2024 has been a revealing one on Ethics Alarms regarding the climate change debacle. Let’s review, shall we? Here, we discussed the New York Times complaining that an action movie didn’t have enough climate change propaganda. Here, we learned that the Biden administration’s “climate adviser” is a lawyer, not a scientist, and engaged in fanciful, unscientific fearmongering, like claiming that cliamte change was causing the wildfires in Maui and California. Here, we discussed an esteemed British climate scientist who argued that the only way to control global warming sufficiently to save the world is to “cull the human population,” ideally through pandemics. Here, an expert testifying before Congress about the need to spend trillions of dollars that the U.S. doesn’t have to be “carbon neutral” revealed himself as a phony.
The introduction to all of this arrived in September of last year, when Patrick T. Brown, the co-director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute, essentially blew the whistle on his own colleagues, writing in part, “…it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals…[a]nd the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society. To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change…[This] distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”
Well, 2024 isn’t over yet. Now the BBC has formally admitted that all the hype about climate change killing off the polar bears was a deliberate falsehood. Responding to a reader complaint, the BBC wrote, “The article reported on the death of a worker who was attacked by two polar bears in Canada’s northern Nunavut territory, and said such attacks are rare because “The species is in decline, and scientists attribute it to the loss of sea ice caused by global warming – leading to shrinking of their hunting and breeding grounds.”
Oops! After the challenge, the BBC wrote, “Research carried out by the ECU confirmed scientists agree climate change will cause a reduction in sea ice, which is likely to have a long-term detrimental effect on polar bears and overall population numbers…. However evidence from the Canadian Wildlife Service and the Polar Bear specialist group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature appears to suggest numbers are stable overall at present and not in decline as stated.”
But wait! There’s more!
The climate scientist who complained to the BBC about the polar bear lie has just had his annual review of UK weather trends, based on official data, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. He found no evidence that the UK’s weather is becoming more extreme. He did find….
• Average temperatures have barely increased since 2007.
• A Met Office study in 2006 found strong evidence that an earlier rise in temperature was linked to increased sunshine, possibly the result of reduced air pollution thanks to the Clean Air Acts of the 1960s and 70s. That study was buried.
• Days with extreme temperatures have fallen since the 1970s, with fewer extreme cold days outnumbering more hot ones.
• Average annual rainfall in England and Wales has increased since the 1960s, but is now at similar levels to periods before the Sixties.
• Summers have not become drier as predicted by the climate change models.
• Rainfall has not become more extreme annually, monthly or daily.
• The sea levels around the British Isles are rising at the same rate they were a century ago.
• Wind storms have declined in frequency and intensity since the 1990s.
Meanwhile, the report’s charts show that temperatures have been rising since the 17th Century, well before “global warming.” The full report can be downloaded here.
I have concluded that no amount of evidence, failed models, exposed dishonesty and dire predictions that never materialize will ever move the climate hysterics to admit that their fervor is based on ideology rather than logic or science. That alone is sufficient reason not to take them seriously, and definitely not to allow them to waste taxpayer money on alleged carbon reduction measures that are pure virtue-signalling to those who think hysteria is a virtue.
Ethics Alarms 
I have long postulated that climate science was a means to supplant those in the fossil fuels (extraction industries) with new oligarchs in these emerging industries. Ideology is not driving the science, money is.
If you examine wealth building to will see that those who are first movers in a new technology capture market share first. From there the first movers seek government assistance to finance expansion and regulations to prevent new entrants.
Granholm’s ham handed grift with the electric bus personal investment illustrates this point. She was just too stupid to allow the public to become aware of her choices among investments.
Climate alarmism is indistinguishable from a religious cult.
Herew ids the United Nations.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antonio-guterres_cop29-activity-7266225390489153536-WRNM?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Today the WSJ published this article: U.N. Reaches $300 Billion Climate Financing Deal as Trump Looms. (Gift link).
It is a paean to grift, ignorance and poor reasoning.
My comment was rejected for violating community standards:
“This year is likely to be the warmest on record. It is also likely to be the first, according to European Union climate scientists, that averaged 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial-era temperatures, a key threshold set out in the Paris accord. Temperatures have been so high that scientists have been at a loss to explain them, even accounting for the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
Does no one remember the Hunga Tonga volcano? It injected nearly 150 million tons of water vapor into the stratosphere, increasing its content by 10%. But that wouldn’t allow for propagandistic scaretastrophe writing such as this.
Speaking of which: The phrase “warmest on record”: What does that mean? Wait, what? It doesn’t mean “ever”, it means over the last fifty years? Then say that, instead of phraseology intended to mislead.
Further, aside from 1.5º C being completely arbitrary, what would the global average temperature be if GHG were held constant since the pre-industrial era, ceteris paribus?Funny, that number never comes up, regardless of its fundamental importance.”
So, I guess it would have been a bad time to bring up the Maldives.
That was rejected as a comment? Why?
No reason specified, other than a list of community standards, one of which I must have violated somehow.
That was my second attempt, by the way. My first, instead of saying “Further, aside from 1.5º C being completely arbitrary …” said “1.5º C was pulled from some activist’s rectal data bank…”
Figuring that must have been the offense, I amended it, only to get rejected again.
Third attempt made it through after deleting But that wouldn’t allow for propagandistic scaretastrophe writing such as this.
“I guess it would have been a bad time to bring up the Maldives.”
The Maldives? You mean the rapidly_disappearing_below_the_ocean_surface island chain that held an Underwater Cabinet Meeting in 2009 so their epically corrupt President Mohamed Nasheed could guilt some idiot Lefties into sending them Climate Reparations?
Sad thing is, it worked; they received half a BILLION shortly thereafter.
Now, were these Climate Criminals good stewards with their generous, new-found pelf and use it to move all their $#!t to higher ground?
Not exactly.
They used it to build golf courses and airports to promote tourism by catering to “Fly-In Golfers.”
“Fly-In Golfers?” To the BFE location of the Maldives? You gotta be f*****g kidding!
Much like Professional Wrestling, the Climate Cabal deftly operates under the umbrella of Kayfabe: Tacit agreement to behave as if something is real, sincere, or genuine when it is not.
Bravo Indigo November Golf Oscar!
PWS
I have been pretty certain that the ‘climate change’ movement was a cult since the 2nd IPCC report. It was very different from the first. Then I found that the original IPCC group had been purged of all (including the head of the IPCC) who weren’t ‘true believers’. All who wanted to do traditional science were cast aside and banned from publishing about climate in the new climate journals and eventually, all science journals. That is why you can find all the IPCC reports except the first online. The first IPCC report contains the traditional temperature record, including warm periods warmer than today. The existence of such warm periods has been mostly struck from the literature and there are ongoing efforts to remove what little references are left to the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warm Period.
The ClimateGate e-mail dump showing the intentional manipulation of the raw data before it is given to researchers really made me realize that we probably don’t even know what the temperature measurements from the last 100 years truly are any more. They have been fudged so many times (and some repeatedly), that I don’t know if anyone has the raw data anymore.
One more concrete example:
When you go look at the National Interagency Fire Center site, it has burn acreage going back to 1983. Why 1983? As it turns out, 1983 was the lowest burn-acreage year on record. Because it’s been drifting upward since, it makes burn acreage very easy to line up with increasing CO2 and the man-made climate-change agenda.
Then the NIFC site says that there is no official data kept before 1983. That is a lie.
US government burn acreage data has been around for at least 130 years…at least. The New York Times (when it was actually reporting news) was reporting on historical government burn acreage history back in the 1930s. Which means the available data was much earlier than that.
https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics/wildfires
It took me five minutes to track down a related eight-minute video from Tony Heller that highlights this exact topic.
Thanks for that Joel! It’s now enshrined in my voluminous Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming file.
One minor quibble, Heller’s incorrect pronunciation of Peshtigo; it’s PESH ti go…not pesh TI go.
PWS
Heller’s YouTube channel is a gold mine for those wanting to criticize the climate-change agenda.
(1) If you look at the global cooling panic of the ’70’s and ’80’s, you need to realize that the same data they were POSITIVE showed an impending ice age, now DEFINITELY shows human-caused global warning.
(2) Always remember, the Viking FARMED Greenland. We can’t farm Greenland. Why not? It’s to cold!
(3). If we really cared about dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we would be banning private jets and yachts, we would stop China from building 1 coal-fired electric plant a week (with a 50 year service life), and we would be encouraging people to use mopeds instead of 9000 lb electric Hummers. Instead, we are trying to ban gardening, livestock, and nuclear power.
Wow!
Do you have a link to this?