From THE DAILY CALLER

Audrey Streb
DCNF Energy Reporter

A 2024 climate change study amplified by the corporate press projecting up to $38 trillion in global climate damages by 2050 relied on inaccurate data, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The study’s inclusion of Uzbekistan’s faulty GDP figures skewed its results and cast doubt on its conclusion that global GDP could be roughly 62% lower by 2100 due to climate change than it otherwise would be, according to the Post. Numerous prominent media outlets touted the study upon its release as proof of climate change’s imminent economic threat, but a new analysis and experts who spoke to the Post argue the paper is undermined by Uzbekistan’s “data anomalies.”

The original study was the second-most cited paper across media in 2024, according to the U.K.-based climate outlet Carbon Brief.

“The only GDP that is set to plummet is the GDP of fraudulent self-promoting climate activists who are about to finally and appropriately get their funding cut by the Trump administration,” President of the Heartland Institute James Taylor told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Common sense and actual peer-reviewed studies show that warmer weather saves lives, with nearly 20 times more people dying from cold than heat, that warmer temperatures and more atmospheric CO2 are stimulating a blooming of greenery throughout the planet, and crop production sets records nearly every year with longer growing seasons and more atmospheric CO2.” (RELATED: Trump Admin’s New Report Blows Massive Hole In The Left’s Climate Catastrophe Narrative)

The U.S. government has even cited the study, with one December 2024 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report referencing it to illustrate the risks climate change poses to the American economy.

Once Uzbekistan was removed from the dataset, projected GDP losses dropped sharply, from 62% to 23% by 2100, and from 19% to 6% by 2050, Hsiang told the Post. Hsiang and his two co-authors, graduate students Tom Bearpark and Dylan Hogan, reportedly uncovered the error after erasing one nation at a time from the data collection and observing that Uzbekistan’s absence drastically shifted the results, according to the Post. The authors found that Uzbekistan’s GDP records showed wild oscillations incongruent with purportedly more reliable World Bank data, which reflected less intense fluctuations, according to the outlet.

“Everybody who works with data has some responsibility to look at the data and make sure it’s fit for purpose,” Global Policy Laboratory Director at Stanford University Solomon Hsiang, who helped point out the error, told the Post. “When you have a lot of data points, the idea that a small country could be so influential is not intuitive.”

Nature editor Karl Ziemelis wrote to the Post that his publication is reviewing the study and that “appropriate editorial action would be taken once the matter was resolved.” The report’s original authors told the outlet that the Uzbekistan data flub was a processing error that was corrected in an updated analysis, though they believe the report still holds up.

“We are grateful, and I think it’s a good part of the scientific process that they’ve pointed out these issues,” Leonie Wenz, professor of environmental economics at the Technical University of Berlin and one author of the initial study, told the Post. “But importantly, the main conclusions of the paper hold, and there are only slight changes to the estimates.”

The massive GDP loss scale was flagged during the peer review process, one review noting that “I find all of this well explained and fairly convincing, yet, purely subjectively, I have a hard time in believing the results, which seem unintuitively large given damages aren’t perfectly persistent.”

Nature, Wenz, his coauthors Maximilian Kotz and Anders Levermann, Hsiang, Bearpark and Hogan did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

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From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Events over the last week or so have included a number of episodes in which climate alarmism has intensified in the face of criticism. For at least two decades now, we have become used to hypersensitive reactions from greens: explosive reactions to being challenged. But whereas that routine of confected outrage may have served the political agenda well in the past, climate scientists’ amateur dramatics today signal something rotten, and not just about the actors. The tired script and empty theatre, too – institutional science – is revealed to be bent and rotten to the core.

“We are in a climate crisis, and we don’t necessarily need people who suggest otherwise,” stated Dr Paul Dorfman from Sussex University, in his closing words during a short debate with me on Talk TV. It was a sinister rejoinder from an expert who seemed to have risen through academic ranks without ever having been challenged, but who completely unravelled during the 12-minute discussion.

Read the full story here.

I watched the footage and Ben deserved a medal for his patience with the outright lies, ad homs, talking over and the plethora of silly faces and hand gestures you would expect from a petulant schoolgirl.

It is of course the same modus operandi we have seen lots of times from the likes of the clown Jim Dale and eco-zealot Donnachadh McCarthy.

The beauty was that Dorfman was there under false pretences anyway. He was introduced as Chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group, which you might think has something to do with the nuclear industry.

It does not. It is just another arm of the green blob, lobbying for renewables, as its own website makes clear:

Nuclear Consulting Group comprises leading academics and experts in the fields of environmental risk, radiation waste, energy policy, environmental sustainability, renewable energy technology, energy economics, political science, nuclear weapons proliferation, science and technology studies, environmental justice, environmental philosophy, particle physics, energy efficiency, environmental planning, and participatory involvement.

The fact that Greenpeace supports NCG says it all!

As for nuclear, several articles written by Dorfman, which are linked on the NCG website, are anti nuclear, such as one he wrote for the Guardian in June, titled “New nuclear would be too late and too costly”, when he stated “New nuclear has limited operational need and a poor business case”

I have no objection to a renewables lobbyist appearing on Talk TV, but viewers should surely be told just who he is?

The topic of this interview was to discuss why UK electricity prices are so high. Dorfman naturally blamed gas.

But surely, as a self proclaimed expert on energy policy, he must know that we are subsidising renewables to the tune of £17 billion this year, plus another £3 billion needed to balance the grid purely to cope with the intermittency of wind and solar?

Offshore wind harvesters are supposed to be one of the answers to the “climate crisis.” It seems unlikely to me. We know and have discussed one of the major weaknesses of this generation mechanism, its unpredictability. In a rational world, that alone would discount it as the go-to for any modern civilisation. Its characteristics are such that the mugs installing it aren’t the ones making it; nor will they/can they ever be.

If the offshore wind harvesters have anything going for them, it is that they emit (almost) no carbon dioxide in the operational phase.

If anyone can think of another advantage of offshore wind, do enlighten me. (I may have a few to share below.)

To place on the other side of the scale, we have quite a list of potential negative impacts. Not all of these are environmental, and many of them are of minor importance. Nevertheless, I thought it might be worthwhile to sketch out some of the potential impacts of a “typical” North Sea wind harvester deployment. The headings are in part garnered from the environment statement for the Norfolk Boreas wind development. They apply just as well up and down the North Sea, differing only in the specifics.

1. Effects on wave and tidal velocity. The main potential effect is on sediment transport south to north, affecting, ultimately, rates of coastal erosion. In principle, the effect of obstacles in the water column is to slow the passing water, and therefore reduce sediment transport. Probably a minor effect in general, in particular as the turbines are now so large that they are hundreds of metres apart, preventing this effect at one interacting with the same effect at its neighbours.

2. Disturbed sediment in the construction phase, in assembling the uprights or burying the cables.

A. This may include toxins which are re-entrained and could end up anywhere. (E.g., arsenic.) Likely to be a minor issue.

B. The disturbed sediment may have an impact on benthic communities. In soft substrates these will be wormy things (polychaetes, among which the most familiar may be rag- and lug- worms). For Boreas, and other developments, there is the risk of interacting with an “important” worm called Sabellaria spinulosa, which uses sediment grains to produce a tube for shelter (you may be familiar with the calcareous tubes of a similar species, the keelworm, which often decorates washed-up mussel shells, etc.). The point for Sabellaria is that it has no means to move once settled, and is therefore vulnerable to being buried. Another minor issue, especially if care is taken.

3. EMF. Naturally, all the lovely juice has to be squirted ashore, and that means electromagnetic fields. Burying the cables takes care of some of the problem before it starts. For Boreas there will be two HVDC cables 120 m apart, and there will be another two 120 m apart 250 m away for the “sister project” Vanguard. Because EMF falls off with the square of the distance, Boreas is pleased to note that its effect will be highly localised. Of course, it will be highly localised in long parallel lines 120 – 250 m apart. Boreas also says that “no direct evidence of impacts to invertebrates from undersea cable EMFs exists.” This was presumably written before there was such evidence, which there is now, although it is not very well defined. Boreas predicts a negligible impact here – but I’m not so sure. Here’s what Heriot-Watt said four years back:

“Brown crabs can’t resist the electromagnetic pull of underwater power cables and it’s changing their behaviour, marine scientists say.”

We also have the problem of EMF affecting skates and rays, which use magnetic fields to navigate, hunt, detect congeners, etc. There is some evidence of these fish not doing well in proximity to undersea power cables. Could the parallel cables form a barrier to dispersal? Boreas doesn’t think so. Then, they aren’t quite sure what an elasmobranch is. I spotted three different spellings of this in the space of two paragraphs of the ES [392, 393 of Chapter 11 (revised) if you’d like to check.]

4. Getting in the way of fishing. For Boreas, plaice and sole fishers will be excluded from 700-odd square kilometres. They’ll be able to make up the difference outside the exclusion zone. [Plaice was known to be overfished well over a century ago. Is there a hidden silver lining in this cloud?]

5. The effect of piling noise on marine mammals. The risk of permanent auditory injury, or in other words, striking the victim deaf, dumb, and (in effect) blind.

There is “embedded mitigation” against this trouble in Boreas’s case – the choice of installing fewer, but larger, turbines to the same overall capacity. Sure, this means there will be fewer piles driven in. But the cynic in me says this choice had little to do with the banging headaches that our cetacean friends are likely to end up with.

The next “embedded mitigation” is “soft-starts” to the banging, thereby, it is hoped, scaring the harbour porpoises (the most abundant cetacean in the neighbourhood) out of damaging range. See also Mark’s piece on whales, and comments below.

6. Birds.

A. Displacement. Some birds just will not enter the footprint of a wind harvesting facility (e.g., red-throated divers). They are therefore displaced from foraging areas. Other birds go straight through, if they survive the trip. The displacement has an energetic cost, and can cause birds to starve (see also C. below).

B. Collision risk. This is what applies to the less timid birds, for example the little gull that I have a very soft spot for, the kittiwake. Boreas says its “worst case” on kittiwake swats is 200 being downed a year, with confidence limits. I have no faith in such numbers, or of the modelling exercises that produce them.

And it’s not just the regular users of the airspace that are at risk: there are also the birds on migration. Swans, geese, things like that, things that aren’t very manoeuvrable and have the unfortunate idea that it’s good fun to fly at night.

For Boreas, the “embedded mitigation” includes fewer, larger turbines! Why not have one, the size of the moon?

C. Barrier effects. Birds like the red-throated diver now have to make a laborious circuit around an enormous footprint in order to make any progress towards wherever they were trying to get to. There is a large energetic cost to these diversions.

7. Shipping and navigation. The deployment of all this paraphernalia leads to an increased risk of allision, and in order to avoid such, requires a degree of circumnavigation of the hazard.

8. Aviation and radar. The turbines, with a tip that reaches 350 m, are a hazard for all the jellycopters whizzing to and fro, bringing people to the wind-collecting arrays and taking them home again. [Boreas intends to make 2 helicopter transits daily, as well as ship movements.] The whirling blades create radar clutter, which may confuse fliers.

9. Any effect on local climate? I don’t see this mentioned in Boreas’s ES, but we know that extracting energy from the wind partly stills it. On the face of it, this is likely to result in a minor warming effect on the surface of the sea – but who knows? [I haven’t tried to look it up.]

So there we have it – a list of possible drawbacks of installing giant whirly things in the North Sea. Note that this is entirely separate to their usefulness as generators. Nor does it say anything about the cost of such electricity as is delivered. Absent subsidies, it is doubtful whether the likes of Boreas would be viable. In other words, no-one would build such a development and then try to sell electricity into an open market. No mention has been made of the materials required to build these rotating colossi, the concrete in their foundations, etc.

There is also the non-trivial issue of cumulative impacts. Each one of these deployments has an impact on its own; together, all of them have an additive effect. Of course, when it comes to displacement, whether of sensitive birds, or fishing boats, the effect can be more than additive. When it comes to the hearty kittiwake flying through the whizzing blades, maybe it is less than additive: you can only die once.

Here you can find the document library for Boreas’s planning application. There are two thousand documents in all; the document library (pdf) is over a hundred pages long.

/message ends.