"New Zealand is planning for a climate future scientists now reject"

"New Zealand is planning for a climate future scientists now reject. And fixing it will require more than a policy tweak.

"New Zealand’s coastal climate change planning system is built on a simple legal standard: councils must plan for the likely effects of climate change, using the best available evidence [sic].

"[And] across the country, planning is being anchored to a future that scientists now say is implausible—and, legally, should never have been treated as 'likely' in the first place. [See story here.] ...

"[C]urrent guidance encourages planners to consider high‑end scenarios such as [the discredited] SSP5‑8.5. ... a scenario that IPCC lead author, and Canterbury University’s Professor Dave Frame, described as one 'no one believes.'

"In Kāpiti, modelling by consultants Jacobs Engineering—using high‑end assumptions based on SSP5‑8.5—identified thousands of homes as being at risk from coastal hazards. But when an independent review was undertaken by coastal scientist Dr Willem de Lange, using scenarios aligned with likely outcomes, the number of at‑risk homes fell to just 44.

"That is not a technical quibble. It is the difference between targeted risk management and large‑scale planning intervention affecting entire communities.

"Across New Zealand, similar approaches are being used by Councils to inform hazard mapping, LIM notations, and development restrictions. Tools like SeaRise continue to present projections derived from scenarios that no longer reflect what is considered plausible.

"Unwinding that system will be difficult.

"But leaving it in place is worse."

~ Sean Rush from his post 'New Zealand is planning for a climate future scientists now reject'

UN's IPCC withdraws alarmist scenario, local media continues alarmist news

Take a quick look at the most consequential graph of the last two decades, below.

But first, the news: the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Change (i.e., the IPCC, the organisation promoting the Climate Scare) has officially withdrawn the warmist scenario known as RCP8.5.

This (below) is roughly what the IPCC's RCP8.5 predicts:

For context (and contrast(, here's the actual satellite record of temperatures for the last few decades:

So what's this RCP8.5 then? The simple answer is that it's the scaremongering scenario sold to "policymakers" as their "business-as-usual" scenario. Here in New Zealand it's become "their main planning scenario with authorities planning for 'managed retreat,' forced abandonment of settlements, and insurance companies refusing to insure."

As Quico Toro explains, if the RCP8.5 scenario were comparable with models used to design bridges, it would result in bridges designed to take around 250 M1 Abrams tanks all at once. Not just unrealistic, but illusionary. 

The “8.5” in RCP8.5 refers to the amount of added solar energy the atmosphere will trap by 2100—specifically, 8.5 watts per square meter. That’s very high—likely to bring about a shocking 5 degrees of global warming above pre-industrial levels.

RCP8.5 was the kind of climate scenario lurking behind Greta Thunberg’s accusation, in her September 2019 speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, that “we are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” It’s the kind of pathway young people in England were thinking about when they decided they needed to launch “Extinction Rebellion.” It’s been a fundraising bonanza for climate activist groups from Adelaide to Zurich, the main player in every single alarmist climate critique you’ve read in the last 15 years.

And it’s been the default setting for literally thousands of climate science papers—Google Scholar lists more than 30,000 published since 2018 alone. It was from this kind of research that we got lurid papers like “Future of the human climate niche,” where respectable Dutch climate scientists claimed that one in three human beings live in regions that will become unlivable in the next 50 years. It was this kind of research that gave rise to countless breathless headlines about how outdoor labor was about to become impossible across much of the tropical world, and alarmist documentaries claiming the ocean was about to end up without any fish. It was RCP8.5 that turned David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth” into the most read story in the history of New York Magazine, and later propelled the book version to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

The story of RCP8.5 is ultimately the story of what goes wrong when people convinced they are defending “The Science” catastrophically misunderstand how science works, and when politicized activists glom onto legitimate scientific tools and insist on ramming the round peg of probabilistic forecasting into the square hole of fundraising emails.

As we say above, here in New Zealand millions of words have been written based on the RCP8.5 scenario leading to authorities planning for 'managed retreat,' for forced abandonment of settlements, for insurance companies refusing to insure, for governments slowly but surely strangling our production of energy.

In the month since this became news however, there has been precisely ONE mention of RCP8.5's withdrawal in the local media. One.

What does that tell you?

Taking a stand, living in truth

"[Let's look at] the example of the greengrocer, living in an authoritarian state [who] habitually puts a sign 'Workers of the world, unite!' in his shop window each day even though he doesn’t believe the slogan but understands it is necessary to demonstrate his loyalty to the regime and ensure he stays out of trouble.

"One morning he decides he will no longer put out the sign .... His seemingly trivial action enables him to live more honestly even if he risks official penalties. ... 

"Czech playwright Václav Havel ... who became President of his country in 1989 after the Soviet-backed, communist government collapsed. ... argued that private individuals [lie our greengrocer] can help overturn repressive systems simply by refusing to participate in expected rituals of obedience, no matter how minor.

"And random acts of resistance like the greengrocer’s can give courage to others similarly tired of enforced conformity in totalitarian states — or in liberal democracies. ...

"What Havel saw so clearly is that totalitarian systems don’t primarily run on violence — they run on the complicity of the population. Each person who goes along with the ritual reinforces the illusion that the ritual reflects genuine consensus. Each greengrocer who puts up the sign makes it harder for the next one to refuse.

"New Zealand’s version of this operates through social rather than state coercion, which in some ways makes it harder to name and resist. ... The country is small and the networks are tight; the social cost of being known as a dissenter is higher in a place where everyone knows everyone.

"The result is a kind of pre-emptive self-censorship that Havel would recognise immediately. ... The New Zealand consensus is not a single monolithic ideology but a cluster of positions that have achieved a kind of sacral status ...

"Some of the most charged include the application of Treaty principles across virtually all public policy, certain framings within debates about Māori sovereignty and co-governance, consensus around specific approaches to climate and housing policy ... To question them is to be located, socially and professionally, as the kind of person who questions them, which is itself a disqualifying mark.

"Havel’s prescription is deceptively simple and genuinely demanding: live in truth. ... It means saying plainly, in your own sphere, what you actually think.

"The greengrocer who refuses to put up the sign does something that seems trivially small but is in fact a profound disruption — he breaks the illusion of consensus ...

"In a New Zealand context this looks like the scientist who publishes findings that complicate the preferred narrative, even knowing it will generate institutional discomfort.

• It looks like the journalist who covers a story the consensus would prefer left alone.
• It looks like the professional who declines to sign the ritual statement and explains why calmly and without apology.
• It looks like the historian who prefers to deal in objective facts rather than subjective “stories” and won’t bow to a critical theory neo-Marxist dialectic.
• It looks like the council member who won’t participate in a prayer (disguised as a karakia) before a meeting because of its religious significance.
• It looks like your author who will not use Aotearoa for New Zealand or insert te reo words into a narrative written in English.
• It looks like the ordinary person who says at a dinner table, 'I don’t think that’s quite right,' and is willing to sit with the social discomfort that follows.

"What Havel emphasises is that this is not heroism in any dramatic sense -- it is simply the refusal to participate in the agreed-upon falseness. And its power is precisely that it is available to anyone. You do not need a platform or an institution or a movement. You need only the willingness to say what you see."

~ David Harvey from his post 'Above the parapet'

It's a heatwave?

"It's like a heat wave

It's burning in my heart

I can't keep from burning

It's tearing me apart"

~ Martha and the Vandellas

TERMINOLOGY IS CHANGING. WHAT USED to be called "swamps" are now wetlands. Heavy rain is now an "atmospheric river." A violent storm is now a "weather bomb" And extreme and large-scale warming events in the ocean have been dubbed "marine heatwaves."

It's said that recent flooding in New Zealand—a "glimpse into the future of climate change"—is due to our present La Niña summer and an increase in these "marine heatwaves." First arriving in the summer of 2017/18, they are now said to be "commonplace."

One of these "new" marine heatwaves helped cause the warm summer of 2018/19. Rainfall that summer "was below normal (50-79% of the summer normal) to well below normal (<50 % of the summer normal) in Northland, Taranaki, Nelson, Tasman and the West Coast as well as parts of Marlborough, Manawatu-Whanganui, Otago and Southland. Above normal rainfall (>120% of the normal) was observed around Hawke’s Bay and parts of Gisborne. Rainfall was near normal elsewhere (80-120% of the summer normal rainfall)."

The new arrival combined with La Niña conditions to get the blame for the unseasonably hot 2017/18 summer. Rainfall that summer was "highly variable from month to month and heavily impacted by two ex-tropical cyclones during February. Summer rainfall in the South Island was above normal (120-149%) or well above normal (>149%) over Canterbury, Marlborough, Nelson, and Tasman, and near normal (80-119%) to below normal (50-79%) around Otago, Southland, and the West Coast. North Island summer rainfall was above or well-above normal around Wellington and much of the upper North Island, and near normal or below normal over remaining North Island locations including Taranaki, Manawatu-Wanganui, Hawke’s Bay, and Gisborne."

2022/23's summer was "a summer of floods and droughts, and very warm," with "a protracted marine heatwave that peaked during January." Cyclone Gabrielle of course arrived a month later when the Antarctic Oscillation "dipped negative."

Summer of 2023/24 was warm, with another marine heatwave and, for most regions, drier. The narrative of causation is already breaking down.

As it did nearly a century ago in 1934/35 when New Zealand experienced its hottest summer because of a massive warming events in the ocean. Or 1938. But this time the floods came in winter. 

SURROUNDED BY OCEAN AND WITH warm air and occasional cyclones brought down from the tropics, flooding is this country's most frequent form of natural disaster—and always has been.

Māori legend includes a story of a great flood. Tāwhaki, god of thunder and lightning, was almost murdered by his brothers-in-law. When he had recovered, Tāwhaki took his warriors and their families and built a fortified village on top of a mountain. Then he called to his ancestors – the gods – for revenge, and they let the floods of heaven descend. The earth was overwhelmed by the waters and the entire population perished. This was known as Te hurihanga i Mataaho (the overwhelming of Mataaho – one of the places that were destroyed). ...

Māori history tells of a pre-European flood in the Tūtaekurī area of Hawke’s Bay in which a party of 50 men, women and children were drowned when two streams rose. 

The early European settlers failed to realise the intensity of rainfall in New Zealand and how rapidly rivers could rise.  The New Zealand Company's very first settlers were dumped on the Hutt Riverside in Petone to begin building Britannia, their new town. It was only a matter of weeks before they discovered what a stupid idea this was, relocating after a few months of regular flooding to Thorndon.

The South Island’s broad gravel-bed rivers were particularly deceptive: they were usually shallow enough to wade across, but when in flood their currents were powerful. By 1870, just three decades after European settlers began arriving in large numbers, rivers had been responsible for 1,115 recorded drownings. Drowning became known as ‘the New Zealand death’.

The greatest flood ever observed on the Clutha River Mata-Au, New Zealand’s largest river in catchment area and volume of flow, occurred in 1878. It was the result of a succession of weather systems bringing in warm wind and rain, which melted the winter snow cover. At the height of this flood, more than 5,700 cubic metres of water poured down the lower reaches of the river every second. ... A 1938 account described the Clutha in flood:
[i]ts angry surface [was] strewed with dead horses and cattle, houses, bridges, furniture, timber and farmstacks. Some days the spring sun shone with a ghastly pleasantry on the devastated towns, while 100 miles away more heavy rain on the mountains was preparing still greater strength for the flood. ...

Twenty-one people were killed in the Kōpuawhara flood of 1938 – the largest number of fatalities from a 20th-century New Zealand flood. It is a sobering reminder of the dangers of building on low-lying land close to rivers.

A reminder we're still receiving.

And those tropical cyclones just keep arriving, as they did long before CO2 levels were rising. The fifty-four people who died in the 1968 Wahine disaster, for example, are one tragic reminder of that. That was Sub-Tropical Cyclone Giselle. And we've been through several alphabet's worth of cyclones since then, everything from Bola to Hola, and worse, to come around again to Gabrielle's letter 'G.'

And there have been many worse cyclones in the South Pacific over the centuries before human industry began. But they either didn't hit these islands, thank goodness, or there was no-one here to record them.

WHILE THE NARRATIVE WAS breaking down on the ground in 2023, it was nonetheless ramping up in the world of climate modelling. A worldwide study (above) published in 2025 claimed '2023 Marine Heatwaves [Were] Unprecedented and Potentially Signal a Climate Tipping Point.' It's that study generally referenced by warmists here. Its "breathless tone is familiar," says Anthony Watts ("new records"! "unprecedented in intensity, persistence, and scale"! "may portend an emerging climate tipping point"!) but its "underlying logic is seriously flawed."

But as Watts argues, "context matters. Particularly in climate, which has cycles that span millennia, not just decades."

The foundational flaw in this study is its timescale. The research relies on satellite data beginning in 1982. That gives us about 40 years of observational history, which is virtually nothing in terms of Earth’s climate system. Prior to satellite coverage, comprehensive, high-resolution global measurements of sea surface temperatures simply didn’t exist. Claims of “unprecedented” events must be framed within that very limited context. As I’ve said before, declaring a “record” based on such a short window is like calling a coin flip streak a “trend” after four tosses.

Ocean temperatures fluctuate naturally over decadal, centennial, and even millennial scales. Our current observational capacity doesn’t cover even half of one oceanic oscillation cycle, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which paleoclimatology suggests runs as long as 50-70 years. To suggest a climate “tipping point” based on this short dataset is not just premature—it’s scientifically irresponsible.

Yet here we are. The marine heatwave cycle in the Southwest Pacific Ocean (our area) has an estimated return period of 141 years. Yet the longest-running evidence for this, says the study, is the coastal station in Leigh, whose records go back just 57 years.

Not just short on temporal context, but also on geographic. The climatic change is said to be global, due to increased global CO2, yet "the authors cite “region-specific drivers” for each major marine heatwave." 

In the North Atlantic, enhanced shortwave radiation and a shallower mixed layer were culprits. [Down here] in the Southwest Pacific, the heat was attributed to reduced cloud cover and increased advection. The Tropical Eastern Pacific was influenced by oceanic advection.

Notice anything? These aren’t unified, global changes due to increased CO2. They are local, meteorological, and oceanographic phenomena—exactly the kinds of natural variability we should expect in a dynamic system. The fact that these local causes are acknowledged undercuts the paper’s own argument for a singular, global cause rooted in greenhouse gas emissions.

Bad science and an unjustified extrapolation is the gist of this study and press release. Perhaps the most egregious leap comes in the suggestion that the 2023 marine heatwaves might represent a “tipping point” in the Earth’s climate system. The term “tipping point” implies a sudden, irreversible shift—a planetary point of no return. But what evidence is there for this? The authors provide none beyond the temperature anomalies themselves and vague references to mixed-layer dynamics.

No historical precedent is given. No paleoclimatic comparisons are offered. No quantitative thresholds are defined. It’s all speculation dressed up in technical language.

Meanwhile, as carbon emissions have been rising over this last century, rainfall has been going down, not up.

The highest frequency of global-scale extreme rainfall events occurred from 1960-1980 − when there were concerns about cooling. 

Since then, the frequency and intensity of rainfall events have “decreased remarkably” (Koutsoyiannis, 2020).

ALSO DECREASING—AND DECREASING REMARKABLY—is the world's s number of climate-related deaths.

One reason it's worth remarking is that severe weather events globally are themselves generally either decreasing or showing no particular trend. And that's not just me and climate scientists like Roger Pielke Jr saying that. It's the IPCC, who find no trends in flooding globally; no long-term trends in meteorological or hydrological drought; no upward trend either in so-called atmospheric rivers, and no upward trend in landfalling hurricanes or tornadoes either in the US or globally. 

None. 

And the US Govt, whose official metric records a general decrease in heatwaves since the 1930s -- or the international insurance industry, who record a decline in both US and European disaster-related losses. And the World Bank agrees. 

Meanwhile, even as alarmists talk about sea level rise inundating coastlines in the near future, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) records that ongoing sea level rise since 1880 amounts to only 240mm, i.e., just 17mm per decade -- measurable, but steady, and not accelerating -- and recent research shows many coastlines worldwide to be prograding rather than retrograding (i.e., shifting seaward) and at a globally-averaged rate of 260mm per year, reducing even this slow but steady threat. And the Department of Atmospheric Science at CSU records that cyclone frequency in the South Pacific (the very reason we're here talking about this stuff) has, since 1980, been declining. (Which is welcoming considering so many more people are living and building in these otherwise threatening places, in part because governments have foolishly absorbed so much of the financial risk.)

But the other main reason for climate-related deaths to fall so remarkably is the very thing warmists decry so loudly and so monotonously, i.e.,human industry, which is the very thing that keeps folk safer from the dangerous weather events that do occur. 

It was the Netherlands' rising wealth, for example, that allowed them to build the dikes and dams that protected their sub-sea level provinces from flooding. And mortality from extreme heat in the US for example, as heat waves have recently kicked up and more and more people have moved to live in desert regions, has fallen pretty much all over the country over the past 50 years. In this case, it's because of things like air conditioning and better medicine that more and more people can afford.

And in the general case, as Bjorn Lomborg explains is succinctly, it's "because richer and more resilient societies are much better able to protect their citizens." 

The climate catastrophists don’t want you to know this [points out energy advocate Alex Epstein] because it reveals how fundamentally flawed their viewpoint is. They treat the global climate system as a stable and safe place that we make volatile and dangerous. In fact, the global climate system is naturally volatile and dangerous—we make it liveablethrough development and technology—development and technology powered by the only form of cheap, reliable, scalable reliable energy that can make climate liveable for 7 billion people.
As the climate-related death data show, there are some major benefits—namely, the power of fossil-fuelled machines to build a durable civilisation highly resilient to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on.

It's not just that GDP is correlated with fewer climate-related deaths and disasters, although it is; it's that the whole relationship between economic progress and human flourishing itself is actually causal. The richer and wealthier a society is, the better able it is to train the engineers and to raise the capital and to devise and build the infrastructure that allows human beings in all the many places on this fragile planet to master all the many things that nature is ready to throw at us.

And that's one phenomenon that really is global.

Here's Martha:

Offshore emissions

"Can someone explain how the deindustrialisation of the UK and Germany [et al] will save the planet? 

    "I still struggle to understand why they sacrifice their industries, jobs and prosperity only to outsource production to Asia, which increases global emissions. Does it make any sense to you?"

~ Michael A. Arouet

"The UN has now spent more than three decades issuing countdowns to catastrophe" [updated]

"A recent story on PBS NewsHour, 'UN says world must jointly tackle issues of climate change, pollution, biodiversity and land loss,' by Tammy Webber of the Associated Press (AP), reports on a new UN 'Global Environment Outlook' that repeats the false assertion that the Earth is nearing a global tipping point that can only be avoided through “unprecedented change” and trillions of dollars in new spending to phase out fossil fuels. These assertions are bogus, lacking any basis in data or observable evidence. In fact, the UN has a long track record of failed disaster predictions tied to climate change, going all the way back to 1989 ...

"A history lesson is in order. This is not the first time the UN has announced that 'we’re running out of time.' In 1989, 36 years of global warming ago, the UN Environment Programme’s Noel Brown told the Associated Press that 'entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels' if global warming was not reversed by the year 2000, predicting up to three feet of sea-level rise by then, massive coastal inundation of Bangladesh and Egypt, and a wave of 'eco-refugees.'

"More than three decades later, each of these predictions have proven, not just false, but wildly inaccurate. The 'Climate at a Glance' website’s 'Sea Level Rise' page documents long-term tide-gauge records and NASA satellite data showing global sea level rising at about 1.2 inches per decade, with, at best, a modest acceleration since the nineteenth century. Nor have we seen the millions of 'climate refugees' that the UN forecast. The Maldives are still above water, Bangladesh has more people than ever, and the “10-year window” to avert disaster has been rolled over so many times it could qualify as a wrecked vehicle.

"PBS/AP never mentions this failed track record. Nor does it acknowledge that the UN has now presided over 30 Conferences of the Parties (COPs) without changing the basic trajectory of global emissions or global temperature ...

"The entries at 'Climate at a Glance'’s on 'Deaths from Extreme Weather' and 'Temperature-Related Deaths' highlight a crucial fact PBS never mentions: over the past century, climate-related deaths have plummeted by more than 95 percent, even as global population has quadrupled and temperatures have risen. Independent analyses, such as HumanProgress’ review of disaster mortality, show climate-related deaths falling from about 485,000 per year in the 1920s to fewer than 20,000 per year in the 2010s, a drop of more than 99 percent on a per-capita basis, as seen in their graph below.

"Th[is] is not what 'running out of time' looks like.

"What the article and the UN report completely ignore is the role that affordable, reliable energy, overwhelmingly fossil fuels, has played in making human societies more resilient to environmental hazards. Mechanised agriculture, synthetic fertilisers, modern flood defences, air conditioning, and rapid disaster response all depend on dense, on-demand energy. That is why climate-related deaths as documented by 'Climate at a Glance' have collapsed over the past century. Yet the UN prescription, uncritically endorsed by PBS/AP, is to rapidly phase out the very energy sources that lifted billions from abject poverty, based on a track record of predictions that have repeatedly failed to materialize.

"'Climate Realism' has chronicled this pattern for years. 'UNFCCC Climate Report Lies About Its Own Science' points out how UN political bodies routinely make sweeping claims about 'intensifying destruction' that are not supported by the UN’s own scientific assessments, which identify little or no change in most types of extreme weather events and trends in natural disasters. In 'The IPCC’s 1990 Predictions Were Even Worse Than We Thought,' 'Climate Realism' reviews the early IPCC forecasts of rapid warming and sea-level rise and shows how they overshot reality. Despite this, every new report is marketed as the 'most comprehensive ever' and used to justify more urgent demands for unprecedented, wrenching, transformational remaking of the world’s economy and governing institutions.

"PBS/AP could have told its audience that the UN has now spent more than three decades issuing countdowns to catastrophe ...

"By omitting the long trail of failed UN climate pronouncements, ignoring the dramatic decline in climate-related deaths, and treating speculative model outputs as inevitable futures, PBS and the Associated Press badly mislead their audience concerning the true state of the Earth. A truly public-minded broadcaster would carefully scrutinise the UN’s record and available data rather than uncritically regurgitate its latest false alarm report."

~ Anthony Watts from his post 'Wrong Again PBS, UN Is Pushing Another False Climate Crisis Report'

UPDATE: Bjorn Lomborg writes in the New York Post:

"The main UN model shows that even if all rich countries were to cut their carbon emissions to zero, it would avert less than 0.2°F of projected warming by the end of the century, while imposing massive hits of up to 18% on rich-world GDP by 2050.

"The ever-increasing cost of climate policy is one reason the rich world is cutting back in many other areas, including aid to the world's poorest.

"That, in part, is why philanthropist Bill Gates has called for a strategic pivot on climate.

"He has laid out three tough truths: Climate change is serious but 'will not lead to humanity's demise'; temperature is not the best progress metric; and we should instead focus on boosting human welfare. [bold added; hat tip Gus Van Horn]

Real Public Health Threats vs. Climate Hysteria: "It is vital that governments focus on real pollutants, not imagined ones."

"Relying on human ingenuity to coexist with a changing climate – either warmer or cooler – and tending to long-recognised public health threats are the best ways to ensure the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants, according to an Australian physician and expert in climate and public health.

“The ingenuity of Homo sapiens at adapting to climate has permitted people to populate almost the entire globe from the freezing Arctic to the steamy tropics, notes Dr. D. Weston Allen, lead author of a paper supporting a proposed repeal of a federal designation of carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant. 'If we stick to doing what we do best – adaptation – we will continue to thrive.' ...

"[C]civilisations did well in past eras of relative warmth during Minoan and Roman times and the Medieval Warm Period. And, he says, cool periods often brought suffering, the most recent being the Little Ice Age, which experienced 'frequent widespread crop failures, mass starvation, disease and depopulation.' ...

"Although activists claim that warming will spread tropical diseases into temperate zones, malaria, once widespread in Europe and North America, declined because of public health measures such as draining swamps, spraying insecticides and increasing medical treatment.

"An oft-ignored fact is that cold weather is far deadlier than heat. Globally, cold kills many times more people than heat despite fearmongering about warming. Also, contrary to hyperbolic headlines, data for the last 100 years show that deaths from extreme weather have dropped by 90%.

"When policymakers focus exclusively on carbon dioxide and hypothetical climate harms, populations are denied the tools to manage real threats: infectious disease, hunger, dirty water, unsafe housing.

“ 'It is vital that governments focus on real pollutants, not imagined ones...,' writes Dr. Allen. 'Misguided climate action can be worse than unmitigated climate change.' ”

~ Gregory Wrightstone from his article 'Real Public Health Threats vs. Climate Hysteria'

"Suddenly, the race is on to be skeptical." [updated]

"Everywhere countries are saying they care about climate change but doing the opposite. The EU nations are fighting over their 2035 and 2040 emissions targets, Mexico is borrowing up to keep its oil company afloat, Canada scrapped their carbon tax, and is being 'coy' about their 2030 target. Governor Gavin Newsom just boosted oil drilling in California a year after he described the industry as the 'polluted heart of this climate crisis.'

"Now Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Tories in the UK, is promising to dump The Climate Change Act if she gets elected. Suddenly, the race is on to be skeptical."

~ Jo Nova from her post 'Deniers are everywhere. The race is on to be a skeptic now — Kemi Badenoch vows to repeal Climate Change Act'

UPDATE: 

"Kemi Badenoch has now confirmed that she will scrap the Climate Change Act, along with its Net Zero targets.
    "But will her MPs allow her to do it?"

"The apocalypse was always a decade away. ."

"In 2006, Al Gore’s 'An Inconvenient Truth' was peak climate fear-mongering.

"He showed maps of cities underwater, claiming melting ice from Greenland and Antarctica would displace hundreds of millions. He said our maps 'would have to be redrawn.'

[He brought his map porn to New Zealand in 2006,  John Key confessing afterwards "all his buttons had been pushed" having undergone a Damascene conversion at the feet of Al Gore's slides.]

"18 years later, none of it has happened. Not even close. The apocalypse was always a decade away. 

"Meanwhile, the man selling the panic got rich. Very rich. 

"While you were told to feel guilty and lower your standard of living, Al Gore built a $300+ million personal fortune from the climate industrial complex. 

"He became the first 'climate billionaire.' 

"He made his money from: 

• Green investment funds (Generation Investment Management) 
• Board seats & advisory roles 
• Massive speaking fees ($200k+ per speech) 
• Carbon credit trading 

"He didn't save the planet. He monetised your anxiety. 

"The truth is, the predictions were always more profitable than they were accurate."

~ Camus

When I hear warmists whinge about the rocketing cost of living, I think about climate justice.

When I hear warmists whinge about the rocketing cost of living, I think about climate justice.

Why?

Because these are climate activists complaining about the effects of climate activism.

Let's start with the cost of tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, capsicums ... you know, all the things now generally grown in greenhouses. To heat them economically, growers use gas. And "because carbon dioxide is a plant food, concentrations of the gas are sometimes elevated in greenhouses to accelerate growth....

...All this requires a lot of energy, making greenhouses vulnerable to climate taxes on carbon dioxide emissions and bans on hydrocarbons, which drive fuel and electricity prices higher.

Government policies have tripled natural gas prices for Simon Watson of 'NZ Hothouse,' a 25-year tomato producer in South Auckland, who says the very foundation of his business is crumbling.

Twenty-five years ago, gas was abundant and we were told it was going to last forever,” said Watson. “It was a wonderful thing.”

But the good times are gone. Natural gas supplies are running out [sic], and rising costs threaten to uproot the entire operation, disrupting hundreds of workers. Watson’s two plants represent about 10% of New Zealand’s 500 acres of covered crops in the upper North Island. He predicts many will have to cut back or close because they can’t afford to pay for gas.

And salad dodgers have to pay too.

Watson points out that 80% to 90% of supermarket products – from meat and dairy to sugary drinks and liquor – rely on gas-intensive processes. The decline in natural gas reserves is pushing prices higher.

As energy commentator Vijay Jayaraj explains, this is an entirely self-inflicted energy crisis.

This manufactured crisis reveals the true cost of climate virtue-signalling – not just in New Zealand but across the globe where similar policies are damaging the agricultural sector. ... The government and the energy industry have nine months to come up with a solution before the high energy demands of next winter make the situation catastrophic.

"Catastrophic" is precisely what warmists were after. So it's funny to see them whimpering now.

You want to ban gas, ban exploration of gas, to price gas off the market? Then, you know, how about sucking up the consequences without whimpering.

But it makes things no easier for the rest of us.

"The climate models didn’t see this change coming, and therefore are missing at least one big crucial factor, or maybe ten."

"[S]omething shifted in Antarctica recently and no one knows what it was.

"In 2016, Antarctic Sea Ice surrounding the continent mysteriously started to disappear. At the same time more snow started accumulating on the main Antarctic ice-sheet ...

"[A]fter 20 years of decline the steadily falling trend has broken.

"What matters most in this story is that the climate models didn’t see this change coming, and therefore are missing at least one big crucial factor, or maybe ten. Who knows?

"Antarctica was supposed to suffer polar amplification, and heat twice as fast as the rest of the world. What happened to that?"

~ Jo Nova from her post 'Antarctica defies the experts'

"The doomsday mindset is causing widespread anxiety in young people

"Human beings have the unique ability to innovate their way out of problems, creating technological solutions that benefit both people and the planet. Unfortunately, children today are often bombarded with messages of an impending apocalypse that can only be warded off by lowering living standards and embracing 'degrowth.' ...

"Even popular culture sometimes promotes this apocalyptic degrowth mindset to children. ...

"Not only is the embrace of degrowth misguided, but research suggests that this doomsday mindset is causing widespread anxiety in young people. ... [T]hat anxiety is international: A study from 2021, surveying 10,000 children and young people aged 16–25 in 10 countries, found that 59 percent of respondents were very or extremely worried about climate change, and more than 45 percent of respondents said those feelings negatively affected daily life and basic functioning.

Human beings have the unique ability to innovate their way out of problems, creating technological solutions that benefit both people and the planet. Unfortunately, children today are often bombarded with messages of an impending apocalypse that can only be warded off by lowering living standards and embracing 'degrowth'...

"Instead of rushing to solutions that require lowering living standards via coercive government mandates or expensive taxpayer-funded subsidies, we should focus on the freedom to make technological advances that raise our standard of living while also mitigating environmental harm. An advantage of that approach is that it may also improve the mental health of young people..."

~ Chelsea Follett from her post 'The Kids Need Optimism, Not Doom and Degrowth'

"$7 Trillion dollars of subsidies [sic] in support of fossil fuels"

 

“What about all the subsidies!” [What about] the Guardian headlines hand-wringing over $7 Trillion dollars of subsidies [sic] in support of fossil fuels. The main source of this meme is the IMF ...

"Literally, 80% of the “subsidies” are what they’d like to charge oil and gas companies for things like the imaginary damage that CO2 does on simulated Earths in broken climate models. The IMF calls this 'implicit subsidies.' ... I might call it a brazen fake. ...

"The orange 'subsidies' are the total fantasies here. It really is that bad.

"Unbelievably, other parts of the '80% implicit subsidy block' even include things like the cost of traffic accidents, fatalities, congestion and wear and tear on the roads. Somehow when fossil fuels cause congestion, and we suffer a loss of productivity, that’s an implicit subsidy because the price of fuel was not efficient.

"The outrageous gall of this is so much that even hard-left Vox is uncomfortable and asks if this was a bit misleading of the IMF ... Maybe the IMF will accidentally solve congestion because everyone will give up and move to the country to grow cabbages?"

~ Jo Nova from her post 'The fantasy land of “Fossil Fuel Subsidies” where even a car accident, a traffic jam are a subsidy'

The models were wrong — "they might as well be tea leaf readers when it comes to predicting the climate"

"Everything about Antarctica has defied the experts. For years Antarctic sea ice expanded when it wasn’t supposed to. Then, suddenly in 2016 the sea ice around Antarctica dramatically started to shrink, and that wasn’t supposed to happen either. Scientists wondered at the time if it was just a temporary blip, but then it got even smaller. Holes in the sea ice 'as big as Switzerland' have started to appear for the first time since the mid 1970s.

"To explain this mystery (that was rarely mentioned) a new paper suggests the salinity of surface waters has changed. We’re not just talking about a small piece of ocean, this is everything south of 50°. For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean was getting less salty — an 'expected response to a warming climate' they said that started in about 1980, 'however, this trend reversed abruptly after 2015.'

"So as news seeps out this week that there is a 'dangerous feedback loop' where shrinking ice is warming the ocean, bear in mind that the experts also admit this is 'completely unexpected' which is their way of saying 'the models were wrong.' Carbon dioxide was not supposed to do this.

"Most likely some large natural cycle has shifted gears. Steadily rising CO2 didn’t cause the rise in sea level before 2015, and didn’t cause the decline after that either. There are bigger forces at work, and we don’t know what they are…

Graph adapted from Climate4You 

"When the die-hard believers point out that Antarctica is 'just catching up' and that they always said Antarctic sea ice would shrink, remind them that Turner et al said in 2013: 'The increase in Antarctic sea ice remains one of the great unsolved puzzles of climate science.' Now they have a new theory, 'the salinity changed' — but what caused that? They don’t know. They might as well be tea leaf readers when it comes to predicting the climate."

~ Jo Nova from her post 'Suddenly 1.5 million square km of sea ice is missing near Antarctica and all the climate models were wrong'

"It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world—that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison."

"It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world—that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison."

~ Harvard Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen

"[T]he [climate] scenario leading to the greatest amount of climate change [is] called RCP8.5 (indicating a radiative forcing of 8.5 W/m2 in 2100), [which has been adopted by the UN's IPCC] as the single business-as-usual scenario .... which gave it special status among ... the hundreds of baseline scenarios of the broader IPCC scenario database.
    "RCP8.5 is not simply 'highly unlikely' — it is [already] falsified, meaning that its emissions trajectory is already well out of step with reality. We showed this conclusively in Burgess et al. 2021, from which the annotated figure below comes.
    "The gap between the black arrow (RCP8.5) and the blue arrow (reality) indicates that RCP8.5 is not just unlikely, but impossible — it is already wildly wrong. Since we published that paper, that gap between RCP8.5 and reality has only grown larger.'

~ Justin Ritchie & Roger Pielke Jr., from their article 'How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality'

Source: Burgess et al. 2021

"When the story of the great turn-of-the-millennium climate science fraud comes to be written by future historians, the central role of the RCP8.5 ‘business as usual’ model scenario, much featured in recent IPCC reports, will be obvious to all. This ‘pathway’ has polluted climate model predictions for years with its wild and improbable claims of carbon dioxide emissions and soaring temperatures. A huge number of science papers incorporating the pathway are published by obvious Net Zero activists, and their ‘scientists say’ climate psychosis-inducing fairy tales are sped on their way by blinkered journalists in the mainstream press. The science writer Roger Pielke Jr. notes that RCP8.5 has been 'falsified' – most knew it was fake, historians are likely to conclude, but the Net Zero addiction was too strong for it to be given up."

~ Chris Morrison from his post 'The Great Climate Science Swindle Goes On'

"Coal is expected to dominate the energy sector for at least three more decades"

"[C]oal is the backbone of energy production, supplying over 70% of India’s electricity. The dark evenings of my childhood have been brightened.

"Other developing countries have learned from China and India how coal jump-starts economies and lifts millions from poverty. Now, they too line up for their share of the fuel that sparked the Industrial Revolution.

"Global coal production reached an all-time high of nearly 9 billion metric tons in 2024. Chinese and Indian output continued to grow, and Indonesia set export records.

"India is on track to burn twice as much coal as the U.S. and Europe put together – possibly within the year – while China has already surged ahead, consuming 30% more coal than every other nation combined. ...

"Coal shipments to Southeast Asia are on a steady climb ... Rising production of South American crude steel will increase demand for metallurgical coal ... African energy production [is] on the rise ... Even the U.K. government, while still parading its 'net zero' credentials, is, nonetheless, procuring [imported] coking coal to keep British Steel alive ... In the U.S., President Trump has prioritised coal under a new executive order ...

"Coal is expected to dominate the energy sector for at least three more decades, barring a disruption by rapid innovation that would enable its economical displacement. Similarly, the mineral will continue to play a crucial role in iron and steel production absent development of a viable alternative.

"Predictions to the contrary are just so much hot air – largely from those most averse to a warming atmosphere."

~ Vijay Jayaraj from his post 'Big, Beautiful Coal Here for Many More Years Despite ‘Green’ Demonisation'

“That’s not because forestry is a better use of the land, but because climate policy makes it more profitable to plant pine trees than to farm sheep"

“Once the backbone of New Zealand’s economy, sheep are fast becoming an endangered species in this country,”

“Each year we’re losing tens of thousands of hectares of productive farmland. Where sheep and lambs once grazed, pine trees are taking their place....

Sheep numbers are rapidly plunging with almost a million sheep disappearing every year.

“If that trend continues, we’re not going to have any sheep left in our country within two decades. We’ll just have hills plastered in nothing but pine trees. ...Williams says the number one driver of sheep farming’s collapse is clear: carbon forestry....

“The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is effectively subsidising pine trees to offset fossil fuel emissions, and that’s pushing sheep farmers off the land, never to return....

Between 2017 and 2024, 260,000 hectares of sheep and beef country were swallowed up by pines.

“That’s not because forestry is necessarily a better use of the land, but because Government policy makes it more profitable to plant pine trees than to farm sheep....

“Climate policy is trumping food production. We’re blindly sacrificing rural jobs, local processing infrastructure, and sustainable red meat exports at the altar of carbon offsetting....

~ Federated Farmers meat & wool chair Toby Williams from his press release 'Federated Farmers launches ‘SOS: Save Our Sheep’ Campaign' [hat tip Home Paddock]

A stream bed, once with year-round full flow, now
rendered dry in summer by pine trees in background

"Global Warming, or as it’s now called, Climate Change, is a major part of recent governments’ policies. ... An Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) was the [government's] tool devised to combat the perceived global warming. ...

"Big businesses which emit carbon ... can choose to reduce carbon emissions at source or they can offset those emissions by buying carbon credits.

"The latter is their preference. That has led to the method of planting trees in large quantities, to act as a carbon sink.

"Pine trees are the obvious answer from a speculator’s viewpoint, as they’re quick growing – compared to native trees – and quickly attain a height of five metres.

"Why five metres? ... “[T]o qualify as forest land in the ETS, the trees in the forest must be species that can reach at least 5 metres in height.” That’s double the height of a standard ceiling. ... With native vegetation, some 70 species [are therefore] excluded from carbon sequestering assessments. Examples are the many species of coprosmas, hoheria, manuka, muehlenbecka, the several species of pittosporums and others.... Even grass must have a carbon sequestering value?

"Frequently farmers plant trees out of shelter or environmental or aesthetic motivation. But under 5 metres in height – they don’t count. Under the ETS, farmers are being unfairly lumbered with costly dire consequences. The dice are loaded by the impractical 5 metre height rule. ...

"Pine monocultures are environmentally disastrous with an insatiable thirst for water depleting streams to dry beds, wilding pines spread, loss of bio-diversity and acidic runoff. ...A pine tree is said to use 85 litres of water a day whereas a native tree, dependent on species, uses considerably less. Water from a pine forest with a 'bare' pine needle forest floor has quicker runoff compared to a typical native forest area with shade-loving undergrowth. In a few words, native forest has a higher water retention factor leading to natural, more consistent stream flows.

"Anecdotal evidence points to streams much reduced in flow once monocultures of pines have been established. For example, bach owners and residents in the Marlborough Sounds and the Northbank of Marlborough’s Wairau Valley have observed the same diminished flow in creeks after extensive monocultures of pine forests are established.

"But planting trees is the way to combat climate change ... An Austrian countess snapped up a sheep station near Masterton for carbon farming of conversion to pines. Swedish multinational furniture manufacturer IKEA secured a 5,500 hectare sheep and beef farm in the remote Catlins while German insurance giant Munich Re bought large parcels of land near Gisborne and in Southland. ... [S]ome of New Zealand’s biggest emitters — Air NZ,Contact Energy, Genesis Energy and Z Energy — have formed a company called Dryland Carbon which plans to acquire 20,000 hectares to plant in forests over five years. In 2020 it got approval to plant a permanent pine forest of one million trees south of Gisborne....

"[W]ith carbon prices high, more and more speculative carbon farming is erasing valuable, productive sheep and beef farm lands."

~ Tony Orman from his op-ed 'New Zealand Carbon Farming'

The DEFINITIVE Climate Change Rap Battle

From the folks who brought us the Keynes v Hayek rap battle ...

Live from Davos, it’s your morning update on the future of the planet. Representing the alarm bells and carbon cuts, it’s environmental activist and former Vice President Al Gore, but he’s not alone. Enter the unapologetic fossil fuel defender, Alex Epstein, armed with charts, charisma, and a whole lot of hydrocarbons. Just when things start boiling over, in steps Mr. Moderate—Bjorn Lomborg—trying to cool the room with cost-benefit calculations. Is the planet on fire? Are fossil fuels the secret to success? Or is there a third path no one wants to rap about? Tune in, turn up, and try to keep your cool—this is the DEFINITIVE Climate Change Rap Battle.

"Sub-soil privatisation should eclipse ‘climate change’ as the number one policy initiative of the 21st century"

“'The case of Guillermo Yeatts (1937-2018) for subsoil privatisation should eclipse ‘climate change’ as the number one policy initiative of the 21st century. This friend of private property, free markets, the rule of law, and civil society, a successful entrepreneur in his own right, a thinker and doer, has set up an excellent opportunity for a new political era in his beloved Argentina.'

Here are some quotations from Yeatts’ book Subsurface Wealth...

“'The history of oil production in Argentina has been characterised by a continuing tug-of-war between the state as owner of the subsurface and private producers in the pursuit of profitable production of the resource. ... The effectively monopolistic position of the federal oil corporation displaced the private sector ... '

"'[P]ublic ownership of the subsurface has been the foundation of a model of forced redistribution of rent in the oil industry. [Government] institutions are the royalties system, public oil production, and the establishment of reserves, quotas, regulations, registries, permits, etc. They have also caused stagnation in the industry and relegated the country’s oil resources to oblivion.'

“'Privatisation … is the institutional change required to reduce risk and allow internalisation of externalities through private, voluntary, and mutually beneficial agreements. Privatisation of the subsurface will ... encourage innovation among surface owners and oil prospectors. ...'

"'This change is about unobstructing minds and freeing them from restrictions. It appeals to the initiative of thousands of surface owners who will discover new business opportunities and new means to obtain profits.'”

~ Robert Bradley Jr. from his post on 'Argentinian Reform: Subsoil Privatization (Javier Milei, meet Guillermo Yeatts)'

PS: It goes for the US too. (See post Transferring Public Lands to Productive Private Ownership Will Unleash America's Abundant Natural Resources) And it would go just the same for us, with our islands' abundant resources. 

FACTCHECK: Climate Version

The Climate Realism site fact-checks February's climate stories. These are their top five corrections:

They suggest that "what’s disappearing faster than glaciers is US participation in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

Our prediction is that the glaciers will outlast the climate hoax.

I reckon they'll be right about that too.

PS: Other notable February climate fact-checks:

• The Guardian says, "There Are Identifiable 'Climate Tipping Points' for 'Climate Catastrophes: 
WRONG:"The premise that we are approaching dangerous and unprecedented climate tipping points is unsupported by history or present data."
• Earth.Com says, "climate change is causing cocoa production to fall in West and Central Africa." 
THIS IS FALSE: "Data show that cocoa production has increased during the last few decades of modest warming, rather than falling. Part of the reason for this is improved growing conditions in those regions and carbon dioxide fertilisation."
• The Washington Post says, "Rats Are Thriving in Cities—And Climate Change Is Helping Them.” 
THIS IS FALSE: "Rats have always lived among and thrived with human populations. As cities have grown, so have urban rat populations, benefitting from mismanaged waste, ineffective pest control policies, and urban decay, none of which have anything to do with CO₂ levels."
• The New York Times says that "Climate Change is Causing High Coffee Prices." 
THIS IS NOT BORNE OUT IN THE DATA. "Coffee production data show that there has been a steady increase over time, despite—and perhaps due in part to—increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and the slight warming of recent decades."
• A recently published (and trumpeted) paper identifies a catastrophic "tipping point" for the Greenland ice sheet. 
BUT HERE'S THE PROBLEM: "This scenario is entirely model-driven, with little to no real-world validation. And, more importantly, it hinges on assumptions that stretch the limits of scientific credibility."
• And finally, "for years, climate scientists have assured us that NOAA’s homogenised temperature datasets—particularly the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN)—are the gold standard for tracking global warming."
HOWEVER: "A recent study published in Atmosphere has uncovered shocking inconsistencies in NOAA’s adjustments, raising serious concerns about the reliability of homogenised temperature records. ... [The] findings reveal a deeply concerning pattern of inconsistencies and unexplained changes in temperature adjustments, prompting renewed scrutiny of how NOAA processes climate data."