As Saleem asks, “If my own government won’t act, who will?”
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July 8, 2025 at 11:37PM
Category: Daily News
Charles Rotter
The New York Times is at it again—clutching pearls and reaching for the fainting couch as the Trump administration dares to let a little oxygen into the musty, tightly sealed room of government climate “consensus.” If the tone of their latest lament, “Trump Hires Scientists Who Doubt the Consensus on Climate Change,” is any indication, you’d think the barbarians had just sacked Rome with nothing but peer-reviewed papers and calculators.
Right out of the gate, the Times wrings its hands over the shocking spectacle of scientists—yes, actual scientists—who “reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change” being allowed anywhere near the Energy Department. If you detect a note of moral panic, you’re not wrong. “The three scientists joined the administration after it dismissed hundreds of experts who were assessing how global warming is affecting the country,” they warn, as though these dismissed “experts” were the last line of defense against an onrushing climate apocalypse.
But let’s talk about these dangerous contrarians—and, for a moment, let’s try something radical: list their actual credentials.
First up: Steven E. Koonin. The Times notes he’s a physicist and author but doesn’t dwell on the fact that he was Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy during the Obama administration. Yes, that Obama administration. Koonin is also a former professor at Caltech, a former chief scientist at BP (one of the world’s largest energy companies), and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. His 2021 book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters, challenged the prevailing doomsday narrative by calmly pointing out that, yes, climate science remains rife with uncertainty and debate—a statement so inflammatory to consensus enforcers that it might as well have been a call to heresy. Koonin’s influence is such that even Energy Secretary Chris Wright, before his current post, reached out to Koonin to say, “‘This is great,’” and later, “Chris and I have talked quite a bit over the last couple years, and I think he is well aligned with what I wrote in the book”.
Next: John Christy. The Times breathlessly warns that he “doubts that human activity has caused global warming” and is “a vocal critic of climate models,” as if criticizing the most speculative outputs of computer simulations were akin to yelling fire in a crowded theater. But Christy is a Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and Alabama’s State Climatologist. He’s published extensively on atmospheric measurement, and—crucially—he is one of the principal researchers behind the satellite temperature record, a global data set widely cited by both sides of the debate. He’s not a crank; he’s the scientist whose data are routinely invoked even by those who disagree with his conclusions. When asked about his Energy Department role, Christy replied he was “an unpaid person who’s available to them if they need it”.
And then there’s Roy Spencer. The article describes him as a meteorologist “who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have,” making it sound as if he’s howling at the moon from his weather station. In reality, Spencer is a former NASA scientist and, like Christy, a principal investigator for the U.S. Science Team on the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) satellite temperature monitoring program. He spent years as a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, with a long track record of peer-reviewed publications in atmospheric physics. Not content to stop there, the Times quickly labels him a “policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, a conservative group that rejects mainstream climate science,” and “a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing group responsible for creating Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the new administration”. All the correct code words are deployed—“conservative,” “right-wing”—to ensure readers know these are not the sort of people you should trust with a Bunsen burner, let alone the levers of climate policy.
But don’t take my word for it—let’s watch the NYT clutch those pearls:
“A vast majority of scientists around the world agree that human activities—primarily the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal—are dangerously heating the Earth. That has increased the frequency and intensity of heat waves, droughts and colossal bursts of rain like the storm that caused the deadly flooding now devastating central Texas.”
As always, the Times presents every weather event as a sign of planetary judgment. Doubt the models? You’re a heretic. Question the regulatory scaffolding erected by unelected technocrats? Prepare for excommunication.
But what about those “hundreds of experts” who were dismissed? The implication is clear: technocratic rule must never be questioned. If you replace the “right” experts with the “wrong” ones, civilization itself is imperiled. The bureaucratic caste system is alive and well at the NYT, and woe to any outsider who doesn’t chant the right slogans.
And of course, no alarmist screed would be complete without the ritual invocation of Michael Mann and Andrew Dessler. Mann—famous for his hockey stick graph and near-ubiquitous presence in any article lamenting insufficient climate alarm—pronounces with customary gravitas:
“What this says is that the administration has no respect for the actual science, which overwhelmingly points in the direction of a growing crisis as we continue to warm the planet through fossil-fuel burning, the consequences of which we’ve seen play out in recent weeks in the form of deadly heat domes and floods here in the U.S.”
Every weather event is, once again, both evidence and sermon. Dessler chimes in, warning darkly that it “would be troubling if these three scientists were involved in repealing the 2009 endangerment finding,” which gave bureaucrats sweeping power to regulate just about every engine, factory, and appliance in the country. “Troubling,” in this context, means “potentially allowing actual debate and reconsideration of a policy linchpin upon which billions in regulatory costs rest.”
To reinforce the narrative, the article even notes that Spencer “has accused federal climate researchers of being biased because they receive taxpayer money.” The implication is that bias can only possibly exist on one side of the debate, never among those whose livelihoods depend on perpetual climate crisis. Spencer’s actual words, in his book The Great Global Warming Blunder: “The popular opinion that government-funded research is unbiased must be considered quite naïve”. Apparently, calling for a little scientific humility is a bridge too far.
No critique is leveled at the climate establishment for its own potential conflicts of interest, for its tendency to brand every policy as an existential necessity, or for the repeated failures of its models to accurately predict climate sensitivity, extreme weather, or even the behavior of clouds—one of the core uncertainties highlighted by the very scientists now being vilified.
The real story here is not the hiring of three scientists who are willing to question received wisdom. The real story is the media’s all-consuming need to delegitimize dissent, their relentless efforts to police the boundaries of acceptable thought, and the spectacle of credentialed “experts” howling in protest whenever their authority is challenged. That is the consensus the New York Times truly cares about: consensus as power, not as science.
None of these men is an outsider to science. None is a failed academic, a YouTube crank, or a “denialist” with an axe to grind. Each has spent decades at the pinnacle of his field, shaping the very scientific instruments and records on which the current debate supposedly rests. This, perhaps, is what most unsettles the New York Times and its preferred “consensus” enforcers. For all the talk of “overwhelming agreement,” they must now contend with the uncomfortable reality that some of the most qualified experts on the planet—not politicians, not lobbyists, but the very people who built and interpreted the satellites and models—don’t share their narrative or their urgency.
So let the caterwauling continue. If this is what a crisis of “climate consensus” looks like, perhaps we should welcome a little more of it. The public deserves an open debate, not another sermon from the high priests of the apocalypse. If even these men see room for doubt, perhaps the real question isn’t why they’re being hired, but why anyone is still pretending there’s nothing left to debate.
H/T David D, Dr. Roy Spencer, Chris Martz
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July 8, 2025 at 08:02PM
Essay by Eric Worrall
After 30 years of failure to move the needle, nobody believes the government will do anything about emissions.
A war of the truth’: Europe’s heatwaves are failing to spur support for climate action
Voters may feel hotter summers are ‘too much’ but they appear to tolerate roll-back of policies to stop global heating
Ajit Niranjan and Elsie McDowell Sat 5 Jul 2025 01.44 AEST
It’s just too much, isn’t it?” says Julie, a retiree in Stanford-le-Hope, Essex, about the 42C (107.6F) heat that her brother had seen scorch Spain last week. The former local government worker has felt summers get hotter over her lifetime and says she “couldn’t stand” such high heat herself.
But like many who experienced Europe’s first heatwave of the summer, Julie does not sound overly alarmed. She worries about climate breakdown for young people, but is not concerned about herself. She thinks more climate action would be nice, but does not know what can be done about it. She does not have much faith in the government.
“It’s like everything else,” she says. “I think it’s all too little, too late.”
As heatwaves engulfed large swathes of Europe and North America last week – the latest in a stream of deadly extremes made worse by fossil fuel pollution – green groups are frustrated that increasingly violent weather has not spurred the urgent support for climate action they had expected.
…
“The issue is really that there are so many other concerns now,” said Hodgson, citing the organisation’s data tracking the top issues that people face each week. “Three years ago you’d have the cost of living first, then the National Health Service, and then immigration and climate – those two would compete for third place. Now, when we do those polls, climate is near the bottom of the list.”
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/04/europe-heatwaves-failing-support-climate-action
The article also references a hilarious poll in which apparently half of Nigel Farage’s Reform party said they wanted a heatwave. And why not – Britain is having a glorious beach weather Summer thanks to the heatwave.
My hypothesis of the self limiting nature of climate policy, where green policies are tolerated only until they start to cause serious economic and social problems, is clearly being played out in today’s Britain. But it is a mixed blessing that climate has dropped to the bottom of the list.
I don’t think the fall of climate change as a priority means climate concern has fallen, the stinky green BBC still has a stranglehold over way too much real-estate in British people’s heads.
A more likely explanation for the apparent drop in climate concern is life in Britain has become so horrible for ordinary people, they have had no choice but to prioritise short term survival over their climate concerns.
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July 8, 2025 at 04:07PM
52.12393 0.95735 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 2 Installed 1/1/1959
Wattisham is a military airfield west of Ipswich in Suffolk. It has variously been used by the USAF, RAF, and British Army with the RAF returning to the site to operate its Sea King and Apache helicopters. In researching this site I uncovered deliberate transfers of readings from one site to another which re-opened this whole issue and cast serious doubts on the Met Office claims that this is never done…….IT IS.
To consider the site by CIMO regulation basics, I agree with both Tim Channon’s and the Met Office’s assessment of Class 2. Tim’s meticulous area delineation and area calculations proved that point from this post imagery below.
My location issue with this site, however, sits outside the tape measure mentality of the Met Office and is more with the transient extraneous heat issues with the changed use of the site. Fixed wing aircraft (most) have a remarkable habit of taking off and landing in straight lines along the runways. Helicopters are quite different of course and can hover all around an aviation site, especially at a training ground. In exactly the same way as at Shawbury there are literally dozens of YouTube clips of helicopters hovering over the site and inevitably causing distortion of readings at Met Office PRTs whose continuous output readings are only averaged over 60 seconds rather than the WMO 5 minute recommendation. Here is a past example though I understand the site is now primarily for “Apache” helicopter gunships.
{As an aside, when Chris Morrison and the Daily Sceptic highlighted my Shawbury report there were an astonishing number of apologists for the Met Office posting on X (formerly “twitter”) that these helicopter flyovers would not make any difference. I do have to wonder at some people’s motivations especially when one was discovered to be a former Met office observer – clearly he had never been anywhere near a helicopter in his life.}
The point I am emphasizing here is that whilst the Met Office can make weasel word claims of being “an internationally agreed distance from the runway” that is of even greater irrelevance when the aircraft are helicopters regularly within a few metres of the screen directly fanning heated air at it. This site may be Class 2 in some aspects but totally unacceptable for climate reporting a lot of the time in other ways. Modern PRTs definitely pick up transient spikes to distort the crude meteorological averaging.
It would come as no surprise to me at all if a new “record” was established here in the warmer East Anglia region – who needs Typhoon Jets when you have got plenty of helicopters to surreptitiously “do the business” for much less expense. Wattisham weather station is in a highly restricted area so the public cannot easily check.
This then comes onto the much more serious issue of the Met Office simply “moving” readings around different weather stations – this is an issue they CANNOT DENY nor REFUSE TO ANSWER because they have already, unwittingly, admitted to it…….and more than once.
Over 22 miles from Wattisham and over the county border between Suffolk and Essex there is former RAF Wethersfield which later became an MOD Police Training centre and thence an Asylum Seekers housing compound. In Wethersfield’s RAF days it had its own official Met Office weather station though this site was never used for climate reporting purposes and thus no temperature readings were ever publicly archived – or perhaps in part they were. Below is a map showing how different this site would have been bearing in mind what the Met office itself declared in its Factsheets about differing locations.
So what has Wethersfield got to do with Wattisham? Returning to my earlier contacts with the Met Office regarding Dungeness and all those 103 missing undead Zombie weather station sites the following comments were made. {my bold}
“By way of further advice and assistance as part of this internal review, I can advise you that
the Met Office is unable to supply specific details of the observing sites requested, as this is
not recorded information. We would advise you that we do not attribute unmodified values
from one station to another station. We use regression analysis to create a model of the
relationship between each station and others in the network. We use these regression models
to generate an estimate for each month when the target station is not operating or missing
data within its period of record. Each estimate is based on data from up to six other stations.
The chosen stations are well correlated with the target station and have data for the missing
month. The choice of predictor stations will change as the network evolves (for example, when
stations open and close). Unfortunately, this means that there is no single answer to the
question of which stations have been used to create the estimates for Folkestone and Dover,
as it will vary from month to month and from variable to variable. The climate averages on our
web page are the mean of the original observations (where available) and the estimates for
the specified station and averaging period. Further details of the analysis method can be found
in section 2 of the following paper:
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/joc.1160.”
In my review of RAF Waddington I picked up the fact that the Met Office had very definitely attributed data from one site to another – the issue of whether or not these “values” were unmodified or not I will address later in this post. The Met Office archived notes very definitely stated
” “NO DAILY DATA : CLOSED 8/1953-5/1955; 7-8/1968. DATA FOR SCAMPTON SUBSTITUTED”
Examining the CEDA notes for Wattisham I first noted a significant data gap from 31/7/1961 to 1/11/1961. Such gaps are not unusual in the archives and in this case were explained by a “Remarks” section note stating the following and their excel spread sheet showing the gap:
| NO DAILY DATA : CLOSED 8-10/1961 |
This period was at the height of the Cold War between the Bay of Pigs incident and Cuban Missile crisis which may or may not be relevant though I do know security was much heightened in the UK with military bases moved to higher alert levels.
Clearly not archiving this period’s readings even if they were taken is no great problem in the vast scheme of things, therefore what was incredibly strange was a subsequent note:
OBSERVATIONS DONE AT WEATHERSFIELD BETWEEN APRIL AND NOVEMBER 1977 DUE TO RUNWAY RESURFACING
For the period above readings from Wethersfield {Ed note:amusing the transcriber spelt the station name wrongly} the Met Office chose to just insert readings with a different observation regime of once daily only onto Wattisham. This is clearly indicated in the excel files by the changing reading recording frequency from “12” to “24” for the period. For brevity, firstly the change from Wattisham to Wethersfield readings on 18th April:
And then the change back from Wethersfield to Wattisham on the 1st December
What possible reasons could the Met Office have for attributing readings from a distant station to Wattisham into its archives in 1977 that they were not particularly concerned about in early 1961? How can a historic climate site record be taken seriously if readings from otherwise unrecorded sites are casually transferred around different locations?
This prompted me to further investigate those transferred readings from Scampton to Waddington mentioned above. Remember that Met Office claim of not attributing “unmodified” values….could I test that? The first period of attribution from Scampton was August 1953 to May 1955. Whilst obviously the WW2 originated airfield Scampton would have had an operational weather station, the archive, however, indicated a different story:
The quoted “Station start date” of 1/1/1963 seemed somewhat improbable and obviously how could they use data from the 1950s at Waddington if Scampton did not exist – though non-existence does not normally present problems for the Met Office. So yet further trawling was required to discover the original records. Not only do records exist, as if by magic they also coincidentally start in August 1953 i.e. the date of attribution to Waddington.
And this below is what they look like in detail. Four observations per day with readings to the tenth of a degree Fahrenheit (0.055°C) that requires professionally trained observer standards.
And also as if by magic these manual records end in May 1955 i.e. the end of the cross attribution period to Waddington. No other copy manuscripts appear in the archive and furthermore digital archives of temperature readings for Scampton do not commence until 1984.
So comparing these manuscript notes with the Waddington archives revealed that after allowing for rounding they were, indeed, directly implanted into the Waddington records. {Interestingly this also revealed that quite bizarrely the transcribers firstly rounded the Fahrenheit to the nearest whole degree before conversion to celsius and then that second rounding effect. This loss of accuracy is quite absurd given the claims of averages to the second decimal place of a celsius degree.}
The July and August 1968 transfers cannot be compared as Scampton’s readings do not appear anywhere until 1984. How often at other times have such readings transfers occurred is impossible to ascertain but then consider the issue of the 2022 national highest temperature record. Despite the Met Office admitting the following
“Dear Mr Sanders,
The 39.9C value on the map in the link you provided is not Waddington but it Cranwell or Scampton, both of whom recorder maximum temperatures of 39.9C that day.
At that time Waddington was having its temperature data marked as suspect as the grass under the screen had been treated with weed killer.
Kind regards,
Weather Desk”
Despite known suspect readings, the Met Office still managed to enter the UK all time “record” highest temperature reading at Coningsby into the records for Waddington. Coningsby’s data was straight transferred to Waddington. I have asked for clarification under Freedom of Information Act and all I got was a Refusal to answer on the alleged grounds it was not retained information – seemingly “records” are not “recorded”!
What I do know is that the Met office is persistently also refusing to answer my questions regarding which stations variously were, are or even, will be, used in the compilation of “climate averages” or ongoing “monthly estimates” for non existent sites. In the cases of Wattisham and Waddington it has taken me a deep inspection to find these attributions, but the Met Office cannot deny them as they are proven by their own admissions and evidence.
Does any of this actually matter? Returning to Wattisham (in the same manner as Waddington) it is one of those Location Specific Long Term Climate averages stations being used by the Met Office to “prove” alarming levels of anthropogenic climate change.
Given the now proven transfer of unmodified readings from one site to another how authentic are the Met Office claims? The quoted nearest “climate stations” include Levington (closed 29 years ago) and the absurdity of Scole born 1971 and departed 45 years ago in 1980. With the Met Office refusing to prove how their data is derived by supplying their input stations how does anyone know they are not either artificially fabricating the numbers or using unacceptable stations?
The Met Office really has to start answering valid questions and stop hiding being false legal protections. They must be accountable.
As a codicil, I was unable to find any good ground level imagery of Wattisham but I did stumble across this simulation of the control tower from a flight simulator. It actually is so precise that it included the weather station to the mid extreme left. A little white box in its very own compound!
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July 8, 2025 at 02:38PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 