The long-overdue showdown with America’s most bloated, self-important arm of climate alarmism finally arrived this week — and what a spectacle it was. In a move that should have happened years ago, the Trump administration decisively dismissed the hundreds of so-called “experts” who were preparing the next National Climate Assessment (NCA) — a document often weaponized to justify costly and draconian climate policies that the American people neither asked for nor benefit from.

According to The New York Times’ own agonized reporting, “The Trump administration has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country”​. Translation: the gravy train of climate catastrophe peddling has hit a brick wall.

The National Climate Assessment has long been a centerpiece in the grand theater of climate fear, projecting dire futures with a laughable level of pseudo-certainty. Despite its authors’ best efforts to scare Americans into submission with apocalyptic visions, most of their “projections” have failed the simple test of reality. As Brad Plumer and Rebecca Dzombak gloomily noted, “The move puts the future of the report, which is required by Congress, into serious jeopardy”​. That’s not a bug — it’s a feature.

The absurdity of the situation becomes even clearer when reading how the dismissed researchers reacted. Jesse Keenan, a climate adaptation professor, practically cried into his recycled coffee mug, declaring, “This is as close as it gets to a termination of the assessment. If you get rid of all the people involved, nothing’s moving forward”​. Exactly, Professor Keenan. That was precisely the point. Perhaps it’s time to move forward with serious, grounded research rather than ideologically driven climate sermons.

Let’s also take a moment to savor the bureaucratic collapse. NASA, which had been doling out contracts like candy to firms like ICF International for “technical support” — read: glorified office busywork — saw those contracts axed​. No more multi-million dollar taxpayer-funded boondoggles to prop up a narrative that grows thinner by the year.

Naturally, the usual suspects are already sobbing that without their preferred team of doomsayers, any future report will “downplay” the supposed dangers of warming​. Yet one has to ask: if your “science” can’t survive the loss of a hand-picked team of activists, maybe it wasn’t science in the first place. Perhaps it was always closer to a political manifesto, dressed up in lab coats.

The Times frets that “state and local policymakers, as well as private businesses, rely on the assessment”​. What they don’t admit is that these assessments often serve more to inflate public hysteria and lawsuits against the federal government than to offer sound advice. Russell Vought, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director, hit the nail on the head when he described the reports as a “source of climate alarmism”​. It’s refreshing to finally see leadership willing to call out the climate-industrial complex for what it really is.

Predictably, the fearmongers are already plotting new strategies to sneak their ideology back in through the cracks. Meade Krosby of the University of Washington lamented, “The question is whether it [the next assessment] is going to reflect credible science”​. Given their track record, “credible” in this context apparently means “produced by a select group of like-minded alarmists with a history of failed predictions.”

The American public deserves better than yet another self-referential, doom-and-gloom fantasy presented as objective fact. This purge of the climate clerisy from the National Climate Assessment is a long-awaited act of intellectual housecleaning. The public should celebrate that, for once, we have an administration willing to stand up to the sprawling technocracy of climate fearmongering and demand real accountability.

The scientists and bureaucrats who treated the NCA like their personal manifesto-writing project are shocked today. They should be. They mistook the American people’s tolerance for blind consent. Now, they are being shown the door, their shrill warnings reduced to background noise in a nation tired of being lectured about its alleged sins against the Earth.

Good riddance. May this be the first of many steps toward reining in the arrogance of central planners who believe they have the right — and the competence — to redesign society based on speculative, unprovable theories.

The climate fear machine has been unplugged. And the lights, ironically, have never looked brighter.

H/T Steve Milloy

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

Dramatic confirmation that the sea ice in the Arctic has been stable for nearly two decades is contained in a recently published science paper from a team led by Dr Mark England from the University of Exeter. The finding is of course obvious to anyone who studies the data but it will inconvenience the activist cranks who continue to promote supposed reductions in Arctic sea ice as an important sign of their imaginary ‘tipping points’ and their fake climate crisis. Despite the data showing the ice has been stable over every month in the year since around 2007, Sir David Attenborough told BBC viewers in 2022 that the region could be summer ice-free by 2035. The climate hysteric Al Gore never quite recovered his authority when he said all the ice could be gone by 2014.

There is still an occasional sighting in mainstream media but the ice vanishing act is having to be retired. In fact the smarter scientists seem to be rushing to accept the ice data while moving the climate trenches back to more defendable lines. The England paper notes a “surprising, but not unexpected pause” simulated by climate models, “relatively frequently”. Old school to the end, the Guardian reported last March that “scientists say” that ice-free summers were possible in the Arctic within the next decade.

Here is the graphic evidence from the two databases consulted by the England team.

These scientists are not the only ones to spot something that appears to have alluded mainstream journalists, scientists and politicians, keen as always to promote the Net Zero fantasy. Recently, the Arctic scientist Allan Astrup Jensen noted that the summer ice had plateaued from 1979-97, and then fell for 10 years. Either side of the drop – manna from heaven for climate cranks – there have been losses, albeit minimal ones. In fact, evidence shows that 1979 was a high cyclical point in Arctic sea ice, a cherry-picked date that conveniently marks the start of more accurate satellite measurements. Sea ice extent was lower in the 1950s and observations stretching back 200 years suggest a 70-80 year waxing and waning cycle. In line with these findings, scientists suggest ocean currents play a large part in determining the sea ice extent.

Last year, the Daily Sceptic noted that Arctic sea ice had soared to its highest level for 21 years. The article noted this interesting and correct fact but made our usual point that ice trends can only be understood over a long, preferably very long term context. The BBC More or Less statistical radio programme referred to the article without putting the high in context. Rather it provided a case study in how alarmists counter the obvious lengthy pause. Professor Julienne Stroeve from UCL suggested the ice extent was thinner, although the presenter Tom Colls had to admit, “the data is not available yet”. What you see, claimed Stroeve, is that the trend is downwards for four decades. The overall decline in long-term Arctic ice is very easy to see, added Colls. A more statistically objective view, something the programme constantly tells listeners it aims to provide, might have noted the lower levels of the 1950s and the recent obvious lengthy pause.

Of course when you are in the climate alarm business, there is a frequent need to explain why the various scares and tipping points never seem to occur. One favoured approach is to simply ignore any unwelcome improvement such as the coral growing back in record amounts on the Great Barrier Reef, and hope nobody has noticed. The other favoured tactic is to state that the computer models that predict one thing are in fact still entirely correct when the opposite occurs. We might refer to this as the ‘global warming leads to global cooling’ explanation. Since computer models rely on inadequate human input of a chaotic and non-linear atmosphere that is impossible to fully understand, it is usually possible to claim with a tweak or two that they were right all along.

The England paper is to be congratulated for laying out the Arctic sea ice data but most of its work is seemingly designed to stay onside with those using computer models to provide what is sometimes called ‘evidence’ of a climate crisis. Rather than the multi-decadal pause being an unexpected event, the scientists note, “comprehensive climate models from CMIP5 and CMIP6 simulate such pauses relatively frequently”. According to these climate model simulations, it is noted, “this pause in the loss of Arctic sea ice could plausibly continue for the next five to 10 years”. ‘Plausible’ and ‘evidence’, it might be reasonably pointed out, are not words that always spring to mind when considering the output of climate computer models. It is of course only one small step that is needed for the crystal ball pseudoscientists to claim they can use models to attribute individual weather events to humans eating Big Macs and driving SUVs.

We can assume that the sea ice predictions of Gore and Attenborough were also derived  from computer models – ever reliable to provide whatever scare you want to promote.

But all can be forgiven in the climate Armageddon business, particularly if you happen to be a high-profile eco loon like Gore. It would have been a “rather brave person” to have predicted that a sustained slowdown in ice loss was just around the corner after the large losses of 2007 and 2012, states the England team. This despite the ensuing pause which many have shown was “entirely consistent with what climate models simulate”. What utter bunk. How brave do you need to be to understand past sea ice cyclical trends? How much intelligence is required to abstain from making ludicrous predictions of an ice-free Arctic on the basis of two years’ data? And why give a free pass to a redundant American politician looking for a role who has helped cause enormous societal distress and economic destruction by inventing a climate crisis primarily designed to impose a supra-national collectivist agenda?

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.