Estimates of the cost of net zero are about as reliable as a weather forecast for two or three weeks time. But this does not stop people giving them out. Here is a piece about the latest efforts:
John Rentoul’s Fake Cost Of Net Zero | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
via climate science
June 5, 2025 at 01:33AM
“… model-observation discrepancies can arise from three causes: the observations could be wrong (unrealized biases etc.), the models are wrong (which can encompass errors in forcings as well as physics), or the comparison could be inappropriate…. [I]t may well be that these discrepancies will resolve themselves in the course of ‘normal’ model development … Or not….” – Gavin Schmidt, Real Science, May 31, 2025.
One of the most enduring themes of the popular discussion of a man-made warming globe has been sea level rise as a result of the melting of ice from the planet’s two frigid poles.
Former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” featured images of icebergs calving off the Antarctic continent. He proclaimed that if the world proceeded to warm at its current rate, worldwide sea levels would rise “20 feet.”
On Oct. 16, 2009, then Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and later presidential candidate and secretary of state, proclaimed, “Scientists project that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013. Not in 2050, but four years from now.”
Last year, an Antarctic iceberg named A23a, floating in the southern ocean since 1986, the size of the state of Rhode Island and weighing a trillion tons, threatened to smash into South Georgia Island (site of explorer Ernest Shakleton’s grave) before it harmlessly spun away and melted. Catastrophe avoided.
New Data, Research
Is the apocalyptic scenario an unavoidable future? Two new scientific studies have found that melting ice in Antarctica has reversed and slowed in the Northern Hemisphere’s Arctic. It’s too soon to reach any overarching lessons from this new data, but worthwhile acknowledging that few scientific “facts” are immutable.
At the South Pole, a team of Chinese researchers led by Wei Wang of Tongji University of Shanghai found that ice on the Antarctic ice sheet increased from 2021 to 2023, following 19 years of decrease starting in 2002.
Published March 19 in the peer reviewed Springer Nature journal Science China Earth Sciences, the research team found that Antarctica’s melting glaciers caused the “global mean sea level” (GMSL) to rise by “5.99±0,52 mm ( milllimeteres) by February 2020. Then the ice began accumulating in the followed three years, “ultimately resulting in a total GMSL contribution of 5.10±0.52 mm by the end of 2023.”
Moving to the North Pole, a March 29 analysis by four researchers led by Mark England from the University of Bristol, published in the ESS Open Archive research platform wrote, “Over the past two decades, Arctic sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005. This pause is robust across observational datasets, metrics, and seasons.”
What to make of these surprising findings that contradict the popular notion of the impact of climate change, long promoted by some researchers who appear to have more interest in advancing policy positions than science? Researcher England titles his team’s research paper as “Surprising, but not unexpected, multi-decadal pause in Arctic sea ice loss.”
The Arctic paper, in typical low-key scientific language, says, “The modelling evidence suggests that internal variability has substantially offset anthropogenically forced sea ice loss in recent decades, although possible contributions from changes in the forced response remain uncertain. Overall, this observed pause in Arctic sea ice decline is consistent with simulated internal variability superimposed on the long term trend according to the bulk of the climate modelling evidence.”
The Wang Antarctic paper concludes modestly, “Overall, the study presents the mass change characteristics of the [Antarctic Ice Sheet] over the past 22 years, highlights the instability of four important glacier basins in the [East Antarctic Ice Sheet], and provides valuable scientific insights for related polar research.”
Pielke View
U.S. climate scientist Roger Pielke, Jr., wrote in an op-ed in the New York Post, “When it comes to climate change, to invoke one of Al Gore’s favorite sayings, the biggest challenge is not what we don’t know, but what we know for sure but just isn’t so.”
Taken together, says Pielke, “the two studies remind us that the global climate system remains unpredictable, defying simplistic expectations that change moves only in one direction.”
Writing in The Honest Broker, Pielke observes that “climate research is not a scoreboard in a Manichean debate, but instead offers certainties, uncertainties, and even areas of total ignorance that establish a nuanced context for developing robust mitigation and adaptation policies.”
He adds, “Humans affect the climate system in many ways, including greenhouse gas emissions, but also through land management, air pollution, and vegetation dynamics. At a planetary scale the net effect of these changes – driven by carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, natural gas, and oil – is a warming of the planetary system. Anticipating regional and local consequences is far more challenging.”
Pielke recalls the lament of the late, great climate scientist Steve Schneider (1945-2010) in 2002: “I readily confess a lingering frustration: uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes, let alone provide confident probabilities for all the claims and counterclaims made about environmental problems.”
Conclusion
What is supposed to be in the world of unsettled climate science cannot substitute for data. And climate models cannot rescue theory or data. Climate modeling is hope-in-process. Gavin Schmidt states:
models are always wrong, but the degree to which they can be useful needs to be addressed – by variable or by model generation or by model completeness etc…. an accumulation of improvements – in physics, resolution, completeness, forcings – have led to a gradual improvement in skill (not just in the sea ice trends!)…. The history of Arctic sea ice comparisons shows that it might be premature to conclude that any specific discrepancies imply that something is fundamentally wrong, or that climate modeling is in a ‘crisis’ (Shaw and Stevens, 2025), it may well be that these discrepancies will resolve themselves in the course of ‘normal’ model development (and as the observed signals become clearer). Or not ;-).
Only the future will tell…. or not.
The post Sea Level Rise: Less Alarmism? appeared first on Master Resource.
via Master Resource
June 5, 2025 at 01:14AM
By Vijay Jayaraj
Whenever “experts are shocked” they usually have marginalized or ignored altogether factors wrongly assumed to have no influence over their hypotheses, theories or beliefs.
Nowhere is this more evident than in climate science where changes in geophysical phenomena continue to defy assumptions and forecasts presented by some of the most highly paid and influential scientists on the planet.
Among the most infamous examples is the failure of computer climate models to accurately predict real-world temperatures. This is predominantly due to the unscientific exaggeration of carbon dioxide’s (CO2’s) potency in warming the atmosphere.
Now scientists have encountered more “shocks” as polar sea ice is refusing to behave as expected. Since September 1, 2024, an astonishing 579 billion tons of fresh snow and ice have blanketed the Greenland ice sheet, marking the most significant accumulation for that date in at least eight years—far surpassing the 1981-2010 average.
Meanwhile, both the North and South Poles are defying expectations, piling on more ice despite, as reported in hyperbolic headlines, “record-breaking” global heat. It’s a breathtaking, almost surreal twist in the story of our planet’s climate!
According to NASA, “Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum extent (the area in which satellite sensors show individual pixels to be at least 15% covered in ice) each September.”
In the post-2010 era, the September minimum extent of Arctic sea ice occurred in 2012, which was also the lowest since satellite measurements began in 1980. But ever since 2012, ice has been increasing or oscillating well above that year’s mark.
Likewise, the volume of sea ice has not significantly dropped since 2012 and there has been a nominal increase in volume since a low point of 2020.
So, why is the minimum coverage of Arctic sea ice holding above the level of 2012?
One of the most obvious reasons could be that CO2 is not as powerful a temperature control knob, which is a possibility that many well-funded scientists refuse to even take into consideration.
Also, remember that we are in the Holocene epoch, a warm geological phase between two glacial advances – one that ended about 10,000 years ago and the next expected to occur some number of thousand years hence. An upward tick in Arctic temperatures shouldn’t surprise us regardless of whether we emit CO2 or not.
In fact, Arctic ice levels witnessed in the 17th century during the Little Ice Age was one of the highest since continental glaciers blanketed Canada and extended into the lower 48 states to create the Great Lakes.
At one point, news media were abuzz with the unexpected gain in Antarctica’s ice mass. Antarctica gained ice from 2021 to 2023, with studies showing nearly 108 gigatons per year added, mainly due to increased snowfall in East Antarctica.
Data from Vostok and Concordia stations in East Antarctica indicate extremely cold temperatures in early May, with minimums of minus 106.6 degrees Fahrenheit at Concordia on May 12. With winter just beginning the temperatures are likely to dive further.
As recently as 2023, Concordia station recorded one of its lowest temperatures for the current decade, a brutal minus 117.76 degrees. Similarly, at Western Antarctica’s Byrd Station, a likely all-time low of almost minus 50 degrees was recorded as recently as 2023. These numbers may be surprising, but they are in tune with the unpredictability of climate – and of nature in general.
Let’s just admit it. Things are not as “straightforward” as crisis-obsessed scientists are making it out to be. The climate system is complex, and the science is not settled. Our understanding of climatic dynamics is in its infancy. And to suggest that changes –whatever the direction – in polar ice presages a catastrophe is infantile.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
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via Watts Up With That?
June 5, 2025 at 12:06AM
From the US Department of Transportation
Wednesday, June 4, 2025
Report identifies years of mismanagement, broken promises, and wasted federal taxpayer dollars
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy today released the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Compliance Review Report finding that the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA)’s high speed rail project is in default of the terms of its federal grant awards. The detailed report, which is over 300 pages, contains 9 key findings including missed deadlines, budget shortfalls, and overrepresentation of projected ridership. The two grants total roughly $4 billion in taxpayer money. As the letter notes, CHSRA has up to 37 days to respond, after which the grants could be terminated.
In a letter to CHSRA’s CEO, Ian Choudri, the FRA noted its report identified a trail of project delays, mismanagement, waste, and skyrocketing costs. The project has received approximately $6.9 billion in federal dollars in roughly fifteen years but has not laid a single high-speed track. Even with continued federal support, the project is far short of the funding needed to finish just a fraction of the track.
“I promised the American people we would be good stewards of their hard-earned tax dollars. This report exposes a cold, hard truth: CHSRA has no viable path to complete this project on time or on budget. CHSRA is on notice — If they can’t deliver on their end of the deal, it could soon be time for these funds to flow to other projects that can achieve President Trump’s vision of building great, big, beautiful things again,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy. “Our country deserves high-speed rail that makes us proud – not boondoogle trains to nowhere.”
Please find a copy of the full letter and full report HERE.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
In February, Secretary Duffy announced that USDOT would be launching an investigation into the CHSRA’s high-speed rail project and reviewing two grants awarded to the project: a $929 million Cooperative Agreement from 2010 and a $3.07 billion Cooperative Agreement from last year.
Under the Secretary’s direction, FRA conducted a detailed review of CHSRA’s compliance with federal grant agreements related to over $4 billion in funding. As part of its investigation, the FRA has contacted state oversight entities, visited construction sites, conducted a risk analysis, met with CHSRA officials, and reviewed several thousand documents.
FRA’s report is 310 pages, inclusive of supporting attachments, and contains 9 key findings:
Find excerpts from the report below:
Given CHSRA’s past performance, including substantial change orders, numerous contractor delay claims, protracted third-party arrangements, failure to account adequately for project risk, and lack of a credible plan to close the $7 billion funding gap, CHSRA is not likely to complete the Early Operating Segment (EOS) by 2033. In executing the FSP Agreement and reobligating the FY10 Agreement, FRA relied on CHSRA’s representations, which were included as commitments in the funding agreements, that CHSRA would deliver the EOS by 2033.
To secure substantial Federal funding, CHSRA represented that it could connect major metropolitan cities in California, but can now only deliver a system that is reduced substantially and delayed significantly, which may connect two random endpoints.
As such, CHSRA’s inability to deliver the EOS by 2033 renders the CHSR Project inconsistent with the goals of the HSIPR Program and constitutes a Project Material Change under the FSP Agreement. These findings support a conclusion that CHSRA is in default under the FSP Agreement and the CHSR Project no longer effectuates the goals of the funding programs, which may give rise to an action under the funding agreements, which could include termination.
…
Similarly, in 2008, the CHSR System was represented as a two-phase visionary system connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco, CA, and later north to Sacramento, CA, and south to San Diego, CA. Since then, the project footprint has been dramatically reduced from an 800-mile segment to a 171-mile segment to the current vision—119-miles. Despite substantial Federal support and funding, CHSRA does not have the capacity to deliver the full CHSR System. This 2025 compliance review demonstrates that CHSRA has not learned from its mistakes and mismanagement and has therefore failed to create an organization capable of effectively and efficiently managing project delivery. Despite the substantial scope reduction, the CHSR Project still continues to face numerous delays and cost overruns. At this rate, CHSRA will never complete the CHSR System. Further, CHSRA has not acted in good faith in making representations to FRA regarding its ability complete the EOS with a reasonable budget and schedule. This not only gives rise to the conditions creating default under the agreement, but also raises a reasonable question about whether continued Federal investment in the CHSR System is a prudent use of taxpayer dollars.
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via Watts Up With That?
June 4, 2025 at 08:03PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 