From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

First they came for your cars, then your gas boilers, travel, food and farms. Now the Net Zero nutters, using their preposterous and invented climate emergency scare, have medicines, anaesthetics and painkillers in their crosshairs. Moves are afoot to reduce the use of popular, cheap, safe and effective nitrous oxide in the UK and replace it with substitutes such as methoxyflurane, a gas long banned in the United States following concerns about kidney and liver damage. Of course any science that disputes climate Armageddon is of little intertest to political activists, but the rest of us might be interested to note recent findings that found any ‘global warming’ caused by gases used by anaesthetists was “negligible and cannot be measured or felt”.

Nitrous oxide, sometimes known as laughing gas, is in common use in dentistry and maternity wards. It is carried on ambulances and is considered a very safe and effective analgesic medicine. But the UK National Health Service (NHS) has made a very silly pledge to be carbon Net Zero by 2040. According to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), the use of anaesthetics, which also include isoflurane, desflurane and sevoflurane, has been identified as a “carbon hotspot“. The NHS Long Term Plan is said to highlight these gases “as an area for action” and the RCEM says consideration should be given to the use of alternatives “where feasible and safe to do so”. The Royal College of Anaesthetists recently reported that many practitioners had moved away from routine nitrous oxide use in general anaesthesia, including in previous “high-usage” areas.

Methoxyflurane is marketed under the brand name Penthrox and has had a chequered medical past. Common in hospitals from the 1960s, it fell out of favour after the concerns about kidney and liver damage were raised. A number of other worries mean that it is best used only on patients who are in reasonable health. It remains banned in the United States, but is available in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland and the UK.

Pressure to use alternatives such as Penthrox is undoubtedly being applied across the NHS with the use of a ‘Global Warming Potential’ metric used to claim that anaesthetic gases are hundreds to thousands of times more warming than carbon dioxide. However, this metric is controversial even within the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In a short recent paper titled ‘Emissions of Anaesthetic Causes Negligible Warming‘ and published by the CO₂ Coalition, three scientists note the opinion of the IPCC that: “It must be stressed that there is no universally accepted methodology for combing all the relevant factors into a single global warming potential for greenhouse gas emissions.” The NHS tells patients that using nitrous oxide “significantly increases the environmental effect of your anaesthetic”, with every hour equivalent to driving a small car 106 km. Perhaps slightly more reassuring for a women giving birth or a patient undergoing root canal surgery is the view of the CO₂ Coalition scientists that the global warming potential is a “nearly irrelevant parameter for assessing whether the warming from anaesthetic gases will be damaging or not”.

In the table below the scientists detail the temperature increases that might be expected from the heat-trapping influences caused by the most important medical gases. The authors note that any warming will be in the order of a hundredth of a degree centigrade – too small to feel or measure. Those interested in learning more about the physics and quantitative details of atmospheric warming are invited to read the discussion that is included in the paper.

Lest it be said that fears about the removal of common anaesthetic gases is a minority sceptical interest, a letter in the Guardian in 2021 will be of considerable interest. Dame Julia Slingo, former Met Office Chief Scientist, and Dr Mary Slingo, Senior Registrar in Anaesthetics at Southampton General Hospital, wrote that any impact of the gases’ tiny emissions and radiative forcing on the climate “will, quite frankly, be ‘lost in translation’”. The effect is “vanishingly small” and invoking climate change as a reason for abandoning their use “does not hold up scientifically”.

Concerns about anaesthetic gases are of course just another one of the never-ending scares designed to enforce the Net Zero fantasy. Removing all hydrocarbons from an industrial society means reducing living conditions to a brutal primitivism. Try the removal of many medicines, try also little food or heat. Despite this, around 200 MPs expressed support for the recent Climate and Nature Bill that sought to outlaw 90% of all hydrocarbon use in the United Kingdom within a decade. A four-hour long clown show featuring almost every debunked climate scare imaginable tried to force the bill to an important second reading, advancing a law that would, if implemented, have led to the almost certain collapse of British society. Thankfully this appalling bill, supported by all 72 Lib Dems and 80 Labour MPs, failed to pass.

When it comes to making unsubstantiated claims to harm human health, it appears that laughing gas and hot air remain in plentiful supply.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Stop Press: Watch (or listen to) the Eighth Annual Fake News Awards, with the Daily Sceptic being cited for “The Fakest Global Warming Story of the Year” in our report on the Met Office literally making up 103 fake temperature stations.

Roger Caiazza

The difference between weather and climate is constantly mistaken by climate change advocates Recently Southern California wildfires have been blamed on climate change.  Patrick Brown addressed the question how much did “Climate Whiplash” impact the Los Angeles fires.  His excellent analysis raises concerns that I want to highlight.

Weather vs. Climate

Every time there is an extreme weather event proponents for eliminating fossil fuels confuse weather and climate when they claim the effects of GHG emissions on global warming are obvious today. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service “Weather reflects short-term conditions of the atmosphere while climate is the average daily weather for an extended period of time at a certain location.”  It goes on to explain “Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.” 

Hydroclimate Volatility

Patrick Brown described the Swain et al. (2025): Hydroclimate Volatility on a Warming Earth Nature review paper. He quoted the first line of the UCLA Press Release for the paper: “Los Angeles is burning, and accelerating hydroclimate whiplash is the key climate connection”  and remarked: “Thanks in no small part to the huge journalistic audience that lead author Dr. Daniel Swain commands, the “climate whiplash” vernacular was immediately adopted in international headlines covering the recent Los Angeles fires.”  This is a classic example of an extreme weather event that is linked to climate change by organizations and individuals that have a vested interest in advancing the threat of climate change.

Brown noted that: “the paper has demonstrated incredible reach and is in the 99.99th percentile in terms of online attention for all research (not just climate research) of a similar age.”  However he echoes my concern: “But as is the case for so much high-profile climate science, there is a large gap between the impression conveyed by the coverage and the impression left from the observational data.”

Climate Whiplash

I have never heard of the concept of climate whiplash before this story broke.  Brown explains:

Dangerous, intense wildfires require dry vegetation. The idea behind the climate whiplash connection to the Los Angeles fires is that very wet winters in Southern California in 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 enabled a great deal of vegetation growth but that the very dry beginning of the 2024-2025 winter allowed that vegetation to dry out, resulting in a landscape primed for uncontrollable wildfires. Swain explains the mechanism in interviews with Adam Conover and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

In order for this to be a climate change problem, we need to know whether these events are increasing.  Brown noted that:

The idea being conveyed is that these climate whiplash events are dramatically increasing not just in Southern California, but globally.  “Every fraction of a degree of warming speeds the growing destructive power of the transitions” Swain said.

Brown described background for this concept:

Taking a step back, the fundamental theory undergirding changing “hydroclimate” (think water cycle where we are considering not just how precipitation provides moisture but also how evaporation takes moisture) whiplash is nothing new. It is a basic fact of atmospheric physics that a warmer atmosphere can “hold” more water vapor (about 7% more per °C of warming). This warming influence on the water cycle has been discussed in detail since at least the 1980s (e.g., Manabe, & Wetherald, 1986)). At first, most research discussed a general intensification of the water cycle, typically emphasizing that already dry areas would get drier and already wet areas would get wetter as the globe warmed. However, by the mid-2000s, studies like Trenberth et al. (2003), Chou & Neelin (2004), Meehl et al. (2005), and Held & Soden (2006) began pointing out that the same physics (warmer atmosphere holds more moisture) can drive larger variability in the same place—heavier rain events juxtaposed with prolonged and/or more intense dry spells.

These concepts are taught regularly as a part of Climate Change 101 classes, including my own, and they are accepted as consensus climate science, articulated with “high confidence” in the IPCC’s most recent assessment report:

“A warmer climate increases moisture transport into weather systems, which, on average, makes wet seasons and events wetter (high confidence)”

“Warming over land drives an increase in atmospheric evaporative demand and the severity of droughts (high confidence).”

The reason I wanted to highlight Brown’s analysis of this paper is because he highlights a key complication for the general public’s understanding of climate change.  It is accepted that a warmer climate increases moisture in the atmosphere and drought severity.  The implications of those mechanisms are important with respect to GHG emission reduction policies.  The question is so what? What is the magnitude of the change, what impacts might result from these mechanisms, and do we expect that changes in global temperatures due to GHG emissions will result in significant impacts from these mechanisms are all questions that should be addressed.

I fully endorse Brown’s explanation, especially the statement that I highlighted below:

However, I like to point out that it is useful to break down lines of evidence in climate science into categories of

1. Historical observations/trends
2. Fundamental theory
3. Mathematical modeling

I know from teaching the “wet gets wetter, dry gets drier” concept that the evidence for increased variability in the same location is much stronger in the theory and modeling categories than it is in observations. This is important because observations should take precedence over the other two. Focusing on observations tells us a lot about how big of an effect we’re talking about (i.e., do we see major trends emerge through the noise of the observation system and natural variability?). Furthermore, a fundamental point of doing science is to explain observations. The canonical order of operations is that first you observe some phenomenon, and then you use the tools of theory and modeling to make sense of it.

Observations

Brown goes on to evaluate observations of the whiplash where increased precipitation enabled a great deal of vegetation growth followed by a period of decreased precipitation that allowed that vegetation to dry out, “resulting in a landscape primed for uncontrollable wildfires”.  I am only going to summarize two of the results.

Brown evaluated observations of year-to-year water cycle variability following the methodology of the Swain et al. (2025) paper. Note that he only evaluated the effect over land because it has no effect on wildfires if it occurs over the ocean.  He did not find any compelling evidence for an increase in these events in California.  The results for global land were described:

So, over all global land, at the timescale that is most relevant to the Los Angeles fires (annual), in the premiere observational dataset (ERA5), using Swain et al. (2025)’s own data, we have seen a long-term decrease in whiplash frequency (this, by the way, is acknowledged in passing in the text of Swain et al. (2025) on page 37).

Let’s pause for a second to recall the first line of the UCLA press release (“Los Angeles is burning, and accelerating hydroclimate whiplash is the key climate connection.”) and the global news coverage it generated. Would any reader of this coverage have any idea about the incredibly important caveats above? Not that I can tell.

In the next section Brown discussed the magnitude of changes in annual water cycle variability.  He stated that:

Now, to be fair, Swain et al. (2025) purport to show evidence of increasing whiplash frequency at multiple timescales, spatial extents (over the ocean, for example), and in other datasets.

However, highlighting changes in arbitrarily-defined “event” frequency without reporting changes in “event” magnitude is misleading, and it goes against one of the core recommendations of the National Academies of Sciences 2016 report on Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change. As Ted Shepherd recently put it in his presentation to the committee responsible for the next such report: “Frequency is the more impressive number, but magnitude is perhaps the more physically interpretable number.”

Brown’s analysis of the magnitude of the changes found: “1 we see no long-term increase in water cycle variability at the location and timescale relevant to the Los Angeles fires.”

Patrick Brown Summary

Brown’s summary is important.  He notes that the choice of analysis data used affects the conclusion:

While “climate whiplash events” may be increasing in frequency under most of the very specific, selected definitions used and datasets investigated in Swain et al. (2025), the general idea that annual precipitation (or more generally, the water cycle, which includes evaporation) is becoming dramatically more variable is not supported when a broader set of datasets and definitions are used.

Brown worries that this analysis and the publicity it received is a problem:

Would a reader of Swain et al. (2025), or especially its coverage, have any idea about the weakness of its broader conclusions or the lack of robustness of its results to different definitions and datasets? Almost certainly not, and I contend that this is a major problem for public understanding and trust in climate science.

One of my over-arching issues with the existential threat narrative is that the accepted science is distorted with respect to reality of natural variability.  Brown explains:

Why don’t we see a robust increase in water cycle variability given the strong theory underpinning “wet gets wetter, dry gets drier”? For one thing, the theoretical size of the effect is known to be quite small relative to natural, unforced variability, making it inherently difficult to detect. For example, we see in Figure 7 above that year-to-year rainfall in Los Angeles naturally varies by as much as 300%, yet the signal we are looking for is one to two orders of magnitude less than this. It is also apparently the case that observational uncertainty is larger than the signal (or there would not be such disagreement between datasets). Physically, perhaps increasing mean precipitation is offsetting the increase in calculated evaporation in the SPEI index, reducing its variability. Maybe reduced temperature variability (via arctic amplification) is reducing calculated evaporation variability.

I agree with Brown’s concluding remark:

My main discomfort with Swain et al. (2025) and its rollout is that it appears that the primary goal was to create and disseminate the “climate whiplash” meme rather than conduct a truly rigorous evaluation of the evidence, including countervailing evidence. Ultimately, this makes the research a much larger advance in marketing than an advance in science.

Conclusion

Patrick Brown does an excellent job eviscerating the climate whiplash headlined stories based on Swain et al. (2025)’s recent paper.  It is frustrating that biased analyses that confirm pre-conceived get so much attention.  It will require many evaluations like Brown’s to address the misinformation.

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Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.  He has been a practicing meteorologist for nearly 50 years, was a Certified Consulting Meteorologist, and has B.S. and M.S. degrees in meteorology.  The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of his previous employers or any other organization he has been associated with.

Essay by Eric Worrall

The Norwegian ruling coalition government just collapsed due to public anger at energy exports to Britain driving up domestic Norwegian prices.

Blackout Britain threat rises on collapse of Norwegian government

Hannah Boland
Sat, February 1, 2025 at 12:07 AM GMT+10

Britain risks being left more vulnerable to blackouts as a political row in Norway over power exports escalates.

The Norwegian government collapsed this week following a row over EU green energy laws. A junior coalition partner in the government quit in protest at plans to implement the policies, amid a broader rise in energy nationalism in the country.

Experts said the collapse raised questions over Britain’s reliance on Norwegian energy imports to keep the lights on. Last weekend, Norway accounted for 4pc of the UK’s power, coming via cables that run under the North Sea.

…

Britain is expected to become increasingly reliant on electricity imports under Ed Miliband’s net zero push as Labour seeks to decarbonise the grid by switching to intermittent renewables, with wind power forming a crucial pillar of its plans.

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Electricity exports have become a flashpoint in Norway, where the public has been facing soaring energy prices in recent years. Critics have claimed the undersea interconnector cables force prices higher.

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Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/blackout-britain-threat-rises-collapse-140740392.html

This Norwegian development is a disaster for the British economy, an economy which is already dancing on the brink of a recession.

At the very least Norway will likely demand a savage price increase which allows the Norwegian government to subsidise domestic prices from profits made by exporting electricity. At worst Britain will permanently lose 4% of its electricity supply.

Britain’s only hope of overcoming the imminent electricity shortfall is to activate demand management plans – shutting down factories and other businesses during peak periods – and to purchase expensive electricity from hospitals and other facilities which have their own diesel generators, who have agreed to act as a backup supply. Either of these options would be expensive for the British economy.

I am not in any way blaming Norway for wanting a better deal. The Norwegian Government’s first duty is to the people of Norway, and if shutting down the interconnector to Britain can help achieve a better outcome for ordinary Norwegians, this is what the government of Norway should do.

But Britain has been caught with its pants down by this latest development, thanks to their insane pursuit of unreliable renewables backed by unreliable imported electricity.

I’m sure the politicians whose energy illiterate policies made Britain vulnerable to external interruptions of supply won’t suffer blackouts, nor will they personally suffer the financial consequences of coming energy price increases. Ordinary British people might not be so lucky.