Academics and the press have been attempting to profit from a completely fictional story about Antarctica, which has collapsed.
Just having fun
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via Real Climate Science
January 14, 2025 at 07:29PM
Ladies and gentlemen, gather round for a moment of silence—or perhaps a loud guffaw—for the untimely suspension of the Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) initiative. Once the darling of “woke capitalism” and self-proclaimed savior of the planet, this alliance of investment giants has decided to fold its tent, apparently under the weight of its own contradictions and a little nudge from reality.
An alliance of investment giants-turned-self-styled climate change crusaders looks to be in tatters after it suspended its activities on Monday amid a backlash against “woke” capitalism.
The Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) initiative was rocked last week by the exit of BlackRock, the world’s biggest investor, as The Post exclusively reported.
NZAM was touted as a coalition of climate-conscious asset managers promising to steer trillions of dollars into sustainable investments. It had all the buzzwords: net zero, decarbonization, stakeholder capitalism. But as we now see, when rhetoric meets resistance, even the mightiest of “green” alliances can crumble.
Larry Fink’s BlackRock, managing a modest $11.5 trillion, was the largest player in NZAM. But last week, BlackRock bolted, citing “confusion” over the initiative’s goals and the growing heat from legal and political scrutiny. Confusion? For a group that allegedly led the charge on climate finance, confusion is an odd defense.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The real story here isn’t confusion; it’s the political backlash. Republican lawmakers had been turning up the heat, questioning NZAM’s anti-fossil fuel stance and labeling it as a threat to free-market principles. For a firm like BlackRock, whose fiduciary duty is to maximize returns, the last thing it needed was to be dragged into a legal and political firestorm.
This retreat is about more than one firm’s exit. NZAM’s decision to suspend activities is a tacit admission that its grand vision of global decarbonization through financial engineering was built on a house of cards. It turns out that arm-twisting investors into abandoning fossil fuels—still the lifeblood of modern economies—isn’t as easy as issuing a press release.
What NZAM and its allies failed to grasp is that most of the world isn’t ready to trade reliable energy sources for expensive “green” dreams. They didn’t count on a backlash from those who actually like to keep the lights on without bankrupting their economies.
This debacle also lays bare the hollowness of so-called woke capitalism. For all the chest-beating about saving the planet, NZAM and its members were quick to run for the exits when the going got tough. They’ve proven that their commitment to climate goals was conditional, a mere marketing gimmick rather than a principled stand.
This is a classic case of virtue signaling gone awry. Companies like BlackRock were happy to bask in the glow of green virtue as long as it was profitable—or, at least, painless. But when real-world pressures mounted, from legal inquiries to political challenges, those lofty ideals were quickly jettisoned.
NZAM’s suspension underscores the dangers of pushing aggressive, top-down policies without a clear understanding of economic realities or public sentiment.
The truth is, the world runs on fossil fuels, and no amount of corporate virtue signaling can change that overnight. Initiatives like NZAM ignore the complexities of global energy needs and the fact that renewables, aren’t ready to replace hydrocarbons on a large scale.
Even more damning is how NZAM’s failure exposes the elitist arrogance of the climate crusade. These financial titans thought they could dictate policy from their boardrooms, ignoring the voices of everyday citizens and lawmakers. That hubris has now come back to bite them.
The suspension of NZAM is more than just a setback for one initiative—it’s a symbolic defeat for the entire ideology of climate authoritarianism. It’s a reminder that policies based on coercion and moral grandstanding are bound to fail when confronted with economic and political realities.
So, let us raise a toast to NZAM, not in mourning but in mockery. Its collapse is a victory for common sense and a warning to all who would attempt to impose utopian visions on a world that isn’t interested. May its demise serve as a lesson to the climate cartel: the road to net zero is paved with good intentions—and bankrupt ideologies.
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via Watts Up With That?
January 14, 2025 at 04:05PM
According to NPR, the historic cold and deep snow forecast for Florida, is caused by global warming. When is weather affected by climate change? : NPR Surface Air Temperature (GFS 10-day forecast) Accumulated Snowfall (GFS 10-dayforecast)
via Real Climate Science
January 14, 2025 at 02:24PM
The most recent case of climatists’ bad behavior is the retraction of a peer-reviewed paper analyzing the properties of CO2 as an IR active gas, concluding that additional levels of atmospheric CO2 will have negliable effect on temperatures. From the Daily Sceptic:
Another important paper taking issue with the ‘settled’ climate narrative has been cancelled following a report in the Daily Sceptic and subsequent reposts that went viral across social media. The paper discussed the atmospheric ‘saturation’ of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and argued that higher levels will not cause temperatures to rise. The work was led by the widely-published Polish scientist Dr. Jan Kubicki and appeared on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect website in December 2023. The paper has been widely discussed on social media since April 2024 when the Daily Sceptic reported on the findings. Interest is growing in the saturation hypothesis not least because it provides a coherent explanation for why life and the biosphere grew and often thrived for 600 million years despite much higher atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases. Alas for control freaks, it also destroys the science backing for the Net Zero fantasy.
Below are some comments responding to a Quora question, text in italics with my bolds and added images:
What are some reasons why some people do not believe in climate change or global warming despite scientific evidence? Is there any additional information that could help us understand their perspective?
Good scientists do not lie and cheat to protect their science, they are happy to discuss their evidence and their findings, and they always understand that everything needs to be replicable and verifiable.
When Climategate erupted on the scene, and the climate scientists behind the man-made global warming narrative were found to have lied and cheated, all honest scientists thought that would be the end of it. Instead, what happened was that those climate scientists closed ranks and carried on, supported by a massive amount of government (ie, the public’s) money. One of the first things they did was to deflect Climategate by saying the emails involved had been hacked so should be ignored, but some of the people involved confirmed that all of the emails really were genuine.
It has been about 15 years since Climategate, and study after study has shown virtually all of the components of the man-made global warming narrative to be incorrect, even that none of the computer models used by the IPCC are fit for purpose,
And yet they maintained their closed ranks,
and the government money kept pouring in.
Did you know that the IPCC does not do any research (please do check that, on their web page About – IPCC they state “The IPCC does not conduct its own research”). It is, as its name says, an inter-governmental organisation, and it is run by and for governments. They say lots of persuasive sciency things, but the simple fact is that they cherry-pick and corrupt the science to achieve their ends. Regrettably, almost all the scientific societies are on the gravy train too. This is part of what the highly respected physicist Professor Hal Lewis said in his resignation letter to the American Physical Society (APS):
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare.
I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge?
It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.
If you want to find out more about this “greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud”, the website Watts Up With That? is a good place to start (the fraudsters absolutely hate it), and it links to many other good websites. It has the full text of Hal Lewis’ resignation letter at:
It’s curious that climate science is the rare scientific field where dissenting scientists, those with contrarian views, are unwelcome and even ostracized.
There are some well known climate scientists that have doubts about the role of CO2 and man made global warming as it pertains to global temperature. They have raised the issue that computer generated prediction models have been inaccurate in predicting temperature patterns because the modeling requires assumptions that have not been shown to be accurate.
Here is a contrarian view from climate scientists who have published climate research results in Nature, which is no small feat:
McNider and Christy are professors of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and fellows of the American Meteorological Society. Mr. Christy was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.
It is not a known fact by how much the Earth’s atmosphere will warm in response to this added carbon dioxide. The warming numbers most commonly advanced are created by climate computer models built almost entirely by scientists who believe in catastrophic global warming. The rate of warming forecast by these models depends on many assumptions and engineering to replicate a complex world in tractable terms, such as how water vapor and clouds will react to the direct heat added by carbon dioxide or the rate of heat uptake, or absorption, by the oceans.
We might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the beginning of climate modeling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.
For instance, in 1994 we published an article in the journal Nature showing that the actual global temperature trend was “one-quarter of the magnitude of climate model results.” As the nearby graph shows, the disparity between the predicted temperature increases and real-world evidence has only grown in the past 20 years.
“Consensus” science that ignores reality can have tragic consequences if cures are ignored or promising research is abandoned. The climate-change consensus is not endangering lives, but the way it imperils economic growth and warps government policy making has made the future considerably bleaker. The recent Obama administration announcement that it would not provide aid for fossil-fuel energy in developing countries, thereby consigning millions of people to energy poverty, is all too reminiscent of the Sick and Health Board denying fresh fruit to dying British sailors.
Another questioner, Dr. Koonin was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama’s first term and is currently director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. His previous positions include professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech, as well as chief scientist of BP, where his work focused on renewable and low-carbon energy technologies.
But—here’s the catch—those questions are the hardest ones to answer. They challenge, in a fundamental way, what science can tell us about future climates.
Firstly, even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.
A second challenge to “knowing” future climate is today’s poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change over decades and centuries, hold most of the climate’s heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still far too short to adequately understand how the oceans will change and how that will affect climate.
A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate’s response to human and natural influences. One important feedback, which is thought to approximately double the direct heating effect of carbon dioxide, involves water vapor, clouds and temperature.
Climate Science Is Not Settled
Another group questioning what some consider “settled science”:
Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.
This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.
Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society (APS), from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word “incontrovertible” from its description of a scientific issue?
There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question
“cui bono?” Or the modern update, “Follow the money.”
via Science Matters
January 14, 2025 at 02:22PM
