By Robert Bradley Jr.
The historical record is unkind to the climate alarmists and the apologists of industrial wind and solar forcing (via government activism). A periodic look back at the litany of emotional, rash judgements is merited. A small sampling follows.
“Two weeks ago, I looked at the question of the anxiety that the climate crisis is causing our psyches. But, if you think about it, there’s an equally interesting question regarding the human mind: How is it that some people, or corporations, can knowingly perpetuate the damage? Or, as people routinely ask me, “Don’t they have grandchildren?” ( – Bill McKibben, “The Climate Crisis,” May 19, 2021)
Comment: Just maybe consumer welfare, taxpayer welfare, and energy freedom deserve a seat at the policy table. And maybe preventing mass industrialization of the living space by wind and solar projects is an ecological good.
“My motivation has always been that I don’t like liars, and I don’t like bullies. And climate denial is a feast for both—those who enjoy confusing and distorting reality, and those who love bullying people, especially scientists. It’s just gross, and it motivates me to fight them and expose them and put them on record. I’d like them to be seen forever to have been on the wrong side of history.” (– Brendan DeMelle , Executive Director, DeSmog (2020). Quoted here).
Comment: This rationale can easily be turned around to the ‘liars’ and ‘bullies’ of climate alarm and forced energy transformation. Remember the Climategate emails regarding peer review and complaint against Judith Curry, Pat Michaels, and others? And the greatest bully of them all was none other than the late Joe Romm, (see here, here, and here).
“Operators of businesses engaged in the exploration for oil and natural gas reserves need to make a plan to do something else or wind up their companies.” ( – Chris Tomlinson, “Fossil Fuel Companies Need to Find a New Line of Business.” Houston Chronicle, May 19, 2021, p. B1)
“No need to act rashly; the industry has maybe a decade left. But the velocity of the energy transition is accelerating quicker than most pundits expected.” ( – Tomlinson, ibid.)
Comment: Oh how Chris Tomlinson, the business editorialist at the Houston Chronicle, would like to have his words back. He was intoxicated by the climate/energy narrative and really thought there was no turning back. How wrong he was! And it will only grow worse over time
Much More ….
Specious arguments mixed with emotionalism can be found at Climate Uncovered’s “some of our favorite pieces from the year”:
- I Am a Mad Scientist by Kate Marvel
- Accepting Death by Coronavirus or Climate Crisis Is Not an Option by Brian Kahn
- Trump’s Racist Coronavirus Response Foreshadows Injustice to Come by Brian Kahn
- It Took A Pandemic To Prove Individual Actions Alone Won’t Solve The Climate Crisis by Amy Westervelt
- What Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus by Mary Annaïse Heglar
- Defunding the Police Is an Environmental Justice Issue by Drew Costley
- Climate Is Not An All Lives Matter Issue by Mary Annaïse Heglar
- How The Fossil Fuel Industry Funds The Police by Alex Kaufman
- The Climate Bois Club by Amy Westervelt
- The Climate Crisis Will Be Steroids for Fascism, by Brian Kahn for Earther
- The Big Oil Money Behind the Members of Congress Who Fueled the Capitol Attack, by Brian Khan and Dhruv Mehrota for Earther
- ExxonMobil Is Twisting Itself in Knots to Justify Pumping Even More Oil, by Kate Aronoff for The New Republic
- Who Really Loses When America Phases Out Natural Gas? by Nick Martin for The New Republic
This list can be greatly expanded with examples before and after the above. The very useful WUWT website listing of false predictions of doom-and-gloom would fit into the database.
Adverts and pop-ups are rapidly making WUWT site NOT worth the effort to bother looking at…
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I am a subscriber, years in fact…hundreds of comment made…donator as well…had to view 3 pages of ads to see my account page. One place says I am paid up to date by credit card, another place says my credit card expired 6 months ago…so…
I also had a subscription for many years, but I had to cancel my existing subscription and resubscribe to get the new subscription features that were not grandfathered in. I’m glad I did.
And if you don’t subscribe, those ads still help support the WUWT.
Just scroll past them.
Small price to pay to support WUWT.
Yeah, lots of that which measurably detracts from the website . . . but at the same time I recognize—and GREATLY APPRECIATE—that Anthony still allows free access to WUWT for those unwilling or unable to pay for a subscription that would remove such adverts/pop-ups.
TINSTAAFL . . . there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Also, I observe that there are very few website remaining that allow such a wide range of uncensored differing opinions/comment postings on any given subject . . . kudos to Anthony and the WUWT editors/moderators!
I think if Michael Mann himself submitted a post, it’s be accepted.
(Though I doubt if his inflated ego could cope with all the punctures inflicted.)
I’d read it.
For the same reason I read The Babylon Bee.
I only find it mildly annoying- not sufficiently annoying to not come here.
We get what we pay for.
(Or don’t pay for, even).
You can subscribe and block the ads, or you can subscribe and not block the ads
Ads and/or subscriptions keep this site running
Sadly, WUWT is still waiting for the check from Big Oil
Those oil field checks have been in the maail now for 20 years. It’s like the ghosts I used to see when at bed time in first grade.
Only problem I have is that I’m a paid subscriber, and I still get one specific popup ad (which takes over the whole screen) very regularly – an ad to subscribe.
Try Ghostery or and/or an Ad blocker.
Problem is they have been told this repeatedly. Their whole point is complaint, suggesting even the least of solutions to their “problem” sends them into an apoplectic fit of whinerism. It can be entertaining on a dull morning.
Bye, Felicia.
The forever bogey man of the Left, the “big greedy corporations.” Hilarious! Lefties are such hypocrites!
Yep.
We don’t have to buy / use everything that ‘big corporations’ offer, but we do all pay for what “big greedy governments” do to us every single day of our whole lives.
It helps to keep a healthy perspective on what / where / why / how to direct our scorn.
It’s also the big greedy corporations they so strictly oppose
who push the climate scam and astroturf all their new and woke values.
And its the owners of big greedy corporations like Bill Gates who pay for the NGO’ s and their employees and who pushed so hard for the vaccine that the left gladly took before they started to scream at those who refused the shot.
That’s how they rebel.
They don’t mind greedy labor unions and that includes some professional associations which are really just a form of labor union- to jack up fees.
They refuse to acknowledge that they themselves are greedy, envious, etc.
Those driving the Left want to be the ones “living in the farmhouse”. (Yet another Animal Farm reference.)
They abhor success unless it’s their own.
As they suck up as much in donations from the Great Satanic Corporate Booger-heads as they can.
American environmental policymakers are oblivious that 95% of the 8 billion living on this planet DO NOT live in America.
Globally there were 825 operational refineries worldwide in 2024.
As of January 2025, there were 132 operable petroleum refineries in the United States. These facilities are primarily concentrated along the Gulf Coast, near crude oil production centers, navigable waterways, and major population hubs. Just three states—Texas, Louisiana, and California—account for approximately 45% of all U.S. refineries and 59% of total refining capacity.
The global oil refining landscape is set to expand with about 180 new refinery units that are planned or announced in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Again, the few refineries in America CANNOT be the cause of climate change!
I remember when there were over 300 in the U.S.
Hear, hear!
I feel sorry for the American public who are slowly waking up to the fact that the people who run the US have been lying to them for years, and believing the fantasy that the 95% are just green with envy about American superiority in every field.
But who am I to blow against the wind?
even less so in Australia..one left.
825, we need to double that number.
Desmogblog, DeMelle can’t even be honest about the actual name of the organization he works at. It’s an organization built on lies at its inception, with the sole goal of impugning the credibility of skeptic climate scientists.
That’s bullying.
Be careful DeMille doesn’t report you to the thought police, or worse, tell his mum on you.
Too late. I ended up on their ‘100s Most Wanted’ list back in 2014 from being a panel speaker at Heartland’s Vegas climate conference, and at the time in 2017 when I was a frequent comment at the PBS NewsHour broadcast news transcript pages (about their to-this-day egregious climate issue bias) I needed to shoot down that Desmogblog profile of me. Nice to see they haven’t added updates to it in years, while still entertaining how they could never bring themselves to link directly to my blog so that their own readers could judge for themselves if what I was saying was actually disinformation or not …
I was on the Sceptical Science hit list for my comments on the BBC (back in the days when it was allowed to comment on climate).
It was a badge of honour.
Funnily enough, it was Sceptical Science that first made me think something wasn’t right with the climate narrative.
I was searching for an answer to a question, and their website came up first. I asked what I thought was a reasonable question and, in return, was met with a barrage of abuse. That made me wonder what was going on, and I found my way to WUWT.
It was a long time ago, so I can’t remember the exact details, but it was a genuine question about something I didn’t understand.
Ah, yes, as I say regularly at my GelbspanFiles blog, that Sceptical Science, the place which was caught deleting comments which undercut its orthodoxy, the place created by that John Cook (no relation to me) who displayed the most inappropriate kind of photo alterations for himself, who is also enslaved to Naomi Oreskes for his accusations about skeptic climate scientists being employed in industry-funded disinformation campaigns.
Education does not protect against climate panic. In the late 60’s, my then FIL was panicked about the coming ice age. He was an aero-space physiologist in the Canadian air force. He died before it became global warming.
Another ice age is still coming, that’s pretty sure.
When – we just don’t know.
But we do know from past events that it does seem cyclical, maybe sparked by confluences of differential cycles of influence on our planet (and others?).
Another Ice Age is guaranteed coming (and as I understand it, we are still at the tail end of one now), and no amount of CO2 is going to stop it, because CO2 is a non-factor.
People, people, we best enjoy this almost perfect climate, because cooler, ice age, temps are devastating to civilizations; e.g. see Canada’s Laurentide Ice Sheet: https://www.britannica.com/place/Laurentide-Ice-Sheet. You see, it’s hard to BBQ in your backyard in Chicago under a mile of ice…
Alarmists, since you have lost the dialog on AGW, you might as well get an early start warming about the coming Ice Age. Maybe Greta can restore her shattered AGW credibility as an Ice Age trailblazer. Since it’s centuries away, she can’t possibly be caught being wrong again in her lifetime.
Definitions are important. We are coming OUT of an Ice Age and the record of that shows periods of warming which are followed by periods of cooling which become warming again before all the last warming has been lost.
So, slow emergence from a current Ice Age.
We have entered the pause and cooling has started. This is the cooling that was first predicted before the Inconvenient Truth, and had been treated in the press and by journalists as Ice Age coming, not just a cooling period.
Story tip:
(Definitely worth a considered reading.)
Nullifying the climate null hypothesis
Judith Curry
https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.141
I read the whole piece, twice.
I found it insightful and well written.
It give equitable (judicial definition: fair) coverage to both sides of the issue.
Dense but very worthwhile, I wonder if many “scientists” have this level of understanding of the Scientific Method.
Thanks for that link. It’s from 15 years ago, but still relevant.
From your link –
Reading further is possibly pointless. There is not even a consistent and rigorous description of the “greenhouse effect”, and only a lunatic (or climate scientist) would be stupid enough to provide a hypothesis to explain something which doesn’t exist.
There are obviously lots of ignorant and gullible people who believe that adding co2 to air makes thermometers hotter, but are too gutless to actually come out and say so.
Put simply, the scientific method requires observation, documentation, speculation, and experimentation. And even then, the experimentally supported theory only holds until experimentation shows it is wrong, either partly or wholly.
Phlogiston and caloric theory – wholly wrong.
Maxwell’s wave theory – partly wrong.
Theory of relativity – no exceptions found so far. Good enough for Government work.
From the title of the above article:
“Climate Crazy Articles (please add your own)”
Gosh . . . so many to choose from . . . rather than individual articles, let me characterize and offer such this way:
— anything published by the UN or its IPCC,
— anything published by Michael Mann or the NAS,
— anything published by The Guardian,
— anything published by major environmental and advocacy nonprofits fronting “catastrophic climate change” or an upcoming/already-passed “climate tipping point”, such as the NRDC, the EDF, the Sierra Club, the WWF, the WRI, the CCL, the UCS, 350.org/Bill McKibbon, and Al Gore’s “Climate Reality Project”(how dare he!), and
— 90% of everything published by the MSM regarding climate change.
that just about covers it 🙂
Active imaginations.
I get a laugh at the way the alarmist faction and mainstream media have pounced on the prediction of a super El Nino developing and what it “could” or was even” “likely” to cause during the next 6-8 months. In other words, no one knows, but as long as there are possibilities, why not blow them out of proportion and claim they’re actual facts?
They seem to be trying to develop “hyping a weather event into CAGW” into an art form.
PS You should have said “SUPER El Nino” instead of just “super El Nino”.
It might be wishful thinking on my part but I believe a handful of WUWT contributors and commenters could whip the snot out of the best the climate alarmists have to offer any day of the week.
Story tip: Australia High Court judgement to make Australia pay for Scope 3 emissions
Anthony Watts for your section regarding Sea Level acceleration you should also link the study by Voortman and De Vos (2025) https://clintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/jmse-13-01641-v2-3.pdf which looked at global tide gauges and found no evidence of acceleration and though many areas show uplift or subsidence, globally the most common measure of sea level rise is about 1.5 mm/yr, similar to the measurement by tide gauges at geographically stable locations such as Honolulu.
Thanks for this post, lots of pithy nuggets to link people to!
Always trust the settled science particularly from well meaning lefties-
Almost 55 million starved – because of one ‘scientist’ | Watch
I’ve been eating Greens ever since