The unspoken truth about wildfires

By Matt Ridley. Excerpts:

"wildfires are getting less frequent worldwide, not more, as the globe warms. The acreage burned has decreased steadily since 2000, according to NASA’s satellites, and is thought to have almost halved in a century. The great fires of 1871 in Wisconsin and Michigan burned more than a million hectares long before anybody drove a car"

"this year is an unusually quiet year for wildfire: so quiet it is breaking records for lack of fires by this date, even in Europe. If you don’t believe me, check the figures produced by the Global Wildfire Information System: as of last week, the world had seen 106 million hectares burn this year, the lowest at this date since these records began in 2012. In Europe, just 3.6 million hectares have burned—less than half the average for this date."

"It has been known for many decades that in fire-prone habitats, the longer you go without a fire, the worse the fires will be. So preventing the build-up of tinder by controlled burns is the most important factor."

Here in Britain the government has consistently and relentlessly demanded less ‘cool’ burning—low-intensity, controlled fires—in winter on heather moorland, Britain’s most fire-prone habitat. Such fires have been used by farmers and gamekeepers for generations to create a mosaic of short and long heather. This encourages fresh young heather shoots for sheep and grouse to feed on and makes open areas for rare birds such as golden plover and curlew to nest in. If done in winter it can burn off the rank heather plants while leaving the moss underneath barely touched, as demonstrated by a famous video in which a gamekeeper places a Mars bar in the moss, lights a fierce fire over it, then picks up the unscorched, unmelted chocolate bar, unwraps it and eats it.

Natural England argues that regular cool burning harms the habitat; researchers at York University and elsewhere argue the opposite: that it encourages the growth of sphagnum moss and other species by letting light in. But both sides agree that regular cool burns can dramatically reduce the risk of much more damaging wildfires, which burn down through the moss layer and into the peat. Cutting heather instead is less effective but better than nothing. Yet Natural England has banned heather burning on deep peat altogether and is pushing hard to limit it further everywhere—or at least tie it up in complicated licensing rules. As a result, the fuel load on heather moorland has been increasing; in places the heather is now waist-deep. The National Fire Chiefs Council warned last year that such restrictions on heather management would increase ‘the danger to firefighters and the public’."

"The authorities know their policies increase the fire risks. Here is what the Cairngorm National Park says in its Integrated Wildfire Management Plan about plans to increase shrubs and other vegetation by reducing deer and stopping burning: ‘These habitats will take many years to develop and during the intervening period fuel loads will increase, as will the corresponding need for fire risk mitigation.’ So they knew the risk was increasing. But little was done. John Kirk, a board member of the Cairngorms National Park Authority, told the Strathspey Herald: ‘Everyone is furious… the entire Abernethy forest has no firebreaks.’"

2026 is the quietest year for wild fires in Europe by some distance

From Matt Ridley.

 

 

 

 

After decades of warnings, new data suggest the Atlantic’s vital circulation may withstand climate warming better than feared

See Shifting currents by Paul Voosen in Science. Excerpts:

"Climate models have long warned that global warming could weaken “deep-water formation”—the density-driven sinking that is the engine of the AMOC. The logic is straightforward: As Greenland’s ice sheets melt and sea ice formation declines, North Atlantic waters will freshen. Combined with warmer sea temperatures, the freshening makes surface waters more buoyant. The AMOC was thought to have shut down abruptly during past climate warmings, and a handful of researchers now argue such a tipping point could occur this century. A sputtering AMOC could trigger a sharp cooldown in northwestern Europe, rising seas along the U.S. east coast, and shifts in tropical rainfall."

"most climate researchers think the AMOC is more resilient than these worst case scenarios make it seem. Emerging evidence suggests the AMOC may not have actually collapsed in the warm climates following ice ages. More detailed climate models suggest it could weaken but not collapse in the current surge of warming. And studies of the AMOC’s present behavior do not yet show any clear signs of trouble. They’re also exposing new facets of the circulation that could buffer any eventual weakening."

"That stately flow actually swings wildly year to year, masking any long-term trend, the first RAPID measurements showed. Swings between apparent decline and recovery have since become a hallmark of AMOC monitoring, and a recurring source of alarm and reassessment."

"Gerard McCarthy remembers well the first time he saw an AMOC decline. It was 2011, and McCarthy, now a climate scientist at Maynooth University, had just joined the RAPID team. His first task was calculating AMOC’s strength. Beginning in 2009, it plunged. “Everyone was like, ‘The new guy made a mistake,’” he recalls. Others checked the numbers. The drop held. “We all realized that something dramatic had happened.”

What happened was not caused by climate change, but rather the weather. That winter, unusual swings in air pressure weakened the jet stream and shifted wind patterns, disrupting the AMOC’s flow. The decline likely contributed to a frigid European winter in 2009 and, by leaving more heat in tropical basins, also led to an active Atlantic hurricane season the following summer."

 "It seems the AMOC is not a single conveyor belt, but a belt of belts, each part operating semiautonomously."

"OSNAP has changed the picture in other ways, including by showing that overturning occurs not so much in the Labrador Sea, as models suggested, as it does farther north, in the Irminger and Iceland basins. Additional data suggest deep-water formation is migrating even farther north, into the Arctic Ocean, following the retreat of sea ice, Årthun says. “You’re expanding the reach of this cooling machine.” The northward migration could make the AMOC more resilient to warming"

"New climate model runs that capture more realistic melt from the Greenland Ice Sheet are less dire. In two preprints posted online in the past year—one led by Chuncheng Guo, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), the other led by Oliver Mehling, an ocean modeler at UU—researchers created multiple simulations where carbon emissions continued until 2250 and temperatures rose by up to 7°C. In both studies the AMOC weakened, losing about 40% of its strength. But it never collapsed. Both studies also suggest the weakening is reversible"

"that resilience persisted even in the face of catastrophic warming."

 "even if atmospheric carbon dioxide levels quadrupled, driving extreme warming, the AMOC would decline by 40% after 20 or so years—but once again, it would rebound."

"Evidence from past ice ages seemed to suggest the AMOC switched off entirely when massive pulses of freshwater from the melting of the North American ice sheet poured into the Atlantic. But new work, also presented at Ocean Sciences, suggests the AMOC may not have collapsed at all during these periods." 

Air Conditioning, Scourge of the French Left

Heat waves kill thousands in Europe, but politicians resist the relief Americans can take for granted

By Alexander Kustov. He is an associate professor of global affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Excerpts:

"The French left argues that air conditioning is a selfish indulgence and an ecological menace. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the country’s most prominent left-wing leader, warned that cooling would mean “increasing the damage,” and says he wouldn’t expose his grandchildren to air conditioning because it “destroys your sinuses.”"

"The economist Alan Barreca and his colleagues found that the spread of home cooling explains most of the decline in “hot-day-related fatalities” in the U.S. since 1960."

"Air conditioning accounts for about 3% of global emissions today, and in France, where two-thirds of the power is nuclear and much of the rest is low-carbon, running a unit is close to carbon-free."

"a group of left-wing economists, among them Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty and Kate Raworth, declared economic growth “a doomed strategy” and signed on in support of a road map, developed by United Nations Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter, for a new “degrowth economy.” Its policies aim to reduce material consumption, shorten the workweek, and impose caps on personal income. Underlying this road map is the idea that wanting to be comfortable is shameful."

"In France, a condominium owner generally needs the consent of the other owners to install air conditioning. In the country’s heritage zones, a state architect can veto any unit visible from the street. In England and Wales, an air conditioner that has no heating function requires permission. The canton of Geneva issues a permit for comfort cooling only to people who prove they need it. Spain forbids public and commercial buildings from cooling below 80 degrees."

"The left’s most respectable voices are telling grandmothers to draw down the shutters and wait it out." 

As Europe Sweats, Some Politicians Talk of Air-Conditioning, Not Climate Action

Heat-related deaths and disruptions to daily life are forcing politicians to reckon, in different ways, with a rapidly warming planet

By Michael D. Shear and Jeanna Smialek of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"In the context of northern Europe’s traditionally mild, temperate climate, some left-wing and green parties opposed air-conditioning and have instead favored renovating buildings with architectural fixes to keep them cool when it gets hot. But the dangers to health posed by this week’s heat wave are piling pressure on that view — and changing minds.

In the Belgian city of Ghent, which is run mostly by left-of-center politicians, the municipal website this week discouraged citizens from using air-conditioners, saying that “the best air-conditioner is a tree” and advising they use fans and request a free tree to plant outside their houses.

Maurits Vande Reyde, a right-wing member of the Flemish Parliament, responded to Ghent’s recommendations on social media.

“It is absurd that all governments in our country, under pressure from left-green mumbo-jumbo, advise against the use of air-conditioning,” he wrote on Tuesday. “The most efficient and best solution. How many deaths would the government already have on its conscience with this kind of absurd advice?”

After The New York Times sent a request for comment, Ghent removed wording that read “avoid air-conditioners,” replacing it with the phrase “cool smartly.”

Thomas Dierckens, a spokesman for the mayor of Ghent, said in a written comment that the city was not against air-conditioning — noting that it had installed 30 portable air-conditioners into day care centers this week.

Marine Tondelier, the head of the Green Party in France, acknowledged that she was “breaking a taboo” when she said on Tuesday that “there are places where we can no longer do without air-conditioning.”

In London, Sadiq Khan, the center-left Labour Party mayor, said on Thursday that air-conditioning would need to be installed in the capital’s schools, offices and hospitals, as he warned that London needed to “act now” to strengthen its resilience ahead of worse heat waves to come. And at the European level, Terry Reintke, co-president of the European Parliament’s Green group, said in an interview that some air-conditioning was necessary, alongside longer-term solutions like planting more green spaces."

Global Warming or Just Getting Old?

A World Health Organization panel calls climate change a global health emergency but forgets to adjust its data for age

By Bjorn Lomborg. Excerpts:

"Heat mortality risk rises sharply with age, and Europe has aged dramatically. Since 1990, the share of Europeans over 70 has increased by 78%. Aging alone explains virtually all the observed increase in heat deaths."

"Any honest analysis of mortality in a rapidly aging society uses age-standardized death rates"

"Europe’s standardized heat-death risk has changed only marginally since 1990"

"the increase amounts to fewer than 850 additional heat deaths"

"Age-standardized data shows that cold death rates in Europe have declined by nearly 50% since 1990" 

United Nations advisory panel junked worst-case emissions scenario

See Donald Trump, Climate Scientist: How a presidential tweet forced the media to come to terms with its faulty global-warming reporting by Holman W. Jenkins. Excerpts:

"an authoritative United Nations advisory panel quietly junked a long-misused worst-case emissions scenario known as RCP 8.5, one of the first to notice was the president"

"Piling up worst-case assumptions, including RCP 8.5, the report (from the U.S. government in 2018) showed warming nevertheless to be an affordable burden for Americans, who would be three or four times as rich by 2090 despite an adverse climate." 

"Reporters . . . ignored the numbers and filled their dispatches with adjectives indicating a doom that, hilariously, the study didn’t support."

"the New York Times [is] . . . now admitting that “news stories [i.e., its own] about climate research often emphasized results based on RCP 8.5 as a picture of what the world can expect unless countries slash their emissions, which isn’t right.”"

"Only later was a back story of justification added. In a RCP 8.5 world, all technological progress in the energy field would end. That is, with a strange exception: The technology to allow the world to quintuple its coal consumption, such as burning coal in cars."

"the world consumes more of every kind of energy, even renewables, without necessarily having any deliberate effect on emissions, though those emissions remain far below the RCP 8.5 forecast" 

The Panic Industry’s New Target

A generation coached to fear climate change is now fretting over AI and data centers

By Barton Swaim. Excerpts:

"Where does Mr. Schmidt think young people got the idea that “the climate is breaking”? Where did the “fear” he laments come from? In part from the scores of climate-panic groups to which the Schmidt Family Foundation’s 11th Hour Project has granted hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 20 years. One detail particularly amuses: When 11th Hour first appeared, in 2006, it funded screenings of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary designed to terrorize viewers with 90 minutes of bleak prophecies, now happily exploded. The outfit, like scores of others founded and funded by other progressive billionaires, spends its resources opposing fossil-based energy and trumpeting the dangers of a warming world."

"Last year Bill Gates posted an essay on his website purporting to scold alarmists and express his own moderate view of the climate question, namely that it is a “very important problem” but doesn’t doom civilization. You have to wonder, then, why Mr. Gates has sent so much of his money to Arabella Advisors. Arabella, a pass-through entity now called Sunflower Services, funds a dizzying array of groups that exist to alarm the public over an imminent climate apocalypse and to portray carbon-emitting energy as an existential threat to humanity."

"nobody staffing the multibillion-dollar ganglion of climate nonprofits and activist groups plans on taking a more measured view of the coming cataclysm."

"modern data centers first appeared in the 1990s, when companies learned the benefits of fast internet connectivity and information storage."

"the people showing up at county council meetings to protest the construction of a data center . . . got their talking points from national nonprofits supported by some of the same moneyed outfits the Schmidt and Gates foundations spent the last two decades bankrolling." 

You Can’t Trust ‘Climate Economics’

Governments, banks and other institutions have based policies on models unconnected to reality

By Roger Pielke Jr. Excerpts:

"Nature in December retracted one of the most influential climate economics papers of the past decade. The paper, by Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann and Leonie Wenz, claimed that unmitigated climate change would cost the global economy $38 trillion a year (in 2005 international dollars) by midcentury." 

"The authors acknowledged that its errors were “too substantial” for a correction."

"The retraction, however, isn’t a one-off. It revealed a crack that runs much deeper into the foundation of climate research."

"Can researchers actually measure how climate affects the economy from the historical record?"

"no"

"Federal agencies . . . estimate the “social cost of carbon” when assessing the costs and benefits of proposed environmental policies. This framework has shaped regulations governing appliance standards, pipeline permitting and vehicle emissions."

"the method underlying this subfield of economics can’t do what researchers claim it can. The problem . . . is that the statistical procedure strips out nearly everything that would allow researchers to identify a climate signal, then mistakes the residual noise for that signal. Lumping together countries with similar average temperatures but entirely different institutions, histories and natural resources and then calculating a single damage relationship for all of them doesn’t work; it describes the average but fails to describe a single real place on earth accurately."

"there’s no way out of this methodological predicament; the future effects of climate change are irreducibly uncertain"

"researchers built many of their climate projections on the back of a hypothetical standardized scenario called Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5—a vision of the future which required coal consumption to quintuple by 2100 based on assumptions about future energy use. Those assumptions have already diverged sharply from actual energy trends, and we know today that the scenario is implausibly extreme."

"many scientists continue to emphasize RCP8.5 in climate research"

"Projections of flood damage, heat mortality, agricultural disruption and wildfire risk have rested on an implausible baseline that describes an imaginary, modeled future."

"An insurance company modified a hurricane loss data set by starting from my team’s carefully collected data. Many of those modifications have no documentation and no basis in research."

"papers that have used the corrupted data set remain in the literature today." 

$170 per tonne industrial carbon tax by 2030—currently Ottawa’s plan—will cost Canadian workers $1,160 in reduced income and result in 50,000 fewer jobs

By Ross McKitrick, Elmira Aliakbari, Joel Emes and Milagros Palacios of The Fraser Institute.

Estimated Impacts of a $170 Industrial Carbon Price in Alberta and Canada

• This study, using a computable general equilibrium model of the Canadian economy, examines the economic implications of increasing Alberta’s and Canada’s industrial carbon price to $170 per tonne by 2030, in line with the current federal mandate.
• This policy would impose substantial costs. In Alberta, real GDP could decline by 2.0%, relative to a scenario in which the industrial carbon price does not increase after 2025. This corresponds to about $1,730 per employed person and a decline of more than 10,000 jobs.
• At the national level, the economy would shrink by 1.3%, equivalent to about $1,160 per employed person, with a loss of over 50,000 jobs.
• The impacts are not evenly distributed across the economy. Energy and energy-intensive sectors in Alberta—including electricity, refined fuels, transportation, and utilities—are projected to experience relatively large declines in output.
• Capital earnings decline much more than labour earnings indicating that, despite the loss in real GDP per worker, households are actually shielded in the short run from the worst economic impacts. The large drop in returns to capital, however, can be expected to result in reduced or cancelled investment plans, which will translate into further long-run declines in Canadian living standards.
• Policy makers should understand the full range of potential economic impacts of further increases in carbon prices, especially in a context in which major trading partners like the United States and China are not engaging in similarly aggressive GHG control policies.

Hochul Wants a Climate Reprieve

As utility costs soar in New York, she seeks a delay in cap-and-tax

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"the Democratic Governor is seeking to walk back her state’s climate mandates"

She wants to "postpone implementation of the state’s cap-and-tax program and CO2 emissions cuts"

which "could increase upstate utility bills by about $4,000 a year and gasoline prices by $2.23 a gallon."

"Manufacturers would have to adopt costly, immature technologies like carbon capture. Gas power plants would be required to shut down prematurely in favor of higher-cost offshore wind and batteries."

"The average winter gas bill for New York City’s National Grid utility customers jumped 25% this year"

"Pipeline constraints have limited supply."

"gas and nuclear plants have been forced to close." 

Newsom’s Climate False Alarms

Global warming isn’t behind California’s wildfires, and fires around the world are declining

By Bjorn Lomborg. Excerpts:

"Age-adjusted heat-related death risk in California has risen modestly in recent decades—enough to account for 90 additional annual deaths"

"Warming has helped reduce age-adjusted cold-related deaths by more than 5,000 a year"

"In the early 2000s, about 3% of the world’s land burned annually—in total acreage, an area about twice Mexico’s size. The trend since has been downward: 2022 hit a record low of 2.169%, and 2025 nearly matched it at 2.198%, the second-lowest."

"global warming isn’t the main driver of fires in North America. Poor planning puts more houses in extreme fire-risk zones. California’s surge in wildfires stems overwhelmingly from poor forest management: decades of fire suppression that built up fuels, with almost no prescribed burns" 

"nearly 20% of the state needs controlled burns to reduce risk, yet only 0.1% to 0.3% receives them annually."

"deaths from fire-related air pollution declined between 2000 and 2019, even as the global population increased over 26%"

"In the early 1900s, nearly 4% of global land burned yearly. Last year, only 2.2% did."

"2024 Nature paper that declared extreme fire events doubled globally from 2003 to 2023. But a subsequent Nature review demolished that claim"

"even if the world’s wealthiest nations made major emissions reductions . . . It would avert less than 0.2 degree Fahrenheit of warming at significant cost" 

‘The Science Guy’ and Facts

Bill Nye and the EPA’s ‘endangerment finding.’

Letter to The WSJ. 

"Bill Nye “The Science Guy” invokes everything except science in his criticism of the Environmental Protection Agency’s rescission of its 2009 finding that greenhouse-gas emissions endanger public health (“The EPA Is Wrong About Greenhouse Gases,” Letters, Feb. 25).

Contrary to the EPA 2009 predictions: There has been a decline in smog levels from 1980 to 2024. There has been no trend in hurricane numbers or intensities since 1973. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds no change in global flooding. There has been no trend in the EPA heat wave index since 1895, except for the 1930s. Several studies show a decline in net mortality from heat and cold. U.S. wildfires have declined sharply since 1926, and global wildfire acreage declined 24% between 1998 and 2015. Global droughts have declined about 0.5% per decade since 1950. Global per capita food production has increased 40% since 1980. And the latest peer-reviewed research reports no acceleration globally in sea-level rise. The Science Guy’s argument is fact-free.

Benjamin Zycher

Senior fellow, American Enterprise Institute" 

A Climate Manual Bait and Switch

The Federal Judicial Center’s biased crusade lives on

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"the Federal Judicial Center’s retraction of its biased chapter on climate science"

"the environmentalist portion of the manual for federal judges, the chapter lives on, published by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)."

"The Fourth Edition’s climate chapter relies on the views of progressive climate lawyers and partisan “experts.”"

"As long as the FJC and the NAS receive taxpayer dollars, Congress should question the funding for polemical texts pretending to be neutral reference guides." 

19 years ago the Guardian said we have "ten years to save the planet from mankind"

A tweet from James Melville. Click here to see the original article.

 

Trump’s Climate Liberation Act

Removing Obama’s ‘endangerment’ finding makes it harder to ban fossil-fuel energy

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"in 2007 a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases qualify as pollutants under the Clean Air Act."

"greenhouse gases aren’t toxic and don’t affect air quality, unlike pollutants that the law expressly directs the EPA to regulate."

"The impact of greenhouse gases on global temperatures is intermediated by such factors as cloud cover and urbanization, and the effect on storms is disputed. In any event, curbing CO2 emissions in the U.S. will have scant impact on climate because emissions are rapidly rising in China, India and developing countries."

"The Great Scalia observed in dissent that “regulating the buildup of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the upper reaches of the atmosphere . . . is not akin to regulating the concentration of some substance that is polluting the air.”"

"the endangerment finding also violates the Supreme Court’s major questions doctrine."

"express authorization from Congress is required for economically and politically significant executive actions. A 6-3 majority invoked the doctrine in West Virginia v. EPA (2022), which struck down the Obama-era CO2 emissions limits for power plants."

If the media really cared about climate change, it would start telling the truth about it

See Trump the Climate Nonentity by Holman W. Jenkins. Excerpts:

"Even very large events, such as Covid or the collapse of Soviet industry, at most leave a noticeable indent only on the varying annual rate of emissions increase, not overall atmospheric CO2."

"The largest human CO2 event in history, the emergence of China as an industrial power, on an emissions graph appears only as a continuation of an uninterrupted upward trend since the Industrial Revolution."

"Last April came a small but telling explosion in the climate community. On behalf of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, a former John Kerry climate aide, Varun Sivaram, inaugurated a program dedicated to “climate realism.”"

"It conceded many long-obvious points: U.S. emissions have become too small a share of the global total to affect the climate outcome. With or without U.S. leadership, countries aren’t going to abandon a resource from which they’re profiting. The internationally agreed targets for restricting future warming are wholly chimerical." 

Preventing climate change versus adapting to it: History shows that societies can adapt to changing climate conditions

By Kenneth P. Green of The Fraser Institute.

Adapting to Climate Change around the World

• This study explores what climate adaptation might look like in modern societies, based on measures taken in the past to adapt to projected climate changes, including higher temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and more frequent extreme weather events such as floods.
• The study examines the history of adaptation to flooding in the Delta Works of the Netherlands; the reduction of flood risk in the rivers of Europe; the success of the Thames Barrier of London; and the barriers protecting the canals and city of Venice.
• The study also examines the history of adaptation to extremes of heat by reviewing two very different examples of extreme heat management, in Ahmedabad, India, and the United States.
• The Netherlands Delta Works, the Thames Barrier, the canal control system of Venice, and river controls in Europe show that changes to these ecologic systems, even fairly rapid ones, can be successfully controlled by societies at the local-to-regional level using conventional engineering technologies and government warning and notification systems.
• Similarly, the effects of extreme heat in Ahmedabad, India, and in the United States are being controlled with currently available engineering and social organization rather than distant global greenhouse-gas emission reductions.
• The United States took a somewhat higher-energy, more technological approach—the wider spread of HVAC technology—while Ahmedabad relied more on passive environmental cooling systems and institutional changes such as public heat notifications and response systems.
• The two distinct approaches show the broad applicability of adaptation in managing climate risks.

The great climate climbdown is finally here

Matt Ridley.

"Finally, thankfully, the global warming craze is dying out. To paraphrase Monty Python, the climate parrot may still be nailed to its perch at the recent Cop summit in Belem, Brazil – or at Harvard and on CNN – but elsewhere it’s dead. It’s gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. By failing to secure new pledges for a cut in fossil fuels, Cop achieved less than nothing. The venue caught fire, the air conditioning malfunctioned – and delegates were told on arrival not to flush toilet paper. Bill Gates’s recent apologia, in which he conceded that global warming ‘will not lead to humanity’s demise’ after he closed the policy and advocacy office of his climate philanthropy group, is just the latest nail in the coffin.

Different themes took turns as the scare du jour: overpopulation, oil spills, acid rain, ozone, sperm counts

In October, the Net Zero Banking Alliance shut down after JPMorgan Chase, Citi-group, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs led a stampede of banks out of the door. Shell and BP have returned to being oil companies, to the delight of their shareholders. Ford is about to cease production of electric pick-ups that nobody wants. Hundreds of other companies are dropping their climate targets. Australia has backed out of hosting next year’s climate conference.

According to an analysis by the Washington Post, in the US it is not just the Republicans who have given up on climate change: the Democrat party has stopped talking about it, hardly mentioning it during Kamala Harris’s campaign for president. The topic has dropped to the bottom half of a table of 23 concerns among Swedish youths. Even the European parliament has now voted to exempt many companies from reporting rules that require them to state how they are helping to fight climate change.

It has been a long, lucrative ride. Predicting the eco-apocalypse has always been a profitable business, spawning subsidies, salaries, consulting fees, air miles, bestsellers and research grants. Different themes took turns as the scare du jour: overpopulation, oil spills, pollution, desertification, mass extinction, acid rain, the ozone layer, nuclear winter, falling sperm counts. Each faded as the evidence became more equivocal, the public grew bored or, in some cases, the problem was resolved by a change in law or practice.

But no scare grew as big or lasted as long as global warming. I first wrote a doom–laden article for the Economist about carbon dioxide emissions trapping heat in the air in 1987, nearly 40 years ago. I soon realised the effect was real but the alarm was overdone, that feedback effects were exaggerated in the models. The greenhouse effect was likely to be a moderate inconvenience rather than an existential threat. For this blasphemy I was abused, cancelled, blacklisted, called a ‘denier’ and generally deemed evil. In 2010 in the pages of the Wall Street Journal I debated Gates, who poured scorn on my argument that global warming was not likely to be a catastrophe – so it is welcome to see him come round to my view.

The activists who took over the climate debate, often with minimal understanding of climate science, competed for attention by painting ever more catastrophic pictures of future greenhouse warming. They altered the name to ‘climate change’ so they could blame it for blizzards as well as heatwaves. Then they inflated the language to ‘climate emergency’ and ‘climate crisis’, even as projections of future warming came down.

‘I’m talking about the slaughter, death and starvation of six billion people this century. That’s what the science predicts,’ said Roger Hallam, founder of Extinction Rebellion, in 2019, though the science says no such thing. ‘A top climate scientist is warning climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years,’ tweeted Greta Thunberg in 2018. Five years later she deleted her tweet and shortly after decided that Palestine was a more promising way of staying in the limelight.

Scientists knew that pronouncements like this were nonsense but they turned a blind eye because the alarm kept the grant money coming. Journalists always love exaggeration. Capitalists were happy to cash in. Politicians welcomed the chance to blame others: if a wildfire or a flood devastates your town, point the finger at the changing climate rather than your own failure to prepare. Almost nobody had an incentive to downplay the alarm.

Unlike previous scares, climate fear has the valuable feature that it can always be presented in the future tense. No matter how mild the change in the weather proves to be today, you can always promise Armageddon tomorrow. So it was that for four long decades, climate change alarm went on a protracted march through the institutions, capturing newsrooms, classrooms and boardrooms. By 2020 no meeting, even of a town council or a sports team, was complete without a hand-wringing discussion of carbon footprints.

The other factor that kept the climate scare alive was that emissions reduction proved impossibly difficult. This was a feature, not a bug: if it had been easy, the green gravy train would have ground to a halt. Reducing sulphur emissions to stop acid rain proved fairly easy, as did banning chlorofluorocarbons to protect the ozone layer. But decade after decade, carbon dioxide emissions just kept on rising no matter how much money and research was thrown at the problem. Cheers!

Activists altered the name to ‘climate change’ so they could blame it for blizzards as well as heatwaves

Switching to renewable energy made no difference – literally. Here’s the data: the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours of energy consumption from wind and solar in the past decade, but 13,000 from fossil fuels. Not that wind and solar save much carbon dioxide anyway, their machinery being made with coal and their intermittency being backed up by fossil fuels.

Despite trillions of dollars in subsidies, these two ‘unreliables’ still provide just 6 per cent of the world’s energy. Their low-density, high-cost, intermittent power output is of no use to data centres or electric grids, let alone transport and heating, and effectively poisons the economics of building and running new nuclear and gas generation by preventing continuous operation. Quite why it became mandatory among those concerned about climate change to support these unreliables so obsessively is hard to fathom. Subsidy–addiction has a lot to do with it, combined with a general ignorance of thermodynamics.

Now the climate scare is fading, a scramble for the exits is beginning among the big environmental groups. Donations are drying up. Some will switch seamlessly to trying to panic us about artificial intelligence; others will follow Gates and insist that they never said it was the end of the world, just a problem to be solved; a few will even try declaring victory, claiming unconvincingly that promises made at the Paris conference a decade ago have slowed down emissions enough to save the climate.

Of course, Al Gore, the former US vice–president who did more than anybody else to alarm the world about climate change and made a $300 million fortune from it, has been at the recent conference in the Brazilian jungle – the one where they felled a forest to build the access road. As he railed against Gates last month for abandoning the cause and accused him of being bullied by Donald Trump, he sounded like one of those Japanese soldiers emerging from the jungle who did not know the second world war was over.

Perhaps Gore might now regret his exaggerated preachings of hellfire and damnation. In his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, for which he shared a Nobel prize, he predicted a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet ‘in the near future’ – out by around 19 feet and nine inches. In 2009 he said there was a 75 per cent chance all the ice in the Arctic Ocean would disappear by 2014. In that year there were five million square kilometres of the stuff at its lowest point – about the same as in 2009. This year there were 4.7 million square kilometres. At the film’s showing at the Sundance Festival, Gore said that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases were taken within ten years, the world would reach a point of no return. Yet here we are 19 years later.

Gore is correct that fear of retribution from the Trump administration drives some of the corporate retreats. President Trump has already cancelled $300 billion of green infrastructure funding and purged government websites of climate rhetoric. But even if the Republicans lose the White House in 2028, it will be hard to reflate the climate balloon. The proportion of Americans greatly worried about climate change is dropping. If Trump takes America out of the 1992 treaty that set up the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change it would require an unlikely two-thirds vote of the Senate to rejoin.

Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish economist who is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and has fought a lonely battle against climate exaggeration for decades, recently explained the shift in public opinion: ‘The shrillness of climate doom also wears down voters. While climate change is a real and man-made problem, constant end-of-the-world proclamations from media and campaigners massively overstate the situation.’

A key figure in the collapse of the climatocracy is Chris Wright, the pioneer of extracting shale gas by hydraulic fracturing who was appointed by Trump as energy secretary this year. Wright commissioned a review of climate science by five distinguished academics that set out just how non-frightening the facts of climate change are: slowly rising temperatures, mainly at night in winter and in the north, correspondingly less in daytime in summer and in the tropics where most people live, accompanied by a very slow rise in sea level showing no definite acceleration, minimal if any measurable change in the average frequency and ferocity of storms, droughts and floods – and record low levels of deaths from such causes. Plus a general increase in green vegetation, caused by the extra carbon dioxide.

The climatastrophe has diverted attention from real environmental problems – and cost a fortune

Indoor air pollution caused by poor people cooking over wood fires because they lack access to gas and electricity kills three million a year. So yes, Gates, influenced by Lomborg and Wright, is correct to say that getting cheap, reliable, clean energy to the poor is by far the more urgent priority.

Sources tell me that Wright is treated like a rock star at international conferences: his fellow ministers, especially those from Africa and Asia, are thrilled to talk about the need to get energy to people instead of being hectored about emissions. Only a few western European ministers sneer, but even some of them (the British being an exception) quietly admit that they need to find a way to climb down off their green high horses.

Fortunately, they now have convenient cover for doing so: artificial intelligence. We would love to go on subsidising wind and solar, say the Germans privately, but if we are to have data centres, we need lots more reliable and affordable power, so we will build gas turbines and maybe even some nuclear.

Likewise, throughout the tech world of the American west coast, emoting about climate suddenly seems like a luxury belief compared with the need to sign contracts with power suppliers mostly burning natural gas – or get left behind in the AI race. The world’s gas glut is impossible to overstate: thanks to fracking, we have centuries’ worth of cheap gas. The tech bros are piling into nuclear, too, but that won’t address the needs for extra power until well into the next decade, and the need is now.

The climatastrophe has been a terrible mistake. It diverted attention from real environmental problems, cost a fortune, impoverished consumers, perpetuated indoor pollution and poverty, frightened young people into infertility, wasted years of our time, undermined democracy and corrupted science. Time to bury the parrot."

A Climate Study Retraction for the Ages

A much-hyped study in the journal Nature turns out to have been full of errors

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"The study . . . projected that climate change could cause $38 trillion in economic damage a year by 2049. To put that number in perspective, the GDP of North America last year was about $31.4 trillion."

"forecast that rising CO2 emissions would cause a 62% reduction in global GDP by 2100"

"scientists flagged problems with its methodology and errors in its data. In July 2024, Nature issued a correction noting that rows of data were “wrongly printed as a decimal, rather than a percentage point.”"

"Other scientists [said] the study “underestimates uncertainty . . . rendering their results statistically insignificant when properly corrected.”"

"“data anomalies arising from one country” in the “underlying GDP dataset, Uzbekistan, substantially bias their predicted impacts of climate change.” 

"the economic harm from climate change no longer exceeded the costs of the government interventions"