Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation
Global warming is real and human-caused. It is leading to large-scale climate change. Under the guise of climate "skepticism", the public is bombarded with misinformation that casts doubt on the reality of human-caused global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming "skepticism".
Our mission is simple: debunk climate misinformation by presenting peer-reviewed science and explaining the techniques of science denial, discourses of climate delay, and climate solutions denial.
Posted on 14 May 2025 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from the Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler
In August 2023, during an especially brutal Texas heat wave, I opened my electricity bill and was stunned by the total. As someone who studies climate change, I couldn’t help but connect the dots: global warming had made the heat wave worse, and that extra heat was driving up how much I had to spend on electricity.
That realization led me to a simple question: how much of this bill was due to climate change? I set out to answer it and, 1.5 years later, I published a peer-reviewed paper. This post explains the method behind that analysis and why I estimate that climate change added about $80 to electricity costs for every Texan in 2023.
The amount of electricity consumed is strongly affected by the outside temperature. We can see this by plotting Texas temperature from ERA5 reanalysis vs. ERCOT energy demand:
Scatterplot of 2023 daily average temperature of Texas (°C) vs daily ERCOT’s daily average power demand (GW); the dashed line is a polynomial fit to the data. Adapted from Fig. 1a of Dessler, 2025
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Posted on 13 May 2025 by Ken Rice
On November 1, 2024 we announced the publication of 33 rebuttals based on the report "Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles" written by Matthew Eisenson, Jacob Elkin, Andy Fitch, Matthew Ard, Kaya Sittinger & Samuel Lavine and published by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in 2024. Below is the blog post version of rebuttal #28 based on Sabin's report.
As with solar energy, complete reliance on wind energy would pose intermittency challenges. However, wind, solar, and storage together can provide the majority of the country’s electricity without compromising reliability1, and energy efficiency and grid flexibility mechanisms can support a renewable energy-based grid. (Lovins 2017) Hydropower has also been found to support wind and solar by compensating for intermittency in those sources (Shan et al. 2020). Moreover, building more long-distance transmission infrastructure can enable greater reliance on wind and solar generation2, and linking offshore wind projects through offshore transmission networks is also expected to enhance grid reliability.3 A National Renewable Energy Laboratory report concluded that “wind power can support power system reliability” by providing “active power controls,”4 which are mechanisms for balancing the power generated by wind farms with the power consumed on the electricity grid (van Wingerden et al. 2017). And although the reliability of wind and solar energy was questioned following Texas’ widespread power outages in the winter of 2021, Texas’ grid failure was primarily caused by freezing natural gas infrastructure, rather than failures at wind and solar farms, though nuclear, coal, and wind also experienced disruptions at a smaller scale.5 (also Busby et al. 2021)
Wind energy has already been successfully incorporated into the United States’ electric grid at significant scale.6 Domestic energy production from wind more than tripled between 2011 and 2022, from 120 billion kilowatt-hours (2.9% of total energy production) to 435 billion kilowatt-hours (10.3% of total energy production).6 Some states have seen even more rapid growth. In 2021, wind energy accounted for 58% of electricity production in Iowa, and 43% of electricity production in Kansas.7
Wind power has enabled Iowa not only to reduce energy costs, but to generate additional revenue by selling excess power to neighboring states during shortages.8 Today, Iowa is considered one of the states with the most reliable energy systems.9 In California, electricity generated from wind power increased from roughly 3% in 2009, to roughly 7% in 2022.10 Electricity generated from natural gas declined from roughly 56% in 2009, to roughly 47% in 2022. Yet even with this increased reliance on wind power, California’s grid reliability has remained consistent, and largely above national averages.11 California has even been able to briefly meet 103% of its energy demands exclusively from renewable sources, demonstrating that a large economy can by powered by renewable energy.12 The UK has also made substantial progress utilizing wind power, which was responsible for 26.8% of overall energy production in 2022, and which helped stave off the worse impacts from the energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.13
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Posted on 12 May 2025 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters
The new Department of Energy secretary, Chris Wright, until recently was the CEO of Liberty Energy, the nation’s second-largest fracking firm. In 2024, the firm published a manifesto called “Bettering Human Lives,” in which Wright makes a provocative statement that would be reassuring – if only it were true:
“Another thing that we often hear about climate change is that it leads to a significant increase in extreme weather events with deadly consequences. This claim is false. Extensive reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) actually show no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or weather-related droughts,” Wright wrote in a CEO letter introducing the report.
The IPCC is a U.N. body with the job of providing information about climate science to governments. Thousands of scientists volunteer to contribute to its reports, which are published every five to seven years.
Wright’s claim about what the IPCC says is effectively rebutted by atmospheric scientist Jim Kossin, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, in the video below by Peter Sinclair, a former Yale Climate Connections contributor.
“We have high confidence that extreme precipitation events are increasing in intensity and frequency and that human actions are playing a substantial role,” Kossin says in the video. Even for drought, where the science is somewhat less certain, “We still have good confidence that drought extremes are increasing and that human actions are playing a role,” Kossin adds.
Understanding the limitations of the IPCC report
The IPCC report is considered the gold standard of climate change information because it is the result of a years-long assessment process by hundreds of the world’s top climate scientists, who subject it to a rigorous review. However, the IPCC report can be exploited by those with vested interests against acting on climate change. Here are four ways to do so:
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Posted on 11 May 2025 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom
A listing of 27 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, May 4, 2025 thru Sat, May 10, 2025.
This week's roundup is again published by category and sorted by number of articles included in each. The formatting is a bit different compared to previous weeks, though. We are still interested in feedback to hone the categorization, so if you spot any clear misses and/or have suggestions for additional categories, please let us know in the comments. Thanks!
Stories we promoted this week, by category:
Climate Policy and Politics (7 articles)
- How the political consensus on climate change has shattered Despite unswering public attitudes on climate change, for a number of reasons both benign and malign the UK finds itself struggling to maintain strong commitment to net zero. BBC News, Helen Catt, May 02, 2025.
- Trump budget would decimate climate, renewables funding The preliminary funding proposal outlines cuts the administration wants for myriad clean energy, climate and environment programs. E&E News, Politico, Andres Picon, May 02, 2025.
- 100 Days of Trump 2.0: Renewable Energy Siting and Permitting Sabin Center for Climate Change Law researcher Matthew Eisenson reviews legal aspects of the Trump administration's interference with market forces in US energy modernization. Sabin Center Climate Law Blog, Matthew Eisenson, May 5, 2025.
- EPA reorganization signals end to climate work The agency plans to eliminate offices that track planet-warming emissions and regulate air pollution. E&ENews, Jean Chemnick, May 05, 2025.
- Trump Administration Decommissions Sea Ice Data That Sounded an Alarm on Arctic Climate Change Cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are now degrading the datasets used to monitor the most rapidly warming parts of the planet. More such moves are coming, NOAA has warned. Inside Climate News, Peter Aldhous, May 07, 2025.
- How Trump cuts could affect your weather reports Following the budget’s release, all living former directors of the National Weather Service, which falls under NOAA, drafted an open letter warning of drastic impacts if the proposed cuts were implemented. The Christian Science Monitor USA, Caitlin Babcock, May 07, 2025.
- Trump admin ends extreme weather database that has tracked cost of disasters since 1980 CNN, Andrew Freedman, May 8, 2025.
Climate Change Impacts (6 articles)
- Dangerously hot in Alaska? New warnings show climate change impact. National Weather Service to launch first heat advisories in Fairbanks and Juneau this summer in response to climate change. USA Today, Dinah Voyles Pulver, May 3, 2025.
- Ice Free Arctic Ocean by 2030 now a real possibility! We're NOT ready!! "Just have a Think" on Youtube, Dave Borlace, May 4, 2025.
- How the climate crisis threatens Indigenous traditions in Canada: `It`s not the way it used to be` Shorter winters and thinning ice are imperiling cultural activities in the north, including hockey, broomball and hunting The Guardian, Hilary Beaumont in Cat Lake First Nation, May 05, 2025.
- Children born in 2020 will face `unprecedented exposure` to climate extremes Children born in 2020 will face ''unprecedented exposure'' to extreme weather events, including heatwaves, droughts and wildfires, even if warming is limited to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures. Carbon Brief, Ayesha Tandon, May 07, 2025.
- Global temperatures stuck at near-record highs in April: EU monitor Global temperatures were stuck at near-record highs in April, extending an unprecedented heat streak and raising questions about how quickly the world might be warming. Phys.org, Nick Perry & Benjamin Legrendre, May 08, 2025.
- Climate change made recent flooding in Midwest, South more intense, report finds The deadly storms that tore through eight U.S. states in early April, killing at least 24 people, were made significantly worse by climate change, according to a study released this week. CBS News, Sarah Metz, May 08, 2025.
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Posted on 10 May 2025 by Sue Bin Park
Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.
Is the climate as unpredictable as the weather?
Climate predictions are more reliable than weather forecasts because they model long-term trends driven by large-scale, predictable factors, like greenhouse gas emissions, rather than short-term local conditions.
Weather forecasts aim to predict daily changes in temperature or precipitation with great detail. These are primarily influenced by rapidly shifting conditions, making forecasts less accurate beyond a few days. Small changes in today’s weather can lead to very different outcomes tomorrow.
In contrast, climate models project broad patterns over decades, predicting how the planet’s baseline will shift. Projections of rising average temperatures are based on well-understood factors like the greenhouse effect, recently driven by our constant CO2 emissions.
A review of climate models published since the 1970s found that they accurately predicted the rise in average global temperatures.
Scientists continue to refine models with historical data and lessons learned since the beginning of computer climate modeling fifty years ago.
Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact
This fact brief is responsive to quotes such as this one.
Sources
NOAA Why should I trust scientists’ climate projections for 50 or 100 years from now when they can’t accurately forecast the weather more than 2 weeks from now?
EarthScan Weather vs. climate: can they be predicted?
NOAA Climate Models
Geophysical Research Letters Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections
Carbon Brief Analysis: How well have climate models projected global warming?
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Posted on 8 May 2025 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack
Open access notables
The post-truth era and how science education keeps ignoring it, Erduran, Science:
Conventional educational strategies in combatting post-truth seem to emphasize merits of truth, evidence, and reason. Such focus misses key elements of the post-truth era. It ignores the political dynamics that engulf science as well as the antiscience campaign that is deliberately carried out and amplified in the public domain. Post-truth demands a cultural shift in science education to ensure that sociological and political contexts of science are explicitly taught and understood. The sooner the science education community commits to dealing with the post-truth problem, the more likely that educational environments will be able to equip students to recognize the cycles of warfare on truth that demand perseverance in dealing with deliberate and manipulative undermining of science.
The Case for the Anthropocene Epoch Is Stronger Than the Case for the Holocene Epoch, Skelton & Noone, Earth's Future:
The recommendation that the Anthropocene be denoted as a geological epoch was recently rejected by the International Union of Geological Sciences. Here, we compare the scientific rationales presented for the Anthropocene, the Holocene and the six other epochs in the Cenozoic Era: the Pleistocene, the Pliocene, the Miocene, the Oligocene, the Eocene and the Paleocene. We also present a historical perspective on the process through which the Holocene was accepted as a formal geological epoch. We conclude that, from a purely geological perspective, the scientific case for the Anthropocene as a geological epoch is stronger than the case for the Holocene and as good as or better than the cases for several other epochs in the Cenozoic Era.
Anthropogenic climate change contributes to wildfire particulate matter and related mortality in the United States, Law et al., Communications Earth & Environment:
Climate change has increased forest fire extent in temperate and boreal North America. Here, we quantified the contribution of anthropogenic climate change to human mortality and economic burden from exposure to wildfire particulate matter at the county and state level across the contiguous US (2006 to 2020) by integrating climate projections, climate-wildfire models, wildfire smoke models, and emission and health impact modeling. Climate change contributed to approximately 15,000 wildfire particulate matter deaths over 15 years with interannual variability ranging from 130 (95% confidence interval: 64, 190) to 5100 (95% confidence interval: 2500, 7500) deaths and a cumulative economic burden of $160 billion. Approximately 34% of the additional deaths attributable to climate change occurred in 2020, costing $58 billion. The economic burden was highest in California, Oregon, and Washington. We suggest that absent abrupt changes in climate trajectories, land management, and population, the indirect impacts of climate change on human-health through wildfire smoke will escalate.
Research was supported by NIH/NIEHS under award number K23ES035863.
The role of science in the climate change discussions on Reddit, Cornale et al., PLOS Climate:
Well-informed collective and individual action necessary to address climate change hinges on the public’s understanding of the relevant scientific findings. Social media has been a popular platform for the deliberation around climate change and the policies aimed at addressing it. Whether such deliberation is informed by scientific findings is an important step in gauging the public’s awareness of scientific resources and their latest findings. In this study, we examine the use of scientific sources in the course of 14 years of public deliberation around climate change on one of the largest social media platforms, Reddit. We find that only 4.0% of the links in the Reddit posts, and 6.5% in the comments, point to domains of scientific sources, although these rates have been increasing in the past decades. These links are dwarfed, however, by the citations of mass media, newspapers, and social media, the latter of which peaked especially during 2019–2020. Further, scientific sources are more likely to be posted by users who also post links to sources having central-left political leaning, and less so by those posting more polarized sources. Scientific sources are not often used in response to links to unreliable sources, instead, other such sources are likely to appear in their comments. This study provides the quantitative evidence of the dearth of scientific basis of the online public debate and puts it in the context of other, potentially unreliable, sources of information.
Groundwater dominates snowmelt runoff and controls streamflow efficiency in the western United States, Brooks et al., Communications Earth & Environment
Climate change in seasonally snow-covered mountain catchments is reducing water supply and decreasing streamflow predictability. Here, we use tritium age dating to show that contrary to the common assumption that snowmelt quickly contributes to runoff, streamflow during snowmelt in western US catchments is dominated by older groundwater. The average age of streamwater during snowmelt runoff (5.7 ± 4.3 years) was intermediate to the average age of groundwater (10.4 ± 4.5 years) and recent precipitation, indicating that 58% (±34%) of snowmelt runoff was derived from groundwater. Water ages, streamflow, and groundwater storage were mediated by bedrock geology: low-permeability hard rock/shale catchments exhibited younger ages, less storage, and more efficient streamflow generation than high-permeability sandstone/clastic catchments. Our results demonstrate that snowmelt runoff is the result of multiple prior years of climate mediated by groundwater storage. Including these interactions will be crucial for predicting water resources as climate and landscape changes accelerate.
This project was supported by National Science Foundation awards 2208424, 2012123, and 2043363.
Increasing frequency and spatial extent of cattle heat stress conditions in the Southern plains of the USA, Lee et al., Scientific Reports:
Oklahoma, as part of the Southern Plains region and a key contributor to U.S. cattle production, faces increasing heat stress due to climate change, which can adversely influence livestock. We analyzed data from 121 Oklahoma Mesonet stations (1998–2022) to assess the spatio-temporal patterns of heat stress that influence cattle production across the state. Using the temperature humidity index (THI) and comprehensive climate index (CCI), we counted the number of days that exceeded critical thresholds for cattle production. Based on THI, only 12% of stations showed a significant increase in heat stress, while more than 60% did based on CCI, driven mainly by significantly lower summer wind speeds. Statewide cattle and calf inventory data showed a significant decrease in cattle numbers, especially following years with a large number of heat stress days based on CCI. At the county level, decreasing inventory often aligned with increasing heat stress, which suggested a strong relationship between heat stress and cattle health. With the number of heat stress days increasing by up to four days per year, adaptive strategies are crucial to mitigate the negative impacts of heat stress on cattle health and productivity in this region.
S.L. was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service’s SCINet Program and AI Center of Excellence (ARS project nos. 0201-88888-003-000D and 0201-88888-002-000D) and administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) through an interagency agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the USDA. ORISE is managed by Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) under DOE contract no. DESC0014664. P.B. was supported by an internship program funded by the NASA Oklahoma Space Grant Consortium.
From this week's government/NGO section:
Global Methane Tracker 2025, International Energy Agency
Methane is responsible for around 30% of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, and rapid and sustained reductions in methane emissions are key to limiting near-term global warming and improving air quality. The energy sector – including oil, natural gas, coal and bioenergy – accounts for more than 35% of methane emissions from human activity and has some of the best opportunities to cut these emissions. The annually updated Global Methane Tracker is an essential tool for raising awareness about methane emissions across the energy sector and the opportunities to bring them down. The Tracker presents the latest sector-wide emissions estimates – based on the most recent data from satellites and measurement campaigns – and discusses different abatement options along with their associated costs. This 2025 update adds several new elements, including: country-level historical emissions data; an interactive tool to explore international methane initiatives; and estimates of emissions from abandoned fossil fuel facilities. It also features a fully open-access model for exploring abatement options in the oil and gas sector.
Voters Reject Trump’s Free Pass to Polluters, Jennifer Hadayia and Catherine Fraser, Data for Progress
Trump has proposed rolling back 31 environmental regulations, including those that aim to cut pollution from cars and trucks and restrict emissions of mercury. Rolling back rules and allowing bad actors to further exceed their permit limits does not prioritize public health or public safety, especially in an already-lax regulatory environment. Voters are concerned. New polling finds that a majority of voters (68%) are concerned by these repeals. This includes 82% of Latino and 79% of Black voters — highlighting how both the harms of and concerns around these environmental rollbacks often most impact people of color. The authors found that voters are particularly concerned about the impact of these rollbacks on human health, with a plurality of respondents (37%) saying that these impacts are their top concern, followed by 17% who say accelerated climate change impacts. Black voters are especially concerned about harms to human health as a result of these repeals, with 43% saying it is their top concern.
119 articles in 51 journals by 779 contributing authors
Physical science of climate change, effects
Compound marine heatwaves and tropical cyclones delay the onset of the Bay of Bengal summer monsoon, Zhou et al., npj Climate and Atmospheric Science Open Access 10.1038/s41612-025-01061-5
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation’s Response to CO2 Increase: Assessing the Roles of Surface Flux and Oceanic Advection Feedbacks, Garuba et al., Journal of Climate 10.1175/jcli-d-24-0143.1
The influence of cloud cover on elevation-dependent warming over the Tibetan Plateau from 1984 to 2022, Wu & Gao, Atmospheric Research 10.1016/j.atmosres.2025.108188
Observations of climate change, effects
Coexposure to extreme heat, wildfire burn zones, and wildfire smoke in the Western US from 2006 to 2020, Hu et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.adq6453
Emerging trans-Eurasian heatwave-drought train in a warming climate, Jeong et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.adr7320
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Posted on 7 May 2025 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bob Henson
Alandmark policy crafted in April by members of the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization, or IMO, will tax international shippers based on the carbon content of their fuels. The draft policy is due to be finalized in late 2025.
The agreement that emerged from the 83rd meeting of the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee was undeniably a compromise – critiqued by activists and oil-rich nations alike. Yet it’s also undeniably historic. As the organization put it, “The IMO Net-zero Framework is the?first in the world to combine mandatory emissions limits and [greenhouse gas] pricing across an entire industry sector.”
Key measures of the approved draft include:
- A fee of $100 per metric ton on emissions surpassing a threshold that will ratchet up each year for carbon intensity (based on greenhouse gas emissions per mile and per unit of cargo capacity), with the fee rising to $380 per metric ton beyond a higher threshold.
- A system that allows ships to “earn” carbon credits and trade them with other ships. Credits can be earned by using lower-emission fuel and/or contributing to a fund that will support low-carbon research, infrastructure, tech transfer, and capacity building, as well as help reduce harm to vulnerable states.
The IMO’s overall emission reduction strategy, launched in 2018 and updated in 2023, envisions reducing fuel intensity by 40% by 2030 and reaching net-zero emissions from international shipping by around 2050.
Members of the International Maritime Organization assemble for the opening of the 83rd meeting of IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Group on April 7, 2025, in London, England. (Image credit: IMO/MEPG via Flickr, CC-BY-2.0)
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Posted on 6 May 2025 by Ken Rice
On November 1, 2024 we announced the publication of 33 rebuttals based on the report "Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles" written by Matthew Eisenson, Jacob Elkin, Andy Fitch, Matthew Ard, Kaya Sittinger & Samuel Lavine and published by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in 2024. Below is the blog post version of rebuttal #27 based on Sabin's report.
Multiple academic studies have assessed the impact of wind turbines on property values. Most recently, a March 2024 study found that having a wind turbine in a home’s viewshed reduces the sales price by 1.12% on average (Guo et al. 2024). The study found that the negative impact of turbines on property values was primarily observed for urban, rather than rural, properties, and that any negative impact on property values disappeared within ten years after turbine installation. The study also found that turbine installations have become less disruptive to home values over time: the researchers found no statistically-significant impact on home values for turbines installed after 2017 and stated that the 1.12% average impact “is larger than the effect one would expect for recent and future installations."
For comparison, a December 2023 study found evidence that, when a wind development is announced within one mile of a home, prices decline by up to 11% compared to homes three to five miles away (Brunner et al. 2024). However, home prices return to within 2% of inflation-adjusted pre-announcement levels roughly five years after the project enters operation. The study found that the population of the county mattered: the decrease was roughly 15% in counties with over 250,000 people but statistically insignificant in counties with fewer than 250,000 people. The study also found no statistically-significant adverse impacts on home sale prices outside of 1.25 miles from the nearest turbine.
An earlier study from 2021 testing how turbine size affects property values at varying distances found that, on average, nearby turbine installation decreases home value by 1.8% (Dröes & Koster 2021). The study also found that the farther a turbine was placed from a home, the less impact it had on property value. The greatest impact, a price drop of 8.3%, occurred when a large turbine (>150 meters) was placed within 750 meters of a home. The greatest impact from a medium sized turbine (50–150 meters) was 3.4%. Beyond 2,250 meters, moreover, the 2021 study found no discernible price impact from turbines. A separate study found no impact beyond 3 km (Jensen et al. 2018). The figure below shows how, for the 2021 study, size and distance of a turbine impacted property value.
Figure 16: Graph shows how different size of wind turbines, and distance from property, affects home value. Turbine height is calculated as axis height plus half of the rotor blade diameter. Source: Droes & Koster (2021)
Another academic study of roughly 50,000 Rhode Island single-family home transactions located within 5 miles of a turbine site found no statistically significant price impact (Lang et al. 2014). While yet another academic study of roughly 50,000 home transactions (spread across nine states) within 10 miles of a turbine site likewise found no statistically significant evidence of a price change.1 By contrast, a 2011 paper found that the presence of a fossil fuel fired power plant within 2 miles of one’s home decreased its value by 4–7% (Davis 2011). Among the fossil fuel power plants in the study sample, 92% were natural gas plants.
Finally, these impacts can be mitigated. For example, multiple studies recommend clustering turbines within wind farms (Jensen et al. 2018, Dröes & Koster 2021). One of these studies found that adding a turbine within two kilometers of an existing turbine had a statistically insignificant impact on house prices. It bears noting, however, that turbines must be spaced in such a way as to minimize wake interference, the phenomenon where an upstream wind turbine interferes with the production of a downstream turbine (Houck 2021).
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Posted on 5 May 2025 by Zeke Hausfather
This is a re-post from the Climate Brink
There are is a lot of dire news in the world these days – the dismantling of US climate policy, the apparent canceling of the 6th National Climate Assessment, etc. So sometimes its worth taking a break from doomscrolling and indulging in one’s hobbies.
Some folks collect trading cards, make miniatures, or do crafts. My hobby is making climate data visualizations (which, I suppose, is not the most uplifting occupation!).
A week ago I was playing around with a climate “tree ring” graph that I shared on social media that had daily global surface temperature anomalies between 1940 and 2025 as colored rings. But with reanalysis data (ERA5 here) we have both temperature anomalies (e.g. changes relative to 1850-1900) and absolute temperatures, and I thought it might be interesting to make a similar graph of absolutes as well.
I also wanted to make some improvement to the plot: rather than using rings for years (which created a discontinuity at the start and end of the year) I created a continuous spiral. I also added monthly labels around the outside to make it easier to read.
Daily global mean surface temperatures from ERA5 between 1940 and present (April 2025).
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Posted on 4 May 2025 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz
A listing of 23 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 27, 2025 thru Sat, May 3, 2025.
This week's roundup is again published by category and sorted by number of articles included in each. The formatting is a bit different compared to previous weeks, though. We are still interested in feedback to hone the categorization, so if you spot any clear misses and/or have suggestions for additional categories, please let us know in the comments. Thanks!
Stories we promoted this week, by category:
Climate Policy and Politics (8 articles)
- Scientist Who Helped Prove Humans Changed the Climate Watches Evidence Being Erased Livermore Lab’s Ben Santer spent decades tracing humanity’s imprint on the atmosphere. Now, the data behind his work is under attack. San Francisco Public Press, Michael Stoll, Apr 23, 2025.
- Why Australia’s most prominent climate change deniers have stopped talking about the climate Global heating sceptics now argue it is more palatable with the electorate to pivot from climate denialism to anti-renewable energy scepticism Australia News, The Guardian, Ben Smee & Graham Readfearn, Apr 26, 2025.
- Trump administration dismisses all authors of major climate report, throwing US assessment into limbo Climate, CNN, Andrew Freedman, Apr 29, 2025.
- White House dismisses authors of major climate report The White House has dismissed approximately 400 scientists and other climate experts who were working on a major report about how climate change affects the U.S. ... a move that threatens to curtail climate science and make information about global warming less available to the public. NPR, Rebecca Hersher, Apr 29, 2025.
- Skeptical Science New Research for Week #18 2025 Skeptical Science's weekly digest of newly published research on human-caused climate change. Skeptical Science, Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack, May 01, 2025.
- Scientific societies say they'll do national climate assessment after Trump dismissed report authors Two major scientific societies say they will fill the void from the Trump administration’s dismissal of scientists writing a cornerstone federal report on what climate change is doing to the United States The Independent News, Seth Borenstein, May 02, 2025.
- Revealed: Forecasts of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels soar in Trump`s first 100 days Tariff chaos hampers Trump’s pledge to ‘drill, baby, drill’, but analysis still shows surge in planet-heating emissions The Guardian, Oliver Milman and Will Craft, May 02, 2025.
- How Massive Cuts to NOAA Could Impact Everything From Weather Apps to Agriculture to National Security How Massive Cuts to NOAA Could Impact Everything From Weather Apps to Agriculture to National Security Inside Climate News, Interview by Jenni Doering, Living on Earth, May 03, 2025.
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Posted on 2 May 2025 by BaerbelW
Note: This blog post was written "day by day" during EGU25 happening in Vienna from April 28 to May 2. Should recordings of the Great Debates and possibly Union Symposia mentioned below, be released sometime after the conference ends, I'll include links to the ones I participated in. I'll also add links to related reporting as I happen upon it.
This year's General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) started on Monday April 28 both on premises in Vienna and online as a fully hybrid conference. This year, I decided to join the conference in Vienna for the whole week, picking and chosing sessions I was interested in. At the time of publication this blog post was still an evolving compilation - a kind of personal diary - of the happenings from my perspective.
As this post has gotten fairly large, you can jump to the different days, via these links:
Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday
The already published prolog blog post contains general explanations about the session formats as well as my planned itinerary for the week.
Monday, April 28
EGU Today
To start the week, I attended Union Symposia (US5) at 8:30am: Bridging Policy and Science for EU Disaster Preparedness
One of the greatest risks to our security is the impact of climate change. Extreme weather continues to ravage ever greater areas of Europe through floods, fires and droughts, throughout the year and across the European Union. The EU's new strategic agenda for 2024-2029 states that it will strengthen its resilience, preparedness, crisis prevention and response capacities in an all-hazards and whole-of-society approach to protect its citizens and societies against different crises, including disasters. [read the rest of the abstract here]
To start the session, the conveners had a surprise for us attendees: they asked us to get together in small groups and wander from one flip-chart to the next which they had set up around the lecture hall. Each flip chart had a question and we had about 10 minutes at each to discuss the question posed on it. I was with a group tackling the question "What are the main barriers in your view to a successful interplay between science and public authorities?" We came up with these thoughts before we had to move to the next "station": perception of scientific work as opinion pieces, vested interests, different interests, agendas, ideology, method differences, communication and vocabulary, and timeline differences. Other groups will have added their thoughts to this collection as we did with two other questions before the time allotted for this exercise was up, taking us back to our chairs.
Then it was the panelists turn to give short statements about the topic at hand:
Chloe Hill (EGU) presented a quick overview about "science for policy" in general, which included mentions of available newsletters and published policy briefs. She also introduced EGU's new Climate Hazard and Risk Task Force and made a plug for the many policy-related sessions happening this week in Vienna.
Andrea Toreti (European Commission Joint Research Centre) explained the three main areas where "Bridging Policy and Science" plays a role:
- "Science follows Policy": providing independent, evidence-based knowledge and science, supporting European Union (EU) policies to positively impact society.
- "Science informs Policy": Promoting trust and collective intelligence activities for co-creation between science and policy
- "Science anticipates Policy": providing foresight, thinking about worst-case scenarios which may have low probability. Keeping innovation and interdisciplinary in mind.
Julia Berckmans (European Environment Agency) briefly introduced the European Climate Risk Assessment (EUCRA), a comprehensive assessment of current and future climate risks in Europe.
Annika Fröwis (University of Vienna) reported on the creaition of a EUropean Higher Education Network for MAster‘s Programmes in Disaster Risk Management (EUMA) which will be a full credit masters course at the university and is currently under development. Its main objective is to deliver advanced education for Civil Protection (CP) & Disaster Risk Management (DRM) professionals.
These presentations were followed by a Q&A session tackling questions from the attendees in the room as well as collected online via Slido. The recorded session may eventually go online; if so I'll then update the blog post with the video link.
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Posted on 1 May 2025 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack
Ordinarily we employ the term "scientific integrity" in connection with staying true to ethical norms of the philosophy of science. Today however in the US there is an external threat to scientific integrity. The structural integrity of the US scientific enterprise is being actively attacked and degraded by forces uninterested in our better understanding of our world and thus how we can better thrive.
The scope and speed of the destruction levied on US science practice challenges our comprehension; it's hard or impossible for us as members of the general public to see the scale of wreckage now unfolding in the US.
This issue of New Research features articles that entered the publication pipeline before the advent of the current US executive administration. Abstracts don't tell us that we are likely reading "last words" from voices we'll not hear from again. Akin to victims of a shipwreck left in icy water, there are authors in this week's edition who are slipping from view forever, their capacities to improve our lives forever ended.
The scientific community is not naturally equipped to communicate this threat to us all. But given that we're all harmed by rampant administrative violence being inflicted on the scientific world, it's important that we know why and how we're intentionally being made more ignorant, that we have a fuller picture informing whatever personal decisions and replies we may make in the face of current events (ideally, voting with a factually accurate informational foundation leading to wise choices).
Fortunately there are people with practiced skills and estabilished resources for helping us comprehend the amount of damage being done to science, and who is responsible for that. Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund have long maintained a resource for just this purpose, the Silencing Science Tracker. While both sponsoring organizations are climate-focused, the Silencing Science Tracker has always been comprehensive across scientific disciplines and affords us a complete picture of the breadth and depth of the assault we're witnessing.
At all levels, ignorance is not strength. Ignorance is additive. Ignorance of what's happening to US science will compound as much larger ignorance, our being blindsided by various harms and unable to to help ourselves as we face bad weather, bad seismicity, bad pathogens. The Silencing Science Tracker reduces ignorance and is a useful operational instrument for monitoring our communal intellectual health.
Open access notables
Public opposition to coal-fired power in emerging economies, Alkon et al., Energy Policy:
Constructing new coal fired power plants presents significant climate, ecological, health, and economic risks. This presents sometimes acute tradeoffs for leaders in emerging economies, where rapid economic and population growth are driving large increases in electricity generation demand. Against this backdrop, combining a novel conjoint experiment with qualitative interviews, we find widespread public opposition to coal-fired power. We also find that this opposition is politically consequential, diminishing support for politicians who support coal-fired power and increasing expressed propensity to engage in social protest. These findings inform our understanding of the social reception of coal infrastructure, as well as the political implications of energy development in key emerging economies.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, United States (award #1949486)
State-level climate obstruction and discourses of climate delay: insights from Arizona, Eskridge-Aldama, Frontiers in Climate:
This study applies the discourses of climate delay (DCD) framework developed by Lamb et al. (2020) to analyze Arizona legislative discourse surrounding House Bill 2686 (2020) and House Bill 2101 (2022), both of which had significant implications for state-level climate governance. Using qualitative discourse analysis of public hearing transcripts, I identify rhetorical strategies that obstruct climate action, particularly those used by utility representatives and their allies. The analysis reveals that delay tactics most often emphasized the negative consequences of climate action and promoted non-transformative solutions, especially those aligned with fossil fuel interests. In contrast, “redirect responsibility” and “surrender” strategies were used less frequently, and “whataboutism” was notably absent. This absence suggests that, in Arizona, obstruction is less about shifting blame and more about affirming local identity and resisting perceived external influence. Based on these findings, I propose an expansion of the DCD framework to include a new subcategory—“pride, identity, and culture”—to capture how regional cultural values influence climate discourse. This study contributes to climate policy scholarship by demonstrating how localized rhetorical strategies sustain climate inaction and by offering a refined framework for future research on discursive climate obstruction.
How tidal properties influence the future duration of coastal flooding, Talke, npj Natural Hazards:
This paper uses a combined theoretical/empirical approach to show that 4 primary factors impact inundation times during high-tide flooding: the amplitude, period, and relative phases of semidiurnal and diurnal tide forcing, and the maximum water-level above a datum. Some regions—such as the US Gulf Coast—have tidal properties that lead to long high-water stands ( > 20 hours). For the same inundation depth of 0.2 m, regions with large semidiurnal tides are inundated for only 1-2 hours. Within individual estuaries, the potential duration can vary by a factor of more than two. Combined with relative sea-level rise rates that vary from less than 0 mm/yr to 10 mm/yr around North America, the observed timescale to transition from a zero to two-hour tidal flood length varies from 1-87 years. This large spatial variability in tidal inundation properties has implications for hazard planning, ecological adaptation and the future evolution of coastal flood events.
This work was supported by National Science Foundation grant 2013280, the California Delta Stewardship Council, CONTRACT # DSC- 21024, and the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, contract W912HQ24C0020.
Coastal adaptation and damage costs at different global warming thresholds, Wong et al., npj Natural Hazards:
Climate change is worsening coastal hazards, elevating the need to mitigate and adapt to future warming and sea-level change. A key question is how future warming relates to coastal impacts in terms of adaptation costs and economic damages, and the potentially unequal distribution of these impacts globally. We use an integrated modeling framework to generate estimates of future coastal adaptation costs and damages, discounted through the year 2150, at multiple global warming thresholds. As warming crosses the 1.5 °C threshold, we find that high-end (95th percentile) coastal damages nearly double, from 1.3 T to 2.3 T US$. Beyond 2.5 °C warming, low-end (5th percentile) damages increase from 1.2 T to 1.6 T US$ and the Global South faces disproportionately high damages as a percentage of regional GDP. Given the plausibility of 2.5 °C warming in even SSP2-4.5, these results highlight the importance of emissions reductions to avoid sizable and inequitable increases in coastal impacts.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. DMS-2213432. V.S. and C.D. were supported by the MultiSector Dynamics program area of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research as part of the multi-program, collaborative Integrated Coastal Modeling (ICoM) project.
Low-Altitude High-Latitude Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Is Feasible With Existing Aircraft, Duffey et al., Earth's Future:
Here, we simulate an ensemble of 41 short stratospheric aerosol injection simulations in the UK Earth System Model in which we vary the altitude, latitude, and season of SO2 injection. For each simulation, we diagnose aerosol optical depth and radiative forcing and estimate the global cooling under a sustained deployment. For altitudes up to around 14 km, high-latitude injection maximizes global forcing efficiency. Aerosol lifetime variation is the largest contributor to changes in efficiency with injection location. Seasonal SAI deployment with low-altitude (13 km) and high-latitude (60°N/S) injection achieves 35% of the forcing efficiency of a high-altitude (20 km), annually constant, sub-tropical (30°N/S) strategy. Low-altitude high-latitude SAI would have strongly reduced efficiency and therefore increased side-effects for a given global cooling. It would also produce a more polar cooling distribution, with reduced efficacy in the tropics. However, it would face lower technical barriers because existing large jets could be used for deployment. This could imply an increase in the number of actors able to deploy SAI, an earlier potential start date, and perhaps a greater risk of unilateral deployment.
Beyond ‘Not in my electoral Year’: Why do some elected officials oppose renewable energy projects?, Delcayre & Bourdin, Global Environmental Change:
This study aimed to examine the reasons behind the wait-and-see and resistant attitudes of local elected officials regarding energy transition projects. Although there is consensus on the importance of renewable energy in combating climate change, its implementation at the local level often encounters opposition from several actors, including elected officials. This study identified the internal, external, and personal factors that influence this opposition by conducting semi-structured interviews with the French officials and stakeholders involved in the energy transition and by analysing the local and regional press. Our findings indicate that political strategies, regulatory complexities, and personal beliefs play significant roles in shaping officials’ decisions regarding energy transition projects. Furthermore, by proposing a typology of elected officials according to their modes of opposition, we offer insights to promote effective and sustainable local energy transitions.
From this week's government/NGO section:
Sigma. Natural catastrophes: insured losses on trend to USD 145 billion in 2025, Banerjee et al,, Swiss Re Management Ltd
Last year’s insured losses from natural catastrophes were on trend at USD 137 billion. Following the long-term trend of 5 ? 7% annual increase in real terms, insured losses from natural catastrophes will approach USD 145 billion in 2025. This year started with wildfires sweeping across the Los Angeles area in January. The currently estimated USD 40 billion of resultant insured losses is a record high, but the fires on their own will not be cause of notable deviation from the annual loss growth trend. The scale of losses elicited a reinsurance response, with two thirds of the claims payouts coming from primary insurers, and the rest from reinsurers.
Managing the UK Economy in times of the Climate Emergency, Emma Dawnay, Green House Think Tank
To have the best chance of successfully transitioning to an economy which is not dependent on fossil fuels, the economic system which drives human activity must be reorganized. The ‘needs’ of financial markets must become subordinate to the ‘needs’ of physics to maintain planetary conditions compatible with human civilization. The mainstream consensus on how a national economy should be managed has little theoretical underpinning; rather, it has evolved with the massive growth in financial markets. The shortcomings of the mainstream consensus have been highlighted by non-orthodox economists for decades, but now more than ever this consensus needs to be reassessed as it is limiting our response to the climate emergency as well as causing unnecessary austerity and hardship. This briefing aims to explain descriptively how a national economy works, how the current consensus is limiting what we can achieve, and how the UK economy could be managed differently.
165 articles in 62 journals by 839 contributing authors
Physical science of climate change, effects
Beaufort Gyre Liquid Freshwater Content Change Under Greenhouse Warming From an Eddy-Resolving Climate Simulation, Shan et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2024gl113847
Disentangling anthropogenic and dynamic contributions to recent ocean warming, Lee et al., npj Climate and Atmospheric Science Open Access 10.1038/s41612-025-01043-7
Energy Gain Kernel for Climate Feedbacks. Part III: Reconciliation of the Apparent “Negative” Nature of Lapse-Rate Feedback, Sun et al., Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 10.1175/jas-d-24-0168.1
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Posted on 30 April 2025 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from the Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler
As readers of this Substack will know, I've been increasingly concerned about the destruction of one of America’s greatest competitive advantages: our university research system. Recently, the Trump administration announced that they were going to cut university overhead rates to 15%. This sounds like a discussion that would put an accountant to sleep, but it's actually quite important, as this post describes. This was originally published Apr. 18 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
There’s an important battle brewing over university overhead rates. Sounds boring, right? But hang with me and you’ll see why this is so crucially important to America. It will determine whether breakthrough technologies emerge in American labs or Chinese ones.
Last week, the Department of Energy slashed university overhead rates to 15 percent. They claim this saves taxpayers $405 million annually while ensuring funds support “support scientific research—not foot the bill for administrative costs and facility upgrades.” This is dangerously misleading.
To understand why, let me start by explaining what “overhead” means. When you picture a university research lab, you probably imagine scientists in lab coats, surrounded by high-tech equipment, performing groundbreaking experiments. What you see in this mental image are what we would call “direct costs”—things that are directly involved in a research project.
What you don’t see are the countless support systems making that research possible. Air conditioning, electricity for lighting, wifi, janitorial services, administrative support for payroll and purchasing, and a million other things that cannot be neatly assigned to a particular research project but without which research cannot be done.
These costs are what go into “overhead” and they fall into two main categories. First are shared, distributed expenses spread across the entire research enterprise that would be impossible or absurdly inefficient to track project-by-project: think HVAC systems, IT support, building maintenance, administrative staff processing grants, library resources, and safety training.
Trying to determine how many kilowatt-hours each of the 300 experiments running in a building consumed, or what percentage of the university’s toilet paper expense should be charged to a specific project would be a bureaucratic nightmare.
Second are long-term investments that must be spread over many years: constructing laboratory spaces for faculty, building office space and classrooms for graduate students, building core research facilities, and upgrading infrastructure.
When a university recruits a promising new scientist, they might invest millions in building out lab space before that researcher has even secured their first grant. These costs should be recovered gradually over time.
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Posted on 29 April 2025 by Ken Rice
On November 1, 2024 we announced the publication of 33 rebuttals based on the report "Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles" written by Matthew Eisenson, Jacob Elkin, Andy Fitch, Matthew Ard, Kaya Sittinger & Samuel Lavine and published by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in 2024. Below is the blog post version of rebuttal #26 based on Sabin's report.
Wind power is a fast-growing industry, creating many U.S. jobs. In 2021, wind energy production employed roughly 120,000 U.S. workers, creating roughly 5,400 new jobs (up 4.7%) since 2019.1 The Department of Energy suggests that this sector could employ as many as 600,000 U.S. workers by 2050.2 As noted previously, the United States’ Fifth National Climate Assessment predicts that there will be nearly 3,000,000 new solar, wind, and transmission-related jobs by 2050 in a high electrification scenario and 6,000,000 new jobs in a 100% renewable scenario, with less than 1,000,000 fossil fuel-related jobs lost.3
Figure 1: Energy employment from 2020 to 2050 under various U.S. net-zero GHG emissions scenarios. Source: U.S. Global Change Research Program.
Most of the current domestic jobs are in manufacturing.4 Over 500 U.S. manufacturing facilities now specialize in producing components for wind power generation.5 For turbines installed in the United States, approximately 70% of tower manufacturing and 80% of nacelle assembly also occurs domestically.6 Furthermore, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics identified wind turbine service technicians as the fastest growing occupation between 2022 and 2023, growing roughly 45% in size during that time.7
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Posted on 28 April 2025 by BaerbelW
As mentioned in the recently published prolog to EGU2025 article, I submitted an abstract to talk about some of the collaborations we've had with other groups and websites over the years. This blog post is a "companion article" to that presentation in session EOS1.1 Science and Society: Science Communication Practice, Research, and Reflection and will go into somewhat greater details than is possible in the 8 minutes available during the oral session. The collaborations are listed along a timeline as they happened. You can download the full presentation in PDF-format (5MB) here.
Klimafakten - Nauka o Klimacie - Denial101x - FLICC-Poster - Repustar - Gigafact - Sabin Center - IUD
Klimafakten - 2011 (ongoing)
In November 2011 we announced our partnership with the newly launched German-language website klimafakten.de. They'd approached us earlier in the year as they wanted to start with a set of professionally translated rebuttals before the Climate Talks in Durban, South Africa (COP17). In the weeks leading up to the launch, Toralf Staud and I collaborated on how best to go about this partnership. We tackled questions like how best to create translated versions of graphics or how to avoid double work by for example linking from a translated rebuttal "stub" on Skeptical Science to Klimafakten. Since then, we've collaborated on several publication announcement and generally kept in touch about debunking climate myths and successful climate communications - an area that Klimafakten branched out into in recent years. Most of the website is in German but they also have an about page in English.
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Posted on 27 April 2025 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz
A listing of 30 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 20, 2025 thru Sat, April 26, 2025.
This week's roundup is again published by category and sorted by number of articles included in each. The formatting is a bit different compared to previous weeks, though. We are still interested in feedback to hone the categorization, so if you spot any clear misses and/or have suggestions for additional categories, please let us know in the comments. Thanks!
Stories we promoted this week, by category:
Climate Education and Communication (6 articles)
- Climate change is transforming how scientists think about their roles CU Boulder researcher Pedro DiNezio emphasizes solving the problems of climate change in the here and now Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, Sara Kuta, Apr 18, 2025.
- Climate change is transforming how scientists think about their roles CU Boulder researcher Pedro DiNezio emphasizes solving the problems of climate change in the here and now Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, Sara Kuta, Apr 18, 2025.
- Exposure to perceptible temperature rise increases concern about climate change, higher education adds to understanding Higher education can train students to carefully consider the evidence around them. The Conversation, R. Alexander Bentley, Apr 21, 2025.
- `Spiral of silence`: climate action is very popular, so why don`t people realise it? Researchers find 89% of people around the world want more to be done, but mistakenly assume their peers do not The Guardian, Damian Carrington, Apr 22, 2025.
- What would change your mind about climate change? We asked 5,000 Australians-here's what they told us The Conversation, Kelly Kirkland, Abby Robinson, Amy S G Lee, Samantha Stanley and Zoe Leviston, Apr 23, 2025.
- EGU2025 - Presentation about our translation activities A preview and companion article to an upcoming presentation at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler, Apr 25, 2025.
Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (6 articles)
- The Drilled Guide to Global Climate Disinformation The terms and narratives the fossil fuel industry is using to obstruct climate action. Drilled, Amy Westervelt, Apr 19, 2025.
- 20 Climate Change Myths That Scientific Evidence Disproves Climate Cosmos, Jessica Taylor, Apr 21, 2025.
- Fossil fuel companies 'poisoned the well' of public debate with climate disinformation The Conversation, Naomi Oreskes, Apr 21, 2025.
- Eight of the top 10 online shows are spreading climate misinformation Often backed by large advertising budgets, a new breed of climate denial is gaining popularity. Yale Climate Connections, YCC Staff, Apr 21, 2025.
- These 3 climate misinformation campaigns are operating during the election run-up. Here’s how to spot them The Conversation, Alfie Chadwick and Libby Lester, Apr 22, 2025.
- Fact brief - Do the 31,000 signatures of the OISM Petition Project invalidate the scientific consensus on climate change? No - Climatologists made up only 0.1% of signatories to a 1998 petition denying human-caused climate change — the consensus among qualified scientists stands. Skeptical Science, Sue Bin Park, Apr 26, 2025.
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Posted on 26 April 2025 by Sue Bin Park
Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.
Do the 31,000 signatures of the OISM Petition Project invalidate the scientific consensus on climate change?
Climatologists made up only 0.1% of signatories to a 1998 petition denying human-caused climate change — the consensus among qualified scientists stands.
Anyone claiming they had a science degree could sign the petition without expertise in climate science. There is a strong consensus among actively publishing climate scientists on the existence of human-made climate change that has only grown since 1998.
The 31,487 signatures, many found to be fictional or unverifiable, would represent 0.25% of all U.S. science graduates. Holding a science degree does not indicate expertise in scientific fields outside one’s specialty.
The petition was accompanied by a manuscript deceptively formatted to resemble the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. PNAS disavowed any affiliation with the manuscript and rejected its conclusions.
A 2021 review of 88,125 peer-reviewed climate change papers published since 2012 found that the climate change consensus exceeded 99%.
Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact
This fact brief is responsive to quotes such as this one.
Sources
Media Matters for USA 700 Club anchor touted global warming skeptics' petition reportedly signed by non-scientists, fictitious characters
HuffPost The 30,000 Global Warming Petition Is Easily-Debunked Propaganda
National Academy of Sciences Statement of the Council of the NAS Regarding Global Change Petition
The Seattle Times Jokers Add Fake Names To Warming Petition
Scientific American SKEPTICISM ABOUT SKEPTICS
DeSmog Oregon Petition
Scholars & Rogues Federal education data shows OISM’s climate change denying Petition Project actually a tiny minority
NASA Scientific Consensus
Environmental Research Letters Consensus revisited: quantifying scientific agreement on climate change and climate expertise among Earth scientists 10 years later
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Posted on 25 April 2025 by BaerbelW
As mentioned in the recently published prolog to EGU2025 article, I submitted an abstract to talk about some of our translation activities and the challenges we have been facing with those. This blog post is a "companion article" to that presentation in session EOS4.3 Geoethics and Global Anthropogenic Change: Geoscience for Policy, Action and Education in Addressing the Climate and Ecological Crises and will go into somewhat greater details than is possible in the 8 minutes available during the oral session which will be happening on May 2. Please note that what follows is by no means meant as a crtiicism of the many volunteer translator teams, of whom we are very appreciative for the work they did over the years, creating the many translations available on our website! You can download the full presentation in PDF-format (3MB) here.
Some statistics
When John Cook launched Skeptical Science in 2007, the website was only available in English. During 2009 some regular readers floated the idea to also offer translated versions of the rebuttals and John added those capabilities towards the end of the year. The first translations added were Finnish, Spanish and Czech. A while later, options to also translate blog posts and pages were added. People worked on their own or within small teams and many translations were added during the first few years as can be seen in the statistics of number of rebuttals added per language and year:
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Posted on 24 April 2025 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack
Open access notables
Internal variability effect doped by climate change drove the 2023 marine heat extreme in the North Atlantic, Guinaldo et al., Communications Earth & Environment
The year 2023 shattered numerous heat records both globally and regionally. We here focus on the drivers of the unprecedented warm sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies which started in the North Atlantic Ocean in early summer and persisted later on. Evidence is provided that 2023 should be interpreted as an extreme event in a warmer world because of superimposed internal variability on top of human forcing, which altogether, made the 2023 event all-time high due to extreme air-sea surface fluxes in the subtropics and eastern basin. The effect of internal variability has been considerably boosted by the long-term ocean stratification increase due to combined anthropogenically-driven ocean warming and multidecadal variability. The 2023 event would have been impossible to occur without anthropogenically-driven climate change but at the current warmer background climate state, it is assessed as a decadal-type event when considering the full North Atlantic ocean and a centennial event in the subtropics and eastern basin. Considering the regional distribution of anomalies is crucial for risk assessment in a warming climate.
Reply to Pielke (2025), Willoughby et al., Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology:
Pielke deprecates both the ICAT database, which he once recommended, and U.S. tropical cyclone (TC) damage estimates from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). We do not share these views. Willoughby et al. (hereafter WL24) is based upon ICAT damage for 1900–2017, both then-year and normalized for inflation, population, and individual wealth, extended to 2022 with National Hurricane Center (NHC) official figures from NCEI. Pielke represents the data of Weinkle et al. (hereafter WK18) as a superior source. We find troubling anomalies in the WK18 data. The issue is that WK18 find that normalized TC damage is constant, but WL24 find that it is increasing. Here, we replicate the WL24 analysis with WK18 data and find a statistically significant growth of then-year damage relative to the U.S. economy, a statistically significant increase in the occurrence of the most damaging TCs, and a 0.6% per year increase in TC normalized damage. The last of these is not statistically significant because of the large variance due to the modulation of TC impacts by the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation. Thus, the increase in U.S. TC damage is sufficiently robust to survive the shortcomings of both datasets.
Discerning the Elevated Risk of Compound Extreme Heat Stress Followed by Extreme Precipitation Events in the Socially Vulnerable Communities in the Upper Midwest, Khan et al., International Journal of Climatology
Compound extreme events have the potential to yield severe socio-economic repercussions. This study delves into compound extreme precipitation events following extreme heat stress (CEPHS), an aspect that needs more extensive examination within the compound event framework in the upper Midwestern United States. Results reveal a significant increasing trend in CEPHS occurrences, particularly in Kentucky, lower, central, and northern parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, central parts of Missouri, northern parts of Michigan, and western and north-eastern parts of Iowa from 1979 to 2021. Moreover, we observed significantly higher intensities of extreme precipitation events following extreme heat stress compared to those occurring independently, predominantly in the central and northern parts of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio during the same period. Our analysis also underscores a robust association between CEPHS and convective available potential energy and convective inhibition. These insights offer valuable implications for flood hazard management strategies under climate change within the region.
This work was supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Hatch project (No. ILLU-741-337).
British heatwave discourse (1985–2023): from ice cream to armageddon?, van Dooremalen & Smith, Environmental Sociology:
How has public discourse about climate change evolved? This paper answers this question through the paradigmatic case of British heatwaves. These are traditionally considered a fortunate break from dull weather, making them a least likely case for the emergency of a discourse of doom. With a topic-modeling analysis of British national newspaper articles on heatwaves from 1985 until 2023 (N = 35,127), we show that a longstanding Romantic heatwave discourse eventually buckled, and that Apocalypticism finally became the dominant genre in the last decade. A supplementary hermeneutic analysis then indicates and explains complexity within this broad trend. 1980s stories already noted routine heatwave problems, while many recent ones continue depicting positive lifestyle implications. Within the Apocalyptic genre itself climate change is today deemed a factual causal force, whereas in the 1980s and 1990s it was a possible carrier of future dangers. In connecting the genre perspective from literary theory to big data method topic modelling, our approach is parsimonious, novel and replicable in other national contexts.
Enhanced flood synchrony and downstream severity in the Delaware River under rising temperatures, Cooper et al., Communications Earth & Environment:
River floods threaten life and economic stability, with risks increasing globally, especially in densely populated coastal areas. In mountainous coastal watersheds like the Delaware River Basin, rising temperature is projected to reduce snowpack, reshaping upstream–downstream flood dynamics. However, the impact on flood synchronization between upland tributaries and estuarine mainstems remains poorly understood. Using multidecadal streamflow simulations from a high-resolution hydrological model, we find significant increases in the frequency and magnitude of synchronized floods under future warming scenarios, particularly severe floods (above the 75th percentile). Under higher warming scenarios, snowpack and rain-on-snow floods in headwater subbasins nearly vanish. Surprisingly, this regime shift amplifies estuarine flooding by enhancing synchronization between historically snow-dominated subbasins and their downstream counterparts. Despite intensified synchronization and flood magnitude, cold-season flood risk declines due to fewer rain-on-snow events. Conversely, summer floods grow larger, more frequent, and synchronized, driving a seasonal reconfiguration of flood risk that should be considered in future mitigation strategies.
The work presented in this manuscript was supported by the MultiSector Dynamics program area of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research as part of the multi-program, collaborative Integrated Coastal Modeling (ICoM) project. All model simulations were performed using resources available through Research Computing at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
From this week's government/NGO section:
Record-High 48% Call Global Warming a Serious Threat, Gallup
A record-high 48% of U.S. adults anticipate that global warming will, at some point, pose a serious threat to themselves or their way of life, up from 44% saying this a year ago. The current reading is two percentage points above the prior high in 2023, following a long-term increase from 25% in 1997. The latest results are from Gallup’s March 3-16 Environment survey, conducted about a month after wildfires ravaged parts of southern California in January. This year’s installment of the annual survey also comes after numerous extreme weather events occurred around the country last summer and fall, including major flooding in North Carolina in September stemming from Hurricane Helene. Thirty-seven percent of Americans in March said they have personally been affected by an extreme weather event in the past two years.
Drill More, Pay More. America's New Energy Paradigm, Jeremy Symons, Center for Energy and Environmental Analysis
Welcome to the “drill more, pay more” era. The United States has entered a new energy paradigm characterized by rising domestic energy prices alongside rising energy production. Despite record-high natural gas production levels, US wholesale natural gas prices (Henry Hub) increased 93% in the first quarter of 2025 (Q1) compared to the same period last year. Record natural gas exports are driving higher prices and volatility. Rising natural gas prices are a triple blow to US consumers. President Trump’s “unleashing American energy” agenda will likely push prices higher, benefitting oil and gas producers but increasing costs to US energy consumers.
123 articles in 62 journals by 736 contributing authors
Physical science of climate change, effects
Circulation and Cloud Responses to Patterned SST Warming, Mackie et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2024gl112543
Climate-Scale Variability in Soil Moisture Explained by a Simple Theory, Gallagher & McColl, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2025gl115044
Contribution of Arctic Cyclones of Different Origins to Poleward Heat Transport to the Arctic, Yang et al., Journal of Climate 10.1175/jcli-d-24-0445.1
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Posted on 23 April 2025 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Pearl Marvell
(Photo credit: Pearl Marvell. Image credit: Samantha Harrington. Dollar bill vector image: by pch.vector on Freepik)
Igrew up knowing that when you had extra money, you put it under a bed, stashed it in a book or a clock, or, if there was enough of it, it went into a savings account at a bank.
It hadn’t occurred to me that my bank account could be contributing to the climate crisis until I learned that since the adoption of the Paris agreement in 2015, 60 of the world’s largest banks have invested $5.5 trillion into the fossil fuel industry. And they’re using our money to do it.
When we deposit our paychecks, the money doesn’t just sit there. Generally, banking institutions will use our money for investments and loans to other individuals and businesses, including fossil fuel companies.
So I realized that one of the levers that I could pull to fight climate change would be to take my money out of banks that invest in fossil fuels. And I could use my skills as a journalist to figure out where to put my money instead.
One thing I learned in my research: It’s no surprise that I didn’t know my bank could be using my money for fossil fuel investments.
“I worked in financial services, and I didn’t even know where my money was going,” said Yejide Olutosin, director of the Business Climate Finance Initiative at Impact Experience, an organization that works with companies to assess their carbon footprint and find ways to reduce it. “So you imagine just the everyday person with the everyday chores and family and obligations. They don’t have the time.”
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