By Steve Milloy
Guest Post by: The Competitive Enterprise Institute, The Heartland Institute, the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the International Climate Science Coalition, and Truth in Energy and Climate.
Editor’s note: This summary serves as a fact check on the top false claims made about climate change by the media in February 2025.
President Trump has changed the climate for “climate change.” Among the many actions he is taking to reverse US climate policy from the direction it’s been headed in for the past 36-plus years, the one that stands out the most is the President’s move to review and (hopefully) reverse the 2009 decision by the US Environmental Protection Agency that emissions of greenhouse gases harm the public health and welfare.
The endangerment finding will be hotly contested and Climate Fact Check will be following developments closely. Meanwhile, here are five top fact checks and more from February.
Links: The Associate Press article, National Resources Defense Council.
Links: 2024 Scientific American article, 2025 Scientific American article, Nature study.
Links: The Washington Post article, 2024 Washington Post article.
Links: The Associated Press article.
What’s disappearing faster than glaciers is US participation in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). President Trump has barred US government scientists from participating in the next IPCC report scheduled for publication in 2029.
Our prediction is that the glaciers will outlast the climate hoax. Don’t miss these other great climate fact checks and more from our partners so you can be prepared for the coming battle over the endangerment finding.
ClimateRealism.com
• False, CNBC, Climate Change Is Not Causing a Housing Market Collapse
• Wrong, The Guardian, There Are No Identifiable “Climate Tipping Points”
• Wrong, Earth.com, Cocoa Production Is Not ‘Under Extreme Climate Pressure’ It’s…
• False, Washington Post, Climate Change Isn’t Causing a Rat Crisis
• Sorry, New York Times, Climate Change Isn’t the Cause of High Coffee Prices
WattsUpWithThat.com
• The Greatest Scientific Fraud of All Time — Part XXXIII
• The Rain In Spain Stays Mainly The Same
• Fearmongering by Numbers: The Greenland Ice Sheet “Tipping Point” That Wasn’t
• How the “scientific consensus” on climate change was invented
• NOAA’s Homogenized Temperature Records: A Statistical House of Cards?
See you in April for the March Fact Check!
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https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/heat-wave-index-usa&ved=2ahUKEwir7-KmtYCMAxUah68BHZ_EFhEQFnoECBUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2DREnbMD9Oci5dKM7QHkLe
all you cagw chicken littles need to know this .
😉
Did a screen cap so people can see the image without following link. 🙂
Oh.. look at the 1930s !!
And here is a similar graph showing percentage of days over 100F
What is the source for this graph?
Climate Science: where facts aren’t facts.
Or, to paraphrase Feynman: ‘Doesn’t matter how pretty your theory is. If it doesn’t match observations, it’s wrong.’
The Danes, like everyone else in Europe, are sold on the idea of anthropogenic global warming. Believers in AGW all believe that Greenland is a giant melting ice cube. If so, they should have no problem letting DJT have it. 👍
Re: Temperature adjustments, NOAA (and others) extensively use the UEFF (the Universal Engineering Fudge Factor aka Finagle’s Constant Fc) when doing temperature adjustments.
How are Kilimanjaros glaciers doing? I haven’t heard anything about them in a long time.
Ice is too reflective to melt in the tropical sun. And above 5000m there is not enough heat in the air to melt ice so it hangs around.
The daily average sunlight in the tropics at top of atmosphere is around 420W/m^2. The albedo for direct sunlight of fresh snow is 0.8 so the ice absorbs lass than 84W/m^2 of the incoming sunlight because the incident angle is rarely 90 degrees.
An ice surface at 273K radiates long wave at 314W/m^2. So a good margin for keeping cool on average. Some ice will melt when the sun is near its zenith but then it refreezes and there will be fresh snow to brighten the surface from time-to-time because there is water vapour up to about 14,000m in the tropics so plenty to descend to 5,000m.
Below 5000m, a tropical atmosphere gains heat through its radiation balance so is able to melt ice below 5000m.
Kilimanjaroro ice is still there as is the ice above 5000m in the tropical Andes..
Rick,
“Ice is too reflective to melt in the tropical sun”
Put some ice out in the tropical sun. It melts. Maybe you meant to say something else?
He probably meant that at high elevations, the albedo prevents most of the ice from direct melting, due to low temperatures. I would think sublimation would be a bigger factor in ice loss.
As for ice in the tropics near sea level, no sunlight is needed at all to melt. Hot nights indeed💃…
Did temperatures go up at the top of Kilimanjaro because of the CO2 ‘greenhouse’ effect ?
The claimed fact that Earth has no thermostat is contrary to observation and the long history of the planet. The setting does change and has changed a little through history but only by virtue of changes in atmospheric mass.
The tropical oceans regulate at 30C SST once cyclic convective instability sets in due to ice formation above 5000m reflection all the sunlight apart from that needed to run the convective engine.
Sea Ice forms at -1.7C and insulates the water below.
The average global surface temperature sits somewhere between these two extremes. Both extremes set by the formation of ice.
“The claimed fact that Earth has no thermostat . . .”
The claim that Earth has a “thermostat” is just that – a claim.
The Earth has cooled, and continues to do so – losing energy globally at a rate of about 44TW. Slowly but surely.
No “global warming” due to any imaginary GHE.
Yes, where there is sufficient water, limit is around 30ºC (can reach much higher where there is no water)
But ice does not set the lower temperature extreme, with temperatures of -60ºC occurring regularly in high latitudes in winter (Antarctica, Siberia, etc )
If CO2 would be Earth’s thermostat and we know that CO2 radiates in all directions wouldn’t more CO2 radiate more energy out to space? We also know that back radiation from CO2 can not be absorbed by the oceans.
Increasing CO2 has two effects on energy movement in the atmosphere. Increases in emissivity do lead to more radiation towards space. Increases in absorptivity lead to a slow down in energy movement upward through the atmosphere.
Kirchhoff’s Law of Radiation tells us these two opposing factors increase at the same rate. This keeps the movement of energy to space constant even as CO2 increases. This is also why the emission height for CO2 is fixed.
Back radiation is absorbed by the surface skin. However, since this is the same area involved in constant conduction with the lower atmosphere, all the absorbed energy is quickly conducted back into the lower atmosphere (where the back radiation originated).
There is one exception when the back radiation induces evaporation. The increased evaporation slightly cools the surface. This cooling counters the slight warming we get from increased broadening of the main CO2 absorption window.
We must change the conversation to CO2. Th e other side must be put in a position where they are forced to claim that it is CO2 that is going to be a catastrophe. No one in their right mind is arguing that climate doesn’t change or that some variations of climate are preferable to us humans. If the other side were forced to defend the notion that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause catastrophe then it is game over for them and we win.
I don’t believe this is true. When I challenge the ‘carbon’ obsessed, they have no idea what I’m talking about when I point out that adding 0.5% of greenhouse gases in 150 years cannot have a noticeable effect on temperature. Given that the greenhouse effect is estimated to increase temperatures by 30K overall, the maximum effect we could possibly have caused to surface temperature, even if CO2 was as strong a GG as water vapour*, or if GG additions had a linear effect^, is 0.15K. Almost all of that observation is either claimed as a lie or wildly misunderstood by them.
They no longer have to claim any such thing. It is almost irretrievably embedded in the collective psyche of those who won’t examine arguments for themselves. That is, unfortunately, the vast majority of people. You could literally demonstrate its falsity with a dozen reproducible experiments, and nothing would change in their minds.
(*Which it isn’t at all)
(^Which it doesn’t at all, it’s logarithmic.)
Given the estimated temperature of the Earth’s core, and heat loss measurements through the surface, I calculate the surface temperature in the absence of external heat input from the Sun at about 30 K, give or take a few Kelvins.
GHE enthusiasts calculate that the Sun’s energy input would result in a surface temperature of around 255 K. That’s for a body with an initial temperature of absolute zero, of course. Add 30 and 255, and you get 285 K.
If you start with a warmer body, it takes less energy to achieve a higher temperature.
No GHE needed.
It sounds like you don’t understand that the primordial Earth started at a temperature much higher than the melting point of rocks.
It also sounds like you are making the same mistake that Lord Kelvin did when he calculated the age of the Earth. Do you take into account the heat generated by radioactive decay?
One thing I have yet to read or hear is who is behind all this climate denier bullshit? Who started telling media and financial sources to ignore, despise, defund, etc, those scientists who went against a narrative that someone had to put together, that is just pure bullsshit? Someone had to profit from this in some way. Gore certainly profited. Mann got Gore going with his fake hockey stick bullshit.
Someone needs to do a deep dive into the background of all this and find out who actually started all this hysteria mongering about climate. I want those people and or groups to be found out and punished severely for causing all the fear among people, for causing the waste of probably billions of dollars and for what?
Photosynthesis: Plants/Plankton turning Sunlight/CO2/H2O into Food/O2; neither animal nor blade of grass would exist, absent CO2. CO2 helps plants resist drought/damage/disease, extends growing seasons, lets plants move higher in altitude & Latitudes, shrinks deserts & reduces the spread of fire, plants using & retaining H2O more efficiently. As CO2 rises, photosynthesis flourishes & plants take in more CO2, sparking more growth, photosynthesis & CO2 uptake (recent studies indicate +20% absorption by 2100). Rising temperatures also extend growing seasons, help babies survive, increase net rainfall & save lives. We are in the short period (glacial interstitial) between long Ice Ages, the norm (where I sit) being a half mile of ice. Warm is good, cold is bad. This Cradle of Life is greener, more fertile & life sustaining than it was 200 years ago, because adding food to the base of the food-chain supports all of Nature, including humans. “It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.” R Lindzen