On April 14 I recorded a podcast with Tom Nelson. He has since posted a slightly edited version on his YouTube site. Go to this link if you would like to watch it — about an hour long. The main subject is the sordid history of EPA’s Endangerment Finding and efforts of people including myself to get it rescinded.
The good news on the Endangerment Finding front is that EPA under new Administrator Lee Zeldin is very much on the job of eliminating the EF. Of course, once it has been rescinded it will face a blizzard of legal challenges. I hope and expect that Zeldin and his team are up to the job of carrying out a rescission that will stick. I offered my suggestions for how to do a rescission that will stand up to challenge in this post from January 26.
Separately, Nelson has made a thing out of compiling a growing list of “Signs That The Climate Scam Is Collapsing.” That list is now up to some 33 items and counting. The current version can be found here. Readers of this blog are likely already familiar with many of the items on Tom’s list. However, today I would like to feature a couple of items from Tom’s list that are important but may be less well known.
Item 3 on Tom’s list is that the funding of something called “NASA GISS” is likely to be terminated as part of the DOGE cost-cutting efforts. GISS is the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. For some unknown reason, GISS is part of NASA, and is located, of all place, in Manhattan, in an office building on upper Broadway near Columbia University. GISS is mainly known for producing a world temperature time series known as GISTEMP, which is systematically massaged and altered in ways to enhance the narrative of climate alarm. For more details than you will ever want to know about the data tampering, go to my 30+ part series “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.”
Tom calls NASA GISS a “climate alarm shop,” which is accurate. For many years it was headed by crazed alarmist James Hansen, until his retirement in 2013. Since then the head has been Gavin Schmidt, who has proved to be Hansen’s equal in spreading alarm. GISS is best known for its regular press releases proclaiming the most recent month or year to be the “warmest ever.” Indeed, GISS’s most recent press release, from January 10, has the headline “2024 Was the Warmest Year on Record.” Since January 20 GISS has not issued any further press releases, which hopefully represents some message control getting exerted by the Trump administration.
Following Nelson’s links, it is not clear to me that the information about the impending defunding of GISS is completely definitive. One link goes to this Wall Street Journal piece from March 29, with the following quote:
It is at NASA, though, where Musk is making the biggest shift in an agency’s priorities to align them with his own—both financially and personally. He is working to recast its programs, reallocate federal spending and install loyalists to aid his decadeslong goal of sending people to Mars.
If true, that would certainly be bad news for GISS; but the WSJ does not mention GISS specifically,. Then there is this piece by Larry Bell at Newsmax today, which uses the WSJ piece to reach the conclusion that GISS is necessarily on the chopping block. From Newsmax:
[As] to NASA GISS, it’s difficult to imagine that any of the three dedicated space exploration action figures [Trump, Musk and new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacson] will wish to continue to divert any more of the agency’s annual $25 billion budget to support climate alarmism by an ugly poster child for DOGE waste spending reform.
So on this item Nelson may be getting a little ahead of himself, but there is certainly a good basis to hope.
Item 9 on Nelson’s list is the final demise of one of the longest-running climate litigations, the one known as Juliana v. United States. This is the case that I have sometimes referred to as the “stupidest litigation in the country.” I have had many posts on it over the years, most recently on April 9, 2024.
The Juliana case was brought way back in 2012 in the federal District of Oregon. The plaintiffs asserted a “constitutional right” to a clean and healthy environment, and sought as a remedy that the court impose a plan to “phase out” all use of fossil fuels. My April 9, 2024 piece included a fairly lengthy summary of the proceedings to that time, which had included three visits to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. After the Ninth Circuit had found a lack of standing for the plaintiffs in a 2020 decision, it had remanded the case back to the District Court with instructions to dismiss; but the District Court instead had given the plaintiffs another chance to amend the complaint to get around the problems. And then the District Court was starting to get the case ready for trial. So after four more years of getting jerked around in the District Court, the government was back in the Ninth Circuit with a mandamus petition when I wrote that post a year ago.
The latest news is that the Ninth Circuit granted the mandamus petition, and now, finally, the Supreme Court has denied a petition for certiorari from the plaintiffs. From Reuters, March 24, 2025:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a bid by 21 young people to revive a novel lawsuit claiming the U.S. government’s energy policies violate their rights to be protected from climate change. The justices denied a request by the youth activists to hear their appeal of a decision by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals directing a federal judge in Oregon to dismiss the case after holding they lacked legal standing to sue.
So this one case is definitively over. The bad news is that there are many other similar and/or copycat cases out there kicking around in the courts. It will be a long time before they are all killed off, but at least this one is a start.
Check out Tom’s list for plenty more examples of the continuing, if painfully slow, demise of the climate scam.
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Cut the money off and the scam dies.
Anyone remember November 2009? The nastiness was supposed to die over a decade ago. It didn’t, not even close. The Left and its wholly own subsidiary and newly rechristened “Legacy Media” will do everything in its power to make sure a there’s a repeat of that coverup.
Obama’s “post-racial society” sure has worried a lot about race.
No government agency should be involved with anything related to climate change
Climate is what it is, and mankind can do nothing about it, and should not
.
No government/taxpayer money should be given to any organizations or individuals engaged in climate change studies, etc.
Any money donated to a private organization or individuals engaged in climate change, etc., will not be tax deductible by the donor and will be taxed as ordinary income by the recipient.
Story tip and off topic: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal. Electricity network head says 6 to 10 hours to restore.
and the cause?
Supposedly proplems with a high tension line between France and northern Spain. I recall that there already was once a similar issue a while ago but it only affected some area in northern Spain.
Well, since then more and more conventional powerplants have been shut down, wind and solar can’t cope with sudden changes without proper backup (I see it on my own PV system the time it takes to ramp up, the battery buffers up to one minute – depending load).
That’s fine for an island solution but disastrous for an interdependent network. So yes the collaps and cascades of disconnections are “man made” renewable BS. Too fragile and instable they make the grid. Finallyvthe “blackout” came, I’m touching myself tonight..BIG TIME…the celebration beers I had already.
Chees, prost, skål and salúd..eff the french lol
I suspect- wild guess- that by now- grid engineers know how to make a grid almost bullet proof- if allowed- with ff energy and keeping the politicians far away.
“… if allowed …”
Linked to the climate change crisis.
At this time (noon DST 04/28) they are blaming temperature differential over long lengths of high-power lines created phase oscillations or power fluctuations. Not directly tied to renewable power generation, but changes to the grid necessitated by trying to use renewables. Sounds like a conventional power plant serving the area around it would not be subject to such a problem.
Restarting from a blackout is, by definition, a slow process.
Small sections of the grid, still in good shape, are put on line one at a time, plus those sections must have only traditional power plants, as wind and solar would crash them back down again
‘… “Signs That The Climate Scam Is Collapsing.”’
I sincerely hope so for all our sakes, but particularly for the younger generations, and those to come, that would have to deal with the complete wreckage of economies dictated by climate alarmism.
As Francis Menton says, however, it’s going to be a protracted process because the Left will obstruct and attempt to run out the clock on Trump’s reformers. It will be like watching the last minute of a close basketball game where play seemingly stops every second.
For the exact reasons you mention, it is necessary for skeptics of climate alarm to sharpen our grasp of the core errors that arose decades ago – exaggerated feedback, the circular reasoning of the “forcing” framing of incremental CO2, the misapplication of the step-iterated models because of the buildup of uncertainty, the failure to properly consider energy conversion in the compressible atmosphere, etc. etc. It is very important “for the younger generations” to see a decisive correction of bad policy that was based on unsound claims all along.
The colleges have spent the last few decades indoctrinating nearly all young people into the notion that government is the solution to all problems, and that only when government runs everything, will any of our problems be solved.
“If it needs doing, the government should do it; if the government isn’t doing it, it shouldn’t be done.”
The Left in a nutshell.
h/t Tom Woods
Well done, Francis! Concise, easy to follow summary about the demise of the climate scam and NASA’s GISS.
The way to avoid endless litigation over zeldin’s takedown of the EF is to win Congress bigly in 2026, then amend the circular definition in the CAA of an air pollutant as that which pollutes. SO2 by definition does (forms acid rain). CO2 does only by a very stretched interpretation, as is necessary for life (photosynthesis) and (experimentally in greenhouses) is optimal about 1000 ppm.
Charles R posted about the lease of the location above Tom’s Restaurant — Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) —
GISS Gets the Boot: A Seinfeldian Saga – Watts Up With That?
Yes, it may not be that DOGE will eliminate GISS, however worthy a result. But GISS’s lease is up, and they will need to either go out of business or work remotely. Note that they use supercomputers at Goddard. So why do they sit next to Columbia University. It also appears that, although they are part of NASA, they work for the EPA. All the more reason to cut EPA funding.
One of the story’s oddest aspects is that a research project requiring mostly introverts in office chairs would be located in an expensive city. There’s no reason it could not be on the edge of Flyover State University.
The unraveling process has begun, and will only increase in velocity and scope. That is the nature of scams. Once exposed, they just naturally collapse. Of course, some extra help would make the process go even faster.
Green lending has taken a big hit in the neck.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Major-Lenders-Withdraw-From-Green-Operations.html
Even though most of the contributors at oil price are Green Weenies. OP.C has shut down comments
Some have not got the memo
Britain will accelerate push to net zero, Starmer tells energy summit
Britain will go “all out” for a low-carbon future and accelerate the push to net zero instead of slowing down as some have demanded
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/24/britain-will-accelerate-push-to-net-zero-starmer-tells-energy-summit
Clown.
Keir Starmer increasingly reminds me of Wylie Coyote after he has run over the edge of the cliff and is just about to look down.
Feet spinning fast.
Story Tip — the Iberian blackout
From the Telegraph
Spain has one of Europe’s highest proportions of renewable energy, providing about 56pc of the nation’s electricity.
More than half of its renewables comes from wind with the rest from solar and other sources. That means Spain’s electricity supplies are increasingly reliant on the weather delivering enough wind to balance its grid.
For much of the last 24 hours, that wind has been largely missing. The website Windy.com, for example, shows wind speeds of 2-3mph, leaving the country reliant on solar energy and old gas-fired power stations.
The weather system that has left Spain bereft of wind is also having similar effects across the rest of Western Europe with the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and others all seeking extra sources of electricity as their wind turbines fall still.
France, for example, has been calling on Spain for extra electricity. The UK, which is also increasingly reliant on wind, was on Monday morning struggling to get any turbine power.
Instead, it was relying on imports from Europe – with the London and South East receiving 58pc of its power from imports, according to the National Energy System Operator (Neso).
The sheer scale of the demands being transmitted between countries and across interconnector cables – especially at a time when wind and other renewable output plummets – may be enough to disrupt grids and power transmission.
The large amount of solar power on the Spanish and Portuguese grids may have also left the Iberian power grid more vulnerable to faults or cyber attacks, according to one expert.
Generators that have spinning parts, such as those running on gas, coal or hydropower, create what is known as “inertia”, which helps to balance the frequency of power on the grid to prevent faults.
Solar panels do not generate inertia on the system, however, and there are known issues with low inertia on the Iberian grid.
At about 10am on Monday, roughly two hours before the power cuts, almost 60pc of Spain’s power was being generated by solar farms, according to transparency data.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/28/what-could-be-behind-europes-power-outage/
So, un-extreme weather is a catastrophe.
This understates the significance of GISS. I have made a few attempts through government ombudsman to discredit the Australian CSIRO/BoM/ ACCESS climate model. In defence, they offer GISS GCM as the epitome of climate modelling and compare the ACCESS results to the GISS GCM. The GISS model is also featured in the UNIPCC reports along with the discredited Hansen back radiation BS.
Within the Climate Scam™ community, GISS is highly influential. Disband GISS and a key foundation block is removed. It leaves the UNIPCC with limited scientific credibility to back whatever wild claims they make.
There was one good GISS scientist but he is no longer with us. Michael Mischenko’s work to bring fundamental physics into climate science was a rare jewel. I also find the GISS Horizons orbital data base valuable in my efforts to understand real climate change.
“a novel lawsuit claiming the U.S. government’s energy policies violate their rights to be protected from climate change.”
Novel?
“What does it mean if something is novel?
AI Overview
If something is “novel,” it means it’s new and original, not like anything seen or known before. It’s fresh, unique, and potentially groundbreaking. The word “novel” comes from the Italian word “novella,” which originally meant “new story”.
The Juliana case may have been novel in 2012, maybe not, either way it can’t be novel after 13 years.
Legally, it was a novel type of case and it was only recently decided that it had no merit. If they had ruled the other way, it would have been a novel decision on a novel case. It still is novel. But, it is now a novel bad lawsuit.
What’s going to keep the courts from running out the clock on the Trump administration? The court challenges against rescinded the EF could take years.