The Week That Was: 2025-12-13 (December 13, 2025)
Brought to You by SEPP (www.SEPP.org)
The Science and Environmental Policy Project
Quote of the Week: “I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.”— Johannes Kepler
Number of the Week: — 32 papers since 2020
THIS WEEK:
By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Scope: This TWTW begins with an essay by David Legates on the Greenhouse Effect. TWTW discusses a 2007 paper by Christopher Essex, Ross McKitrick, and Bjarne Andersen on the global temperature. Then, two papers by Net Zero Watch are presented one on human liberty, the other on powering human freedom. A Swiss magazine published an interview with SEPP director Willie Soon. TWTW discusses a paper by Charles Rotter and Anthony Watts that explains incorrect views concerning increased energy in the atmosphere from greenhouse gases. TWTW concludes with further discussion on the retraction of a significant paper in Nature.
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There Is a Greenhouse Effect: Climatologist David Legates, a director of SEPP, uses plain English to explain for the Cornwall Alliance why there is a Greenhouse Effect and why at current concentrations in the atmosphere carbon dioxide is a bit player in the enormously complex play called Climate Change. In “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Greenhouse Effect. No, It Won’t Kill Us” after a brief explanation that he is addressing accusations that other climatologists face, Legates states:
“Here is the controversial statement: “Carbon Dioxide contributes very little to the Greenhouse Effect.”
First, that simple proclamation raises the temperature of most climate alarmists to a boiling… er, maybe I should call it … a tipping point.
Carbon dioxide has been labeled an Earth-breaking, existential threat and merely by increasing its concentration to about 427 parts per million, we have committed the Earth to a warming of at least one-and-a-half degrees Celsius. The recent Dartington Declaration, signed by more than five-hundred PhDs, argues that this small increase in carbon dioxide has condemned the coral reefs to an extensive dieback if not outright extinction and put the rest of the planet in peril. Their arguments are that we must reduce global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by one half by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.
If the UN Conference of Parties cannot seem to reduce carbon dioxide emissions after thirty meetings, I am not sure how signatures from five hundred scientists will make any difference, especially if they ignore the development of China and India, but I digress. The question here is always “How much warming will a doubling of carbon dioxide cause, and will that warming be devastating to the planet?”
I can cite numerous scientific studies that demonstrate a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide will warm the planet between 1.0 and1.5 degrees Celsius. The argument that a magical tipping point in climate disasters occurs with a warming of just 1.5 degrees Celsius is a political statement and arises not from a scientific argument that a sharp cliff exists at exactly 1.5 degrees Celsius. It goes back to COP16 in Cancun, which formally suggested a need to “consider strengthening the long-term goal from two degrees Celsius to one-point-five.”
As I often say, carbon dioxide is but a bit player in climate change. But yes, it does get listed in the credits because it plays a role, albeit small.
Having gored the first ox, I will now turn my attention to the second: the concept that the greenhouse effect is non-existent. There are several arguments for this, including (1) that no molecule can store heat, (2) that climatologists are idiots who cannot understand the basics of physics, and (3) that a century-and-a-half old conspiracy theory was perpetrated by famous physicists to guarantee that the concept of global warming could be used to destroy our way of life.
Let me take these on one at a time.
The first argument is what I call the “instantaneous re-radiation model;” that is, any object or molecule, upon absorbing a photon of electromagnetic radiation, has five femtoseconds to emit that energy in other wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Thus, it cannot be said to store heat.
My immediate response to this line of thought is to ask those who follow it, “How do you define the temperature of an object?” When I learned physics, it was defined as “the intensive variable that determines the direction of spontaneous heat flow and quantifies the average kinetic energy per-particle in thermal equilibrium.”
That is just a fancy way of saying that “temperature is the measure of the average kinetic energy of the molecules that makes up the object.”
How does an object obtain an increase in kinetic energy when it warms? One way is to absorb more electromagnetic energy than it gives off. Yes, it must give off energy if its temperature is above absolute zero, but if more energy is obtained than is given off, the kinetic energy increases, and subsequently, the temperature of the object increases.
Now, some of that energy is emitted towards space, but some is emitted downward toward Earth’s surface. It is not that the atmosphere is magically creating energy to heat the surface; rather, this is energy that went into warming the atmosphere, which, since its temperature is above absolute zero, then emits that energy—some of it toward Earth’s surface. This energy can be kept in a loop, whereby energy is emitted by the surface, absorbed by the atmosphere, and in turn, emitted by the atmosphere and absorbed by the surface. Both Earth’s surface and its atmosphere are warmed by this energy loop, which we lovingly call the Greenhouse Effect.
The follow-up question is, “Why focus on just carbon dioxide? Since most of the atmosphere is nitrogen, oxygen, and argon, shouldn’t those molecules absorb and emit energy as well?”
The answer is … they do. All molecules absorb energy and emit energy if they are at a temperature above absolute zero. But different gases behave differently in that they absorb and emit energy in selective wavelengths.
Nitrogen, oxygen, and argon—which make up 99% of dry air—are different from water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and many of the other gases that make up the atmosphere. Nitrogen and oxygen are diatomic molecules; they contain just two atoms per molecule. Argon is a single atom; therefore, it is monatomic. All the others, including water vapor and carbon dioxide, are molecules containing at least three atoms. Thus, they have vibrational characteristics that monatomic and diatomic molecules lack. These vibrations often result in absorption and emission bands in the thermal infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum—heat, as we call it—whereas nitrogen, oxygen, and argon (and others) do not.
The short argument here is that molecules with three or more atoms can absorb and emit energy in the thermal infrared (heat) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. If more energy is received than is given off based on the temperature of the molecule, the molecule will increase in temperature. Similarly, if more energy is given off than received, based on the temperature of the molecule, the molecule will cool. But with gases in the atmosphere, the absorption and emission lie within select wavelengths.
The second argument is that climatologists are idiots who cannot understand the basic laws of physics, such as the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.
As a climatologist, I take umbrage at this argument and point out that climatologists existed before climate modeling and well before the discussion of global warming, or even global cooling, came into being.
But now, let’s debunk the argument. The rationale is that climatologists misuse the Stefan-Boltzmann Law—which dictates that the energy given off by an object or molecule in the atmosphere is proportional to the fourth power of its temperature. The argument is that the law is only applicable for a single source of electromagnetic radiation and that the emitter must be warmer than the emittee, or the target. If the emitter is colder than the target, it cannot possibly add any energy to the target—or so the argument goes.
The last statement is correct, but only in the aggregate. Remember that this is a two-way street; the target is also an emitter if it is at a temperature above absolute zero. The point is usually made by these proponents that in energy diagrams, more energy is emitted by the atmosphere and absorbed by the Earth’s surface than is received from the Sun. Yes, that is correct. But if you turned off the Sun, the atmosphere and Earth’s surface would slowly cool until they reached an equilibrium temperature of absolute zero. All the energy in this system originates from the Sun; it is just that some go into heating the atmosphere, which, in turn, keeps Earth’s surface warmer than it would have been if the atmosphere were not present. That Earth’s surface receives more energy from the atmosphere than from the Sun is a testament to how efficient the climate system is at keeping Earth’s temperature at a level that makes life habitable. We can thank our Creator for that.
The final argument against greenhouse warming is that this is a conspiracy that began in 1845. The hoax was perpetuated when the physicist James Prescott Joule, for whom the unit of energy is named, produced a false definition of energy that has since corrupted the field of physics. Other big-name physicists have been in this hoax, most notably Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Gottfried Leibniz, Johann Bernoulli, Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, Lord Kelvin, and William Rankine, just to name a few. Even Einstein himself was in on the conspiracy. Somehow, they all knew that climate change would become a major scientific issue some one hundred fifty years in the future, so, they made sure that carbon dioxide as an evil gas was cooked into the immutable laws of physics. I love a conspiracy theory as much as the next person, but … well ….
So, let me reiterate my position.
I DO NOT believe that carbon dioxide, methane, or nitrous oxide are existential threats to the planet. Neither are they reasonable threats of any kind.
Let me also state for the record that I DO NOT believe that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. In fact, if all life on Earth ceased to exist, our atmosphere would lose all its oxygen content and the proportion of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would increase above ninety-five percent. Note that, according to most reputable scientists, there is no substantial life on Mars or Venus, and the atmosphere of our two closest planets are largely carbon dioxide—that of Mars is about 96 percent carbon dioxide, 2 percent argon, and 2 percent nitrogen, while the Venusian atmosphere consists of about 96.5 percent carbon dioxide and only 3.5 percent nitrogen.
Thus, technically speaking, oxygen in our atmosphere is a pollutant created by life on Earth, most notably plant life. We should be infinitely grateful for the presence of that pollutant in our atmosphere. And to the Creator of everything who saw to it that oxygen, carbon dioxide, and all other gases were included in our atmosphere in appropriate quantities.” [Boldface added]
See link under Challenging the Orthodoxy.
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No GMST: The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons published an article by Jonathan Cohler “The Father of Lies Hijacking Climate Science: Global Mean Surface Temperature Does Not Exist” based on a presentation he gave at the 43 annual meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. The key resource is a paper by Christopher Essex, Ross McKitrick, and Bjarne Andersen published in 2007 in the Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics “Does a Global Temperature Exist?” The mathematics in the Essex et al., paper is beyond the scope of TWTW, but the abstract and conclusions are in plain English. The abstraction states:
The abstract of the Essex et al., paper states:
“Physical, mathematical, and observational grounds are employed to show that there is no physically meaningful global temperature for the Earth in the context of the issue of global warming. While it is always possible to construct statistics for any given set of local temperature data, an infinite range of such statistics is mathematically permissible if physical principles provide no explicit basis for choosing among them. Distinct and equally valid statistical rules can and do show opposite trends when applied to the results of computations from physical models and real data in the atmosphere. A given temperature field can be interpreted as both ‘warming’ and ‘cooling’ simultaneously, making the concept of warming in the context of the issue of global warming physically ill-posed.” [Boldface added]
The conclusion of the Essex et al., paper states [Boldface added]:
“There is no global temperature. The reasons lie in the properties of the equation of state governing local thermodynamic equilibrium, and the implications cannot be avoided by substituting statistics for physics.
Since temperature is an intensive variable, the total temperature is meaningless in terms of the system being measured, and hence any one simple average has no necessary meaning. Neither does temperature have a constant proportional relationship with energy or other extensive thermodynamic properties.
Averages of the Earth’s temperature field are thus devoid of a physical context which would indicate how they are to be interpreted, or what meaning can be attached to changes in their levels, up or down. Statistics cannot stand in as a replacement for the missing physics because data alone are context-free. Assuming a context only leads to paradoxes such as simultaneous warming and cooling in the same system based on arbitrary choice in some free parameter. Considering even a restrictive class of admissible coordinate transformations yields families of averaging rules that likewise generate opposite trends in the same data, and by implication indicating contradictory rankings of years in terms of warmth.
The physics provides no guidance as to which interpretation of the data is warranted. Since arbitrary indexes are being used to measure a physically non-existent quantity, it is not surprising that different formulae yield different results with no apparent way to select among them.
The purpose of this paper was to explain the fundamental meaninglessness of so-called global temperature data. The problem can be (and has been) happily ignored in the name of the empirical study of climate. But nature is not obliged to respect our statistical conventions and conceptual shortcuts. Debates over the levels and trends in so-called global temperatures will continue interminably, as will disputes over the significance of these things for the human experience of climate, until some physical basis is established for the meaningful measurement of climate variables, if indeed that is even possible.
It may happen that one particular average will one day prove to stand out with some special physical significance. However, that is not so today. The burden rests with those who calculate these statistics to prove their logic and value in terms of the governing dynamical equations, let alone the wider, less technical, contexts in which they are commonly encountered.”
One may argue that TWTW uses global atmospheric temperatures measured by satellites, which is not quite correct. TWTW uses global atmospheric temperature trends measured by satellites, not temperatures. Further, the data is carefully adjusted for any changes in instruments and changes is satellite orbits. Early on, when it was shown that the data by the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) did not adjust for variation of satellite orbit, and this was verified, the UAH team scrupulously made appropriate adjustments and continue to do so.
One may argue that the supposed need to hold temperatures to 2°C or 1.5°C does not need a global temperature only a departure from accepted temperature. But there is no established temperature trend for surface-air temperatures, and it is impossible to construct one. The global coverage for measurements is totally inadequate, particularly for the one-hundred years from 1850 to 1950. See links under Challenging the Orthodoxy
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Human Liberty: UK’S Net Zero Watch has published two reports written by different people that argue that Net Zero is destined to fail because it depends on a model of central planning that does not and cannot work and that Net Zero depends on thermodynamically inferior energy sources that cannot sustain the needs of modern civilization. Conservative Member of Parliament Steve Baker and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacturing & Commerce wrote the one report: “Net Zero and the Threat to Human Liberty. The Executive Summary states:
“In this paper, Net Zero and the Threat to Human Liberty, Rt Hon Steve Baker FRSA argues that current decarbonisation efforts rely excessively on top-down mandates and central planning. These approaches undermine personal freedom, erode economic prosperity, and ultimately fail to achieve affordable environmental benefits with public consent. Drawing on historical precedents in planned societies and insights from classical liberal scholars, the paper demonstrates how heavy-handed climate policies reproduce the same mistakes that doomed socialist economies: inefficiency, stagnation, and authoritarianism.
The paper begins by illustrating the scope of Net Zero policy: wide-ranging directives covering energy generation, transport, housing, agriculture, waste management, and even personal lifestyle choices. It shows that these measures often lead to impractical infrastructure demands, higher costs for households and intrusive interference in daily life. The author underscores the importance of liberty, explaining how individual freedom – protected by the rule of law, autonomy, and decentralized governance – underpins not only economic flourishing but also moral agency and authentic community bonds.
Highlighting the fatal conceit of knowledge in central planning, the paper contends that state-led revolutions in the name of Net Zero inevitably misallocate resources and fail. Real-world consequences include energy shortages, high and volatile prices, and limits on personal autonomy. Drawing upon works by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger, the paper advocates market-based incentives that align carbon reductions with entrepreneurial discovery, moderate carbon pricing, and transparent cost-benefit analysis – all designed to spur technologies without crippling economic growth or personal choice.
Finally, the author outlines a better way: harnessing voluntary cooperation, local experimentation, and innovation through competition on the merits. Civil society can help shift norms without the heavy hand of regulation. By preserving individual liberty, we can foster the creativity and technological breakthroughs necessary for meaningful, enduring progress, ensuring abundant energy and a flourishing society.”
In the report Baker succinctly states:
“…no group of officials, however capable, can ever possess the knowledge needed to run a complex society and advances in information technology do nothing to change that reality. As a result, enforcing Net Zero through state direction poses a direct and growing threat to peoples’ liberty in modern Britain.”
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Powering Freedom: British academic and energy analyst John Constable wrote the second report which goes through how independent thought and the use of high-density fuels led to the development of modern civilization and prosperity. Asia is undergoing the transformation from rural poverty to prosperity and many in Africa desire it. Unfortunately, many western politicians wish to reverse this process by declaring carbon dioxide is a pollutant and ignoring the squalor of rural poverty in many countries. The “feel-good” image is being “one with nature.” Few who invoke this image have spent considerable time without modern conveniences such as heating, plumbing, sewage, water purification, electricity, modern clothing, and modern buildings.
In the report Constable has a pithy statement:
“…the defining achievements of modernity – our social, cultural, and economic complexity, our dramatic expansion of wealth creation and our unprecedented level of personal freedom – were only made possible because high-quality, dense fuels unlocked a vast surplus of usable energy. This surplus enlarged our physical liberty, the practical freedom to act in the world, as well as making us tolerant of each other’s success, giving rise to the modern West as we know it.”
In his conclusions Constable writes:
“The first signs of this disaster will be a transfer of socio-political authority to the renewable energy sector as policy supported by state policy permits them to engross the majority of the real capital available to our society. This will result in a concentration of power and the consequent constriction of individual human freedom unseen for several hundred years. It is hard to believe that this would be a politically stable situation.
There has been undoubted progress in human affairs on the thermodynamic axis. Contemporary human societies, the global population, and society considered as a whole, are without any question much further from equilibrium than those living 10,000 years ago, or even as recently as 1600. That expansion of the ecological niche has delivered a notable improvement in human freedom and in moral tolerance. We are not only able to live but willing to let live. This state of affairs is exceedingly improbable. There are already signs that this extraordinary interlude, which began only three or four hundred years ago, is drawing to a close in the West. The East, on the other hand, is a different matter, as it always has been.”
For both reports see links under Challenging the Orthodoxy.
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It’s the Sun: P. Gosselin of No Tricks Zone writes that the Swiss weekly magazine published a candid interview of SEPP director Willie Soon in German, which can be translated using Google AI. Gosselin writes:
“His decades of research into solar and stellar physics lead him to the controversial conclusion that focusing on regulating CO2 is misguided,
‘You can’t make laws against the sun,’ he argues.
Dr. Soon states that the sun provides 99.99% of the energy that powers our weather and climate, and satellite data confirms that solar radiation is not a constant, but fluctuates, particularly in the UV and X-ray ranges. He contends that temperature patterns over the last 150 years correlate much better with solar activity fluctuations than with CO2 levels. According to Soon’s analysis, the CO2 signal is below the detection limit as a primary climate driver.”
See links under Challenging the Orthodoxy
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Climate Whiplash: One of the more absurd terms to come from those promoting alarm of a warming world is Climate Whiplash. In WUWT, Charles Rotter and Anthony Watts destroy the myth that more energy in the climate system means more extreme energy including the claim of climate whiplash. The authors make good use of moving illustrations to emphasize their points. Also, they write:
“The climate system is not an oscillator. It has oscillatory components, but the whole system is a gradient-driven heat engine. It moves energy from where there is a lot of it (the tropics) to where there is very little (the poles). If more energy enters the system, the distribution of that energy doesn’t increase the amplitude of some hypothetical wave. Instead, the equator-to-pole gradient changes because the poles warm more rapidly than the tropics. Meanwhile, tropical thunderstorms act like an atmospheric relief valve that limits how warm the equator can become. The system redistributes energy; it doesn’t behave like a spring someone tightens.”
As discussed in last week’s TWTW on Saturation Physics, doubling of carbon dioxide in today’s atmosphere does not increase temperatures significantly.
See link under Challenging the Orthodoxy.
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The Retraction: After delaying over a year, Nature magazine retracted an article from Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research that claimed dire results to the world’s gross domestic product if the globe does not reduce CO2 emissions. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal stated:
“One scandal of our age is the attempt to sell the public on the narrative of climate catastrophe. It’s been fed by the press and overheated political and scientific claims that sometimes are phony. That’s the story with the journal Nature’s retraction of a highly publicized climate study that made headlines.
The study was a shocker when it was first published in April 2024. Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research projected that climate change could cause $38 trillion in economic damage a year by 2049. To put that number in perspective, the GDP of North America last year was about $31.4 trillion. The study’s finding would mean that storms, heat waves, and other calamities, supposedly caused by climate change, would wipe out the equivalent of the North American economy, and then some, every year.
The study also forecasts that rising CO2 emissions would cause a 62% reduction in global GDP by 2100, and that damage over the next quarter of a century would exceed the costs of mitigating global warming by six times.
Progressives hyped the study to argue that government interventions like electric-vehicle mandates are worth the cost. The study ‘shines a new light on the patterns and severity of climate change’s economic impacts while bolstering key conclusions from other research,’ reported Axios, a leading promoter of the climate-scare narrative.
Yet not long after the study was published, other scientists flagged problems with its methodology and errors in its data. In July 2024, Nature issued a correction noting that rows of data were ‘wrongly printed as a decimal, rather than a percentage point.’
Other scientists wrote in a comment to Nature—akin to a newspaper letter to the editor—that the study ‘underestimates uncertainty . . . rendering their results statistically insignificant when properly corrected.’
Still other scientists in August noted in a comment that ‘data anomalies arising from one country’ in the ‘underlying GDP dataset, Uzbekistan, substantially bias their predicted impacts of climate change.’ When the Uzbekistan data was removed and statistical uncertainty corrected for, the results were no longer ‘statistically distinguishable from mitigation costs at any time this century.’
In other words, the economic harm from climate change no longer exceeded the costs of the government interventions to do something to arrest warming temperatures.
The study had so many errors that Nature has now retracted it, but what an embarrassment. ‘Post-publication, 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,’ the retraction says.
The retraction is also a black eye for the Network for Greening the Financial System, a group of central banks and financial regulators that incorporated the study’s projections into its bank climate stress test scenarios. The Federal Reserve belonged to the network until Chair Jerome Powell withdrew in January.
One question is why the study’s glaring errors weren’t caught by peer reviewers before it was published.”
See Article # 1 and for other comments see links under Lowering Standards.
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Number of the Week: — 32 papers since 2020 In commenting on the retraction of the paper in Nature by members of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany, on Dec 3, 2025, Retraction Watch observed:
“In July 2024, Nature issued a correction to the article that addressed rows of data which were “wrongly printed as a decimal, rather than a percentage point.”
Nature has retracted 32 papers since 2020, including three in 2024. The retraction today marks the sixth for the journal in 2025.” [Boldface was italics in original. H/t John Robson]
NEWS YOU CAN USE:
Commentary: Is the Sun Rising?
Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon Challenges The Climate Consensus … It’s The Sun, Not CO2
By P Gosselin, No Tricks Zone, Dec 10, 2025
Link to: “You can’t make laws against the sun”
By Pierre Heumann, Die Weltwoche, Dec 3, 2025
Too powerful for power grids? Are we ready for a second Carrington event?
166 years ago, a powerful solar storm damaged the telegraph network. Could such an event happen again today? Some researchers consider an equally powerful solar storm likely. However, there are simple tips for self-protection.
By Maurice Forgeng, Epoch Times (German translated to English), Dec 7, 2025
Challenging the Orthodoxy — NIPCC
Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science
Idso, Carter, and Singer, Lead Authors/Editors, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2013
Summary: https://www.heartland.org/_template-assets/documents/CCR/CCR-II/Summary-for-Policymakers.pdf
Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts
Idso, Idso, Carter, and Singer, Lead Authors/Editors, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2014
http://climatechangereconsidered.org/climate-change-reconsidered-ii-biological-impacts/
Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels
By Multiple Authors, Bezdek, Idso, Legates, and Singer eds., Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, April 2019
http://climatechangereconsidered.org/climate-change-reconsidered-ii-fossil-fuels/
Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming
The NIPCC Report on the Scientific Consensus
By Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, and S. Fred Singer, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), Nov 23, 2015
http://climatechangereconsidered.org/why-scientists-disagree-about-global-warming/
Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate
S. Fred Singer, Editor, NIPCC, 2008
http://www.sepp.org/publications/nipcc_final.pdf
Challenging the Orthodoxy – Radiation Transfer
The Role of Greenhouse Gases in Energy Transfer in the Earth’s Atmosphere
By W.A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer, Preprint, Mar 3, 2023
Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases
By W.A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer, Preprint, December 22, 2020
Net Zero Averted Temperature Increase
By Richard Lindzen, William Happer, and William A. van Wijngaarden, CO2 Coalition, June 2024
Radiation Transport in Clouds
By W.A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer, Klimarealistene, Science of Climate Change, January 2025
Challenging the Orthodoxy
Yes, Virginia, There Is a Greenhouse Effect. No, It Won’t Kill Us.
By David Legates, Cornwall Alliance, Dec 8, 2025
Link to: The Dartington Declaration: Tipping the Future
By Staff, Global Tipping Points, Accessed Dec 11, 2025
Climate Policy Is Based on a Meaningless Number, according to the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
By GlobeNewswire, The Manila Times, Dec 12, 2025
Link to: The Father of Lies Hijacking Climate Science: Global Mean Surface Temperature Does Not Exist
By Jonathan Cohler, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Winter 2025
Link to earlier paper: Does a Global Temperature Exist?
By Christopher Essex, Ross McKitrick, and Bjarne Andersen, Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics, 2007
Net Zero is ‘structurally doomed’, new reports warn, as fresh polling shows voters losing confidence
Press Release, Net Zero Watch, Dec 9, 2025
Link to first report: Net Zero and the Threat to Human Liberty
By Steve Baker, Net Zero Watch, Dec 9, 2025
…no group of officials, however capable, can ever possess the knowledge needed to run a complex society and advances in information technology do nothing to change that reality. As a result, enforcing Net Zero through state direction poses a direct and growing threat to peoples’ liberty in modern Britain.
Link to second report: Powering Freedom: The Thermodynamic Roots of Modernity
By John Constable Net Zero Watch, Dec 9, 2025
Deconstructing the Myth: “More Energy in the System Means More Extreme Weather”
By Charles Rotter and Anthony Watts, WUWT, Dec 9, 2025
#DOEDeepDive: Chapter 3.2 on emissions scenarios and the carbon cycle
By John Robson, Climate Discussion Nexus, Dec 10, 2025
As the DOE report shows, the leading carbon cycle models have estimates of annual CO2 uptake that differ by a factor of seven. But not to worry, they can still predict the future with great precision, because the science is settled. And next week we’ll dive into the settled science of climate sensitivity.
Global Average Temperature – Error Margins Too Large – No Correlation Possible
By Michael Limburg with Grok 4.1, WUWT, Dec 9, 2025
Chill Out: Refrigerants Are No Global Warming Threat
By Gregory Wrightstone, CO2 Coalition, Dec 8, 2025
The upshot is that amount of hydrofluorocarbon in the air is too small to matter, irrespective of its warming potential – molecule for molecule – relative to CO2, which itself has only a minor influence on global warming.
Defending the Orthodoxy
UN says world must jointly tackle issues of climate change, pollution, biodiversity and land loss
By Tammy Webber, AP, Via The Hill, Dec 9, 2025
Link to: Global Environment Outlook 7
By Staff, UN Environment Programme, Dec 9, 2025
The Global Environment Outlook, Seventh Edition: A Future We Choose, the product of 287 multi-disciplinary scientists from 82 countries, is the most comprehensive scientific assessment of the global environment ever carried out.
Why investing in Earth now can lead to a trillion-dollar benefit for all – Executive Summar
[SEPP Comment: Modern industrialized society is destroying modern industrialized society?]
Aussie Climate Scientists Demand Their Own Energy Guzzling Supercomputer
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 9, 2025
Defending the Orthodoxy – Bandwagon Science
Global warming intensifies extreme day-to-day temperature changes in mid–low latitudes
By Qi Liu, Congbin Fu, Zhongfeng Xu & Aijun Ding, Nature Climate Change, Nov 21, 2025 [H/t Bernie Kepshire]
Climate models project a further amplification of extreme day-to-day temperature changes under warming, with frequency, amplitude and total intensity rising by ~17%, ~3% and ~20%, respectively, by 2100 in regions covering 80% of global population.
[SEPP Comment: Greater oscillations without physical evidence.]
Quantification of the radiative forcing of contrails embedded in cirrus clouds
By Torsten Seelig, et al., Nature Communications, Nov 28, 2025 [H/t Bernie Kepshire]
From abstract: Here, we infer the local net radiative forcing of around 40,000 embedded contrails by combining aircraft position data with height-resolved cloud observations from spaceborne lidar. Considering the period from 2015 to 2021, we find an annual mean local warming effect of 60 mW m−2. Expanding these findings to the global scale suggests an annual global mean net radiative forcing of embedded contrails on the order of 5 mW m−2.
[SEPP Comment: According to the paper, the calculations infer that contrails add 5 milliwatts (5*(1/1000) W/m2) or 0.005 W/m2 to warming. Yet in IPCC AR-6, there is a discrepancy of 13 W/m2 between the assume blockages from greenhouse gases (20 W/m2) and the total influence of greenhouse gases, change in albedo, and aerosols (7 W/m2). The findings are insignificant, even if accurate.]
Questioning the Orthodoxy
The legacy of 15 years of Dr. Michael Connolly’s weather balloon research: Proof that our current paradigms on the Earth’s atmosphere are wrong
By CERES team, CERES-Science, December 8, 2025
The Climate-Risk Industrial Complex and the Manufactured Insurance Crisis
A new THB series – Part 1, Origins of a “Crisis”
By Roger Pielke Jr., His Blog, Dec 8, 2025 [H/t Bernie Kepshire]
The cult that academic climate change research is trapped in
By Dr Shane Fudge, The Conservative Woman, Nov 29, 2025 [H/t Bernie Kepshire]
Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and author, argues that a cult is ‘a group that centers around a shared devotion to a person, belief, or ideology….
Climate change, we are told, is a ‘wicked problem’ which requires collaborative thinking, i.e. involving as many different disciplines and stakeholders as possible.
Universities provide a unique vantage point for understanding the pervasive influence of manmade climate change on our world. They are increasingly dependent on research funding rather than student numbers, and a vast amount of money has been made available for climate research over the last three decades.
This has meant that a whole culture has emerged around the manmade climate change agenda, suggesting that much of this research serves to reinforce ideological purposes rather than the true pursuit of scientific truth.
[SEPP Comment: Climate change has been a social problem since the evolution of homo sapiens?]
With a whimper: The world moves on from climate change leaving Australia on a sinking ship
By Jo Nova, Her Blog, Dec 11, 2025
It was never about The Science
And so we find that the global consensus quietly dispersed, there were no press releases, no ceremonies, just the dawning realization that nearly everyone had left the party without saying goodbye. And they didn’t wait for the UN to say “the science” was fine. The herd is on the move regardless…
Trust the Experts? It’s a Bad Bet
By Mitzi Perdue, WUWT, Dec 6, 2025
Psychologist Philip Tetlock spent twenty years tracking expert predictions about world events. In his two-decade study, Tetlock catalogued more than twenty-eight thousand expert predictions and found that experts were slightly less accurate than a random coin toss.
The questions he posed were simple ones with yes or no answers. For example, would the Soviet Union collapse in five years? Would a major war break out? Again and again, the hedgehogs, the deep experts, failed dramatically.
The climate cult’s dissolution is inevitable
By Vijay Jayaraj, The Hill, Dec 9, 2025
The fragile structure of global decarbonization depended on financing from its chief patron, the U.S. When that flow of dollars ceased with the incoming Trump administration, the fading of an already moribund climate narrative accelerated.
All meetings all the time
By John Robson, Climate Discussion Nexus, Dec 10, 2025
Wherever you live, if you act sufficiently badly that you too will be subjected to an endless stream of government press releases, we confidently wager that you’ll find that the climate-obsessed ruling class is also in the habit of taking plane flights non-stop, often for brief visits to unimportant events at which they meet the same people and say the same clichés. Almost as if they were vacuous.
Energy & Environmental Review: December 8, 2025
By John Droz, Jr., Master Resource, Dec 8, 2025
After Paris!
The West vs. the Rest
How developing countries took control of climate negotiations and what that means for emission reduction.
By Robin Guenier, Climate Skepticism, Dec 8, 2025 [H/t Bernie Kepshire]
COP30 (50,000 participants for what?)
By Robert Bradley Jr., Master Resource, Dec 10, 2025
COP 30: Far Worse than COP 28 (Kalmus ignored)
By Robert Bradley Jr., Master Resource, Dec 11, 2025
[SEPP Comment: Kalmus blamed the failure of COP-28 on the fossil fuel industry. It’s the fault of the fossil fuel industry that in the US wind power works less than 35% of the time, solar less than 25% of the time?]
Social Benefits of Carbon Dioxide
The Christmas Gift that Climate Grinches Can’t Abide
By Vijay Jayaraj, CO2 Coalition, Dec 9, 2025
Silver fur and CO2
By John Robson, Climate Discussion Nexus, Dec 10, 2025
From the CO2Science Archive.
Problems in the Orthodoxy
300 years of sclerosponge thermometry shows global warming has exceeded 1.5 °C
By Malcolm T. McCulloch, et al., Nature Climate Change, Feb 5, 2024 [H/t Bernie Kepshire]
[SEPP Comment: Sclerosponges are long lived, slow growing marine sponges that deposit a hard calcium carbonate skeleton, recording chemical changes in the local seawater. A major issue with this article is how fine is the record? Neither marine sediments nor ice cores are fine enough to record the past 300 years.]
After twenty years of “climate” driven abstinence — Europe is quietly reviving oil and gas
By Jo Nova, Her Blog, Dec 9, 2025
Science, Policy, and Evidence
Defense bill delays phaseout of ‘forever chemicals’ in firefighting foam
By Rachel Frazin, The Hill, Dec 8, 2025
“Forever chemicals” are the nickname of a family of chemicals also known as PFAS that are known to last for hundreds of years in the environment without breaking down, making them difficult to clean up.
Exposure to these chemicals has been linked to increased risk of prostate, kidney and testicular cancers, as well as to fertility and immune system issues.
[SEPP Comment: If the chemicals don’t break down, how do they contribute to “prostate, kidney and testicular cancers”? The term “linked to” generally means correlation not causation. For example, ice cream sales are linked to shark attacks.]
Shutting Down the ‘Fourth Branch’
By Ted Noel, American Thinker, Dec 12, 2025
Measurement Issues — Surface
ENSO: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions
By Staff, NOAA, Climate Prediction Center, Dec 8, 2025
Changing Weather
Northern Hemisphere tropical activity in 2025
By Paul Dorian, WUWT, Dec 9, 2025
There were no landfalling hurricanes this year in the US for the first time since 2015.
Pielke Jr. hurricane season wrap-up
By John Robson, Climate Discussion Nexus, Dec 10, 2025
Hurricanes did hit the Caribbean, most notably Melissa which killed 100 people. But as for hurricanes hitting the U.S., 2025 was very disappointing, for those who find the absence of death and devastation a letdown.
Good-Bye Hurricane. Hello Winter.
By William D. Balgord, Townhall, Nov 23, 2025
The Torrent Has Begun: The Philippine Connection
By Cliff Mass, Weather Blog, Dec 8, 2025
But it is not quite that simple. There is substantial three-dimensionality to atmospheric rivers.
To prove this to you, below are air trajectories–the three-dimensional motion in space–of the air reaching the Cascades at 10,000, 5000, and 2000 meters above the surface. At high altitudes, the moisture is coming from the western Pacific, but at lower elevations, the moisture is coming off the Pacific to our south.
Atmospheric rivers are like real rivers, with tributaries contributing moisture along the way.
The Atmospheric River Event is Ending— And ANOTHER One is Predicted
By Cliff Mass, Weather Blog, Dec 11, 2025
Many of the windward slopes of the Cascades and Olympics received more than 10 inches, with some experiencing 15-17 inches.
You will also notice extreme rain shadow areas in the lee (east) of major barriers, which received less than an inch.
Numerical weather prediction models were STUNNINGLY good, as shown by the predicted 5-day precipitation totals by the UW WRF model made last Sunday.
Close correspondence between predicted and observed rainfall.
All of this is a reminder that the most impactful severe weather of the Pacific Northwest is flooding. Not heatwaves, not wildfires, not windstorms.
Building on Monmouth’s Flood Plains
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 6, 2025
Despite warnings from the Environment Agency and the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) between 2001 and 2011, 200,000 new houses were built on the flood plain and there are almost 500,000 homes that have been given planning permission and are waiting to be built on the flood plain.
It has got nothing to do with climate change; it is a matter of geography.
Changing Cryosphere – Land / Sea Ice
Greenland Petermann Glacier Has Grown 30 Kilometers Since 2012!
By P Gosselin, No Tricks Zone, Dec 6, 2025
[SEPP Comment: Unable to confirm the report from other sources.]
Regional Cooling Since The 1980s Has Driven Glacier Advance In The Karakoram Mountains
By Kenneth Richard, No Tricks Zone, Dec 9, 2025
Link to paper: Recent cooling enhances glacier resilience to global warming in the northern Karakoram: Evidence from tree rings
By Wentai Liu et al., Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, May 15, 2025
Polar bears and Arctic sea ice status
By Susan Crockford, Polar Bear Science, Dec 7, 2025
Lowering Standards
Science identifies human fingerprint on wildfires
By John Robson, Climate Discussion Nexus, Dec 10, 2025
But now, as PJ Media reports, documents filed in a civil lawsuit against the state show an order had been given by the state mere weeks before the Palisades Fire that “directed a let it burn fire management plan,” meaning “don’t put out the fire”. Even if people lived there. And without telling them. And here you blamed our carbon.
The PJ Media story is damning if true, and it looks true:
End of the world retracted
By John Robson, Climate Discussion Nexus, Dec 10, 2025
Link to: RETRACTED ARTICLE: The economic commitment of climate change
By Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann & Leonie Wenz, Nature, Dec 3, 2025
As we’ve observed snidely before, Nature preens about its overall marvelous excellence including that wonder of modern science, peer review:
“Nature is a weekly international journal publishing the finest peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology on the basis of its originality, importance, interdisciplinary interest, timeliness, accessibility, elegance and surprising conclusions. Nature also provides rapid, authoritative, insightful and arresting news and interpretation of topical and coming trends affecting science, scientists and the wider public.”
Government Bodies Humiliated by Promoting Junk Climate Scares from Retracted Nature Paper
By Chris Morrison, The Daily Sceptic, Dec 12, 2025 [H/t Bernie Kepshire]
Earlier this month, the Bank of England used “plausible” scenarios derived from Kotz to go into full climate catastrophizing overdrive with suggestions that asset and bond markets could face stresses similar to the 2008 global crash. On Monday, the Daily Sceptic looked in detail at the Horlicks [British drink powder] made by the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility, which used Kotz to divest itself of the opinion that the country’s GDP would fall by nearly 8% unless humans stopped the weather changing.
[SEPP Comment: See links immediately above.]
Communicating Better to the Public – Use Yellow (Green) Journalism?
Fact Checking The New York Times
How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? – The New York Times
By Tony Heller, His Blog, Dec 6, 2025
6-Minute Video
Media Outlets Shill for Climate Risk Firm, Despite No Evidence Showing Climate Change Threatens Homes
By Linnea Lueken, Climate Realism, Dec 10, 2025
Wrong, Financial Times, the Arab Region Faces No Climate Emergency
By Linnea Lueken, Climate Realism, Dec 8, 2025
Speaking of being wrong
By John Robson, Climate Discussion Nexus, Dec 10, 2025
Communicating Better to the Public – Exaggerate, or be Vague?
When a Single Rain Gauge Speaks for the Planet: How a Narrow Dataset Becomes a Global Climate Headline
By Charles Rotter, WUWT, Dec 7, 2025
Link to dubious article: Storms in the Southern Ocean are producing more rain – and the consequences could be global
By Steven Siems and Zhaoyang Kong, The Conversation, Dec 4, 2025
Reintroducing that uncertainty is not an act of skepticism for its own sake; it is a restoration of proportion. The data from Macquarie Island may hint at interesting variability, but the confidence intervals are wide, the sample small, and the physical mechanisms unresolved. Treating such a fragment as evidence of global hydrological change risks turning science into storytelling.
Communicating Better to the Public – Make things up.
Claim: The USA Securing Critical Mineral Supply Chains Threatens the Global Climate
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 6, 2025
Communicating Better to the Public – Use Propaganda
The End is Nigh. Yawn
By Bill Johnson, Quadrant, Dec 9, 2025
Link to paper: Heatwaves in a net zero World
By Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick*, Lucinda Palmer, Andrew King and Tilo Ziehn, Environmental Research, Climate, Nov 17, 2025
Opening clause of abstract: While historical and future increases in heatwave frequency, duration and intensity are well documented,..
[SEPP Comment: Future increases in heatwaves have been well documented?]
UK Scientists Demand Free TV Time to Deliver their Emergency Climate Briefing
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 7, 2025
Questioning European Green
NESO FES Costings
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 11, 2025
Link to report: FES 2025 Economics Annex, December 2025
By Staff, NESO (National Energy System Operator) December 2025
From Homewood:
So, let’s examine what we do know:
- Renewable energy remains more expensive than fossil fuels
- Extra electricity grid costs – for upgrades, system balancing and storage – will add billions a year to electricity costs
- Heat pumps are more expensive to buy and run than gas boilers
- EVs are more expensive to purchase, with the extra cost more than outweighing savings on running costs.
No amount of dissembling by NESO can alter these basic facts.
Delaying Ed Miliband’s net zero targets ‘could save UK £350bn’
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 11, 2025
Questioning Green Elsewhere
African Energy Chamber to G20: Fossil Fuel Future
By Robert Bradley Jr. Master Resource, Dec 9, 2025
We reject calls to phase out fossil fuels under the guise of climate virtue, which only threatens Africa’s prosperity and keeps millions locked in energy poverty. Instead, we demand a just energy future powered by African resources, built by African workers and delivering tangible benefits to communities. We call on the G20 to make fossil-fuel development a central pillar of its Africa policy, unlocking financing, dismantling ideological barriers, promoting exploration and investing in the gas infrastructure that will energize homes, industries and economies across the continent.
Funding Issues
Climate Change Weekly # 565— Foreign Elites, China Fund American Climate Alarm
By Staff, Environment & Energy, Heartland.org, Dec 12, 2025
Moron Miliband Hands £1.5 Million of Taxpayer Money to Make Vegan Supplements
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 11, 2025
[SEPP Comment: At a former oil refinery?]
Litigation Issues
Humphrey’s Executor On The Ropes
By Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian, Dec 9, 2025
Can Congress create federal agencies with power to enforce the laws and prosecute crimes, but which agencies are outside the control of the President? In a 1935 decision called Humphrey’s Executor, the Supreme Court held that it could.
Supreme Court should not let climate lawfare set US energy policy
By Paul Driessen, WUWT, Dec 7, 2025
Defendants argue that the case raises major, complicated national and even international issues and therefore belongs in federal, not state courts. But after years of legal wrangling, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in May 2025 that the lawsuit could indeed proceed in state court.
Greenpeace Asks a DUTCH Court to Overturn a $345 Million Dakota Pipeline Judgement
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 8, 2025
The group wants to use European law as a shield to disrupt American infrastructure projects.
[SEPP Comment: It will be interesting to see what authority a Dutch court has in the US.]
Why the Supreme Court Must Intervene in Boulder’s Climate Lawsuit
By Phil Goldberg, Real Clear Energy, Dec 11, 2025
These courts have explained that imposing massive monetary damages on energy companies has “the same practical effect” as directly regulating – or taxing – worldwide emissions, which they have held, is beyond the reach of state liability law, regardless of the specifics of the claims. Trial courts in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and South Carolina have dismissed climate lawsuits in their jurisdictions precisely on these grounds.
Playing Both Ends of the Court? Leftist Dark Money Group Defends Funding Climate Litigators and NGO That Trains Judges
By Tyler O’Neil, The Daily Signal, Dec 6, 2025 [H/t SJ Cvrk]
In its 2024 tax filing, New Venture Fund reported sending $2.3 million to Sher Edling, L.L.P., a law firm that represents Democratic prosecutors when they file climate litigation against tax filings. The fund also gave $1.25 million to the Environmental Law Institute, a nonprofit that trains judges how to approach their work to “make environmental, economic, and social progress.”
America’s Energy Independence Threatened By “Dark Money” Lawfare
By Scott Walter, Real Clear Energy, Dec 11, 2025
The Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project has worked surreptitiously to shape the opinions of judges themselves, in hopes that those judges will hand down more favorable opinions. The Institute has quietly been leaving its mark on thousands of judges across America, raising eyebrows but little more.
NGOs Help Philippine Typhoon Victims to Launch a Climate Lawsuit
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 12, 2025
Subsidies and Mandates Forever
One State’s Green Mandates Can Become Another State’s Nightmare
By Bonner Russell Cohen, Real Clear Energy, Dec 10, 2025
States that have adopted “clean-energy” mandates are accustomed to having ratepayers in other states help them pick up the tab for their headlong march to a green utopia. This is especially true when this involves stringing high-voltage transmission lines across vast expanses to conduct intermittent wind and solar power generated in remote locations.
Ford BOSS: EV mandates THREATEN entire European car industry
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 10, 2025
8-minute video
EPA and other Regulators on the March
EPA cuts mentions of humans from webpage on climate change causes
By Rachel Frazin, The Hill, Dec 10, 2025
Link to: Causes of Climate Change
By Staff, EPA, Accessed Dec 11, 2025
From EPA: Natural processes are always influencing the earth’s climate and can explain climate changes prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. However, recent climate changes cannot be explained by natural causes alone.
From the Hill: The Energy Department earlier this year released a report that downplayed both climate change itself and its connection to human activity.
Energy Issues – Non-US
The Problem with the “Primary Energy Fallacy”
The hidden costs of powering civilization
By Lars Scheernikau, The Unpopular Blog, Accessed Dec 12, 2025
- Primary energy refers to raw, unprocessed energy directly from nature like coal, oil, gas, uranium, a flowing river, sunlight, or wind.
- Electricity or final energy used for transport, by contrast, is a secondary form of energy, largely derived from primary sources. And currently, on average, electricity “consumes” about 40% of global primary energy. The rest is required to enable transportation, heating, and industry.
- Electric power has little value in itself unless it has the right voltage, current, frequency and phase and unless it is available when needed.
“The Primary Energy Fallacy” is a fallacy in itself because it uses inappropriate assumptions.
North Sea Roadmap to Ruin
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 9, 2025
Link to report: The North Sea Strategy Is a Roadmap to Ruin
By Staff, INEOS, Dec 8, 2025
The UK’s North Sea oil and gas industry has powered the nation for over 50 years. Yet the Government’s decision in the November Budget to maintain the Energy Profits Levy (EPL) at 78% threatened that resource in minutes….
Solutions exist. As the first step, the UK government could immediately replace the EPL with the proposed Oil and Gas Price Mechanism. This would tax only genuine windfalls, capturing revenue on exceptional profits whilst restoring stable, predictable and viable fiscal terms for the industry in normal conditions.
New Budget Gives DESNZ £12bn A Year To Waste
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 8, 2025
It is time the whole Department was shut down. Its administrative functions could easily be taken over by the Department for Business & Trade without any additional staff.
Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ)
Electricity Bills Set To Rise By 18% In Next Five Years
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 7, 2025
I am going to make a forecast!
In five years’ time, our electricity bills will have risen by 18%, even before general inflation takes effect.
This is not a guesstimate, it is based on what the OBR and NESO have officially said. My calculation also assumes that wholesale prices remain unchanged.
We will probably see general inflation of about 15% over the next five years, which will impact bills as well. Based on this, electricity bills will probably be around 30% higher by 2030.
Energy Issues – Australia
AEMO drops a bomb: Australia’s renewables plan now includes coal all the way til 2049…
By Jo Nova, Her Blog, Dec 10, 2025
Even the AEMO [Australian Energy Market Operator], our green grid operators, have realized Australia is not ready to shut down the last coal plants by 2037 which was the plan up until five minutes ago.
The plan is still to build massive infrastructure that doesn’t work most of the time:
Now, apparently, the old coal plants will keep going through the 2040s. The story is that they will shift to a “flexible role” (also known as an inefficient role). They will be used “sparingly” during the extended dunkelflautes that the AEMO forgot to plan for.
Australia’s Electricity Future
By Mike Jones, WUWT, Dec 9, 2025
Rationality Returns to Australia as Climate Scare Wanes
By Vijay Jayaraj, CO2 Coalition, Dec 15, 2025
[SEPP Comment: Optimistic?]
Energy Issues — US
Hurricanes in 2024 led to the most hours without power in the United States in 10 years
By Staff, Today in Energy, US Energy Information Administration, Dec 1, 2025
Link to: Electric Power Annual, 2024
By Staff, EIA, Oct 16, 2025
New York’s climate law will ration fossil fuels and tax the rations
By David Wojick, CFACT, Dec 3, 2025
New York Must Reconsider the Climate Act
By Roger Caiazza, WUWT, Dec 12, 2025
New York State entities have found that the Climate Act transition will be unaffordable and meeting the schedule is impossible. The only appropriate course of action is to reconsider the Climate Act but no [one] in the majority dates [dares to] broach the subject.
Hydro produces clean Snake River energy; the Left wants to wreck it.
By Craig Rucker, CFACT, Dec 10, 2025
Our Lower Snake River Dam investigation uncovered some inconvenient “dam” truths. Dam breaching would lead to phasing out reliable hydroelectric power for electricity produced by intermittent solar and wind. Transportation of goods by barge would stop. And most “daming” of all, migratory salmon — an anti-hydro scapegoat — aren’t threatened by these power plants. Our report revealed marine mammals like voracious killer whales and sea lions pose a far greater threat.
Average US gas price drops below $3 — but not in these states
By Addy Bink, The Hill, Dec 4, 2025
In addition to California [$4.51], only Hawaii ($4.44) and Washington state ($4.14) have a statewide average above $4.
Washington’s Control of Energy
To Create an Abundant America, Congress Should Pass the SPEED Act
By Joe Luppino-Esposito, Real Clear Energy, Dec 11, 2025
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has become perhaps the clearest example of how well-intentioned environmental laws can devolve into instruments of delay and obstruction. Enacted over 50 years ago, NEPA requires federal agencies to evaluate the environmental impact of major projects. Over time, however, what was meant as a procedural safeguard has become an expensive, years-long ordeal. The White House Council on Environmental Quality reports that completing a full Environmental Impact Statement now takes an average of 4.5 years.
Oil and Natural Gas – the Future or the Past?
The Gulf of America Is Back
By Erik Milito, Real Clear Energy, Dec 10, 2025
In 2024, Gulf of America oil and gas activity supported approximately 428,000 jobs across all 50 states, contributed $35.9 billion in spending, and generated $7 billion in federal revenues. Few industries deliver that scale of widespread economic impact.
Nuclear Energy and Fears
Reviving Nuclear Power
By William D. Fletcher , Craig B. Smith, Real Clear Energy, Dec 10, 2025
Part of the problem was that nuclear power plants were funded and built by individual electric utility companies. These companies build plants on land they owned in their service areas. Most did not need the electricity produced or could not afford the cost of more than one or two nuclear reactors.
In addition, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) added new safety requirements especially following the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979. This added to costs and construction delays.
To solve the cost problem in the U.S., there needs to be economies of scale by building a large number of reactors of the same design, at some regular production rate. There should be a large number of reactors built at each site.
Why are developing economies pursuing small modular reactors?
By Ronal Stein, Robert Jeffrey, Olivia Vaughan, America Out Loud, Dec 8, 2025
For Gen Z, Why Nuclear Energy Future Is a Unifying Force in a Divided World
By Grace Vanderhei and Gabriel Ivory, WUWT, Dec 10, 2025
Generating stations do more than create electricity. They can also support system add-ons that help create clean water through desalination and create valuable medical materials for diagnosing heart disease and providing crucial cancer care.
The World’s First Thorium Molten Salt Reactor
By Haley Zaremba, Oil Price.com, Nov 21, 2025 [H/t Bernie Kepshire]
China’s experimental thorium molten salt reactor has reportedly achieved sustained thorium-to-uranium fuel conversion, marking a major scientific first.
The breakthrough could ease China’s dependence on Russian-enriched uranium and accelerate its rise as the world’s dominant nuclear power.
With thorium abundant domestically, the technology could transform China’s long-term energy security and global nuclear influence.
Alternative, Green (“Clean”) Solar and Wind
Time to Stop Pretending Renewables Are Cheap
By Tilak Doshi, Via WUWT, Dec 6, 2025
By fixating on narrow efficiency gains, ideologues overlook how wind and solar, at scale, regress humanity toward low net-energy systems reminiscent of pre-industrial eras. Primary energy metrics, far from obsolete, illuminate the total inputs required for industrial societies that promise prosperity for the vast majority of people in the Global South. Until breakthroughs in storage render intermittent energy sources viable without mandates and massive subsidies, fossil fuels — and yes, even “beautiful, clean coal” with pollution-limiting filters and equipment — remain indispensable.
Aussie Solar Farm Fire Briefly Interrupts Output
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 8, 2025
Alternative, Green (“Clean”) Energy — Other
EDP is ‘seriously considering’ rejecting European Hydrogen Bank subsidy due to lack of visibility on demand
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 6, 2025
Worse still, for these investors, is the risk that future governments will abolish Net Zero completely, or at the very least keep carbon taxes low. In that event, their business model is completely shot.
Alternative, Green (“Clean”) Energy — Storage
Claim: Battery Rationing is Required to Contain an Aussie Green Subsidy Blowout
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 8, 2025
My point is Rohan is wrong about 10KWh 15KWh of battery capacity being enough. For a battery to be any use, it has to be able to handle at least expected seasonal peaks in demand, not just average demand.
Alternative, Green (“Clean”) Vehicles
Xi sees your EV
By John Robson, Climate Discussion Nexus, Dec 10, 2025
Which makes one wonder just how silly the people in charge in Western countries actually are. Especially since, the Telegraph story adds, along with images of warning stickers allegedly affixed to the cars, “The MoD has already banned some electric vehicles (EVs) with Chinese components from being parked near sensitive military bases.” Someone remind us just how much benefit we’re getting from cars that don’t work very well in return for the astonishing harm to our economy, the environment and our national security.
EU To Postpone Petrol Car Ban to 2040
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 8, 2025
If UK manufacturers have to switch their production lines to EVs, they are going to miss out on exports to Europe. It is likely that some will simply carry on exporting ICE cars to Europe, and not bother making EVs at all.
Octopus Energy ramps up electric car charging costs
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 7, 2025
The whole EV tariff is a big con anyway. What you save on nighttime EV charging is lost through higher day tariffs.
Don’t Drive In The Cold
By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Dec 9, 2025
Health, Energy, and Climate
Formaldehyde Breaks Free from the Shackles of IRIS
By Susan Goldhaber MPH, ACSH, Dec 10, 2025
The real story here isn’t partisan whiplash—it’s whether EPA will finally anchor major chemical decisions to the best available, most transparent science rather than defaulting to an opaque program with a checkered track record. Formaldehyde’s revised TSCA evaluation demonstrates a practical path forward: use rigorous, fit-for-purpose evidence (like controlled human sensory-irritation studies) when it better reflects real-world biology and exposure, while still protecting workers and consumers.
Environmental Industry
Tidbits
By John Robson, Climate Discussion Nexus, Dec 10, 2025
With the climate craze fading out fast, now comes plastic. Right on cue Bloomberg Green has a new crusade: “Despite clear evidence that plastic is clogging oceans and beaches and breaking down into microplastics that enter our bodies, humans are continuing to produce the material at accelerating rates.
So never mind Net Zero for carbon. “If the world continues on the current trajectory, the outlook for 2040 is bleak, the report warns.” Cool. Whole new crisis; same old remedy. “At the root of the problem is the fact that plastics are mostly derived from fossil fuels.” Boo fossil fuels.
BELOW THE BOTTOM LINE
Claim: Childhood Exposure to Tropical Heat and Climate Change Makes People Stupid
By Eric Worrall, WUWT, Dec 10, 2025
[SEPP Comment: Is that why humans do not swing from trees as chimpanzees do?]
ARTICLES
1. A Climate Study Retraction for the Ages
A much-hyped study in the journal Nature turns out to have been full of errors.
By The Editorial Board, WSJ, Dec. 9, 2025
TWTW Summary: Discussed in This Week above.
**********
2. Britain Asked a Power Plant to Build a ‘Fish Disco.’ It’s Not Going Well.
The world’s most expensive nuclear station is trying to frighten fish with a deep-sea boom box. But DJing to save marine life is a nightmare.
By Max Colchester and Eliot Brown, WSJ, Dec 11, 2025
TWTW Summary: The article begins with:
“The aim at first was simple: prevent murder on the seafloor.
Over a decade ago, Britain’s environmental regulator approved a new coastal nuclear power station on the proviso its cooling system wouldn’t suck in millions of fish from the Bristol Channel.
EDF, the French company building the plant, promised a novel solution: It would construct an elaborate noise machine, aka a ‘fish disco,’ to scare the fish away.
DJing to save marine life, it turns out, is a nightmare.
Different fish move to different tunes. High-frequency noises deter shad, but might be harmful to dolphins, which communicate using high frequencies. Trout and salmon need more bass. Eels, unhelpfully, have ears behind their eyes and only respond to flashing lights.
‘It’s not straightforward,’ says David Clarke, a fisheries expert at Swansea University who was funded by EDF to monitor high-frequency beeps fired at tagged shad to see if they swam away.
EDF is on the hook to roll out an aquatic Woodstock requiring miles of cables linking 288 underwater speakers blaring sounds louder than a jumbo jet 24 hours a day for 60 years.”
The article concludes with alternatives being tried, but no one is satisfied.
Possibly not idiots, but certainly ignorant and gullible if they believe that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter.
As Feynman said “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
No, the author can “cite” speculations and fantasies by the ignorant and gullible which have no experimental support at all. There is not even a consistent and rigorous description of the “Greenhouse effect”. Just pseudoscientific evasions and wriggling.
No greenhouse effect. Adding CO2 to air doesn’t make thermometers hotter. End of story.
Only it does agree with experiment.
Wow.
Even Victor Frankenstein didn’t perform such convoluted re-assignments of parts when he made his creature.
And not surprisingly, your referenced study turned out just as credible a result as Victor’s.
Since CO2 has higher heat capacity than air or water vapor, so it will cool slowly.
David Legates was a co-author on Monckton et al (2015) which suggested that there would be a total of around +0.8C global warming between 2014 and 2100 (see section 8.3.5), compared to around +2.0C suggested by the IPCC/CMIP5 model ensemble.
Monckton et al used HadCRUT as their surface temperature reference. According to the latest HadCRUT iteration (HadCRUT5), the total warming since Jan 2014 (CO2 397ppm) to their latest updated month (Feb 2025, CO2 426ppm), is +0.34C, which occurred at a rate of +0.31C per decade.
For those who prefer UAH, warming in their lower troposphere satellite data set since Jan 2014 (updated to November 2025, CO2 428ppm) is +0.44C, with a warming rate of +0.37C per decade.
At current rates of warming, assuming no increase or decrease, the Monckton et al +0.8C central estimate for total warming from 2014 to 2100 would be surpassed by ~2040 (HadCRUT) or ~2035 (UAH), leaving 60-65 years of their projected period still to run.
Maybe David Legates is not the best-placed person to be forecasting the influence of CO2 on global temperatures?
‘At current rates of warming…’
If you have any evidence that the ‘current’ or any other warming in Earth’s history is / was caused by fluctuations in CO2, please provide it the space below.
And please, since models aren’t evidence, please don’t bother citing same. Thank you.
Did you not read the above contribution from David Legates?
I did! But clearly you didn’t because DL didn’t provide any of the evidence that I asked you for either.
I’m afraid that there is a level of evidence that satisfies competent scientists – and then there’s you.
Why don’t we all chill and see what 2035 or 20240 brings?
That would be a rational approach, yes?
Yeah, let’s just ignore the models that have been right so far and carry on to 2035 or 2040 on the off chance that Monckton and Legates were right after all. Let’s hope it’s not too late by then. Fingers crossed.
“The models have been right so far”
If they really were right, there wouldn’t need to be 114 or so of them.
Just one would do (h/t Albert)
Yet here we all are . . .
Adding CO2 to air doesn’t make thermometers hotter. I note you are not silly enough to state that it does. Very cunning.
Adding heat does.
That statement is absolutely false.
This is what is posted by Dr. Roy W. Spencer for the latest trending, referring specifically to the UAH data, graph and statistical analysis of satellite-based temperature measurements of the global lower atmosphere:
“The Version 6.1 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for November, 2025 was +0.43 deg C departure from the 1991-2020 mean, down from the October, 2025 value of +0.53 deg C . . . The Version 6.1 global area-averaged linear temperature trend (January 1979 through November 2025) remains at +0.16 deg/ C/decade (+0.22 C/decade over land, +0.13 C/decade over oceans).”
— https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/12/02/uah-v6-1-global-temperature-update-for-november-2025-0-43-deg-c/
As anyone can see, nowhere to be found is your claim of a “warming rate of +0.37C per decade”.
In addition, “since Jan 2014” until end-November 2025 is 10 years 10 months, or 1.08 decades.
Multiplying that time span by the UAH-specified warming rates gives the following net change results:
— global average: 1.08*(+0.16 °C/decade) = +0.17 °C
— over land: 1.08*(+0.22 °C/decade) = +0.24 °C
— over oceans: 1.08*(+0.13 °C/decade) = +0.14 °C,
so again nothing close—anywhere—to your claim of +0.44 °C change over that same time span.
Facts matter.
‘Now, some of that energy is emitted towards space, but some is emitted downward toward Earth’s surface.’
Not a word re. collisions or convection, just the consensus application of radiant transfer theory (RTT) to the troposphere.
Perhaps one of these weeks, SEPP will deign to have one of their AMO physicists take on one of the non-straw man arguments against climate alarmism, such as this one:
https://andymaypetrophysicist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Shula_Ott_Collaboration_Rev_5_Multipart_For_Wuwt_16jul2024.pdf
Does the fact that radiation exists cancel out convection? Is it possible that they both affect climate?
He’s talking about radiation’s impact on climate, so he discusses the mechanism of radiation on climate rather than that of convection.
Is that weird?
(Here I am defending David Legates… that really is weird)
In comments in the above article about the “greenhouse effect”, I was disappointed to see a general lack of specifics about how that that process actually occurs. To wit, the author’s following statements (playing somewhat footloose with the term “atmosphere”):
” . . . since its temperature is above absolute zero, then emits that energy—some of it toward Earth’s surface. This energy can be kept in a loop, whereby energy is emitted by the surface, absorbed by the atmosphere, and in turn, emitted by the atmosphere and absorbed by the surface. Both Earth’s surface and its atmosphere are warmed by this energy loop, which we lovingly call the Greenhouse Effect.”
Actually, Dr. William Happer (see attached slide from his presentation ” Why Has There Been No Global Warming For The Past Decade?”, UNC Chapel Hill, September 8, 2014) shows that CO2 (the second-most dominant ‘greenhouse gas”, behind water vapor) has photon relaxation times on the order of 0.01 to 1 second in the lower atmosphere, whereas the time for collision of a CO2 molecule with another atmospheric molecule (99% probability of that being either a N2 molecule or a O2 molecule) is on the order of microseconds to nanoseconds depending on pressure and temperature.
For example, the radiative lifetime of the (010) molecular vibration is about 1.1s (Cheo, 1971). It is tantamount to eternity on a gas kinetic time scale.
In comparison,
“The typical collision time through which a CO2 (010) molecule can transfer its energy to another gas molecule is about 20 μs in the lower atmosphere at altitude 3.5 km. Collisions take place more often than re-radiation. Therefore, when a CO2 molecule in air absorbs a photon, it is much more likely – on the order of 1s/20μs=0.5 × 10^5 times – to heat the surrounding air molecules with the energy it acquired from the absorbed photon than to re-radiate the photon. Statistically, the same CO2 molecule re-emits the photon energy two out of 100,000 times; but 99,998 times out of 100,000 the excited CO2 molecule is de-excited by collision.“
— https://geoexpro.com/recent-advances-in-climate-change-research-part-ix-how-carbon-dioxide-emits-ir-photons/ (my bold emphasis added)
So, in fact, the “greenhouse effect” happens primarily because LWIR-absorbing gases in the atmosphere (primarily water vapor and CO2, but there are others) absorb radiation emitted off Earth’s surface and then almost immediately transfer (“equilibrate”) that energy with all other chemical species in the atmosphere via molecule-to-molecule collisions that transfer mechanical energy (tied up in in molecular vibrations mode, not as electron cloud excitation or ionization) to other non-LWIR absorbing molecules well before re-radiation typically occurs. It is the distribution of surface-emitted LWIR energy across the full atmosphere’s constituents that, in accordance with Maxwell-Boltzmann equipartition of energy in mixed gases, results in the entire atmosphere then emitting thermal radiation to maintain a pseudo-equilibrium balance of energy entering the atmosphere versus energy exiting the atmosphere.
Of course, one also has to appreciate the thermal radiation from gases is isotropic, meaning that in the lower atmosphere almost as much thermal radiation is directed back toward Earth’s surface as is directed in the direction of deep space . . . the Greenhouse Effect!
While the above is true, a deeper dive into the subjects of collision induced absorption (CIA) and collision induced emission (CIE) will reveal that even N2 and O2 can weakly absorb Earth-surface emitted LWIR, a fact not generally recognized even by many atmospheric scientists.
People such as we (us?) may be out to lunch with our criticism of the ‘canonical’ explanation of the GHE, but the fact that none of the ‘heavy hitters’ in the skeptic community seem eager to ‘publish’ a critique of the work I cited above seems counter productive.
Happer has published a paper about climate sensitiviy (the effect of doubling CO2 in the atmosphere), noting that it has a warming effect.
I’ve seen them (he has several). Let me know when he, or any of the other more credible scientists taking on climate alarmism has any comments on this;
https://andymaypetrophysicist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Shula_Ott_Collaboration_Rev_5_Multipart_For_Wuwt_16jul2024.pdf
Or this;
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20140012672/downloads/20140012672.pdf
Or even this:
https://wucj.lab.westlake.edu.cn/Others/Lamb1995_Article_Anti-photon.pdf
So let’s just overlook the fact that ToldYouSo is talking through his hat about CO2’s role in climate and Will Happer’s view on it and instead look at some completely different stuff?
Obviously ignorant and gullible, then,
Whereas you are knowledgeable and wise, oh great blog-commenter.
Indeed I am, and thank you for your kind encomium. I accept flattery from the ignorant and gullible. It does them no good, of course, and is completely wasted if they think they will benefit thereby.
A couple of points. First, no rigorous and consistent description of the “Greenhouse Effect” exists. Feel free to provide one that you are prepared to defend.
Second, “thermal radiation” (the “thermal” is redundant) can be directed towards the Earth’s surface. That doesn’t mean the photons will interact with the surface! That’s about as stupid as thinking that 300 W/m2 from a block of ice will heat the hotter surface below, or a hotter rock to the side. The radiation will reach the surface or the rock, but what then?
So, unless you can demonstrate otherwise, in my worthless opinion, you are both ignorant and gullible, unable to think for yourself.
The opinions of others may differ from mine.
I did exactly that in my preceding post of December 15, 2025 8:37 am.
You obviously need help, so:
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation defines “thermal radiation”,
— “Thermal radiation” is classified as non-ionizing, different and distinct from much higher energy ionizing radiation, the classes of which are described in the following items
— radiation given off by transitions between energy levels of electron clouds surrounding atoms/molecules (at specific frequencies) is different and distinct from “thermal radiation” (which is broadband)
— gamma ray, X-ray, UV and visible light are all different and distinct from “thermal radiation” that is characteristic of Earth’s atmosphere/temperature range
— radiation emitted by lasers and masers (being coherent) is different and distinct from “thermal radiation”
— radiation given off by radioactive substances (alpha particles, beta particle, neutrons) is different and distinct from “thermal radiation”
— very high energy radiation from space (“cosmic radiation”, comprised mostly of bare protons and highly ionized atomic nuclei) is different and distinct from “thermal radiation”
— and finally, reflected radiation (which becomes polarized) is different and distinct from “thermal radiation” which is emitted directly, unpolarized, from matter as a function of its absolute temperature.
Whew.
No, you didn’t. Nobody has. That’s probably why you are refusing to repeat your supposed “description” here.
You dimwit. In your context, “radiation” is sufficient. “Thermal” is redundant. Your Wikipedia article just regurgitates the usual nonsense aimed at the ignorant and gullible – like you. I assume you are talking about radiation of specific frequencies, but you can’t quite figure out what they are.
Maybe you should read your own reference –
The “thermal” is redundant. Commonly used by people who are commonly wrong, being ignorant and gullible. Maybe you should adopt a real physicist’s description, and just refer to radiation as light. All frequencies, no matter where it comes from. Leave the 19th century behind.
Adding CO2 to air won’t make thermometers hotter, if that’s what you are really trying to imply.
My apologies . . . I forgot to add the following to my long list above:
— radiation from atmospheric lightning discharges is different and distinct from “thermal radiation”
— radiation from certain biological processes (bioluminescence) is different and distinct from “thermal radiation”
— radiation emitted when mechanical compression or shear energy is applied to certain crystalline materials (triboluminescence) is different and distinct from “thermal radiation”
— radiation from fluorescent lights is different and distinct from “thermal radiation”
— radiation emitted from certain manufactured semiconductor devices (commonly known as LEDs) is different and distinct from “thermal radiation”
— Cherenkov radiation (radiation in the blue region of the visible portion of the EM spectrum, resulting from electrically-charged particles traveling faster than the speed of light in a transparent medium, such as water) is different and distinct from “thermal radiation”
— bremsstrahlung radiation is different and distinct from “thermal radiation”
Just because some people think that thermal radiation is simply “light” does not mean it’s really that simple.
Yes it is. All photons are light. Even NASA agrees –
If you want to use vague terms like “thermal radiation”, be my guest.
If you believe that demonstrating ignorance and gullibility will make people think that adding CO2 to air can make thermometers hotter, go your hardest.
And just becomes some people—especially one with a one-trick-pony mentality of repeatedly asserting that everyone else must believe “adding CO2 to air can make thermometers hotter”—need to get beyond their confirmation biases and limited knowledge, I guess I should have added the following two comments at the bottom of my above listings of how “thermal radiation” is different and distinct from other types of radiation, both EM and particle types:
1) “In optics, nonclassical light is light that cannot be described using classical electromagnetism; its characteristics are described by the quantized electromagnetic field and quantum mechanics.”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonclassical_light
2) While a claim of “all photons are light” is generally true (let’s temporarily overlook my comment 1 above, hah!), it is not true that all light is comprised of photons . . . reference the wave-particle duality of light (a good primer on this is available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-particle_duality
for those that don’t know but care to learn).