Tidbits

Speaking of the alleged Pyrocene and the alarmist discovery of smoke from wildfires, an alert reader/viewer comments “I was just driving north on Highway 11 near Kirkland Lake Ontario and saw a historical marker for the “Great Fire of 1916”…. I suspect it adds another data point to this story.” Indeed. It turns out that the “Great” (or arguably “Lousy”) fire in question aka “the Matheson Fire” is estimated to be the deadliest in Canadian history though it’s uncertain how many people were killed or how many hundreds of thousands of acres it burned (a useful warning when people talk or write as if we had exact and detailed information about past fires to justify calling a recent one “unprecedented”). Moreover, Wikipedia says, “Because of forest fire smoke that had covered the region for several weeks and the absence of a forest fire monitoring service, there was almost no warning that the conflagration was upon the communities.” Forest fire smoke lasting weeks? Say it ain’t so.
A number of US state attorneys-general have sent a pointed letter to the “Big 4” accounting firms for pushing climate-related financial disclosure on their clients, warning that this practice may not only increase costs but that the firms “appear to have violated their professional duty of independence by committing to push for climate-related disclosures in financial reporting, contrary to professional standards of materiality, neutrality, and error avoidance.” And indeed to have “created potential conflicts of interest” because they sell such services. Why is there so little of this kind of push-back elsewhere? Why are no Canadian provinces taking this kind of action? And why, indeed, are the firms so eager to jump on this bandwagon? Oh right. They sell such services.
National Geographic asks “Are U.S. cities seeing more ultra-hot days than they did decades ago?” The real answer is no and was published in the scientific literature earlier this year. Undeterred by such facts, National Geographic commissioned a new analysis which conveniently told them what they wanted to hear: “According to numbers calculated exclusively for National Geographic by the research group Climate Central, more than 30 cities – from Miami to Houston – now experience a month or more of additional days over 90°F than they did in 1970, before climate change caused significant warming. Some 30 others are reeling under 20 or more additional 90-degree days. The increase in these extremely hot days poses problems for health, infrastructure, crops, and wildlife, among other concerns, climate scientists say.” As they would. And we like “ultra-hot”. More than we like “climate change caused” when it’s a description of alterations in the weather not a source of it. Or that old media standby “reeling” whereas if you went there they’d be standing stolidly in place.
Speaking of which, Anthony Watts channels Paul Homewood with “Hottest July Evah!” under which heading Homewood shows a map of surface air temperature in July 2026 compared to the average for July over the last 10 years. And guess what? There are hotspots including parts of Western Europe, hence the headlines about endless heatwaves the new normal yada yada, and also the Arctic hence it’s warming faster than the rest blah blah blah. And a stretch of the Pacific off Ecuador. But oddly most of the planet shades blue for below average and even “areas surrounding Britain and France were well below normal.” As Homewood adds, “Does not look like global warming to me!” But then, he’s not wearing red-tinted glasses.
Cor, that’s a classic. Michael Shellenberger notes sardonically that Ghent University rector Petra De Sutter last September told incoming students “In times of increasing polarization, the university has a duty to foster adversarial debate. At a time when an individual’s feelings about climate change or vaccination seem to carry as much weight as years of research, it is all the more urgent that young people learn how to ask critical questions. Doubt means that we dare to question convictions…” and then quoted Einstein that “Dogma is the enemy of progress.” Before cancelling a guy who helped out a DEI candidate for fitting the dogma but faking the work. But we digress. The point is, in mentioning “an individual’s feelings about climate change or vaccination” the rector was clearly seeking to bolster dogma over adversarial debate and didn’t even notice. We pity the fool student who asks critical questions about climate orthodoxy (or pronouns) anywhere near that person or that institution.
As climate change corrupts field after field and institution after institution, the once thoughtful, even contrarian TED now peddles TED-ed orthodoxy, including how it’s already too hot for a dog’s paws and might well be in 30 years. MSN repeddled it as “The pavement gives third-degree burns – by 2050, extreme heat could last 180 days”. Yeah. Unless it doesn’t.
On the subject of science more generally, we can’t resist quoting New Scientist that “The first signs of dark matter particles may finally have been spotted”. As you know, to salvage their in may ways highly successful basic paradigm about how matter works, physicists have long been driven to claim that 85% of it doesn’t work that way. Instead it lurks inert and invisible. So why believe in it? Because otherwise they’d have to change their ideas and people dislike doing so. But at some point they have either to find the missing stuff or get a new theory. Applies to climate too.

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