Quote of the Day
When will there be a national reckoning for those who misled us? None of the dire predictions about carbon emissions throwing us into global catastrophe offered by scientists, politicians, or international organizations over the past 50 years have come true. In the end, the endless string of chilling forecasts failed to terrorize people out of modernity.
By the time it was all said and done — and it feels like the public is about done — there wasn’t a malady, tragedy, or human foible that wasn’t attributed to a slight variation in world climate, including mental illness, diabetes, migraines, prostitution, asthma, dementia, and sexual dysfunction. Climate change has turned us into addicts, thieves, human traffickers, refugees, and warmongers, and accentuated our political divisions.
It’s been 20 years since the release of the Academy Award-winning An Inconvenient Truth. In it, Malthusian nutjob and former Vice President Al Gore confidently popularized a slew of unhinged pseudoscientific warnings. Yet the snows of Kilimanjaro are still with us. Glacier National Park is not “formerly known as Glacier National Park.” We have not seen a dramatic increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes — we have seen fewer. There has not been a catastrophic sea-level rise flooding major areas. Despite the hopes of some, Manhattan and Miami remain above water. As do low-lying Pacific islands.
No other group of people would be treated with deference after engaging in such a massive and costly deception.
…
the notion that man-made greenhouse gases pose an existential threat to humankind has been little more than a backdoor way to institute unpopular environmentalist policies and temper economic growth. It’s about time we end the scam.
David Harsanyi
February 10, 2026
A reckoning for global warming alarmists is past due
At this point, even if the global temperature were to rise and be due to human activity, it would be a modern-day version of the story “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” There have been too many failed prophecies to get people to believe the most recent ones. Plus, one should be extraordinarily skeptical of people who make false prophecies. They have a vested interest in getting more people to believe their next prophecies.
grifters gotta grift.. . .
Perhaps this should be our standard for Respected Experts ™ who make dire predictions.
“When can we expect to see definite signs of your Dire Predictions coming to pass?”
“What, exactly, are those definite signs?”
“What do you, personally, pledge to do if these signs don’t appear when you say they will?”
Similarly, I’ve long believed than any major policy bill, proposed by our legislative branch, should have its own built-in expiry date. Spell out what we should look for, as a sign that it’s working, and what signs we should look for as an indication that it’s not working… with a promise to cancel the program, after a periodic check-in, if the program isn’t working.
I’m always perplexed at the “nothing’s happening” stance with climate change. There are lots of measurable effects, but it’s true some of them haven’t occurred as fast as predicted. But ocean acidification and warming is all measurable, glacial retreat is measurable, movement of animal species north to avoid high temps in the south is measurable…these are all well documented and clearly happening. But that’s the thing about predictions…timelines on severity are hard to get right.
And of course we have the causality problem: how exactly would one *prove* climate change was to blame for a specific negative effect? I don’t know that creating a causal link is even possible, so you’re left with evaluating probabilities, which will always be up for debate.
So we’re left with Pascal’s wager:
https://fourweekmba.com/pascals-wager/
Substitute “climate change” for “god” and you get the idea. Seems to me the smart money’s on assuming climate change is real, and if it turns out it wasn’t we just have lots of clean energy and a bunch of unused oil in the ground. And we’re going to have to go that way at some point anyway: there’s only a finite amount of oil available, so it’s not a question of *if* we’re going to hit Hubbert’s Peak, it’s just a question of *when.*
Part of the problem is cherry picking of the data. Signs in Glacier National Park, which said, “This Glacier will be gone by 2009!!” were removed in 2009 (or whatever year it was) after the Glacier grew. “More hurricanes!!” There were (supposedly anyway, I haven’t checked for myself), actually fewer hurricanes. “The global temperature has increased N degrees since the start of the Industrial Revolution!!” Yes, but the chosen date, 1850, coincides within a fraction of a degree of the minimum of the last 10,000 years. So, is it human activity if the temperature increases to something approximating the 10,000 year mean?
If I were to make a Pascal’s wager, I would place my money on preventing a mile high glacier over Seattle and risk raising the oceans by five feet.
Side note, I find it telling you openly admit you don’t know if it is possible to create a causal link. Yet, you are okay with forcing a lower standard of living on billions of people with no certain benefits and possibly inviting another ice age and all the disruption and death that would bring.
Tell me more about this lowered standard of living. For whom and by how much, and as a result of what? I’m not seeing a clear path from switching energy sources to widespread poverty.
As for the industrial revolution being the start date: around that time we had 1 billion people on the planet, just beginning to industrialize. Now we have 8 billion, many of whom are fully industrialized and many more on the way. I don’t really see how you 8x the population, add massive carbon emissions, and not change the environment. Later in this thread others claim “the CO2 theory of climate change” is false, so I suppose if you don’t think the atmosphere is being changed by carbon emissions there’s no argument to be had. If you do, you have to account for that 8x multiple.
Why do *I* think greenhouse gases are a thing? Because we used to have a hole in the ozone layer, we decided it was CFCs, banned them, and the hole went away. Is it *possible* the hole went away naturally? Sure. But the probability has a whole bunch of zeroes to the right of the decimal point before you get to the one. So given that we got that one right, I’m inclined to listen to climate scientists about carbon as well. Doesn’t mean they’re all right (they used to think the sun orbited the earth), but I’m giving them more weight at this point than anybody else. Maybe it’ll turn out they’re totally wrong, and I’ll look silly. I’m ok with that.
What is the total cost of energy from conventional sources versus green sources? Be sure to include the cost of meeting peak demands when there is no sun or wind. That energy cost is distributed to essentially everyone. Directly in the costs of heating and lighting, and indirectly via higher costs of goods.
Does CO2 block infrared in the 15 micron range? Yes. Scientific fact. At the current concentrations, what is the atmosphere optical depth? Ask your favorite AI. It’s complicated, but at the strongest absorption wavelength, depending on the angle from earth to sky, is 50 to 150 meters. Assuming humans contribute 10% of all CO2, it is actually closer to 3%, then eliminating all human CO2 would distribute the absorbed heat in an additional ~5 to ~15 meters of atmosphere. Given that there is considerable mixing of air in these distances, I don’t understand how these amounts of CO2 can make a measurable difference.
Perhaps my analysis is missing something. Please correct me if you have a better way of looking at the issue.
I dunno, man, I’m not a climate scientist. I’m not any kind of scientist. I’m in no way qualified to be making judgements about the optical density of the atmosphere and how CO2 affects that. That’s why I tend to listen to what actual scientists with experience in the field say.
Wrt power when the sun and wind aren’t available: my current favorite is the gravity battery: if you have a hill available, you attach a big weight to a cable on a track and when the sun/wind produces excess power you drag the weight up the hill. At night when the sun/wind aren’t available, you let the weight descend and drive your generator. We could even be using the elevators in skyscrapers as generators every time they descend. Old mines are great for this since they already have tracks/elevators in place. Love me a gravity battery.
Do the math on your gravity battery. I thought they were great until I figured out the size and distance moved of a gravity battery to hold as much energy as an ordinary car battery.
I asked Chat GPT my C02 absorption questions. I’m mostly convinced my analysis is “a good try” but, ultimately, probably wrong as applied to heat retention of the planet.
And yet there are a bunch of companies trying different gravity battery concepts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery
Seems like if it were a simple math problem they wouldn’t be doing that.
And a lot of those seem to be large-scale batteries. I’m interested to know if there are energy recovery methods that could be applied to existing infrastructure like buildings, e.g. every time an elevator goes down we recover some energy, so that rather than trying to create a whole bunch of energy with a small number of batteries, we create a little energy with a large number of batteries. There’s also the benefit of reducing transmission cost if you can localize generation.
Maybe it won’t pan out, but at the moment I think it’s interesting as one element of what will surely be a multi-pronged approach.
Elevators use counterweights so going down empty means it requires energy. But, still, going up empty could produce electrical energy. I was almost certain this was being done. It is just too obvious a win. Copilot confirmed this has been done for decades. Anytime there is a net imbalance going down they push the energy back into the grid.
The “gravity battery” is tremendously inefficient, even more so than our other methods of power storage. That’s one of the primary weaknesses of all “use electricity for everything” plans – our means of storing electrical power are all *BAD* in that they waste a significant portion of the power to be stored.
Of course, even your examples are not the best examples OF the gravity battery – that would be Ye Olde Dams. If you’ve ever heard of people pumping water to the upper portion of a dam? That would be one of the better forms of gravity battery.
(Of course, the enviro-cultists are largely against dams. Go figure.)
Personally, I would advocate for just spending any excess electrical power on creating more gasoline. It would inherently NOT increase the CO2 in the air to keep using gasoline like that, since CO2 in the air would be the source of the CO2 in the additional gasoline. Gasoline is amazing stuff – liquid as reasonable human temperatures, energy dense but relatively harmless *for how energy dense it is* (compare to lithium ion or other battery materials), easy to transport by numerous, already-well-built means…
“Love me a gravity battery.”
John S.
Ever consider what it takes to raise that weight? Minus the losses in all mechanics?
How many is it going to take to power just Seattle?
How ’bout. Since AI is going to take everybody’s jobs. We just have you’all pedaling power generators for yourselves and AI?
You NOT being a scientist goes without saying.
Try one of those hand-crank generators for awhile, then get back to us.
“And yet there are a bunch of companies trying different gravity battery concepts:”
Let us know when one of the ones “trying” actually succeeds.
And especially if they actually succeed… you know, without just being another leech on the taxpayers that can’t *actually* succeed without free money from uncle sugar.
“Seems like if it were a simple math problem they wouldn’t be doing that.”
There have been lots and LOTS of companies doing things that mathematically make no sense without free magic money from uncle sugar.
Free magic money gets cut off, company folds instantly, money all gone, nothing to show for it. That is not “success”, that’s a scam, and usually a CORRUPT scam with someone in the government getting something back in return under the table.
Quality Learing Gravity Batteries is not a good thing, John.
“Tell me more about this lowered standard of living.”
Check the price of energy in various countries as they have “gone green” – it goes up TREMENDOUSLY every time.
And that extra cost affects almost literally everything, as almost literally everything takes some power to produce. Growing food, transporting food, preparing food, purifying water… you know, minor, unimportant things like that. It’s really well-documented in LOTS of places.
“As for the industrial revolution being the start date”
It’s convenient to be the start date because it was tremendously, amazingly COLD then, on the geological scale, not just the historical one. That’s called “cherry picking”. Start at the coldest point in literally millions of years, then claim it’s going to warm up… yeah, that’s a REALLY REALLY REALLY good way to bet, no matter the mechanism!
Also, on the CO2 theory, if you look at the 20th century, the *VAST* majority of the CO2 was released in WWII and after. A large majority of the warming occurred… BEFORE WWII. There are SO many points like that.
“Because we used to have a hole in the ozone layer, we decided it was CFCs, banned them, and the hole went away.”
No, the REPORTING on it went away. There’s a major thinning in the ozone layer every winter in the hemisphere that it’s winter in. Every year.
And CFCs were supposed to last for decades – that was reporting on it, why we needed to ban it IMMEDIATELY!!!!one!!! And then, the “hole” reporting stopped almost instantly once the ban went into place. By what the people demanding the ban said, *it still shouldn’t be gone yet today*.
It was pure propaganda. There are some additional theories about WHO put out that propaganda for the sake of money and expiring patents, etc, and while the timing on some of that stuff is *awfully* convenient for certain big-business interests, I don’t really care WHO did it, just that people stop believing it and stop falling for it time after time.
We KNOW what a world with high CO2 looks like – it’s quite available in the fossil record (what SUVs did the dinosaurs drive to cause that, I wonder?). Summary? Garden of Eden. The actual science says that the world in general and people in particular would be better off if the world was at least 1 degree C warmer, probably 2, and maybe more.
And certainly, we KNOW what happens when the CO2 gets too low – ice age and DEATH. In fact, at that “lowest temperature in millions of years” point, the CO2 was also **INCREDIBLY** low, low enough that plants weren’t growing well, nearing the point where nearly all plants would just starve to death because they wouldn’t have enough CO2 for photosynthesis.
Hey, let’s go back there! Such a good idea, right? Just starve everyone to death.
The environ-cult isn’t science, it’s a religion.
About the CFC/Ozone Hole connection. From the beginning, I have asked many proponents of the CFC guilt industry to explain the transport mechanism whereby the extremely heavy CFC molecules from my spray can are able to move from the Earth’s surface to the Ionosphere. There has been not a single response. Add to that a needed explanation for how those molecules also migrate from the middle latitudes to the poles as well. Me thinks that propaganda is the most likely cause of such movement.
I have a degree in atmospheric science and a military credential in contract management.
Long story short: it’s fricking obvious that the government is awarding grants to the scientists that give cover to the course of action that the politicians want to do anyway. Those bought scientists then do a full court press with all their government money to run any dissenting scientists out of the mainstream to keep the government cheese flowing.
My evidence? Cliff Mass, who was one of my professors, who believes in anthropogenic climate change, expressed concern that a carbon credit scheme would produce any beneficial results. The dean of the “College of the Environment” arranged a community meeting on the subject , where he stood back while undergraduates screamed at Professor Mass in a Maoist struggle session. The entire University of Washington ‘College of the Environment’ is not a scientific concern, but a religious belief system divorced from scientific rigor.
I disagree with my prof, Dr Mass, on the composure of natural versus anthropogenic climate change, not because of specific scientific criteria (which he himself admits is highly up for debate), but because I recognize a solid pattern of political behavior in regard to scientific research. It is considerably more likely that the research indicates the existence of climate change, and the cause of that change is from human activity, because that supports the arrogation of government power, than it would if that determination of change supported a reduction in government power. A scientific whore is always willing to give the john what they want.
This isn’t new. One only has to listen to President Eisenhower’s farewell address, and pay attention to the part after the “military industrial complex” that everyone quotes.
That be hilarious, Massa John!!!!
It’s amazing to hear someone try to defend something so provenly ignorant.
This is the lie you fell for.
ALL CO2 in the atmosphere is roughly 400 parts per million.
Of that, humans account for less than 3 percent. Let’s be generous and call it 5%.
That’s 20 parts per million of atmosphere. (Remembering that number also includes something you can’t control. Like your own respiration.)
And you think you can change the temperature of the planet by controlling less than say 18 parts per million???
Especially when you consider that the thermal coefficient of CO2 is no different than any other gas at play in our atmosphere in realistic terms.
Plus, If you were to stand outside in one place for 24 hours. Would you not experience a larger temperature change than the dire predictions of 3 degrees in 100 years???
The sun controls the temperature of this planet. And nothing other.
All that. And the outright laughable lie that CO2 builds up in the atmosphere. As the amount of it has been proven to be one of the limiting factors in plant growth.
More CO2 would just add to the surface area of every blade of grass, trees, crops, and every other form of plant on this planet.
Ocean acidity is a monstrously stupid lie. 1 liter of water at STP, (Standard temperature and pressure, roughly 68 degrees F. at 14.7 lbs. PSI.) Absorbs 1 liter of CO2.
The colder the water, the more it will absorb. Now consider that the oceans average about 10,000 ft. in depth and cover most of the earth???
Ya, wake me up when the ocean becomes a giant bottle of club soda.
Now consider the truth.
We all know it was/is a lie. But how many scientists backed up that lie? Why did they back a lie that was so easily proven to be one?
What kind of ignorant evil would subject humanity like that? (We expect it politicians. But not science.)
And the greater point. If they feel that comfortable lying to us about all that.
What else are they lying about?
Covid was a lie. They backed it to.
Evolution is a lie. They back that also.
I could go on.
And I’m supposed to believe them when they tell me there is no God that created all this?
That alone would make me at least start searching for a God.
Cause what they have to say sounds more like Hindu chanting than science.
Climate change-OOOMMM.
Evolution-OOOMMM.
Ozone depletion-OOOMMM.
It’s all bullshit. And more like a bunch of vampire elitists playing with their food.
Thanks. John was so wrong on so many items in standard lefty-orthodox-cult talking-point precision, I didn’t think I’d have the patience to rebut them all. But then, that’s why he is the way he is, I guess. He believes all their fabrications and half-truths.
“I’m always perplexed at the “nothing’s happening” stance with climate change. ”
That’s because you have no interest in facts that challenge your worldview.
“But ocean acidification and warming is all measurable, glacial retreat is measurable, movement of animal species north to avoid high temps in the south is measurable…these are all well documented and clearly happening.”
Depends on which moment. “Species moving north” becomes “species moving south” becomes “species moving north” again, all well well-documented, with various studies and news articles, happening at least twice… JUST IN THE 20th CENTURY!
“Seems to me the smart money’s on assuming climate change is real”
OF COURSE “climate change” is real. The number of people who would say the climate doesn’t change is… well, I’ve never met or heard of one, including all my time online.
The claim isn’t “the climate isn’t changing”. The claim is “the CO2 theory of climate change is utter garbage”, and it has a LOT of data behind it.
Just to mention my favorite, we have several hundred thousand years of ice core data. In that time, there have been numerous instances of warming and cooling. On the warming instances, there are examples of CO2 as a “lagging indicator”, and there are instances of CO2 moving in tandem with the warming, but there are literally no instances of CO2 being a “leading indicator”.
If you understand how any of this stuff works, you’re already done with the CO2 theory of climate change, just from that. That alone is sufficient. That’s how bad the CO2 theory of climate change is.
And there are several other examples that are *at least* that bad, just harder to communicate to people. And there multiple examples of things that are nearly that bad.
And the predictions have been HORRIBLE. “glacial retreat is measurable” – like that one, yep, totally measurable, and the only way it supports the climate change religion is if you very carefully control which glaciers you measure.
Polar bears are dying off! There are only about 6 times as many of them now as there were in the 1950s! (Yeah, read that again, and go check on all the stories about polar bears dying out.)
If you are super careful, you can cherry pick a few predictions that aren’t actively garbage, but the vast majority of them have been completely, utterly wrong. The track record of the climate change doomers is really, really, really, really, REALLY bad.
” there’s only a finite amount of oil available”
We can literally make more. The military has fielded the technology to make jet fuel from air (you know, where the actual components of the fuel go after it is burned).
It takes energy to do this. The benefit of oil from the ground is that the energy is already there, so we will have to switch to a different *energy* source at some point, yes, but we can keep using gasoline forever, if we so choose, but gathering the CO2 and other bits we want out of the air and converting it back to fuel. Yes literally, not exaggerating.
“if it turns out it wasn’t we just have lots of clean energy” Except that the “clean” energy you are talking about mostly… isn’t. It just displaces the non-clean part to where air-heads who pay no attention don’t notice it.
I’ll see your Hubbert’s Peak and raise you the Simon–Ehrlich wager.
“Polar bears are dying off! There are only about 6 times as many of them now as there were in the 1950s! (Yeah, read that again, and go check on all the stories about polar bears dying out.)”
Yup,
Since we quit clubbing baby seals the polar bears have a lot more to eat.
” there’s only a finite amount of oil available”
“We can literally make more. The military has fielded the technology to make jet fuel from air (you know, where the actual components of the fuel go after it is burned).”
Yup again, It’s called “thermal depolymerization”.
Was patented over 20 years ago.
Been using it at the “Butterball” turkey plant in Missouri the whole time.
Turns any organic material, grass cuttings, tree branches, turkey guts, into lite sweet grude oil inside of 30 minutes with just temp and pressure.
And once again. If they will lie about something this stupid.
What else are we being lied too about?
Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » THIS. WE ALSO NEED A RECKONING FOR THE COVIDIOCY AND ALL OTHER INSTANCES OF ELITE OVERREACH, REALLY: