- The New York Times produces a list of “this year’s Super Bowl commercials, from best to worst” in case you didn’t see them so you’ll have no idea anyway, or did but want to be told what to think. And their “critic” (Superbowl ad critic being an even less convincing job than the fictional “Flatties and Drummies” buffalo wing critic, speaking of actually classic ads) starts by saying “The trends? Nothing controversial, as you would expect, but also – and perhaps for associated reasons – very little creativity.” Then it awards 10th spot to a “Science Moms” ad about how climate change will wreck her baby’s world before she finishes college that is as devoid of creativity as it is of credibility. Like making this one of the best ads because climate.
- Not only that, but the Times also ran one of those weepy pieces on how “Writers have spilled a lot of ink on the question of whether it is ethical, desirable or financially advisable to have children in an era of accelerating environmental crisis.” In which “the Oregon writer Emma Pattee explains how she has made peace with the dire facts of climate change, including the reality that her children will be increasingly affected by warming and pollution or climate-related disasters in the years to come.” Which is about finding “a place of letting go” not “a place of getting facts”.
- At one point we suggested irritably that various efforts to downplay severe winter weather would lead to them telling us there’s no storm. And we’re surprisingly close, with outlet after outlet bellowing that, in CNN’s words, “Swaths of the US may be grappling with frigid weather, but for the planet as a whole, heat records are being obliterated — and it spells very bad news. Two new studies conclude it’s a signal the planet is likely on track to breach the Paris climate agreement goal of restricting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” How can it be record-breakingly hot everywhere while being unusually, even record-breakingly cold on so much of the Earth? And as we noted last week, the latest satellite data show a dramatic temperature drop in January, not the obliteration of heat records.
- In case you’re having a tough day, we want to cheer you up by saying at least you’re not at the “Climate and Solidarity” event sponsored by something called the Climate Action Network at which you would lament: “Climate crisis. Eroding social safety net. Colonialism. The rise of xenophobia and the far right. Just when we thought things couldn’t get worse, US broligarchs unleashed the threat of tariffs on the Canadian economy, leading to economic anxiety and corporate profiteering. Corporate-aligned governments of all stripes are profiting off this moment to promote further resource extraction, deregulation and deportations. What does a people-first response to this moment look like, and how can it cut through all the noise?” By bundling every left-wing cause together and shrieking, apparently.
- Well, it’s one solution. Heatmap offers “One Weird Trick for Getting More Data Centers on the Grid” which consists, evidently, of them just switching off the machines briefly during peak demand hours. So the solution to a government-mandated power shortage is darkness, in the same way the solution to collective farming creating food shortages is to eat less. And be happy. It’s so simple. Why didn’t we think of it?
- Never mind cold snaps. Instead “’Code red’ alert issued as temperature soars to almost 50C” in South Australia. And evidently “These temperatures are the hottest seen at this time of year in the region since 2007.” When it was hotter.
- Oh, and as Mark Carney continues his triumphal march toward coronation as Canada’s Liberal party leader and Prime Minister, institutions continue their shame-faced march out of his Net-Zero Banking Alliance, with Canada’s largest, the Royal Bank, joining all our other major banks in fleeing the wreckage.
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19 Feb 2025 | News Roundup
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It is incredible how many articles claim January as the hottest on record when satellite data shows January plummeting off the December drop.
And still no explanation for the sudden rise in 2023 and now the precipitous drop back toward the long term average.
There is an explanation for the apparent global temperature peak around now, and it doesn’t have anything to do with CO2. It’s a bit technical, but here goes.
Although actual thermometer records are only available for a few hundred years at very most, proxy records of temperature are available from thousands of years ago, using measurements derived from such things as tree rings, lake sediments, ice cores and so on. If you plot one of these proxy records as a function of time you get what seem to be a randomly varying data series, but if you subject the data to spectral analysis you can convert the data to an overlapping series of simple sine waves. There are millennial sine waves, i.e. sine waves with periodicities of the order of 1000 years, centennial sine waves and decadal sine waves. If you add these sine waves together exactly as they were before spectral analysis you will get the original data series back again, but, and here is the interesting point, what you get back by combining sine waves depends on the phase relationships between them, i.e. where the start of each sine wave is relative to all the others. If you change one or more phases you can get an apparently different set of temperature data. For example, proxy data over the last 1000 years normally shows the medieval warm period and the little ice age (MWP/LIA), but a slight change in relative phases can result in the infamous hockey stick. Thus, a random variation in climatic conditions at a some point in time in some part of the globe could very well have acted as a phase change, which in turn could genuinely result in a hockey stick for that part of the globe rather than the MWP/LIA sequence.
More interesting is that if you lop off the most recent data in the proxy records (say from 1880 to the present) before spectral analysis is performed, so that the resultant sine waves are not affected by post-1880 temperatures, then recreate the temperature series from the sine waves and extrapolate it to the present day you still get the well-known dramatic temperature rise of the late 20th century. However, this must obviously be an artifact of sine wave recombination which has nothing to do with post-1880 global warmingsince there was no post-1880 data in the analysis. In other words, the recent temperature peak that all the climatists are loudly proclaiming is due to mankind’s wickedness in burning fossil fuels has nothing to do with fossil fuels or for that matter, CO2. And incidentally, this temperature peak is goiong to disappear quite soon.
I can recommend “Cycles in Very Long Temperature Records” by John Abbot in 'Climate Change, The Facts 2025', published by the Institute of Public Affairs. If you have access to it, this was originally published in 2021 as “Using Oscillatory Processes in Northern Hemisphere Proxy Temperature Records to Forecast Industrial-era temperatures”, Journal of Earth Sciences Vol 10, No. 3, pp. 95-117.
RG can I suggest that you study Nikolov and Zeller’s various papers/ YouTube lectures. They explain and prove the reasons for both short term and long term climate variations and it’s nothing to do with GH gases. Best regards.
No cogent explanation for anything,just the constant stream of lies and half truths.
The Alarmists took their cue from the Witch Doctors of old. Take a natural phenomenon like an Earthquake and say” The Gods are offended ,sacrifices must be made”
There is an issue with this. The sharp temperature drop( Dark Ages) was the result of the super Volcanic Eruption of 536 in the Ring of Fire,probably Krakatoa,that appears to have created the Sunda straight and certainly gave a dark Decade of unending Winter. It certainly killed off a large percentage,perhaps as high as 25% ,of Mammals on the planet.
I believe that the God Vulcan has a serious influence on Global Temperatures,much more serious than is acknowledged by even the “ Honest” Scientists. We even see this as recently as the Last Krakatoa and Pinaturbo eruptions.
Thank Roger for that very enlightening scientific explanation of the natural variability in temperature that has no correlation with variation in atmospheric CO2, and, as you point out, with the increase in CO2 since industrial revolution removed. Fascinating.