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:

Checking in on human progress

 The start of a year is a good time to do a stocktake. An update. A check-in on how well we're all getting on. Energy maven Alex Epstein offers an important data point...

Anti-growth (and anti-energy) catastrophists like Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome were wrong. Today's humans are the best-fed humans in history.

And things will keep improving—unless we fall for new catastrophist propaganda like civilisation-crippling “net zero” plans.

 

"Why are leading institutions so biased against fossil fuels?"

"Why are leading institutions so biased against fossil fuels?

"Because their operating 'anti-impact framework' causes them to view fossil fuels, which are inherently high impact, as intrinsically immoral and inevitably self-destructive.
...

"Our knowledge system’s opposition to fossil fuels while ignoring their enormous benefits can only be explained by it operating on an anti-human moral goal and standard of evaluation that regards benefits to human life as morally unimportant.

"Outside the realm of energy, an example of an anti-human moral goal at work is the scientists who, operating on the anti-human moral goal of animal equality, oppose animal testing for medical research and disregard its life-saving benefits to humans.

"The primary moral goal of our knowledge system that operates on energy issues is the anti-human goal of eliminating human impact on the rest of nature—a widely-held goal that is often disguised as merely eliminating only human-harming impacts.

"Our leading institutions' attempt to disguise their goal of eliminating all human impacts as eliminating only human-harming impacts by using vague terminology such as 'going green,' 'minimising environmental impact,' 'protecting the environment,' and 'saving the planet.'

"The goal of eliminating human impact necessarily drives our knowledge system’s opposition to cost-effective energy because cost-effective energy always significantly impacts nature.
...
"Our knowledge system ignores the benefits of cost-effective energy because on the anti-human standard, it is intrinsically immoral and its benefits are morally irrelevant.

"Our knowledge system catastrophises the negative side-effects of cost-effective energy because it views Earth as a 'delicate nurturer.'

"On the 'delicate nurturer' assumption, Earth naturally exists in a delicate, nurturing balance, with humans as 'parasite-polluters' whose impact can only destroy it ... 

"The 'anti-impact framework' must be replaced by the 'human flourishing framework,' including the goal of advancing human flourishing ..."

~ Alex Epstein from his post 'The root cause of our leading institutions' bias against fossil fuels'

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.

"...it's fundamentally poverty, and the solution is to become rich — and that requires using fossil fuels.”

“It's a big mistake on the part of a lot of the media to just focus whenever there's a poor country that suffers from anything that's connected to climate to say, ‘Oh, it's climate change. The solution is get rid of fossil fuels.’ No, it's fundamentally poverty, and the solution is to become rich — and that requires using fossil fuels.”

~ Alex Epstein from his Q+A with students at the John Locke Institute

Banning fracking

What would be the effect of a US president banning fracking? Alex Epstein has the answer:

Banning fracking would have been one of the most harmful policies in US history. It would have destroyed 60% of our oil production and 75% of our natural gas production.

Why is that important?

Fracking is very likely the single most beneficial technological development of the last 25 years. By extracting cheap, abundant oil and natural gas from once useless rock, it has made energy far cheaper than it would otherwise be.

The availability of food is highly determined by the cost of oil, which powers crucial machinery, and gas, which is the basis of the fertilizer that allows us to feed 8 billion people. Thanks to fracking, the world is far better fed than it would otherwise be.

Given how life-giving fracking is to humanity and how essential it is to the prosperity and security of the US, any politician who has ever suggested banning fracking should be considered an energy menace until and unless they issue a deeply reflective apology.

So does any US presidential candidate want to ban fracking? Hard to know. But there's at least one who did: 

Kamala Harris ... in 2019 said, “There is no question I am in favour of banning fracking,” [and] now tells voters in fracking-dependent states like Pennsylvania that she is no longer wants to ban fracking.

Should we believe her?

They shouldn’t believe her, since Harris’s net-zero agenda requires banning fracking. ... And far from questioning the anti-fossil-fuel, “net zero” agenda, she has remained 100% committed to it.

Which means she’s an enemy of not just fracking but all fossil fuel use.

The guiding energy goal of Biden/Harris is “net zero by 2050”—rapidly banning activities that add CO2 to the atmosphere.

Since there’s no scalable way to capture CO2, burning fossil fuels necessarily means more CO2.

Given that “net zero by 2050” requires banning virtually all fossil fuel activity, the whole conversation about whether Kamala Harris wants to ban fracking is absurd.

You can’t be for fracking and for net-zero anymore than you can be for penicillin and for banning all antibiotics.

So, what about the other candidate? Where exactly does Trump stand?

Frankly, who the hell could know.

Giving it the gas [updated]

 

NZ Electricity Generation, 8:10am to 11:20am, 13 June 2024.
Source: NZ Interactive Electricity Grid by @morganfrnchstgg

Today's a normal kind of cloudy, breezy winter day around the motu (as they say).

As you were enjoying your breakfast toast and coffee this morning, at today's first peak-power time, the electricity grid was supplied with 82% renewable power. Good stuff, right! 

As you can see above (and I've enlarged it for you just below), the bulk of that renewable power came from hydro — almost two-thirds — with a decent amount (17%) from geothermal. Good stuff. Thank you. But can you see the anaemic offering from the other two renewable contributors, solar and wind? Just 129MW from the country's wind farms — contributing just 2% to your breakfast toaster — and from solar just a risible 1.3MW. Virtually zero percent.

And that's a normal morning.  (As we were reminded by Transpower on May 10th, we're so close to being underpowered here that the gap between peak production and consumption on still, cloudy days is dangerously small.) If we zoom out to see the contribution of New Zealand's largest solar "farm" up in Kaitaia over the last seven days, even it's useful-but-insubstantial peak of 20MW is only achieved momentarily in the middle of the day, offering little help for morning or evening peak.  Sure, more solar "farms" are planned, but they all have that same problem. And they all take time to get going. Lots of time.

But what about wind? Sure, this morning it only gave the grid a measly 2%. But on other mornings (Monday for example, see below) wind "farms" put in around 17% of the power that made your shower hot and your kettle boil.

But — and here's the big but — that wind doesn't blow all the time. If we zoom out again to the last seven days (below) we see that the contribution of New Zealand's largest wind farm, just outside Palmerston North, is literally up and down. from zero to 150MW (and back again, see that drop-off on Monday afternoon) in the time it takes to yell "turn that bloody heater on!"

In fairly simple terms, that's why we need gas. Even when the wind does blow and the sun still shines, it's gas that helps make up that sizeable difference. Just one plant, Todd Generation's Junction Road plant running on Taranaki gas produces almost as much peak power as the windmills do on the Tararuas, and at times that the windmills don't, and can't. It's almost like the two are symbiotic. (Just for fun, compare the two graphs above and below, and with the peak morning and evening times at which we need to cook.

Maybe that's why we say, "now we're cooking with gas!"

Even at Huntly — which uses both gas (light brown below) and Indonesian coal(because we're no longer able to produce our own) — and which  produces up to a massive peak of 850MW, you can see it keeping your kettle on the boil even when the wind isn't blowing.

This is why commentators like Alex Epstein describe unreliable wind and solar as "parasitic" on reliable power. And not cheap. Essentially to rely on wind and solar, we need generators to build enough capacity — in the form of power that's easily turned on and off — so that when wind don't blow and sun don't shine the lights can still be kept on. Which essentially means that the more wind and solar are built, exactly the same capacity of reliable power needs to be built to double that, so it can come on the field as a reserve.

But we can't build dams any more — too expensive, takes too damn long under the RMA, and too many objections. And batteries, while promising, still only contribute a maximum of 13MW here, and take oodles of new mining to produce. (And the more unreliables you have, the more expensive battery power would be necessary, one reason this is still is not being tried anywhere.)

So what does that leave? Answer: gas. If you want your breakfast sausages, you need this place to be be cooking – or at least producing power — with gas.

Sure, good old Chloe Swarbrick told the nation on Monday that Australia does all this with domestic solar panels. She didn't tell you however that the price of power in Australia has gone through the roof those solar panels are on. Or how often Victoria, say, suffers brownouts. Or how small a proportion of the grid those panels produce even at peak time. (All of Australia's solar panels, domestic and commercial, contribute just 12% of the grid's power and, like here, need still non-existent battery power and reliable backup generation of the same capacity when they're not producing.) But in any case, New Zealand is not that sunburnt land — not even as sunburnt as Victoria.. And no amount of solar panels can fill the gap when the sun don't shine.

For that, and for some time to come, we still need gas.

(NB: These graphs come from the really neat interactive electricity grid charts made possible by Morgan French-Stagg. Thank you sir.)

UPDATE: The UK has noticed the results of Jacinda Ardern's 'energy suicide note' of banning gas exploration, and warns its politicians not to contemplate the same there. The Telegraph writes:

[UK Labour leader] Keir Starmer is standing by a pledge to ban new drilling in the North Sea, despite New Zealand abandoning a similar policy amid blackout fears. [UK] Labour’s manifesto, due out on Thursday, will feature a pledge to block all new licensing for oil and gas as one of its key energy policies. It follows last weekend’s announcement that New Zealand’s government was lifting a ban on new oil and gas exploration.
    The ban was announced by former prime minister Jacinda Ardern in 2018. “The world has moved on from fossil fuels,” Ardern proclaimed at the time. New Zealand’s trailblazing policy, which was the first of its kind, became a key inspiration for [the UK] Labour Party’s own plan. However, some in the party are now questioning the commitment after New Zealand resources minister Shane Jones last weekend denounced its own ban as a disaster – and revoked it. It followed three years of rising energy prices that have left 110,000 households unable to warm their homes, 19pc of households struggling with bills and 40,000 of them having their power cut off due to unpaid bills, according to Consumer NZ.
    Since April the situation has further deteriorated: Transpower, the equivalent of our National Grid, warned that the nation was at high risk of blackouts. New Zealand’s shift to renewables meant it no longer had the generating power to keep the lights on during the cold spells that mark the Antipodean winter, said Transpower, as it begged consumers to cut their electricity consumption.
    The threat to New Zealand’s energy security comes despite the fact that geologists have discovered billions of cubic metres of natural gas in the seabeds around the country.
    Sean Rush, a leading New Zealand barrister specialising in petroleum licensing law and climate litigation, called the oil and gas ban “economic vandalism at its worst in exchange for virtue signalling at its finest”.... [Shane] Jones said last week: “Natural gas is critical to keeping our lights on and our economy running, especially during peak electricity demand and when generation dips because of more intermittent sources like wind, solar and hydro.” ...
    

Jenny Stanning, director of external affairs at OEUK, says exploration is essential to simply slowing the decline in output. “The New Zealand experience shows how important it is for countries to carefully manage energy transition and energy security. We will need oil and gas for decades to come so it makes sense to back our own industry rather than ramping up imports from abroad.” ... Russell Borthwick, chief executive of Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce – the region that lies at the heart of the UK offshore industry – says the UK needs a managed and nuanced transition to low carbon energy. ... New Zealand’s experience suggests much of the UK industry would not survive a ban on new drilling.
    “Back in 2018, at the time of the ban, there were 20 international and five local companies engaged in exploration and production in New Zealand,” says John Carnegie, chief executive of Energy Resources Aotearoa, the local industry trade body. “Since then, exploration has fallen dramatically. We only have nine remaining investors, seven international and two local. The rest have left.” ...

Robin Allan, chairman of Brindex, which represents the UK’s independent offshore companies, says: “New Zealand’s ban was a politically motivated decision which ignored data on oil and gas demand, the advantages of domestic production and a realistic pace of decarbonisation. The [UK] Labour Party should see what is happening in front of their eyes in another island nation which has already implemented a poorly reasoned policy – and think again.” [Hat tip Ele Ludemann]

Net Zero is dead. Thank goodness.

Good news, readers! Despite politicians' best efforts to arrest the use of fossil energy, and their increasing sponsorship (at the cost of trillions of dollars) of unreliable and inefficient 'renewable' energy projects around the globe, despite all this political energy directed against thee fossil fuel still powers the world -- and it is powering ever more of it:

Global fossil fuel consumption is still increasing.... The data show that the much vaunted 'energy transition' off of fossil fuels has yet to get underway.
    "Since 2015, when the Paris Climate Agreement was signed, global energy consumption increased by 61.2 exajoules (EJ), which is a bit more that the total 2022 energy consumption of the European Union. This increase is very good news for those who lack access to modern energy services....

The truth is, "Net Zero" activists who claim it's possible to "transition" away from fossil fuels completely by 2050 are deluding themselves.

Achieving net-zero fossil fuels by 2050 requires the deployment of the equivalent of 1 nuclear power plant per day — starting today and continuing every day until 2050.

Crikey, even China isn't building them at that rate. And no-one else is building them at all -- or anything at all of that energy magnitude. (And the energy density of unreliables is simply too poor for their use as a full substitute to be feasible.)

A reminder here for those who are gnashing their teeth about this: Energy multiplies human effort. Without that abundant and reliable energy, modern civilisation is dead. So news that more energy is being put to use by increasing numbers of people is good news.

"But what about the climate?!" I hear from the back of the room. "Don't you believe in climate change." "Climate change" is in an intentionally vague term. (The terminological change from "global cooling" to "global warming" to "climate change" to "climate crisis" has only taken three decades; where can words go next I wonder?)  It doesn't say how much change; whether or not it's a good change; nor whether ot not it's caused by us. At this level of vagueness, everybody "believes" that climate changes.

If by 'climate change' however you mean some human impact on climate, then yes, there is. Some. But, importantly, there is no impending 'climate crisis' before us -- despite what politicians and their activist would like us to believe. 

And most importantly, it is the energy delivered by fossil fuels that enables us to protect ourselves from today's weather emergencies. So much so that even as the world has warmed by ~1 degree over the last century, mostly in the colder parts of the globe, climate disaster deaths have fallen by 98%! Thanks in large part to the energy made available by fossil fuels.  More production, powered by fossil fuels, has made us more safe, not less.

This is not a trivial point. It's something to celebrate, not to damn. As energy activist Alex Epstein argues, 

If we want a world in which all 8 billion of us have the opportunity to flourish -- to live long, prosperous, fulfilling lives -- we need to use more, not less, fossil fuel going forward. 

Those two loaded question above, by the way, and my responses to them, are based on Alex's recent Energy Talking Points, offering advice on how to answer loaded climate questions like these, including these doozies:

Check out all his responses here:  >> 'HOW TO ANSWER LOADED CLIMATE QUESTIONS'

"The IPCC's heralded Synthesis Report ... is like a polio report omitting the polio vaccine."

Climate-related disaster deaths
[Source: see Note 1]

"The IPCC's heralded Synthesis Report [the culmination of its lengthy 6th 'Assessment Cycle' of reports] is supposed to accurately synthesise the best information about human beings' climate impacts in order to rationally guide policy.
    "Instead, it severely distorts science to advance a corrupt political agenda....
    "A proper climate synthesis report must cover 2 key issues:

1. An even-handed (covering minuses and pluses) and precise account of our climate impacts.
2. An account of our ability to master climate danger, including the use of fossil fuel to neutralise its own negative climate impacts....

    "I recommend just skimming the IPCC Synthesis Report, linked below—this report that is supposed to be so brilliant—and just ask yourself if it is remotely even-handed about human impact on climate, or if it accounts for our mastery of climate. (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_LongerReport.pdf )
    "Instead of an even-handed and precise account of our climate impacts, the IPCC SR gives us a blatantly biased view of exaggerated negative impacts, with no mention of positives like global greening thanks to CO2 fertilisation of the atmosphere or decreasing cold-related deaths.
    "Instead of accounting for our climate mastery ability, the IPCC SR ignores our ability to neutralise negative climate impacts, despite the fact that we've driven climate disaster deaths down by 98%over the last century!
    "This is like a polio report omitting the polio vaccine."

~ Alex Epstein and Stephen Henne, from their lengthy analysis of the IPCC Synthesis Report titled 'The IPCC's Perversion on Science'

Food supply per person per day (calories)
Source: See Note 2

Note 1: UC San Diego - The Keeling Curve
    For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes (extreme temperature, drought, flood, storms, wildfires) declined 98%–from an average of 247 per year during the 1920s to 2.5 in per year during the 2010s.
    Data on disaster deaths come from EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain, Brussels, Belgium – www.emdat.be (D. Guha-Sapir).
    Population estimates for the 1920s from the Maddison Database 2010, the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, Faculty of Economics and Business at University of Groningen. For years not shown, population is assumed to have grown at a steady rate.
Note 2: HumanProgress - Food supply, per person, per day

Pointing out the "97% Abusers"

"If you've ever expressed the least bit of skepticism about calls to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use to prevent a 'climate crisis,' you’ve probably heard the smug response: '97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and human-caused.'
    "This response is inane....
    "The usual purpose of saying '97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and human-caused' is to make you believe our climate impact is catastrophic—a 'climate crisis.'
    "But neither the statement itself nor the studies it’s based on say our impact is catastrophic....
    "The '97%'... either agree on some unspecified impact or, at most, attribute rising CO2 levels as the leading cause ... of the mild 1°C warming we have experienced to date.
    "But they are abused to claim 97% agreement on catastrophic climate impact.
    "'97% abuser' John Kerry has falsely equated:

“97% of climate scientists have confirmed that climate change is happening and that human activity is responsible.”

With:

“if we continue to go down the same path…the world as we know it will… change dramatically for the worse.”

    "'97% abuser' Barack Obama, in response to a study that said "97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming,” tweeted “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous”—just adding 'dangerous' from nowhere.
    “'97% abuser' Al Gore took a study about papers agreeing with the idea that 'Earth’s climate is being affected by human activities' and misrepresented it to mean 'we’re causing global warming and that it’s a serious problem'—adding 'serious problem' from nowhere....
    "[L]ike many other authors of 'consensus' studies [these 97% Abusers are] clearly motivated by the desire to use insignificant consensus about some climate impact to drive their desired catastrophe narrative and anti-fossil-fuel political outcome....
    "By being coupled with the refrain 'listen to the scientists,' the '97%' claim is designed to make you only look at the climate side-effects of fossil fuels when making policy—ignoring fossil fuels’ benefits....
    "Fossil fuels actually overall make us far safer from climate by providing low-cost energy for the amazing machines that protect us against storms, protect us against extreme temperatures, and alleviate drought. Climate disaster deaths have decreased 98% over the last century... But the '97% consensus' abusers try to avoid the discussion about fossil fuel benefits....
    "Summary: Using '97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and human-caused' to argue against fossil fuels is illogical and unscientific. It:

1. Falsely equates some climate impact with catastrophic climate impact
2. Ignores the huge benefits of fossil fuels

    "If someone tries to intimidate you into opposing fossil fuels by saying '97% of climate scientists agree,' trying asking them:

1. What exactly do they agree about—do they agree there’s a 'climate crisis'?
2. Do you agree we should also factor in the benefits of fossil fuels?" 

~ Alex Epstein, from his post 'The myth that "97% of scientists agree' about a climate crisis' [emphases in the original]

Pointing out the Climate-Mastery Denialists

"'We are typically taught that whatever the benefits of fossil fuels or other forms of energy are, they always come at the expense of our environmental safety and health.
    "'But the history of climate safety shows that fossil-fueled machine labour makes us far safer from climate— a phenomenon I call 'climate mastery....'

 

"What has allowed humanity to reduce climate-related deaths by 98% over the last century is Climate Mastery. '[O]ver the last century, as CO2 emissions have most rapidly increased, the climate disaster death rate fell by an incredible 98 percent. That means the average person is fifty times less likely to die of a climate-related cause than they were in the 1920s.... not only does our knowledge system ignore the massive, life- or- death benefits of fossil fuels [illustrated so well by this one], but it has a track record of being 180 degrees wrong about the supposedly catastrophic side-effect of climate danger — which has dramatically decreased...'

    "'Knowing that our knowledge system consistently denies [this] temperature mastery is crucial context to keep in mind whenever we hear claims about 'catastrophic' temperature changes in the future; there is a very good chance those claims are based on climate mastery denial, and that without such denial catastrophe would be implausible....'
    "'As [climate-mastery denialist Paul] Krugman puts it [for example], 'We can see the damage now, although it’s only a small taste of the horrors that lie ahead.' '
    "'But the idea that climate danger is bad and getting worse, overwhelming our mastery abilities, is completely false....'
    "'[I]f we look at the universally acknowledged history of climate and life on this planet, we inevitably come to the conclusion that rising CO2 levels leading to an unliveable planet is literally impossible — because the planet was incredibly liveable for far less-adaptable organisms, with much in common with us, when CO2 was at levels that we could not come close to even if we wanted to....'
    "Given all of the horrors of nature that humanity has already mastered, humanity can clearly master some more. Yes, we can imagine worst-case scenarios that overwhelm our abilities. Imagination, after all, is infinite. But that doesn’t show that such scenarios are likely enough to worry about.
    "As I’ve argued before, our default should that worst-case scenarios are highly unlikely. After all, humanity already got this far. If specialists with a long track record of hyperbole warn us of doom, we should ignore them. Unless, of course, specialists with a long track record of calm, measured thought chime in, 'For once, the doomsayers are right.' Show me these specialists, and I’ll read them."

~ Alex Epstein, with comments interpolated by Bryan Caplan, from Caplan's post 'The Meaning of Climate Mastery'

"We don't take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and [try to] make it safe."

....

"We don't take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and make it safe.... [C]limate will always be naturally hazardous -- and the key question is whether we have the adaptability to handle it or, better yet, to master it."

~ from Alex Epstein's book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and his irrefutable case for a fossil future [interpolation mine]

 

There really is a "climate emergency" ...

"It is now almost a third of a century since 1990, when the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made its first predictions about the weather," Christopher Monckton reminds us.

So, since they're meeting again in what they call COP27, and gain making apocalyptic predictions about the decades ahead, let's see how their first third-century of crystal-ball gazing has gone.

What did they say in 1990?

Under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases ... [t]his will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1 C° above the present value... [and 1.8 C° warming from preindustrial times to 2030."

=> This translates to 0.3-0.34 C°/decade medium-term warming. However, since 1990 only 0.14 C°/decade has occurred.

That's not what you'd call highly competent weather forecasting: while oft proclaiming that warming is far worse than they've been predicting, instead it's been less than half as much!

And their predictive power is even worse than it looks:

IPCC’s business-as-usual scenario was founded on the assumption that on business as usual CO2 emissions would increase by 10-20% by 2025. The truth, however, is that it is only 2022 and yet global CO2 emissions are not 20% above their 1990 level but 60% above it ...

Does this sort of error matter?

This matters. For global climate policy is based not on the unexciting observed reality, which is that in the real world global warming is slow, small, harmless and net-beneficial, but on IPCC’s and the models’ wildly exaggerated predictions, which have not been cut back to bring them into some sort of conformity with mere reality.

Based solely on these failing predictions, for example, we keep hearing that we are in a "crisis," that this is an "emergency," that (though not so much anymore) this is our "nuclear-free moment."

And yet, even on this allegedly. overheating planet, one is ten times as likely to die from cold weather rather than hot, that in general extreme weather is if anything decreasing rather than increasing, and that over the last century climate disaster deaths have decreased by 98%.

Even "the most plausible danger of rising CO2 levels and temps, rapid sea level rises that would destroy coastal investments," are only predicted by the bad predictors "to reach 3 feet in 100 years" -- and that's the most extreme of their predictions. Future, wealthier, generations can master that.

But there really is an emergency. The fake climate emergency has created a very real energy emergency.

The false idea that fossil fuels' climate impacts are an "emergency" that requires us to rapidly eliminate fossil fuels has caused an energy emergency ... [in which] skyrocketing energy prices are driving price inflation in every area of life.... the worst-affected are poor nations—who are getting outbid for today’s scarce energy supplies.

As Alex Epstein reminds us.

Today’s high fossil fuel prices are not primarily a “Putin price hike.”
They are caused by global anti-fossil-fuel “climate emergency” policies—which made fossil fuel prices artificially high before Putin’s war and prevented the free world from quickly increasing production in response.

Yes, it is galling seeing the same climate warriors who created this very real energy emergency winging their way to a resort in Egypt in order to berate all the rest of us to wear an energy hairshirt. Just remember when their carefully crafted headline predictions emerge how bad they've already been, yet how disastrous the emergency they've created.

"Just a few years left until catastrophe..." #Catastrophizing

 

"UN routinely warns us that we have just a few years left until catastrophe:
In 1989, a senior UN official warns Associated Press that we have to fix climate change by 1999 or climate change goes beyond human control."

~ Bjorn Lomborg [hat tip Homepaddock]

 

 [Tweets from Pierre Gosselin, Seamutt, Liam Dillon, Willis Eschenbach, Wittgenstein, Daryl Vogel, Alex Epstein from the #catastrophizing thread]