Note how much more severe the heat is in the bottom image! Except for the small fact that all the temperatures are much lower.

This is far from a one-time occurrence. For example, George Mason University maintains a Weather and Climate Data site. On August 1, 2023, this image was displayed on their home page:

This is a reasonable map with yellow depicting temperatures from 65–79°F, orange from 80-89°F, and red 90°F and above.

However, at the same time they had the following chart displaying temperature forecasts with a completely different visual scale:

Here the yellow zone is compressed down to 60-63°F, orange 64-71°F, while red starts at a very comfortable 72°F. These are not arbitrary or accidental changes, but intentional ones made for the purpose of generating an overall impression of crisis in the face of data that conveys no such meaning.

New Study Suggests Global Warming Could be Mostly an Urban Problem

A team of 37 researchers has published a peer-reviewed paper in the journal, Climate, which highlights two important conclusions:

1. Warming due to the urban heat island effect is significantly underestimated by the IPCC — the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
2. The IPCC appears to under-represent the sun's actual impact on temperature

From the review:

"It is well-known that cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside. While urban areas only account for less than 4% of the global land surface, many of the weather stations used for calculating global temperatures are located in urban areas. For this reason, some scientists have been concerned that the current global warming estimates may have been contaminated by urban heat island effects. In their latest report, the IPCC estimated that urban warming accounted for less than 10% of global warming. However, this new study suggests that urban warming might account for up to 40% of the warming since 1850."   [Emphasis added]

and:

"The study also found that the IPCC's chosen estimate of solar activity appeared to have prematurely ruled out a substantial role for the Sun in the observed warming.

"When the authors analysed the temperature data only using the IPCC's solar dataset, they could not explain any of the warming since the mid-20th century. That is, they replicated the IPCC's iconic finding that global warming is mostly human-caused. However, when the authors repeated the analysis using a different estimate of solar activity — one that is often used by the scientific community — they found that most of the warming and cooling trends of the rural data could actually be explained in terms of changing solar activity."   [Emphasis added]

The lead author of the study, Dr. Willie Soon states:

"For many years, the general public has been assuming that the science on climate change is settled. This new study shows that this is not the case."

The 2023 Temperature Spike

Yes, temperature data showed a larger than normal temperature increase during 2023, and of course, the general media was quick to jump on this as conclusive proof that man-made CO₂ was responsible.  Here were a few typical headlines:

The state of the climate in 2023

"In its last report in 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that human activity is changing the climate in unprecedented and sometimes irreversible ways."   — BBC: 03-19-23   [Emphasis added]

Earth is on track for catastrophic warming, U.N. warns

"Cut emissions quickly to save lives, scientists warn in a new U.N. report"   — NPR: 03-20-23   [Emphasis added]

Global heat in 'uncharted territory' as scientists warn 2023 could be the hottest year on record

"And they are not holding back — "extraordinary," "terrifying" and "uncharted territory" are just a few of the ways they have described the recent spike in global temperature. ... As the world burns fossil fuels and pumps out planet-heating pollution, global temperatures are steadily warming."   — CNN: 07-08-23   [Emphasis added]

World is dangerously close to a global warming limit as 2023 goes down as hottest on record

"The unprecedented heat in 2023 was caused primarily by climate change, Copernicus said, but was exacerbated by El Niño, a natural climate variability that increases Pacific Ocean heat and typically boosts the world's temperatures."   — CNN: 01-09-24   [Emphasis added]

After laying the blame mostly on man-made climate change, it was refreshing to see CNN at least make mention of the possible contribution from El Niño.  A paper published on 10-10-24 by the European Geosciences Union (EGU) titled:

The 2023 Global Warming Spike Was Driven By the El Niño–Southern Oscillation

concludes that the naturally occurring El Niño–Southern Oscillation can fully explain the recent temperature rise.  From the Abstract: fully

"Global-mean surface temperature rapidly increased 0.29± 0.04 K from 2022 to 2023.  Such a large interannual global warming spike is not unprecedented in the observational record, with a previous instance occurring in 1976–1977.  However, why such large global warming spikes occur is unknown, and the rapid global warming of 2023 has led to concerns that it could have been externally driven.  Here we show that climate models that are subject only to internal variability can generate such spikes, but they are an uncommon occurrence (p = 1.6% ± 0.1%).  However, when a prolonged La Niña immediately precedes an El Niño in the simulations, as occurred in nature in 1976–1977 and 2022–2023, such spikes become much more common (p = 10.3% ± 0.4%).  Furthermore, we find that nearly all simulated spikes (p = 88.5% ± 0.3%) are associated with El Niño occurring that year.  Thus, our results underscore the importance of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation in driving the occurrence of global warming spikes such as the one in 2023, without needing to invoke anthropogenic forcing, such as changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases or aerosols, as an explanation."   [Emphasis added]

And thus, once again, the so called "settled science" of anthropogenic global warming is shown to be very far from settled, and the alarmism generated by the popular press is nothing more than propaganda pushing a political narrative that is seen, over and over, to have very little to do with reality.

Floating Solar Can Increase Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Science X (phys.org) published a report titled, Floating Solar Can Increase Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Study Finds.  As is typically concerning work in the climate arena, investigations are primarily done using computer models.   From the report:

"While floating solar—the emerging practice of putting solar panels on bodies of water—is promising in its efficiency and its potential to spare agricultural and conservation lands, a new experiment finds environmental trade-offs.  [...]"

"'There have been a flurry of papers about floating solar, but it's mostly modeling and projections,' said Steven Grodsky"

Politicians rush ahead to mandate this application, but:

"In the first manipulative field study examining the environmental impacts of floating solar, published Dec. 6 in Environmental Science & Technology, researchers found that floating solar panels increased greenhouse gas emissions on small ponds by nearly 27%.  [...]

"'If you put floating solar on there,' Grodsky said, 'you're drastically reducing oxygen availability for organisms, you're messing with ecological processes, how decomposition takes place, the microbes, the way wind moves across the surface of the water.  It's all connected.'"

This is another case which calls into question the reliability of the computer models in predicting climate outcomes.  The environmental systems are still far too complex to currently be modeled with accuracy, as example after example demonstrate.

Volcanoes and CO₂

On April 2, 2025, the University of Manchester, UK released a report titled:

New technology reveals volcanic CO2 emissions could be three time higher than anticipated.

in which they report:

"Estimates of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from volcanoes may have been significantly underestimated  [...]"

"Scientists typically monitor volcanic emissions by focusing on hot vents, known as fumaroles, which release high concentrations of easily detectable acid gases like sulphur dioxide (SO₂) and hydrogen chloride (HCl).  However, many volcanoes also have cooler fumaroles, where water-rich hydrothermal systems on the volcano absorb the acidic gases, making them harder to detect.  As a result, CO₂ emissions from these cooler sources are often overlooked, leading to significant underestimations in volcanic gas output.

"The new technology exposes those hidden emissions, offering a more accurate quantification of the volcanoes gas output.  [...]

"However, it's also important to realise that despite our findings that CO₂ emissions could be around three times higher than we expected for volcanoes capped by hydrothermal systems, volcanoes still contribute less than 5% of global CO₂ emissions, far less than human activities such as fossil fuel combustion and deforestation."

On May 2, 2025, the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) published a report titled:

More than 19,000 undersea volcanoes discovered

which stated:

"Paul Wessel, emeritus professor with the SOEST Department of Earth Sciences; Seung-Sep Kim, SOEST alum and professor at Chungnam National University (Korea); and researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography recently published a study identifying 19,325 new seamounts.  This work expanded a previously published catalog that had 24,643 seamounts.  [...]

"With only one-quarter of the sea floor mapped with sonar, it is impossible to know how many seamounts exist.  But radar satellites that measure ocean height can also find them, by looking for subtle signs of seawater mounding above a hidden seamount, tugged by its gravity.  A 2011 census using the method found more than 24,000.  High-resolution radar data have now added more than 19,000 new ones.  The vast majority-more than 27,000-remain uncharted by sonar.  'It's just mind boggling,' says David Sandwell, a marine geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who helped lead the work.  [...]

"The seamount catalog is sure to expand further with Seabed 2030, an international project to accelerate high-resolution sonar mapping that Mayer is helping lead.  But space surveys will improve too."

As summarized in Watts Up With That?:

"The climate establishment loves to pin the rise in atmospheric CO₂—now around 420 ppm—squarely on human emissions.  But these two studies, released within weeks of each other, expose massive gaps in our understanding of natural CO₂ sources.  If volcanic emissions on land are triple what we thought, and we've just found 19,000+ new undersea volcanoes, the natural contribution to atmospheric CO₂ is likely far higher than the 'less than 5%' figure tossed around.

"Let's do some back-of-the-envelope math.  The USGS estimates global volcanic CO₂ emissions at about 0.26 gigatons per year USGS Volcano Hazards Program, compared to human emissions of ~35 gigatons.  But if Manchester's findings apply broadly, that 0.26 could be closer to 0.78 gigatons or more.  Add in unknown contributions from tens of thousands of undersea volcanoes, and the natural CO₂ flux starts looking like a serious player.  We're not saying humans don't contribute—fossil fuels are a big factor—but the certainty of attribution just took a major hit.

"These discoveries don't just challenge climate models; they demand a rethink of how we monitor and predict CO₂ trends."

Significant Problems With Temperature Data Being Reported By The UK's Meteorological (Met) Office

In addition to previously reporting on the manipulation of temperature data used to manufacture inaccurate "global warming" readings, problems with the reliability of weather stations have been discussed here, here, here, and here.  More recently the MET Office has come under scrutiny for the quality, and even existence, of many of its weather stations.

Chris Morano at Climate Depot is one of a number of people reporting:

"Last year the UK Met Office was shown to be inventing long-term temperature data at 103 non-existent weather stations.  It was claimed in a later risible 'fact check' that the data were estimated from nearby well-correlated neighbouring stations.  Citizen super sleuth Ray Sanders issued a number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to learn the identity of these correlating sites but has been told that the information is not held by the Met Office.  So the invented figures for the non-existent sites are supposedly provided by stations that the Met Office claims it cannot identify and are presumably not recorded in its copious computer storage and archive."

The article continues to provide additional specifics related to the Met Office's inability (or unwillingness?) to provide sources for its temperature data in the face of some shocking facts.

In another article,Paul Homewood discusses the placement of many of the Met's weather stations in poor quality class 4 and 5 locations, subjecting them to urban heat island effects which render them unreliable, providing reading uncertainties of between 2-5 °C!  Homewood states in his article titled Nearly All Daily UK High Temperatures Are Set At Junk Weather Stations:

"The Met Office have sent me a list of the daily high temperatures so far this year and I have analysed them for the summer months by WMO Classifications, which they supplied last year."

"The results speak for themselves — overwhelmingly sourced from junk weather stations where temperatures may be inflated by as much as 2C or even more by poor siting.

Out of the five highs set at Class 1 sites, four are in the urban heat island bubble of Cambridge, so are equally meaningless from a climatological point of view.

The usual sites we are very familiar with are well represented - twelve are next to the tarmac at Heathrow. —The car park in Hull appears six times, and the garden suntrap in Cavendish four times. —Interestingly Cirencester, a Class 4 site, crops up nine times, which might arouse local interest.

Pershore also appears on the list nine times, in addition to two more at Pershore College. Both are junk Class 4 sites, with two degrees of uncertainty.

I hardly need to point out that there are hardly any daily highs at good quality sites. —The only other Class 1 site to the urban jungle in Cambridge happens to be at Weybourne in Norfolk - readers comments welcome!

As to the three Class 2s, two were at Kew Gardens, inside the three degree urban heat island of London. —The other was at Holbeach in Lincolnshire, near the Wash where I went cycling a few years ago.

I hardly need to ask why there are virtually no daily highs recorded at pristine rural stations!"   [Emphasis added]

It's Back!   Global Boiling is Out.  Global Cooling is Hip Again.

Just in time for the holidays, the New York Post runs an article titled: Climate Scientists Claim Gulf Stream Could be Near Collapse — Predicting a New Ice Age.  From the article:

"A key Atlantic current could be pushed to the brink of collapse within decades, supposedly ushering in a new ice age and dramatically raising sea levels, climate scientists have claimed in a controversial new study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

"The apocalyptic predictions came as a result of a collaboration between researchers at the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, San Diego — weeks after one-time climate alarmist Bill Gates publicly downplayed the impact of temperature fluctuations on the planet.  [...]

"Should the AMOC [Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation] slow down too much, they claim, it could have significant ramifications.  These include the extreme suggestion that temperatures across Europe to [sic] drop by nearly 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

"'Winters would be more typical of Arctic Canada and precipitation would decrease, also,' Jonathan Bamber, a professor of Earth observation at the University of Bristol, told the Daily Mail."

Well, they covered their asses with a well placed "supposedly" so it's all good.  You do have to feel sorry for Bill Gates, changing his tune a couple of weeks too early.  Now he is being left out in the cold!  :-)

Another Example Showing How Temperature Data Is Being Biased

Anthony Watts began his reporting on climate data back in 2006 when he demonstrated how changing the paint used by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) on the Stevenson screens, the boxes enclosing their temperature monitoring devices, increased the temperature in those enclosures.

Now, a new problem with the temperature readings has resulted as BoM is replacing these enclosures with ones only a quarter of the original size.  A summary of a report [PDF] published in the International Journal of Climatology concludes:

"The peer-reviewed science confirms that shrinking the size of Stevenson Screens increased average temperatures across a year by 0.54°C and, on hot summer days, it can increase the maximum temperature by 1.7°C.  ...  Yet the BOM denies the existence of this peer-reviewed science, pretends that it doesn't exist, and claims that shrinking the screens by 74% had no effect on the recorded temperatures."

Watts continues:

"Furthermore, at every weather station where the BOM replaced the traditional "large" Stevenson Screens with smaller ones, they ripped out the large ones and replaced them with the small ones on the very same day.  This is contrary to long-established practices, which require that when you change measuring equipment, you keep parallel data from both setups to determine whether the equipment change may have introduced a warming or cooling bias into the record.

"If you wanted to artificially inflate temperatures and create new "record hot days" to generate propaganda for the climate cult, you'd do exactly what the BOM did: shrink the size of the Stevenson Screens.  And if you wanted to cover up your malfeasance and fraud, you'd rip out the large screens and replace them with the small ones on the very same day so there would be no parallel data — exactly what the BOM did."

Chickens Roosting.

The article, Obama-Backed $2.2B Green Energy 'Boondoggle' Leaves Taxpayers On The Hook, goes into great detail regarding the history of the California-based Ivanpah solar power facility.  Here is a short list of the important points:

Construction Period:		10-27-10 thru 02-13-14		(3.5 years)
Construction Cost:		$2.2 billion dollars		($3.3 billion in 2026 dollars)
Federal Loan Guarantee:		$1.6 billion		($2.4 billion in 2026 dollars)
Treasury Grant:		$539 million in 2014		($752 million in 2026 dollars)
Other Economic Grants:		Tax Credits & Accelerated Depreciation
Remaining Unpaid Federal Loan:		$730-$780 million

• The technology is outdated and inefficient, costing electricity rate-payers up to $100 million more per year than other energy sources.
• Both the Federal Government and the Pacific Gas & Electric utility wish to terminate the project as uneconomic.
• California regulators refuse to shutter the plant citing fragility of the current electric grid resulting from the loss of power.
• In 2023, plant operation was at 17% of capacity, when 25-30% was projected.
• Multiple sources report that up to 3,500 birds, including peregrine falcon and barn owls, are killed each year.  In 2016, a federal biologist reported up to 6,000 bird deaths per year.  (Source: Wikipedia)

Quoting from the article:

"[T]he project's financing structure spreads risk unevenly.  Federal loan guarantees, taxpayer-funded grants and long-term power contracts help stabilize returns for investors, while leaving taxpayers and electricity customers exposed to potential losses and higher costs."

This is just another example of how government can never get it right through central planning, divorced from real-world market feedback that includes a proper assessment of investment risks.  But this is just one of many examples.  For a more comprehensive list, see the section, The Financial Consequences Of The Environmental Movement.