Green

NYT: Environmental Groups Face ‘Generational’ Setbacks Under Trump – ‘As President dismantles the country’s efforts to fight climate change, enviro groups are back on their heels’ – ‘The morale is destroyed’

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 18:29:33 -0500

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/16/climate/environmental-strategy-trump.html By David GellesClaire Brown and Karen Zraick Aug. 16, 2025Updated 11:50 a.m. ET In the Biden administration, the American environmental movement reached what many of its supporters considered an apex. Congress passed the largest ever federal law to combat climate change. Coal-burning power plants were shutting down. Hundreds of billions of dollars of federal investment in renewable energy, […]

Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter Ella Emhoff suffers from ‘climate anxiety,’ feels ‘disgust’ at state of the world

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 18:21:04 -0500

Ella Emhoff’s climate anxiety clip is being shared and ridiculed on Twitter, but all I feel for Ella, and the millions of young people like her, is sympathy. pic.twitter.com/akAT4430R6 — Lucy Biggers (@LLBiggers) August 15, 2025 # https://nypost.com/2025/08/16/us-news/ella-emhoff-suffers-from-climate-anxiety-feels-disgust-at-state-of-the-world-whiney-tiktok-video/ By Georgia Worrell NY Post excerpt: Failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ lefty, activist stepdaughter was back to her whiney […]

In France, Sweltering Is a Climate Virtue: Paris seeks ‘energy sobriety’ & wants you to use a fan & limit the AC to a single room & set to 78°F or warmer

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 11:12:44 -0500

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/in-france-sweltering-is-a-climate-virtue-77145796 By The Editorial Board Most of France has been sweltering under a heat wave this week, so naturally air conditioning has become the latest flash point in climate politics. The climate scolds want to prod the public into adopting what they call “energy sobriety,” and the French are discovering that in practice this means […]

A Perfect Match! BlackRock’s Larry ‘You have to force behaviors’ Fink appointed co-chairman of World Economic Forum – Meanwhile, WEF clears founder Klaus Schwab of wrongdoing

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 09:20:23 -0500

Larry Fink seeks to continue The World Economic Forum's 'enduring mission'

‘Beyond Chemicals’: ‘Beyond Meat is beyond screwed’ – The Decline of Beyond Meat…Plant-based ‘meat’ company facing potential Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 09:05:42 -0500

Beyond Meat is beyond screwed… Beyond Meat is beyond screwed… Excerpt from Revolver News: Economic Times: Plant-based meat pioneer Beyond Meat is facing a potential Chapter 11 bankruptcy after reporting falling sales, dwindling cash reserves, and mounting debt, according to bills.com, which confirmed it on August 12. Once credited with creating the market for […]

‘Grossly exaggerated’: Media gives ‘little attention’ to new bombshell DOE climate report – Interview with co-author Physicist Dr. Steve Koonin

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 09:01:04 -0500

‘Grossly exaggerated’: Media gives ‘little attention’ to new bombshell climate report By Paul Homewood We looked at the new DoE climate report the other day, which put climate change into perspective. Here, Andrew Bolt interviews Steve Koonin, one of the report’s authors and formerly Obama’s Under Secretary for Science, Department of Energy:

New Study Thoroughly Disassembles The CO2-Drives-Climate Assumption In One Fell Swoop – ‘CO2 only contributes about 4-5% to the greenhouse effect, whereas water vapor & clouds contribute 95%’

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 16:00:06 -0500

New Study Thoroughly Disassembles The CO2-Drives-Climate Assumption In One Fell Swoop By Kenneth Richard Not only does CO2 have no discernible effect on climate, but any alleged anthropogenic role within the hypothetical greenhouse effect is not detectable either. In recent decades there has been a concerted effort to assert it is “settled” science to characterize […]

Cheers! NASA acting dir. Sean Duffy says climate science will ‘move aside,’ with NASA only focusing on space exploration

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 13:06:32 -0500

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5453230-duffy-nasa-climate-science/ BY RACHEL FRAZIN Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said Thursday that climate and earth science at the agency will “move aside” as it refocuses solely on space exploration. “All the climate science and all of the other priorities that the last administration had at NASA we’re going to move aside, and all of the […]

A First-Of-Its-Kind Lawsuit Seeks Wrongful Death Climate Damages From Oil Companies. Sealed Court Docs Show a Rockefeller-Funded Green Group Is Steering It

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 12:51:02 -0500

A First-Of-Its-Kind Lawsuit Seeks Wrongful Death Climate Damages From Oil Companies. Sealed Court Docs Show a Rockefeller-Funded Green Group Is Steering It. The case could lead to more wrongful death and even criminal homicide cases against oil companies By Thomas Catenacci August 15, 2025 A first-of-its-kind lawsuit seeks to compel oil companies to pay wrongful […]

The Left Is Litigating America Into an Energy Crisis

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 12:49:00 -0500

Op-Ed: The Left Is Litigating America Into an Energy Crisis By Madison Gesiotto Gilbert Excerpt: Once a global leader in energy innovation, California is now becoming a case study in how to sue an industry out of existence. Gavin Newsom has turned the state into a legal meat grinder for energy producers, dragging them into […]

No, Tribune, Short Term AI Weather Analysis Provides No Insight Concerning Climate Change

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 06:30:47 -0500

The Tribune News Service article, “AI is fast-tracking climate research,” embraces a misleading central premise. Although AI can speed up certain weather data processing tasks, it is unable to magically make long-term climate forecasts more accurate. The piece blurs the line between short-term weather model gains and the far more uncertain, decades-scale climate projections — a fundamental error that misleads both policymakers and the public.

The article quotes AZTI marine biologist Ángel Borja saying, “It will allow us to process data and get results much faster, so people that make decisions can act faster, too.” This might be true for fisheries management or local ocean data sets, but when applied to climate, speed does not equal accuracy. Acting “faster” on flawed or incomplete climate projections risks imposing and enshrining harmful and costly policies for decades, based on noise or computer model errors, not an accurate signal.

Here is a breakdown of each of the claims in the article.

Claim: “Some AI-powered models are already outperforming conventional forecasting systems.”

Yes — but that’s in weather forecasting, which operates on hours-to-weeks timescales. Even Microsoft’s Aurora and Google DeepMind’s GraphCast, cited in the story, focus on short-term atmospheric prediction. This has almost nothing to do with the 30-year climate averages that define climate science. See Climate at a Glance: Climate Model Fallibility.

Claim: “AI models… can enable climate scientists to explore hundreds of times more scenarios than they can today.”

Quantity isn’t quality. Exploring “hundreds” of flawed scenarios faster doesn’t change the fact that climate models — AI or not — still have massive uncertainty ranges and are built upon unverified assumptions. Observations show CMIP6 climate models overstate warming trends by nearly double actual measurements as told in Climate Models vs. Measured Data. If your inputs and physics are wrong, multiplying the number of runs just multiplies the wrongness.

Claim: “High-quality weather information is the first step to setting warning systems.”

True, for short-term weather events — but irrelevant to long-term accurate forecasts of changes in a regions climate. Weather quality doesn’t fix deep uncertainties in equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), which still ranges from 0.8°C to almost 6°C by 2100. Nor does it solve the known ±4 Watts per square meter radiative cloud forcing error — more than 4,000 times the estimated signal from a year’s worth of CO₂ emissions according to the Hoover Institution.

Claim: “AI is set to turbocharge what the center can offer policymakers… allowing them to make more-informed decisions.”

This is the most dangerous overreach. Climate is by definition a 30-year statistical average. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) defines climate as “…the average weather conditions for a particular location and over a long period of time. “Fast-tracking” such projections is meaningless — the data horizon can’t be shortened without destroying the definition of climate itself. Worse, rushing policy on the back of still-uncertain models risks trillion-dollar mistakes.

Tribune News Service: please stop confusing flash with substance. AI is not a magical oracle of climate truth — it’s a faster, sometimes cheaper way to crunch the same flawed models that have consistently overshot observed warming. Until climate models can reconcile with reality, narrow their error bars, resolve cloud physics, and stop producing 200% exaggerations of observed warming, your framing of AI as a “climate game-changer” is not journalism — it’s marketing copy. And marketing copy dressed as science is worse than ignorance; it’s an invitation to policy disaster.

The post No, Tribune, Short Term AI Weather Analysis Provides No Insight Concerning Climate Change appeared first on ClimateRealism.

False Stories in the New York Times and the Seattle Times on Western Washington Megafires

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 06:30:24 -0500

From the Cliff Mass weather blog, via WattsUpWithThat.

[Last week], the New York Times ran a story that was blatantly false, with the Seattle Times featuring it as well.

The claim: that Western Washington will experience more “megafires” due to human-caused global warming (climate change).

Unfortunately, the writer of this story (a Washington State stringer for the NY Times) failed to examine the historical record or the best science, getting the essential facts wrong.

How do I know the writer got it wrong?

Because for the past two years, I have researched this very issue and just published a paper on this topic in the peer-reviewed literature (here). I have read every paper and report on this issue.

So exactly that did the NY Times (and the Seattle Times) get wrong?

The article defines megafires as ones that involve hundreds of thousands of acres.

How many such fires have occurred since 1900 in western Washington?

ONE. The Yacolt Fire of 1902 (238,000 acres), just north of the Columbia River.

Has there been an increase in the number or size of large western Washington fires during the past 50 years, a period in which the Earth and our region have warmed?

The answer is no, which alone should make one doubt the NY Times claims.

If global warming contributes to big fires, we should be seeing increases in the number of big western Washington fires due to such climate change. We are not.

The reason for this lack of correlation between warming and big local fires is clear.

Big western Washington fires are very different animals from the small localized westside fires, such as the current Bear Gulch fire on the Olympic Peninsula (about 4000 acres now).

To have a “megaburn” burn in western Washington, one needs strong, sustained easterly (winds from the east. No matter what the temperature, no matter what the prior rainfall, without strong easterly winds we do not get westside megafires.

It is very difficult to produce large wildfires in the very moist environment of western Washington forests. Only strong easterly winds make it possible.

How do I know this?

Because in my research (again published), I looked at EVERY large western Washington and Oregon fire of the past 150 years, examining all available weather observations and simulating most of them with a modern high-resolution model (see sample below of near-surface winds for the 1902 Yacolt fire, colors indicate wind speed).

Every one of them was associated with strong easterly flow.

So what does this have to do with climate change and global warming?

It turns out that strong easterly winds are REDUCED in our area under global warming/climate change.

You read that right. The threat of the necessary strong easterly winds is LESSENED by climate change.

I can tell you why.

Anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming is greater in the interior of continents than over the slower-to-warm oceans. Virtually every climate simulation shows this…it is not controversial (see example below from regional climate runs made by my group)

Warm air is less dense than cold air, which results in preferential pressure declines inland than over the slower-to-warm coastal areas.

If pressure falls more inland (where it warms more), then winds tend to move from west to east (air tends to blow from a high-pressure area to a lower-pressure pressure).

Onshore flow like this is just the OPPOSITE of that needed for big western Washington wildfires.

To put it succinctly: the NY Times and Seattle Times not only got the story wrong, they got it REVERSED. Global warming will reduce the potential for western Washington mega-wildfires because the necessary easterly winds are weakened.

The writer of this story did not bother to examine the frequency of local megafires nor understand the meteorology that drives them.

Such sloppy and poorly researched “journalism” misinforms readers and leads to poor decision-making. Very disappointing.

The post False Stories in the New York Times and the Seattle Times on Western Washington Megafires appeared first on ClimateRealism.

AP: ‘People often make wrong climate choices, a study says. One surprise is owning a dog’ – ‘Dogs are big meat eaters, & meat is a significant contributor to climate change’

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 23:00:47 -0500

https://www.wcax.com/2025/08/13/people-often-make-wrong-climate-choices-study-says-one-surprise-is-owning-dog/ By The Associated Press It turns out many Americans aren’t great at identifying which personal decisions contribute most to climate change. A study recently published by the National Academy of Sciences found that when asked to rank actions, such as swapping a car that uses gasoline for an electric one, carpooling or reducing food waste, participants […]

Artificial Intelligence Means Farewell to ‘Net-Zero’ Fantasy – Climate goals are ‘a dead letter’

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 07:06:18 -0500

https://dcjournal.com/artificial-intelligence-means-farewell-to-net-zero-fantasy/ by Peter Murphy Artificial Intelligence is upon us, is here to stay, and is heading in one direction: more. More AI means more electric power generation — a lot more. “Green” or “renewable” energy is not going to cut it, no matter the fantasies of the climate-change doomsday crowd. That means the climate goals […]

Watch: Princeton University’s Dr. Will Happer: Climate sceince has been hijacked — Academic freedom is dying

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 06:57:06 -0500

— , When professors talk climate in private, it’s science. When politicians & media talk climate, it’s propaganda.… pic.twitter.com/k6U3vHE81t — Freedom Research (@freedom_rsrch) August 12, 2025

Wrong, Los Angeles Times, Declining Academic Rigor Is Responsible for Falling Test Scores, Not Climate Change

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 06:30:07 -0500

The Los Angeles Times (LAT) recently published an article asserting that “rising heat is causing students to underperform across the globe.” This is false. This is the kind of tidy, single‑cause climate narrative that papers love for two reasons. First, it absolves one of their favorite liberal institutions, the public school system, of responsibility for poor student performance. Second, it points to climate change as a convenient scapegoat for public schools’ failure, no matter how ridiculous that connection sounds to any reasonable person. The LAT’s claims don’t square with history, which includes decades of education policy that have steadily watered down standards. It also ignores an easy solution to improve student comfort, air conditioning.

The author of the LAT article, “Rising heat is causing students to underperform across the globe,” claims, “[e]ven on days when temperatures were between 80 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the data show that students can experience heat stress, followed by a drop in cognitive performance.”

That’s a sweeping generalization ignoring the fact that correlation is not proof of causation.

Basic historical perspective matters. The author of the LAT article ignored the fact that the 1930s were far hotter than at present—yet no nationwide academic collapse followed. See the figure below from the EPA:

Figure. Annual values of the U.S. Heat Wave Index, from 1895 to 2020 for the contiguous 48 states. The index defines a heat wave as a period lasting at least four days with an average temperature that would only be expected to occur once every 10 years, based on the historical record. Source: Environmental Protection Agency, “Climate Change Indicators: Heat Waves,” https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heat-waves

As seen in the figure, the United States endured extraordinary heat waves in the 1930s, with many all‑time state heat records set during that decade still standing. Yet there’s no evidence of a contemporaneous, heat‑driven academic nosedive following those years. In fact, during the 1930’s, when there was no air conditioning at all, the number of people unable to read or write in any language, the illiteracy rate, was 4.3 percent in the United States. By comparison, today’s modern public school system has resulted in approximately 21 percent of the adult population being functionally illiterate, meaning they struggle to perform basic reading tasks, lacking the basic reading skills to navigate everyday life.

If heat alone were an academic wrecking ball, the 1930s should have left a stark, indelible crater in student outcomes. They didn’t. For context, see Climate at a Glance: U.S. Heat Waves.

In fact, it’s not clear that hot temperatures necessarily result in declining academic performance. Each year perennially hot India and Southeast Asian countries produce thousands of the world’s top scientists, engineers, statisticians, computer scientists, and mathematicians. Heat evidently hasn’t stunted those nations’ children and teens’ abilities to learn.

Even if heat matters at the margins, air conditioning (AC) neutralizes most of it—and most schools in the United States have (or are adding) AC systems. According to this report,

In the 1950s, the introduction of air conditioning into schools across the United States played a crucial role in transforming the educational landscape. This innovation not only made year-round learning possible but also enhanced student well-being, academic performance, and the overall quality of education.

Hot stuffy rooms may impact learning, but that’s a building‑management problem, not “a climate crisis.” The strongest empirical study on “heat and learning” found that air conditioning largely erases and impact heat might have on test scores. The authors explicitly conclude that learning losses from hotter school days are mitigated by classroom AC.

In practice, American districts have been steadily installing or upgrading AC. Examples range from Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) policy of AC in classrooms to continuing district‑level build‑outs: The website LAist reports LAUSD’s AC policy and challenges keeping aging units running. School districts in historically cooler locations, like in Denver, are also rapidly installing air conditioning in those campuses currently lacking it.

A 2020 GAO report found that 41% of districts needed HVAC updates—telling us many systems exist but are aging and need replacement, not that AC is absent.

If the LAT were serious about student performance related to temperatures a better headline for its article would have been, “Increase Air Conditioning in Schools to Boost Learning.” Instead, we get climate alarm.

The real story of falling performance is three decades or more of “dumbing down” education. The uncomfortable truth is that U.S. schools have been lowering expectations, and inflating grades for years. Simultaneously, the education establishment has been radicalized, substituting controversial social programs and subjects while deemphasizing core disciplines, or worse, suggesting that math and science must be viewed through the lens of race or sex. Physical writing is now almost unknown and reading for pleasure, and the use of imagination it requires, has collapsed—especially among teens—replaced by the instant feed of video games and online media, which require no substantive imaginative thought. These trends pre‑date any recent heat uptick and track far better with long‑run test stagnation and decline.

Here are some points on those issues.

1) Grade inflation is real—and long‑running

ACT’s multi‑state analyses document decades of grade inflation in high schools, not explained away by student or school characteristics. Their review: [Grade Inflation Continues to Grow in the Past Decade] shows sustained growth in GPAs unaccompanied by commensurate gains in external scoring measures.

2) Standards and accountability have been eased—including eliminated exit exams

California suspended and then eliminated its high school exit exam via SB‑172, severing the link between a diploma and minimum academic mastery. That’s not climate; that’s policy.

Alongside this sits decades‑long debate over social promotion (passing students to the next grade absent mastery), documented in research and practitioner statements.

3) Deep reading is disappearing

Federal data show a decades‑long collapse in reading for pleasure, tightly associated with lower comprehension and vocabulary growth. The National Endowment for the Arts summarizes NAEP’s long‑term trend survey findings: from 2012–2023, the share of 13‑year‑olds reading “almost every day” fell sharply; their average reading score also declined over that period.

When students don’t read deeply, they don’t build the background knowledge and vocabulary that drive success in complex texts—no matter the thermostat setting.

4) What the tests actually show over 30 years

The NAEP Long‑Term Trend and main NAEP series—our best consistent yardsticks—report that U.S. reading and math scores have stagnated or drifted down in the 2010s–2020s after earlier gains in the 1990s/2000s.

None of these educational assessments attribute long‑run U.S. underperformance to rising classroom temperatures. They point to curriculum, instruction, standards, engagement, and literacy habits.

Perhaps, not coincidentally, the decline in test scores has also coincided with the introduction and sometimes forced integration of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Critical Race Theory, into schools. Often displacing historically core courses in history, civics, and other disciplines.

The LAT took a complex, decades‑in‑the‑making education problem and tried to pin it on the weather mislabeled as climate change. That’s not journalism, rather it is narrative promotion. The record shows that in 1930s were hotter were hotter than today, and many countries around the world are hotter than the United States, and have been throughout history, yet high quality learning, with higher literacy rates, existed in those times and nations. The evidence also shows that to the extent that temperature does hamper learning, AC largely neutralizes heat‑classroom effects. Also, thirty years of softening standards, grade inflation, social promotion, and the decline of real reading line up far better with the test score arc. So, spare us the climate catechism—instead, try write a headline and a story with intellectual honesty for a change.

The post Wrong, Los Angeles Times, Declining Academic Rigor Is Responsible for Falling Test Scores, Not Climate Change appeared first on ClimateRealism.

Trump Sec. of State Marco Rubio: ‘The U.S. will not accept any environmental agreement that harms the interests of the American people’ – USA will reject the ‘Net-Zero Framework’

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 20:18:25 -0500

The United States will not accept any environmental agreement that harms the interests of the American people. The International Maritime Organization’s proposal for a “Net-Zero Framework” is a tax on Americans levied by an unaccountable UN organization. @SecDuffy,… — Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) August 12, 2025

Extreme weather expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. responds to AP’s ’10 questions’ on new federal climate report: Calls some questions ‘absolutely ridiculous’ & tells AP ‘your goal here is not journalism but team sport’ – ‘The (UN) IPCC is not a sacred text’

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 20:03:32 -0500

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-climate-beat-goes-on The Climate Beat Goes On My response to 10 questions from the Associated Press on the DOE CWG report By Roger Pielke Jr. Excerpts: Last week I was contacted by two reporters at the Associated Press with a request to comment on the Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group (DOE CWG) report and the […]

CEO of California utility brags that AI will remotely control your appliances & drain your EV battery to ‘smooth demand’ – Beware: The ‘Smart Grid’ Will Automatically Turn Off Your Air Conditioner & Set Your Thermostat

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 19:45:24 -0500

Patricia Poppe, the CEO of California utility PG&E, enthusiastically explains her cheerful vision of a future in which they will use AI to automatically disable your devices and drain your electric vehicle battery to “smooth demand.” https://t.co/uHS5bSxtQG — Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) August 8, 2025 Beware: The “Smart Grid” Will Automatically Turn Off Your Air Conditioner […]

Climate Lockdowns: ‘COVID was the rehearsal…Climate is the show’ – Canadians banned from ‘walk in the woods’ for their own safety?!

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 19:37:39 -0500

https://irrationalfear.substack.com/p/climate-lockdowns DR. MATTHEW WIELICKI Excerpt: This month, Canadians learned that a walk in the woods could cost more than a speeding ticket. Nova Scotia barred hiking, biking, fishing, and even picnics on forested land and advertised fines up to $25,000 for violators. https://halifax.citynews.ca/2025/08/06/several-25000-fines-issued-for-violating-burn-bans-says-natural-resources/ New Brunswick shut the public out of Crown land for “safety.” Newfoundland and Labrador […]