- As if California didn’t have enough fires already, we hear that “Monterey County authorities issued evacuation orders Thursday night after a fire broke out at a battery storage facility along the Central Coast that the company claims is the largest in the world.” And it’s serious as well as ill-timed: “A major fire burning Friday at one of the world’s largest battery storage plants in Northern California is sending up flames of toxic smoke, leading to the evacuation of 1,700 people and the closure of a major highway.” But lithium-ion batteries are totally safe, totally. It’s just the fires they cause that aren’t. (And the dirty way they’re made… and disposing of them…)
- Canadian Liberal leadership candidate and former Finance Minister/Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland suddenly discovered that if we don’t like the carbon tax she spent a decade praising she doesn’t either, letting it be known via “a source close to Freeland” that “She is ready to make difficult decisions to meet our emissions targets and make sure big polluters pay for their outsized emissions. But she will not fight Canadians on a policy they have been clear they do not support. That’s why Chrystia Freeland will replace the consumer carbon price with a system that will work within our federation and will be developed collaboratively with provinces and territories. She looks forward to working together on fighting the climate crisis.” Talk about having your carbon tax and eating it too.
- Related, in one of the hundreds of press releases in which the Canadian government boasts of handing out money for almost anything to almost anybody, we learn from FedNor, aka the “Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario”, another agency that insults our intelligence while emptying our wallets, that “Winter is a season that defines us in Thunder Bay.” And here you told us it was a thing of the past. So not even you believe it?
- Will the ravages of global warming never cease? The latest is that the inauguration of Donald Trump had to be moved indoors due to… hurricanes? Drought? Wildfires? Heat waves? No um heh heh that is “because of a frigid weather forecast in the nation’s capital Monday”. However NBC assures us that “Inauguration Day is often cold, but Monday looks to be especially brisk.” Brisk. Not cold. Drat that global brisking.
- There was a lot of talk of “whiplash” regarding the January 2025 Los Angles fires. As in “climate whiplash” or even “hydroclimate whiplash”. But now Roger Pielke Jr. weighs in on “climate science whiplash”. For instance “The [San Francisco] Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. And thanks to global warming, it’s about to get even foggier.” And yet “Declining fog cover on California’s coast could leave the state’s famous redwoods high and dry, a new study says. Among the tallest and longest-lived trees on Earth, redwoods depend on summertime’s moisture-rich fog to replenish their water reserves. But climate change may be reducing this crucial fog cover.” Owwwww! RPJ adds “I have called this dynamic: The Guaranteed Winner Scam Meets the Hot Hand Fallacy.” Aka “Instead of using science to inform understandings of the thing that just happened, we use the thing that just happened to cherry pick which subset of science we decide is relevant.” For instance drought and fires. Or Jeremiah sinking into the mire.
- Scientific Alarmism, which apparently cannot mend its ways, tells readers “In his farewell address, President Biden warned that a powerful “oligarchy” could undo four years of progress on climate policy”. And we all know rich people never donate to the Democrats. And that it is the job of scientific publications to amplify malarkey from politicians who know nothing of science.
- Michael Mann, who shows no desire to mend his ways, finally got a bit of justice in his long-standing, scorched-earth lawsuit against National Review, Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn. He was ordered to pay the magazine $530,820.21 in various costs, within 30 days. As NR said, it’s not much, just a fraction of what they’ve spent fending off his explicit attempt to use a “major lawsuit” to “ruin National Review”. And it’s an outrage that various courts refused to apply laws intended precisely to stop such lawfare. And nothing has yet been done about the absurdly huge damages awarded against Steyn (but not Simberg) who Mann called “this odious excuse for a human being.” But it’s a start.
- We learn from Indy 100 via MSN that “Melting ice reveals secret buried in the Rocky Mountains not seen for 6,000 years”. And what can this secret be? Why, “a 5,900-year-old whitebark pine forest… located at 3,100 metres above sea level which is 180 metres higher than the present tree line.” And it even quotes “Cathy Whitlock at Montana State University” that, gosh, “that’s because the climate was warmer back when these trees grew”. Next you’ll be saying the Holocene Climatic Optimum was real, worldwide, and puts the kibosh on claims that 2024 was “the hottest year in global history” or “hottest year ever” or even just “the warmest year on record” or that “the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024.” You will, won’t you? Or is the HCO totally off the record?
I wish the alarmists would drop the hype and just get on with the work of finding out more about how our climate works. Climate change is real, natural forces and humanity impact our climate. Too little is known to determine how much humanity impacts climate, it might be a lot, it might be negligible. We cannot change the climate like it is a thermostat. What we can do is mitigate changes through activities such as better forest management, not building in flood plains, or having raised basements without window-wells so that we can be better protected from summer rain storms.
I like the whitebark story. It can be related to grain farms found in permafrost in Greenland, or the historical record of the Arctic Ocean being ice-free during the age of the Vikings.
Nicolov and Zeller have proposed a novel hypothesis that millennial changes in temperature are due to changes in atmospheric pressure and solar radiation.
Short term variations are caused by albedo variations (cloud cover). Their papers include an elegant ‘proof’ using NASA ‘s data. It’s worth studying their papers because if they are correct greenhouse gases have no effect on atmospheric temperatures.
More info on Nicolov and Zeller’s hypothesis at http://www.climate-veritas.com
Environment Canada, just today, put out a message that 2024 was the warmest year ever, apparently, they don't read CDN or follow MSN.