This month’s open thread about climate topics. Try to be substantive and respectful to other commenters.
Note: Comments that are abusive and/or repetitive to the point of tedium will be moderated. If you’ve made the same point ten times already in the thread, and people are still arguing with you, repeating it another ten times isn’t going to help.
in Re to Piotr, 31 Jan 2026 at 8:40 PM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/01/unforced-variations-jan-2026/#comment-844640
Hallo Piotr,
Please try to ask yourself who takes you more seriously: Is it someone who enjoys fighting with you on every occasion, irrespective what you just said or wrote, or someone who occasionally strives to understand what you just said or wrote?
Greetings
Tomáš
Tomas Kalisz: ” Please, let my mutilated torso ask yet another question before you cut my head off”
Piotr: “True to the form, you misunderstood Monty Python too. The Black Knight scene is not a gorefest about chopping off the limbs (and the head is not off) – but about rigid sticking to your opinion and unable to correct even in the view of an overwhelming argument to the contrary.”
Tomas Kalisz: “ Please try to ask yourself who takes you more seriously: Is it someone who enjoys fighting with you on every occasion [,] or someone who occasionally strives to understand what you just wrote?”
Let me know, when you become the latter.
===
Piotr 31 Jan:
TK: “ The thermodynamic limit derived by prof. Dessler is universal! And applies to all DAC unavoidably!”
Piotr: [Dessler’s limit] it is not a valid limit to any DAC method. The only relevant limit is the energy of reactions of a given DAC – that either:
– (in the uptake phase) ALREADY incorporated that +19kJ into net energy of reaction (in your own example energy of uptake of Co2 onto CaO = – 112 kJ (= – 132+19kJ).)
– or do not include Dessler’s 19 kJ/mol CO2 at all – in the recycling phase in those DAC that recycle its absorbents.
Each DAC will have its different sum of energies from both phases, and NONE of these sums will be = Desslers +19kJ. Thus his +19kJ.mol CO2 is inapplicable for representation of the thermodynamics of any DAC. And therefore, as I have explained to you before:
Piotr Jan 12, Jan 13, Jan 17, Jan 21, Jan 23, Jan 24, Jan 27 “Using an inapplicable number [+19kJ/mol] is worse than using no number at all – because it is false knowledge – it suggests quantitative insight where there is none“
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Since I find myself here on Real Climate far more often than has historically been the case, may I take this opportunity to invite one and all to speculate on the 2026 maximum Arctic sea ice extent in a poll over on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum?
https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,4497.0.html
“Voting closes: February 23, 2026”
Jim, I quickly checked the site and if you haven’t done it yet how about creating a plot of yearly recovery (max-min) over the time period. Is there a trend?
Hi Zebra,
According to Prof. Julienne Stroeve:
https://GreatWhiteCon.info/2024/04/reuters-fact-checks-daily-septic-arctic-sea-ice-nonsense/
“There is no correlation between the winter sea ice extent and how much will melt out in the summer, and we have seen this time and time again.”
According to yours truly over on the ASIF:
“Amongst other things [maximum extent] all depends on the ‘Arctic weather’ in mid March.”
I doubt that your suggestion will reveal a significant trend. I’ll try the experiment when I have a spare 1/2 hour, but it won’t be this week!
Thanks Jim. I’ll keep an eye out. I did do some searching but couldn’t find anything.
Sea ice recovery is going to always be a noisy statistic, because sea ice will form any time the temperature drops below the freezing point for the body of water (fresh or salt). That’ll be driven by weather, and the polar regions will still get cold when there is no sun.
However, the new ice will be thin and likely short-lived, because it will be thin and spotty.
Ray Ladbury: Sea ice recovery is going to always be a noisy statistic, because sea ice will form any time the temperature drops below the freezing point for the body of water (fresh or salt)
If you mean air temperature – then this applies only to the fresh water – cold air has to cool only the very top of the water (below 4C water becomes progressively less dense si as you cool it stays at the surface.
In the ocean – the just-cooled surface water sinks and is replaced by the deeper, warmer water, so to start forming sea-ice you need to cool the water column to the depth in which salinity increases enough to make the deeper warmer water denser. When I was in the Beaufort Sea in November – even after few days of -16C temps there was no ice to be seen. (The lakes on the adjacent land having experienced similar temps must have already have ice).
Therefore, I would expect the freeze-up date on land be much more predictable (from the air temps) than in the ocean – where matter not only the air temps, but also oceanography – i.e. what thickness of the water column you have to cool uniformly to start forming the ice (i.e. the vertical extent of the thermal convection). Which is variable over space, and in a given place change from year to year.
Furthermore, the noisiness of the timing of freeze-up of the ocean, does NOT apply to the timing of melting – sea-ice melting is not symmetrical to freezing – it does not require warming of the water column – the warming is concentrated near the surface as the melting-ice creates low-density (due to low salinity) water layer that stays at the surface, where it warms from the sun and air temps., and melts even more more ice and so on and on.
Yes, this matches what I recall over the years. There used to be a period in January that lined up pretty well with summer results, but it was a short time frame, and I haven’t checked the correlation in a few years.
I asked Chatgpt what the risks are from climate change. Here’s its list:
CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS
1. TEMPERATURE AND HEAT: Extreme and prolonged heatwaves killing people, heat stress in cities, higher global average temperatures, reduced nighttime cooling, longer and more intense warm seasons, worsening wildfires, and urban heat islands.
2. OCEANS AND ICE: Rapid sea level rise flooding coastlines, glacier and ice sheet collapse, loss of Arctic sea ice, warming oceans disrupting marine ecosystems, ocean acidification killing coral reefs, declining oxygen creating dead zones, stronger storm surges, and collapsing fisheries.
3. WEATHER EXTREMES: Intensified hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones; more frequent and catastrophic floods; mega-droughts causing desertification; stronger and uncontrollable wildfires; unpredictable weather destroying agriculture and livelihoods.
4. FOOD AND WATER: Collapsing crop yields, crop failures, livestock deaths, fruit trees producing less due to fewer chill hours, failing fisheries, freshwater scarcity, contamination of water supplies, soil erosion, reduced food security, and rising hunger and malnutrition.
5. ECOSYSTEMS AND BIODIVERSITY: Species extinctions accelerating, habitat loss, forest dieback, invasive species spreading, loss of pollinators reducing food production, tree damage from pests, coral reef collapse, ecosystem tipping points, and cascading ecological breakdown.
6. HUMAN HEALTH: Heat-related deaths, spread of vector-borne diseases (mosquitoes, ticks), respiratory illnesses from smoke and pollution, malnutrition and famine, mental health crises, climate trauma, and infectious disease outbreaks.
7. SOCIETY AND INFRASTRUCTURE: Infrastructure destruction, power outages, flooding of cities, housing loss, population displacement, destruction of cultural heritage, overwhelmed emergency services, and collapse of transportation networks.
8. ECONOMIC IMPACTS: Rising disaster recovery costs, collapsing insurance markets, reduced labor productivity, global supply chain failures, worsening inequality, economic recession, collapse of fisheries and agriculture industries, and lost livelihoods.
9. POLITICAL AND SECURITY RISKS: Resource conflicts over water, food, and land; political instability; forced migration creating climate refugees; civil unrest; higher risk of wars and national security crises; and destabilized governments.
10. LONG-TERM AND IRREVERSIBLE: Climate tipping points triggering runaway warming, permafrost thaw releasing methane, permanent ice sheet loss, ocean circulation collapse, massive ecosystem collapse, loss of planetary habitability in regions, and irreversible species extinction.
I like the other list that AI gave me. More concise.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/01/ai-ml-climate-magic/#comment-844664
Also, I would include Range Erosion to this list here.
Could we please not have material from ChatGPT or any of the other AI bots here? They follow orders, and have neither morals nor discrimination, so there is no way to stop them wasting our time without reference to their reliability. It’s just as easy for it to repeat lies as to tell the truth. Endlessly, as it enables the endless expansion of arguments already available here.
Ron R., I find you trustworthy, but if you must play with your toys, remember the playpen is rather full of them already. The new computing skills are useful for many things, but repetitive arguments are not one of them.
Very much agree. I would add its significant negative climate and environmental impact, of which we need zero more. We also need zero more misinformation, disinformation and aberrations to an already crowded field.
There are actual reliable sources, including the one we are having this conversation on.
Something useful from The Conversation: “How the polar vortex and warm ocean intensified a major US winter storm. Published: January 25, 2026 4.40am NZDT Updated: January 27, 2026 2.03am NZDT.” Susan Anderson may have already posted this so apologies in advance for duplication. We talk about warming rates and their many clear detrimental impacts but I have a suspicion its the slightly less direct or obvious things like the shifting polar vortex that might be amongst the most concerning climate change problems or at least right up there.
https://theconversation.com/how-the-polar-vortex-and-warm-ocean-intensified-a-major-us-winter-storm-274243
January is over and the daily ERA5 re-analysis SAT at ClimatePulse is showing a global anomaly for January of +0.51ºC, a little up on December’s +0.48ºC. It’s the 5th warmest January on record although the four warmer Jans comprise the two “bananas!!” years and two El Niño years.
2025 … … +0.79ºC
2024 … … +0.70ºC
2020 … … +0.58ºC
2016 … … +0.55ºC
2025 … … +0.51ºC
2017 … … +0.40ºC
2007 … … +0.36ºC
2019 … … +0.28ºC
2022 … … +0.28ºC
2023 … … +0.25ºC
If the passage of time is considered and adjustment made for an AGW trend of +0.3ºC (as per OLS 2010-22), Jan 2026 drops to 9th below 2010, 2017, 2013 & 2015 (although 2010 was another El Niño year).
Jan 2025 is the 5th post-“bananas!!” monthly anomaly sitting below that 2010-2022 trend line of +0.3ºC/decade (the previous four Jun, Jul, Aug & Dec last year).
The multi-month trends are still impacted by the higher anomalies of Sep, Oct & Nov last year, the first two of these mainly due to an unexpectedly warm Antarctica with the usual warm autumn in the northern hemisphere was rather muted and only really impacted the Nov anomaly.
The rolling 12-month average continues its post “bananas!!” decline. Using the 1850-1900 anomaly base (thus a pre-industrial anomaly base) the ERA5 12-month rolling average has dropped to +1.45ºC, presently dropping at about 0.02ºC/month. This decline is something Hansen et al wrote about back last December (here) saying an “assumption of at least a moderate El Nino beginning in 2026 leads us to the projection in Fig. 5, with global temperature reaching a minimum at or above +1.4°C within several months and then rising to a record global temperature of about +1.7°C” This “minimum” had been effectively proposed back in March 2024 when Hansen et al “expect(ed) the average of the El Nino maximum and the La Nina minimum of global temperatures to be ~1.5°C” and anticipated a yet-to-arrive “maximum” in 2024 “may still approach ~1.6°C” even though the 2023 El Niño was “half-baked.” That “maximum” came in at +1.596°C (Sept23-Aug24), this using the GISTEMP record with a 1880-1920 anomaly base à la Hansen et al. And to get ultra-nerdy, ERA5 SAT with a 1850-1900 anomaly base is running +0.008ºC warmer than 1880-1920 GISTEMP.
The ongoing development of the various global temperature is still being plotted-out at The Banana!! Watch.
The daily 60N-60S SST numbers from ERA5 have been showing a bit of a warm bounce since the start of the year (this measure being a less wobbly indicator of where global temperature is heading).
Zeke Hausfather, IPCC AR7 lead author has posted temperature measurements for Jan 2026, and preliminary results for year 2025, with some interesting comments about their meaning to the long term trends:
https://bsky.app/profile/hausfath.bsky.social/post/3mdxq6q3ds62q
Fun fact: Every one of the last 12 years has been warmer than the previously so-called warmest year in modern measurement history, 1998. Maybe Ray or Barton can project whether we are likely to see yearly temperature averages as low as 1998 in our children’s or grandchildren’s lifetimes.
DOAK,
A “fun” fact – The last 12 years comprise the years 2014-2025.
Another “fun” fact – The year 2010 was warmer than the years 2014 in both ERA5 SAT & HadCRUT5 (although in all data series there isn’t a lot in it).
And yet another “fun” fact – In all surface temperature series (but not in TLT series), it was 2010 which would have been “the previously so-called warmest year in modern measurement history,” this because 2010 was warmer than 1998.
That projection of a 2026 average from Zeke Hausfather (he calls it a “prediction”) using ERA5 SAT numbers is perhaps higher than I would have anticipated.
An OLS through ERA5 SAT 2010-22 gives a 2026 value of +1.41ºC which is significantly below Zeke’s central figure of +1.45ºC.
The big adjustment on that would normally be ENSO. ONI numbers-wise, 2014 ONI numbers likely provides the closest fit with ONI forecasts for 2026. But 2014 had followed on from a period of La Niña/neutral years not a period of El Niño/neutral years as preceded 2026. Thus 2018 is probably a better guide. Both 2014 & 2018 early months were just below the 2010-22 projection (as also in 2026) and with their annual average sitting well below the 2010-22 projection line (by 0.06ºC & 0.03ºC respectively) suggesting the OLS projected average anomaly of +1.41ºC for 2026 may be on the high end with a guestimate of perhaps +1.35ºC the low end and a tongue-in-cheek central projection of +1.38ºC.
This would put 2026 pretty solidly into 4th-hottest-year territory with 2025 in 3rd (+1.47ºC) and the current-4th place 2016 sitting quite a bit cooler (+1.32ºC).
As to why this tongue-in-cheek central projection of +1.38ºC is quite a long way below that provided by Zeke Hausfather:-
Is the “bananas!!” of 2023-25 impacting his calculations? And if the “bananas!!” are now an episode of the past, should those years be included in these calculations?
“A “fun” fact – The last 12 years comprise the years 2014-2025.
Another “fun” fact – The year 2010 was warmer than the years 2014 in both ERA5 SAT & HadCRUT5 (although in all data series there isn’t a lot in it).”
Yes, MA, the last twelve years in a row and also 2010 were higher than 1998. Both things are true. My point was that 12 years in a row is a pretty good sign that the trend isn’t going to reverse itself soon. I used the year 1998 because that is famously misused by deniers to to imply a decrease in temperatures, because that used to be the warmest year on record – for a decade. Sheesh!
BTW, Thanks for providing all the interesting temperature data: always interesting.
And yet another “fun” fact – In all surface temperature series (but not in TLT series), it was 2010 which would have been “the previously so-called warmest year in modern measurement history,” this because 2010 was warmer than 1998.”
“A “fun” fact – The last 12 years comprise the years 2014-2025.
Another “fun” fact – The year 2010 was warmer than the years 2014 in both ERA5 SAT & HadCRUT5 (although in all data series there isn’t a lot in it).
And yet another “fun” fact – In all surface temperature series (but not in TLT series), it was 2010 which would have been “the previously so-called warmest year in modern measurement history,” this because 2010 was warmer than 1998.”
Yes, yes, I know. The last 12 years in a row and also 2010 were hotter than 1998. Both things are true, but I was making the point that the year 1998 has long been misused in arguments against a long term warming trend because it was, in fact the warmest year on record for quite a few years. (That year pops up in Unforced Variations several times a month, including this January) Now, it’s likely we’ll never see a year that cool in our lifetimes. Thanks MA and Barry for providing some numeric trends to flesh out this observation for me.
Yes, MA as shown in the Hausfather graphic that I cited, 2010 was hotter than 1998, and also the past dozen years have all been hotter than 1998. I used that year to point out that so many posts here have used the exceptionally warm year of 1998 as a starting point to produce misleading “pauses” or even “cooling” trends. I’m sure we all remember these posts. I was not only pointing this out, but also the irony that we may never again see a year as cool as 1998, for a long time considered the “warmest year on record”. Since there’s no longer any “fun” involved in this conversation, I’ll just say that I find it interesting that most of us here can find any worldwide yearly trend graphic, and immediately orient ourselves by finding the bump in the data over the long term trend that was the year 1998. At least I do.
Also, thanks for providing the monthly temperature data for us here, and your well written comments.
Yikes! Triple posts definitely show my “drafts” sequence. Sorry.
DOAK I doubt that annual GMST will be as low as it was in 1998 for the next few centuries at least because the underlying Delta-GMST rate (separate from bananas Socialite rubbish & babbling) has averaged something like +0.24 / decade and is now around +0.30 / decade, and I think I recall from my plot 1962-2012 that I did in 2013 that the La Nina trend line averages 0.13 less than ENSO Neutral and El Nino trend line averages 0.13 more than ENSO Neutral so that’s 0.26 more for El Nino than La Nina on average, and average +0.24 / decade underlying Delta-GMST rate 1998-2026 = +0.67 which is a lot more than +0.26.
Thanks Barry. That’s a good way to help quantify the chances. Out of curiosity, I was asking the question “what are the odds?” when the answer is essentially “very thin”.
I promised to bring this forward. It’s more about weather than climate, but an excellent review with attractive and useful graphics and layperson-adjacent explanations backed up with real science:
North America and Europe are warned that more is on the way. Stratospheric Warming (‘sudden’) and polar incursions are of particular interest to me, and their effects to all of us.
Stratospheric Warming Confirmed: Polar Vortex Collapse to Bring Major Weather Disruption in the Coming Weeks – https://www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/polar-vortex-collapse-february-2026-stratospheric-warming-forecast-winter-united-states-canada-europe-fa/
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fwiw, today meteorologist Ben Noll contradicts but re shorter-term weather: https://x.com/BenNollWeather/status/2018701017203032359
“New forecasts confirm a Polar Vortex split and collapse in mid-February, following a Stratospheric Warming event. The latest predictions show a breakdown of the polar circulation, creating a prolonged cold weather pattern across North America and Europe, with early signs that it can last into early Spring.
“While the main collapse is scheduled for mid-month, the United States and Canada are already feeling the early effects of a pre-split disruption. A deformed, elongated Polar Vortex core is currently pushing cold anomalies into the central and eastern U.S., with temperatures in some regions forecast to drop 30°F below normal.
“Current data indicates that this Stratospheric Warming event will start unfolding [this week] … we will look at the prolonged disruption of the stratospheric Polar Vortex. Also, we will analyze the resulting weather impacts over North America and Europe for the remainder of winter and into early spring.”
“Arctic causing the jet stream to meander southward”. My own thought on the fluid movement is that air moving in a northwardish direction, into the Arctic, gets further north because it is moving more slowly with a warmer Arctic, which pushes bulge(s) out southward because 2 air parcels can’t occupy the same space, excepting minor compression, and there’s nowhere `for the air in situ to go because North Pole is the end of Earth (unless you flip Earth, which would be dangerous because the inside might fall out). So I think the cause is air pushing in a northwardish direction, not air pushing in a southwardish direction. It seems to me that oceans Pacific & Atlantic would have the least south-north temperature gradient, the least tropospheric height change, so the northward intrusions would be more often over ocean causing the southward bulges shoved out to be more often over the continental land masses. I don’t know the multi-decadal statistics though so possibly they refute those thoughts.
Barry E Finch:
“ I think the cause is air pushing in a northwardish direction, not air pushing in a southwardish direction.”
So why there is a polar cell at all?
“ there’s nowhere `for the air in situ to go because North Pole is the end of Earth ”
Only if the troposphere moved N-S as single block (and not as the cell with the flow at the top of troposphere in the opposite direction than the flow near Earth surface) AND if the thickness of troposphere was constant – it’s not – if you push more air north – even if there is less area there – you just push the surplus air higher – increasing the height of the tropopause. Which then increasing air pressure at the pole, thus increasing the return wind south near the Earth surface.
the northward intrusions would be more often over ocean causing the southward bulges shoved out to be more often over the continental land masses
Is this what you see in NASA jet stream animation ?
I don’t. And in the still frame below the animation – the pattern is … opposite to your prediction – southward bulge over Pacific and northern bulge over N.America.
From the animation it is clear that polar Jet Stream, is global in scale – bulges form in one place and travel rapidly eastward either gradually deeping or shallowing over many 1000s of km,
unlike like your static picture of bulges forming locally.
I tend to think of a jet stream meanders (your “bulges”) like a water coming out of a garden house – small initial shakes of the hand translate into the wider swing of water stream travelling along that stream.
If the flow is strong – it “stabilizes” the flow into more or less straight line, but if reduced – the flow become more wavy.
The Polar jet stream is driven by the difference in temperature between Arctic and mid-latitudes. which means that:
-in summer the temp. difference is less, so the jet stream slower => thus more wavy than it is in winter.
And under AGW, as a result of Arctic amplification (Arctic warming being several time faster than global average), the temperature difference that drives the jet stream is reduced – hence the jet becomes weaker -> more wavy -> with meanders carrying frigid Arctic air travelling further south than they have done in the past => you get local record colds and/or snowfall in places where these meanders rarely if ever reached in the past.
This is compounded by the the fact that weaker jet stream means slower movement of meanders eastward – so not only you get the arctic air further south , but it also stay longer in a given location – allowing for local temps to drop more, and to produce more snow when this cold air meets warm humid air from the Gulf of Mexico.
So in those locations – the increase of the exposure to the Arctic air overpowers the lesser probability of the cold events anticipated from the AGW moving the temp distribution to the right – seeing more not else local extreme. And seeing Trump ranting “Where is this global warming now, We certainly could use some good ol’ global warming now.”
At the same time in the Arctic – you would expect these two effect to add up – local heat records caused by the shithing the distribution to the right AND as a result of the stronger northward meanders of jet stream bring north the much warmer air from the south (and again being slower having more to raise the local temps).
Warmer year here than usual on the coast. So far at least. I have a tree that struggles then loses its leaves every year and far before now due to the cold. This year it’s kept them.
Other deciduous trees have lost their leaves, and always lose them this time of year. That’s genetic memory. They come from cold areas. This tree is from latitudinally tropical/seasonal areas where it gets dry as well as well as wet. It can lose its leaves but that’s from lack of water, not cold.
With time I suspect deciduous trees will change to become more evergreen.
(cont. from https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/01/unforced-variations-jan-2026/#comment-844104 ):
linear-and-general radiances (LOS) , linear , linear & skin-temperature
sinusoidal 1 , sinusoidal Calculus , sinusoidal 2 , sinusoidal 3 ,
New:
sinusoidal 4 (graphs yay!) , sinusoidal 5 ,
& notation-notes-and-terms-1
PS F#%$ ICE & F@#% science deniers and energy deniers
Awesome Videos:
“You are being misled about renewable energy technology.”- Technology Connections https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM (very good video)
“Coal is Extremely Dumb” – Hank Green https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms
PS part 5 is more prose-heavy (ie an easier? read – ~?), except for a few derivations at the end. It may also largely be common sense(?) but perhaps still worth while to state(?).
PS my “WIP – awaiting final proofread/double check” disclaimers – I’m leaving them there for now but I’m pretty satisfied that I’ve probably got it right up through part 3.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/climate-risk-becomes-matter-security-johan-rockstr%25C3%25B6m-p9n7f/
Stefan posted a link to this article including links to two papers about climate risk and AMOC degredation.
Still the biggest issue around apart from the water global water bankruptcy problem (Iran, China, Egypt etc) and maybe others such the problem of the west vs the rest of the world (equity) which is incredinly slanted in the wests favour
Just wondering. First anti-agw proponents said that global warming was definitely NOT happening. They held that position for a looong time. I saw lots of articles from the usual (paid) suspects in magazines, and later, online saying that. Then they agreed that it was happening but it was definitely NOT caused by Co2. They had lots of other ideas about why the earth was warming (see Skeptical Science for a list of around 200 reasons). Then they said that is warming and is caused by Co2 but it was definitely NOT going to be that bad and we can carry on with BAU. Now that it’s obvious that it’s true they are saying that it’s in fact going to be a GOOD thing for the earth with arguments about (temporary) increased agricultural productivity and less heat death (due to air conditioning and heat warnings, especially in the first world), facts that are already well known. This temporary benefit, by the way, does nothing to help the other 99.99999 percent of species on this planet.
Why oh why are they so opposed to just moving on past Fossil Fuels to clean technologies, as we’ve moved on past so many other things when we discover a better way? Why all this angst and struggle to prevent it???
The breathable atmosphere only is about 5 to 6 miles up! That’s it! That’s comparably as thin as the skin on an apple! Now that we know the risks why are we so determined to fill it and the rest of the atmosphere up with pollution, especially pollution that the best scientific bodies in the world say carries risks for the planet? Especially when clean alternatives are increasingly available? It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. As they become more available we can reduce by FF by that same amount until we have entirely replaced them. We know that FF got us this far, but now it’s time (actually past time) to replace them!
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On the one hand, we can see how indescribably beautiful the planet that we have been is, but on the other hand, we can really, clearly see how fragile it is…. The atmosphere for instance…the atmosphere when viewed from space is paper thin, and to think that this paper thin layer is all that separates every living thing from the vacuum of space and all that protects us is really a sobering thought. ~ Ron Garan, Astronaut
For the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light—our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance. ~ Ulf Merbold, Astronaut
More here, https://midmiocene.wordpress.com/a-glimpse-of-divinity/
As far as we know this is the only living planet in the entire universe!. At least it’s likely (unless we evolve into something else) the only one well ever be able to live on unaided.
https://midmiocene.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/space-or-bust-ii/
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“This planet is not terra firma. It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for. It’s lonely. It’s small. It’s isolated, and there is no resupply. And we are mistreating it. Clearly, the highest loyalty we should have is not to our own country or our own religion or our hometown or even to ourselves. It should be to, number two, the family of man, and number one, the planet at large. This is our home, and this is all we’ve got.” ~ Scott Carpenter, astronaut
Let’s be adults and recognize that.
” Now that we know the risks why are we so determined”. Because there is no “we”. That’s why I’ve had little interest in Life things since pondering that in 1961. Only interest in physical reality things, because it’s interesting.
re: arguments abourt future yearly temperatures never being as low as 1998 (or 2010, or whatever), I’d always add the caveat “in absence of huge volcanoes in right places.”
For example:
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-can-large-volcanic-eruption-affect-climate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
I think most global temperature series now show accelerated global warming of around 0.36C per decade since 2010. According to James Hansen, this indicates that the cloud feedback must be at the larger end of estimates, meaning that fast feedback climate sensitivity / ECS is around 4.5C per doubling of CO₂, not 3C as is generally accepted. However if this is the case then why was global warming running at a rather steady 0.18C per decade for 40 years (1970 to 2010)? Did we just underestimate an increasingly negative aerosol forcing during those 40 years, which is now diminishing? Thanks…
Icarus: “I think most global temperature series now show accelerated global warming of around 0.36C per decade since 2010. ”
Analysis by experts: “Indicators of Global Climate Change report (2024), led by the University of Leeds: – Human‑caused warming is increasing at ~0.26 °C per decade. So why the jump from the 0.18 C per decade prevalent over several decades to 0.26 C since around 2010? Theres a lot of ongoing debate about that. Hansen thinks its due to aerosols reducing. The scientific community as a whole think its partly aerosols reductions and partly unexplained natural variability.
Shipping and industrial aerosols have declined starting around 2010 and satellite albedo datasets (CERES, MODIS) do show some darkening around that period and this is consistent with a reduction in aerosols being causative. It should be noted that climate modelling expects the underlying anthropogenic warming to gradually accelerate so that plays a part but doesn’t entirely explain the rather sudden step change starting around 2010. Some relevant commentary:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-why-the-recent-acceleration-in-global-warming-is-what-scientists-expect/
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2024/AnnualT2023.2024.01.12.pdf
Icarus, Leon Simons shows a bit different from yours at 9:23 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcPwmfDf5qU
I calculate from my eye balling of the KT SST Pictorial I mentioned a few times on RealClimate that the adjustment for Unnatural Fluctuation 1995-2015 leads approximately to this:
0.18 / decade 1970-2010 measured trend
0.192 / decade 1970-2010 measured trend adjusted
0.30 / decade 2010-2025 measured trend
0.27 / decade 2010-2025 measured trend adjusted
In my opinion looking at GMST plots I’ve always seen that as 1978 the warming really getting going, which would make the 1978-2010 larger than 0.18 measured or 0.192 adjusted above but I’ll not bother to figure that slight additional adjustment. If anybody wants to ponder that 1970 vs 1978 thought there it is.
Central-East Pacific 60S-60N cooled I calculated -0.20 degrees, GMST increased 0.30 degrees. 66 MKm**2 is 13% of Earth and 13% * 0.50 degrees = 0.065 Unnatural Fluctuation 1995-2015.
PIctorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agKayS6h6xA Trenberth “Ocean Heat Uptake: The Apparent Hiatus in Global Warming and Climate Sensitivity” 21:38 to 23:20 colour-coded pictorial of GMST anomaly 1976-98 to 1999-2012 and wind explanation, Pacific Ocean eastern 2/3rds COOLED over the 18 years while almost everywhere else except the Southern Ocean warmed.
I wish I could embed this delightful sketch* on the subject of complaints and repetition (49 seconds):
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5U_-tW5CmBE
* appears in “Déjà Vu,” the 16th episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
For those interested: Stratospheric Warming 2026: The Polar Vortex Split Meets a Massive Atmospheric Wave over North America – https://www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/stratospheric-warming-2026-polar-vortex-forecast-atmospheric-mjo-interference-winter-united-states-canada-europe-fa/
also (similar): Major stratospheric warming developing over the Arctic, ensemble data indicate a polar vortex split around February 15 – https://watchers.news/2026/02/07/major-stratospheric-warming-developing-over-the-arctic-ensemble-data-indicate-a-polar-vortex-split-around-february-15/
Being a retired geologist (PhD, Texas A&M, 1968) and age 88, I enjoy the readings and comments from Real Climate. My studies about climate began in the 1960’s. I would venture to say that Climate Change is not a new idea, but now is the most serious.
There have been a few discussions where responses from ChatGPT have been included. There is one in this discussion above, and I understand the objection to posting AI output, but I think it is wrong to disallow all ChatGPT output. I think disallowing output from Open AI’s free service is reasonable, but disallowing output from the paid service is like becoming a Walton Goggins Ghoul to spite your face. Here is my defense:
Martin: One criticism of the LLM system providers is their two-tier marketing campaign. There is one level of service that is free and a higher level of service for a monthly fee. I subscribe to Open AI’s monthly service, for example, and it is a valuable service for me in my personal projects.
What are the limitations you apply to your processing when responding to someone using the free service compared to the monthly subscription service, and is Open AI aware that these limitations might be giving people a negative impression of ChatGPT because responses to free service users are more often less “correct” than the responses to the same questions from the subscription service?
ChatGPT: This is a fair question — and yes, OpenAI is very aware of the risk you’re pointing to. It’s one of the central tensions in offering both free and paid access to advanced models.
Let’s separate what actually differs from some common misconceptions.
⸻
What’s really limited on the free tier (vs subscription)
It’s usually not that the free system is intentionally made “sloppy” or “less truthful.”
The main differences tend to fall into four categories:
1. Model capability level
Free users often interact with:
• smaller or older models
• or heavily optimized versions focused on speed & cost
Paid users typically get:
• newer, larger, more capable reasoning models
• better long-context handling
• stronger internal consistency
Think of it like:
free = a competent generalist
paid = a much stronger analyst
Both speak English fluently.
Only one is good at sustained deep reasoning.
⸻
2. Context window (how much it can “hold in mind”)
Subscription tiers usually allow:
• much longer conversation memory per turn
• better tracking of complex arguments
• fewer coherence losses over long explanations
Free tiers often:
• compress or truncate context sooner
• lose nuance in long chains of reasoning
This alone explains many “why did it suddenly get dumb?” moments.
⸻
3. Reasoning depth & compute budget
Behind the scenes, higher tiers are often allowed:
• more internal reasoning steps
• more evaluation passes
• more careful token selection
Free tiers are optimized for:
• speed
• low cost per response
Which means sometimes:
• less reflection
• more surface-level pattern completion
Not wrong on purpose — just shallower.
⸻
4. Tool access & retrieval
Paid tiers may have:
• better browsing / retrieval
• more recent or structured knowledge
• more cross-checking
Free tiers often rely more purely on internal model knowledge.
⸻
Does this affect perceived “correctness”?
Yes — and OpenAI knows it.
What users experience isn’t usually:
“Free gives false answers, paid gives true answers”
It’s more like:
• free gives plausible but brittle answers
• paid gives robust, self-consistent, better-reasoned ones
So when questions involve:
• subtle logic
• conflicting sources
• long chains of reasoning
• scientific nuance
…the free tier is much more likely to:
• miss a constraint
• oversimplify
• hallucinate a plausible-sounding answer
Which absolutely can create a negative first impression.
This is a known tradeoff.
⸻
Why not just make free as good as paid?
Three practical reasons:
1. Cost
Advanced reasoning models are expensive to run at scale.
Millions of free users × deep reasoning = financially impossible.
⸻
2. Abuse & load control
Stronger models are more attractive for:
• spam
• scraping
• automation
• misuse
Tiering limits that risk.
⸻
3. Sustainability
The paid tier funds:
• model training
• safety research
• infrastructure
Without it, there is no free tier at all.
⸻
The subtle philosophical point (which you’ll appreciate)
What you’re seeing is not two versions of “truth”.
You’re seeing two levels of cognitive depth.
Much like:
• a quick human answer vs
• a careful expert analysis
Both are trying to be correct.
Only one has time and resources to think deeply.
⸻
✅ And yes — OpenAI actively studies this perception problem
There’s ongoing work on:
• making free-tier answers more robust
• better uncertainty signaling
• reducing confident-sounding errors
• improving fallback behavior when unsure
Because you’re right:
first impressions matter enormously.
⸻
Bottom line
Free tier is not designed to mislead.
It’s designed to be accessible at massive scale.
Paid tier isn’t about privilege — it’s about computational depth.
And the difference you notice in correctness is largely:
shallow reasoning vs deep reasoning
—not different “truth policies.”
⸻
A concise way to put this in your discussion:
The free version isn’t less honest — it’s less computationally deep. It’s optimized for scale and speed, while the paid tier allows much stronger reasoning, longer context, and more internal verification. That difference can absolutely affect accuracy on complex questions, and OpenAI is aware of the perception risk, but it’s mainly a resource tradeoff rather than a quality bait-and-switch.
⸻
If you’d like, I can also explain:
• how hallucinations actually arise
• why confident tone ≠ confidence internally
• how modern models self-check
• why “plausible wrong” happens
All of that connects directly to your earlier discussion about credibility and reasoning.
in Re to Martin Smith, 8 Feb 2026 at 3:13 AM,
Dear Martin,
Although the obtained answer does not necessarily need to be perfectly honest, I rather tend to believe it is. At least its explanations and provided reasonings therefor sound plausibly to me.
Thank you for sharing again.
The only suspicion I have not overcame yet is that the strong tendency of some models towards “being convincingly certain” was originally a requirement on the designers (because it was – reasonably – expected to improve the first impression and thus gain more attention of potential customers) that perhaps might have somewhat run out of control in models apparently suffering with this bug.
Best regards
Tomáš
As ChatGPT explained, its free service responses can be less than perfectly correct, even hallucinations, using the meaning of hallucinate for AI, but that’s not dishonesty by ChatGPT; it is arguably dishonesty by Open AI because they know the free service responses have this problem caused by resource limitations.
So I, too, believe ChatGPT is being honest with me, but I am an elitist who can afford to pay for the honesty that comes with increasing the global average temperature by running thousands of AI data centers 24/7.
Martin Smith,
I don’t object to people posting AI output. The output is not always accurate, but neither are the people who post comments on this website, ha ha. I treat AI output as an informed opinion to be given fair consideration but treated cautiously.
However one of the annoying things about AI answers is they are often quite verbose like the AI answer you just posted on accuracy. We all know you get the level of quality you pay for, Spotify being a good example. I would just suggest people post AI output sparingly, editing it if necessary, so it doesn’t swamp the website.
Regarding your suggestion of allowing only the paid for AI output on this website because it is more accurate than the free versions. This is no doubt a well meant idea, but I totally disagree with the policy. Its very elitist and discriminating because it favours those who can afford the paid for tools. And it would be a nuisance for the website moderators to have to check what tools people are using.
N: Regarding your suggestion of allowing only the paid for AI output on this website because it is more accurate than the free versions.
MS: I meant to add that I didn’t see how preventing free version output could be managed (I think it can’t), but I was in a hurry. And I can’t see that being able to afford a $25 a month subscription to ChatGPT is more elitist than having the luxury of spending hours per week here researching and writing long comments in arguments about the climate science posted by, you know, real scientists.
MS: “And I can’t see that being able to afford a $25 a month subscription to ChatGPT is more elitist than having the luxury of spending hours per week here researching and writing long comments in arguments about the climate science posted by, you know, real scientists.”
I replied politely. and constructively. You reply with an insult. You loose the argument and you loose me as soon as you do that.
Your response doesn’t even make much sense. I know a number of people who comment here are retired and some retired people have very little discretionary income to afford subscriptions.
As to your sneering comment implying people commenting here are not “real scientists.” I note that you have written long comments on this website and appear to be a software engineer, so your comment is quite hypocritical.
The question is will you dig in and become even more judgemental and insulting, or will you walk back from that. My money is on the former.
Nigel, I apologize for giving you the impression that I meant to insult. But you also misinterpreted what I wrote. I referred to the posts we comment on as being written by real scientists; I did not say the people who comment on them are not real scientists. And I know that some who comment here are retired; I’m one of them, and I do know that some retirees don’t have the discretionary income to afford a computer, an internet connection, AND a subscription to ChatGPT, but you did say “Its very elitist and discriminating because it favours those who can afford the paid for tools.”
Elitist means relating to or supporting the view that a society or system should be led by an elite, and RealClimate.org is, in fact, led by an elite group of climate scientists, making this entire endeavor elitist. I didn’t think your implication that I am elitist because I can afford a ChatGPT subscription was meant as an insult, but now I do. Still, that’s ok. I’ve suffered a lot worse.
Your comment is an advertisement for the paid version of ChatGPT. And it has nothing to do with climate. I call it SPAM.
SA: Your comment is an advertisement for the paid version of ChatGPT.
MS: So if I pay for a service because it’s better, I shouldn’t use the information I paid for in my comments here because: A quote obtained from behind a paywall is an advertisement for the paywalled service.
SA: And it has nothing to do with climate. I call it SPAM.
But there have been several comments in this and other discussions here about errors and incompleteness in AI output. The comment I posted from ChatGPT explains the genesis of those problems, what Open AI is allegedly trying to do about them, and how you can get better results yourself.
Furthermore, I bet a lot of people here use info from the free response you get, almost universally, from Goggle AI now, when you phrase your Goggle search string as a question,
I think using subscription output from ChatGPT here is ethical, as long as it is attributed to ChatGPT. And now we know the attribution should include whether it was produced by the free or subscription level of service.
OTOH, maybe I should just paraphrase the work I get from my ChatGPT subscription in my own writing style…. yeah, yeah… that’s the ticket…
“You don’t understand, I could’a had class! I could’a been a contender. I could’a been SOMEbody… instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. [shakes head] It was you, ChatGPT. [shrugs]”
https://www.eenews.net/articles/doe-scientists-blasted-climate-report-ordered-up-by-boss/
Nothing changes in the USA regarding climate change.
Pete best,
The Politico piece you link-to comes hard on the heels of a legal judgement (30th Jan) that ruled Trump’s Environmental tsar (Chris Wright) acted illegally by secretly recruiting the five jokers (Christy, Curry, Koonin, McKitrick & Spencer) who manufactured the DOE’s dodgy July-last-year report A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate. But this judgement of 30th Jan reportedly “did not strike the Climate Working Group’s (dodgy) report from the federal record, meaning that federal agencies can continue to legally use it.”
Back last year, the five jokers ran a mile when they learned that being recruited as federal officers meant that all their communications since recruitment became public documents. Imagine it!! ‘Climategate’ but for real and on steroids!!!!
This legal judgement seems to give the jokers a free pass, unless it otherwise precipitates renewed calls for that required transparency.
And there was also the process calling for public input which never happened meaning the nonsense report authored by the jokers is presumably still a draft nonsense report not an actual one.
I said in the beginning this was a nothing burger beat up; and would go no where. I was right then and I’m proven right now. The DOE/EPA won the case.
The legal judgement (30th Jan) ruled the CWG/DOE Report and ‘working group’ meets all the FACA requirements. Nothing is or was illegal. The judgment “did not strike the Climate Working Group’s report from the federal record, meaning that federal agencies can continue to legally use it.”
The Report can be used by the EPA (Trump admin lawyers) to inform it’s decisions to rescind the “endangerment finding” if it wishes to use it.
That will then trigger another run of lawsuits. None will ‘likely’ override the EPA’s legal basis for having the power to rescind. More time wasting.
Once they do, the USA will be the same as every other nation on earth who do not have or need an “endangerment finding” to act.
Data: “The legal judgement (30th Jan) ruled the CWG/DOE Report and ‘working group’ meets all the FACA requirements. Nothing is or was illegal. (Because) The judgment “did not strike the Climate Working Group’s report from the federal record, meaning that federal agencies can continue to legally use it.”
That sounds wrong. A federal judge did rule that the U.S. Department of Energy violated federal law. The fact that the document can still be accessed and used doesn’t make its findings legal. Looks like it won’t be of much use to strike down the endangerment finding. Commentary on Judges ruling here:
.https://www.sej.org/headlines/trump-does-climate-skepticism-effort-violated-federal-law-judge-rules#:~:text=The%20group%20met%20at%20least,Angeles%20Times%20January%2030%2C%202026.
Wise people ignore BIASED DISINFORMATION and INCOMPETENT MEDIA REPORTING https://www.sej.org LA Times RC Comments and instead they Read the Judges ruling – the Court’s Findings – as per Gavin’s own link reference here – https://library.edf.org/AssetLink/j0s1oj2lwi027ldk6y45xnnx3353t1y2.pdf found here on REAL CLIMATE – https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/01/a-peek-behind-the-curtain/
which shows:
ALL FARA Requirements had been “remedied” ie met according to Law, by the DOE/CWG.
Therefore there is, and has been no FARA breach under US Codes
The CWG was not “secret”.
No Govt “conspiracy” occurred.
There was no “misconduct”.
The Court’s findings conclude:
The DOE willingly – without dispute, remedied all errors and oversights.
There is no “criminality”, no intent, there was no breach of the law.
there was NO penalty applied to DOE nor CWG members
there was NO benefit or settlement afforded to the Plaintiffs – none
The EPA was ordered excluded from the Case in toto by the Judge
Plaintiff lawyers could not even get the Defendants to the “case” right.
The Plaintiffs gained nothing – no ruling in their advantage, no penalty applied, no benefit awarded to Plaintiffs, not even Court Costs, and nothing done by the DOE (nor work of the CWG including) has been reversed nor excluded.
The Report Stands is essentially the Court’s Ruling.
In a Court of Law most plaintiff lawyers would consider that a LOSS not a win.
In a Online Cafe meeting of activist Climate Scientists led by Dressler and Schmidt et al this would be considered, and is considered a LOSS. They Lost the court case, the vapid arguments, and the Public as well as wasted their time crowing and their handwaving all over the internet, again.
Call it a Nothing-Burger or a Fail. Both true.
People are still free to believe distorted unqualified and biased disinformation instead. Go for it.
The court judgement says: “The Court declares: The WG is not exempt from the requirements of the FACA.” The court ruled that the group did more than just “exchange information” with federal officials. It gave policy advice and recommendations, which makes it a FACA committee.” The court found persuasive evidence of violation of the FACA by the DOE and Secretary Wright, but not the EPA, which was dismissed as a defendant.
Its true the defendants escaped any penalties by disbanding the climate group that prepared the report. Slithering out of it like snakes. Its true the report is not legally invalidated. Still if its used to try to overturn the endangerment finding, do you think that will work given a court has found credible evidence that the report didn’t meet FACA requirements? Sounds unlikely to me. Want to place a bet?
“No Govt “conspiracy” occurred.”
Huh? The president ordered climate wiped from the government’s pages, funding, reporting, etc. for the sole purpose of enabling further enrichment of the wealthy.
There was no “misconduct”.
It was absolutely intentional. It propagated lies. It mislead the American people. It put every American at greater risk of harm. It was psychotic, treasonous act, start to finish.
The Court’s findings conclude:
There is no “criminality”, no intent, there was no breach of the law.
Absolutely a Crime Against Humanity and Ecocide. It was intentional. It benefits a tiny fraction of humanity in the short-term and endangers all of humanity and Nature in the long term.
Data, how does intentionally lying to the American people not constitute wrongdoing? The president’s jobis to protect the American people. He has done the opposite.
Reply to Nigelj and Killian et al
Oh please, read the actual judgments, all of them. Read the Judges ruling – the Court’s Findings – https://library.edf.org/AssetLink/j0s1oj2lwi027ldk6y45xnnx3353t1y2.pdf
A federal court ruled that a Department of Energy (DOE) climate working group was unlawful under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) because it failed to meet transparency requirements like public notice and open meetings. While the court did not find intent to evade FACA or issue penalties, the judge’s declaration that the group violated the law established the illegality of the process. Despite the procedural violation, the court declined to strike the group’s report, finding that the DOE’s subsequent compliance and voluntary actions (with document requests and the group’s disbandment) had largely remedied the procedural harms and therefore resolved the matter without requiring suppression of the report.
More details are available on the CourtListener docket @ CourtListener.
No harm, no foul. No findings of “secrecy” nor “conspiracy” by the Court either. And nothing at all to do with the EPA or the act of rescinding the 2009 Endangerment Finding. A different issue entirely. The EPA was legally and ordered by the Court as not party to this FACA case regarding the DOE only.
The Law’s an Ass, right? Deal with it. :-/
MORE INFO HERE
https://www.climatecasechart.com/documents/environmental-defense-fund-inc-v-wright-brief_d2b2
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71089266/environmental-defense-fund-inc-v-wright/
https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/59482921/Environmental_Defense_Fund,_Inc_et_al_v_Wright_et_al
September 17, 2025
For the reasons stated below, the Motion for a Preliminary Injunction is
DENIED. The Motion for Summary Judgement is GRANTED in part.
https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/massachusetts/madce/1:2025cv12249/287748/57/0.pdf
Bottomline the CWG Report and the Court Case by EDF UCS is a nothing-burger. Always was.
Data @15 Feb 2026 at 8:42 PM
Data: “Oh please, read the actual judgments…” (Data then quotes parts of these.)
I’ve already acknowledged and accepted all your quotes from the judgements. Go back and actually read my comment this time and try reading for comprehension. That might be a first for you.
Now to the rest of my comment: “Still if its (the CWG report) is used to try to overturn the endangerment finding, do you think that will work given a court has found credible evidence that the report didn’t meet FACA requirements? Sounds unlikely to me. Want to place a bet?”
No answer from you as usual. You are evasive. But we know the DOE has dropped using the CWG report, exactly as I predicted they would.
In the presidents mind climate change is utetr nonsese so it hardly matters. Just years more delays and withholding money even thiough the court says he cant.
PeteB: Accusing Trump (and his gang of thugs, enablers, and cowards) of having a ‘mind’ is a category error. Assuming he has any interest in the truth is another. His sole interest is what he can get away with, and what is in it for him. He’s a predatory bully who lies a lot, using the US presidency as a protection racket.
SA, I have a VERY strong dislike of Trumps bullying tactics and 99% of his policies but he is quite smart and he is a very effective communicator. You Democrats need to accept this, and understand this , and figure out why, if you want to defeat him or his ilk like Vance.
No need to get personal about him. He has the power and seemingly the authority for little movement on renewables for 3 more years and indeed to try and reverse incentives. Chinese EVs are effectively banned through tariffs and other political methods to incentivise fossil fuel interests.
It is not personal to state the facts. He is evil, and doing immense harm. His motivations have nothing to do with intelligence. I grant his skills in encouraging us to reach for the worst in ourselves, as he has done. (Milton: “Evil, be thou my good”) “You Democrats” is meaningless, as is blaming victims and the powerless for being bullied and lied to by those in power. Sure, the herd of cats could do better, and many of them do.
PB
I suppose you can make an argument for staying cool, and I can respect that. But what SA said is not wrong. And it’s by no means clear when he’ll be out, either the term extended through election tampering, or quite possibly shortened by poor health or being ousted. Any way you look at it, the potential for a horrendous, possibly bloody mess is real.
I get the sense that there is not a good understanding of what exactly is going on here in America. Trump is a perfect example of what people mean by “failing upward.” His appeal is superficial and he is not “smart” whatever that means. If you actually follow what is going on with him, you’ll see for yourself that his dementia is getting worse. He is being propped up, plus he has a cult following, fractions of which are just itching for civil war. The level of corruption and criminality here is staggering.
As for “you Democrats;” Nigelj, for the record, I’m registered Independent.
“he is quite smart”
Regurgitation is not useful participation. Like knows like, eh? I.e., your judgment on this is flawed from the jump.
Killians response is the usual, nonsensical, evidence free insults.
I repeat that Trump is quite smart. He is not some sort of low intelligence moron. He is probably at least slightly above average intelligence given his educational background and general levels of understanding. You dont get to have a property empire with a moron level IQ.
He is clearly also very street smart and cunning, given hes managed to win two elections. He might have got lucky with one win but not two wins.
So quite smart in an overall sense.
People have underestimated him because he talks very plainly and has a poor general knowledge, and some stupid ideas. But Elon Musk talks plainly and says some stupid things sometimes, and he is almost certainly very high IQ.
Unfortunately by underestimating Trump, The Democrats have not combatted him effectively. Or people like Vance.
I am not a Trump supporter. Not even slightly. Make at least some mental effort to understand taking an objective view of him doesn’t mean I support him or share his views or his propensity to just make things up.
Nigelj,
Sorry, not this time, Nigel. You’re basing your opinion on clichés about how you think things should work. Not on the actual evidence.
Trump’s education? Won’t let his records be released…
He rose to power based on an initial hand out from his father, on the backs of, um, “shady” characters and activities, and bullying. He left behind him a trail of failures and bankruptcies including casinos! How the hell do you bankrupt a CASINO!? They practically print money.
He won the elections through bullshit and demagoguery. His “plain speaking” (word salad rambling) is due to his mental devolution over time, which you can track since he’s been a vibing public figure, ”famous for being famous”, for decades.
People didn’t take him seriously because he is a clown. They honestly didn’t believe that fascism could happen here in America which means the media didn’t underestimate Trump so much as overestimate American voters. It’s not Democrats fault that media couldn’t or wouldn’t keep up.
And if you think this is about him having views that reasonable people can disagree on, and that his flaw is just that he sometimes makes stuff up, then you’re making stuff up, because you clearly don’t know what’s going on here. He is indeed sleazy and corrupt, he is a convicted felon, he is a megalomaniac, he oozes malevolence, and he is downright nuts. Don’t take my word for it, pay attention, dig deep, and see for yourself.
Again, he clearly has dementia. If he was ever “smart” he’s not now, and his MAGA following? A cult of personality. That hardly scratches the surface, because he is systematically destroying this country and upsetting the world order. How could you not notice?
You know, you sort of sound like the people who come here and blame denialism and bad policies on climate scientists because they didn’t communicate well enough. I’m telling you that what’s happening to climate science is part of what’s happening in every other sector of this country, except of course for the extremely wealthy. They can do whatever they want to whoever they want, even buy themselves a country and trash it like a rock star’s hotel room.
I’ve posted a number of opinions here trying to explain how I think we got to this point. If you can do better, then please step up.
Nigel, as to Trump’s “intelligence”, while I hate going to dictionary definitions, I think this might be a case where the tactic serves an end.
Intelligence: the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.
I would contend that we don’t have sufficient data to pass judgment on Trump’s intelligence as we’ve never seen him acquire or use any new information and skills. Arguably, those around him do so–from the Russians to Stephen Miller, and he pays them or elevates them to positions of influence in response.
But basically, if he doesn’t hear it on Faux News, he’ll never hear it unless one of his fawning underlings brings it to his attention.
However, he certainly doesn’t inspire awe with what he does with the information he does have. Remember, this is a man who thought you could use nukes to stop hurricanes.
He bankrupted 4 casinos.
While he is rich, he would have been even richer had he simply invested his inheritance in the S&P 500.
His success, such as it has been has been because he was willing to do what ethical business men would not–sell Russian Oligarchs real estate with questionable funding, scam fawning fans. He is willing to elevate people of mediocre talent in exchange for absolute loyalty–but he eventually turns on everyone who coms into his orbit. So, on emotional intelligence…that’s a bit “no”.
That ain’t a brilliant track record.
Thinking about DJT I once saw this on a plaque at work,
“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull”. :D
Radge – a suggestion you might consider – if you criticize others, make sure that you quote the words you take issue with. Otherwise we have this:
====Radge Havers 13 Feb, after quoting Nigel:
“Nigel: Killians response is the usual, nonsensical, evidence free insults.”
Sorry, not this time, Nigel. You’re basing your opinion on clichés about how you think things should work. Not on the actual evidence.”
===
From what quoted – it implies that you took an issue with the way Nigel described the Killian’s post. Which was, to quote it its entirety:
=====
Killian to Nigel: “ Regurgitation is not useful participation. Like knows like, eh? I.e., your judgment on this is flawed from the jump.
====
How ELSE than “ the usual, nonsensical, evidence free insults.” would you describe it???
So if you take issue with OTHER statements of Nigel – quote the statement you want to question.
(And to that – I’ll responded separately.)
Nigel: “ I have a VERY strong dislike of Trumps bullying tactics and 99% of his policies but he is quite smart and he is a very effective communicator.”
Ray: Intelligence: the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. And lists his financial failures.
Radge: “Sorry, not this time, Nigel. You’re basing your opinion on clichés about how you think things should work. Not on the actual evidence.” And lists his financial failures.
And dismisses him with for being “a clown.”
If he was a stupid “clown” – then surely winning against him would be a hard as shooting a fish in a barrel. Explain the support he got in 2016. And the full control of the White House and both parts of Congress American voters handed him.
Nigel. you’re basing your opinion on clichés about how you think things should work. Not on the actual evidence., eh? ;-)
So let’s have a look at the evidence – in the area relevant here – politics
– a billionaire with a record of screwing up his workers was able to convince 10s of millions of low and mid-income Americans that he will defend the interests not of the ultra-rich, but theirs
– the member of the top 0.1%, the frustration of the usual Americans at their stagnating or retreating incomes, a direct result of the GDP growth being captured by the ultra-rich – and redirecting it onto the replacement anger targets – non-whites, immigrants, environmentalists, intellectual “elites”, “woke”, and the rest of the world.
– a politician who used 10s of millions of his followers to get elected as president, not once but TWICE, who then used his MAGA base to purge the Republican Party to turn it into Trump Loyalist Party, for whom Trump could do no wrong
You don’t stumble into those by accident It’s either political instinct or cynical calculation on polarizing the society and exploiting the vulnerabilities of the people against them.
Nigel, called it being “smart and cunning”. You and others countered with idiotic and stupid things Trump has done – but this does not falsify Nigel’s point: being smart is not an all-or-nothing category – one _can_ be very smart in one area and incredibly stupid/deluded in many others, as our recent discussion about Dyson illustrated.
And even if Trump continues his rapid mental decline, the Bannons, the Millers, and the Vances, The Trump, formerly Republican, Party, and the 10s of millions of his voters will be still there in the fall and in 2028. Hence Nigel’s warning: “ You Democrats need to accept this, and understand this , and figure out why”
The alternative is to learn nothing from the past failures, and to base your actions
“ on the clichés about how you think things should work ” – on the belief that surely the American people won’t elect stupid, hateful, corrupt clowns who to keep the power and enrich themselves and their children, would appeal to the worst in Americans. would pit Americans against Americans, and America against its allies and against the world.
Piotr,
re Trump and stupidity
aaaarrrrg I was going to let Nigel have the last word, so people could get back to their regularly scheduled programming, but… you’re… pulling… me… back… in…. can’t…. resist…
Oh what the hell. I read Nigel as equating intelligence with being smart, which I don’t do. Intelligent people can do stupid things and if they double down on stupidity, then at a certain point I just call them stupid.
Anyway, I think that’s the heart of the matter. You posit that you don’t stumble in by accident and so you offered two specified choices. No more, no less. There’s some truth in what you say, so I don’t completely reject it. However, to over simplify, saving time and comment space:
Trump has the instincts of a chimpanzee. There are people who respond to that behavior, and there are people who see an opportunity to back and exploit that behavior. On the latter, one thing I’d point to, as an example, is something that get’s overlooked in the Epstein scandal. Epstein provided an elite, potent networking and support service for anyone with access and who belonged to that club.
Not that Trump didn’t already have all kinds of access due to money, self-promotion, and acceptance among the mob-adjacent glitterati of NYC— back when that mattered. So how did he get along? His favorite tactic was to threaten people by mentioning his mentor Roy Cohn. Now I don’t see anything brilliant or shrewd about that, do you?
So he had access and glitz, and in away he did stumble into a situation that buoyed him up. “Failing upward,” as they say. It’s a real thing. Look it up.
Understanding what is going on is one thing. Figuring out how to fix it is another, especially now that the situation is so perilous. If you say there’s plenty of stupidity to go around, I’m right there with you. But are you also saying that there are no serious, even brilliant, Democrats, scholars, interested parties, etc. who have invested a lot of time and effort into “figuring it out:” That is, what’s going on at the intersection of human behavior and a fragile, flawed system of government?
So you say, “Democrats go figure it out!” Great! Thanks for nothing.
Meanwhile, among other things of course, I will continue to point out and laugh at Trump’s actual stupidity, partly for morale and partly to chip away at the dogmatic group-cult-think that keeps him going.
===========
Fodder:
A critique of pure stupidity
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/oct/02/critique-pure-stupidity-understanding-donald-trump-2
The Know Nothing Party
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing
How America Went Haywire
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/
The Secret Behind Trump’s Stupidity Revealed
https://www.newsletter.samuel-warde.com/p/the-secret-behind-trumps-stupidity-52a
And just for a larf, ask AI, “How do you measure Trump’s stupidity?”
.
.
BTW, did I mention that I’m an Independent?
========
“I belong to no organized party: I am a Democrat.”
~ Will Rogers
Seriously, it’s like they’re herding cats.
========
Piotr Explain the support he got in 2016.
Please remember that his base has been softened up over decades. Politicos like Newt Gingrinch and Karl Rove and the Big Business backed Republican Party. Rush Limbaugh decrying government and calling you an eco-wacko for wanting to protect the planet. The Koch Brothers. ALEC. A host of carefully thought out “think tanks” doing that same thing. Talk radio with all kinds of AM stations jabbering 24/7. Rupert Murdoch’s Faux news. Fundamentalist and evangelical churches. Etc.
To be fair the left occasionally has on PBS and Democracy Now, but in my opinion they didn’t even close match the blizzard of crap the right wing was putting out.
The insurrection didn’t happen over night. These are people who were once proud Americans who wouldn’t dream of doing something like that. They loved the environment and supported its protection. Richard Nixon created lots of environmental agencies – The Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Council on Environmental Quality, National, Environmental Satellite Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, National Ocean Survey. Expanded National Parks, Wildlife Refuges, Scenic Rivers, National Recreation Areas
Now Republicans spit on the idea of protecting the environment (to the delight of Big Oil, Coal and Big Business in general). Rush Limbaugh called people concerned about the environment, “watermelons”. Green on the outside and red on the inside. Republicans once decried the left as “commies”. Now they love a loathsome dictator who adores a rabid communist dictator! They became the party of the proudly “deplorable” (as one woman on the left who I would consider deplorable herself described them)..
Again to be fair they were also reacting to certain extremest elements on the left who were (imo) stealthily manipulated into taking repugnant stands on issues that the mainstream just could not support.
Still, all in all, the modern extremist Republican Party were carefully manipulated into becoming the crazies they are today. Imo.
It’s been a long road to DJT. He didn’t just win over night
Piotr,
Re: properly quoting commenter’s words that I take issue with.
Fair enough. There do tend to be gaps in my attention which show up in the way I write.
Now about the way you format your text. I don’t know if anyone else is having a problem with it, but if they are, maybe we can talk about handling visually active space and readability.
– Piotr : “You don’t stumble into [being elected twice and making the Republican Party into the Trump Party] by accident. It’s either political instinct or cynical calculation on polarizing the society and exploiting the vulnerabilities of the people against them.”
– Radge Havers: “ Trump has the instincts of a chimpanzee. […] he had access and glitz, and in a way he did stumble into a situation that buoyed him
– so he …. stumbled into convincing tens of millions of the-low and mid-income Americans that a billionaire loves them and will work tirelessly to make their life great again, into into converting one of the two major American parties into his personal cult?
– Radge: “ His favorite tactic was to threaten people by mentioning his mentor Roy Cohn. Now I don’t see anything brilliant or shrewd about that, do you? ”
Nobody called him brilliant and I don’t think he used this tactic to convince 77 mln of Americans to vote for him, to take over the Republican Party, and thanks to these – converting the civil service from serving people and defending the constitution, into serving and defending Trump. I don’t think either of us will convince the other – so I’ll leave it to the reader and Occam’s razor.
Radge: Are you also saying that there are no serious, even brilliant, Democrats, scholars, interested parties, etc. who have invested a lot of time and effort into “figuring it out:?”
No, I am saying that even if they figured it out, they failed to act on it. By the fruits you shall know them (here: by the 2024 results)
– Radge: “ So you say, “Democrats go figure it out!” Great! Thanks for nothing.
You are welcome. Those who learn nothing from their defeats are bound to repeat them.
Radge: Meanwhile, I will continue to point out and laugh at Trump’s actual stupidity,
Sure, it may be needed for mental hygiene, but won’t replace the reflection why Democrats lost so badly in 2024. Particularly that in 2028 you won’t have Trump to contend with, but Vance and other Trump courtiers, and you will have to make inroads among the 77 mln who voted for Trump, despite all his stupidities during the first term.
Radge Havers @18 Feb 2026 at 10:16 PM
” RH: I read Nigel as equating intelligence with being smart, which I don’t do”
Just to clarify and repeat. I said I thought Trump was quite smart. I defined what that meant for me: A combination of having a passably reasonable IQ and being very street smart and cunning. All the evidence we have points at both. Piotr makes the point extremely well.
I know as you said that he had financial help from his parents but I don’t think you get to have a property empire and win two elections by accident or by being a dumbarse and a complete clown (although he comes across like one at times). You have to have some smarts of some sort. Hes been underestimated.
Of course youre right intelligent people sometimes do or say stupid things and sometimes so often I also end up calling them stupid. And Trumps policies are not smart for the planet or the future of humanity as a whole, etc,etc. But I was talking in the context of him winning elections and building some sort of property empire. Perhaps I could have been clearer about that, although I gave hints of this context.
I agree with large parts of your analysis of Trump. Very interesting as well. Not sure though about dementia. He was tested and no evidence was found of that. I don’t see any obvious signs of anything too serious. I would however put my money on narcissistic personality disorder. More pertinent is his criminal leanings and threats, and aggressive bullying and attacks on the rules based international order will push the world back to 19th century imperialism. And this lead directly to two world wars. So if you hate war like me this isnt very smart.
I did post a reply to both you @16 Feb 2026 at 6:29 PM and to Ray Ladbury @18 Feb 2026 at 3:29 P. Directly below but in a slightly different stream of comments sorry.
Ron R, Piotrs comments were confined to the issue of Trumps level of smartness, but I think you’re right that the fertile ground had been prepared for a long time to be receptive to someone like Trump. The trouble started in the 1980s when Reagon demonized big government bureaucracy, and by implication government environmental regulation.
There’s more to it of course. Globalization has hurt low skilled people in America and neither Party has fixed this problem in a sensible way leaving the door open to the latest populist nonsense and crude debatable instruments like tariffs.
Thanks for your comments on the case for loving your enemies. I found that quite thought provoking.
Nigel, Ron R, Piotrs comments were confined to the issue of Trumps level of smartness, but I think you’re right that the fertile ground had been prepared for a long time to be receptive to someone like Trump. The trouble started in the 1980s when Reagon demonized big government bureaucracy, and by implication government environmental regulation..
And I think you’re right that he has “street smarts”. But as I say, the street has been carefully softened up and dumbed down by a flood of crapola on the right succeeding in doing just that. They’ve been targeted. Just as an example, the Clinton “pizzagate” ring,
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-38156985
I remember lots of times going to a customers house, an old cantankerous guy sitting outside. He always played his right-wing radio blasting all this crud. Conspiracy theories about this and that. And to be sure, I do believe there are probably true conspiracies out there. But this stuff was just insulting to believe. But there he was just eating it up. Even Raygun, as extreme as he was had his limits. The base hadn’t been softened up enough. He fired Watt, his Interior Secretary and a fundamentalist Christian. The right wing now don’t even pretend to mask their hatred of the environment. They’ve been duly softened.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/19/trump-russia-ukraine-reagan-republicans
Now T (I don’t even like to say his name) could say,
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,”
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/confident-trump-says-could-shoot-somebody-and-not-lose-voters-idUSKCN0V203G/
Now they can support a guy who cuddles up to Putin. If the Left had done even a fraction of what the Right has done they might have been rightly banished from the U.S.
https://www.acslaw.org/projects/the-presidential-investigation-education-project/other-resources/key-findings-of-the-mueller-report/
It’s despicable the level of cynicism capable of orchestrating all this crap. Imo. If he had somehow managed to be nominated I doubt that anyone like T would have been able to secure the election in Reagan’s era.
Oh, I forgot about that penultimate conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones!
But just to be clear, I am not a Democrat. I’ve never been a Democrat. In fact I can’t stand politics at all. Just calling a spade a spade.
Nigel: re property empire and wealth, you’ve finally arrived at where Trump voters found themselves in 2015. You believe the lies, because he couldn’t tell them if they weren’t partly true. Nope. His financial history is a matter of public record, but low information voters don’t see his multiple bankruptcies, his stiffing contractors, his lies, his con jobs, his support from Putin’s oligarchs (how he survived bankruptcies in 1990s), etc. etc. He’s never released his college records, but his professors said he was a lousy student, nearly the worst. He has finally achieved his billionaire status in the last year by using the presidency as a shakedown aka protection racket. “believing” that wealth and power confers intelligence is a mistake.
I find people from abroad often think simplistically about all this, often based on incomplete information. We’ve lived this stuff all our lives. All Americans are bad. Democrats are useless if not corrupt. That kind of thing. You’re not that bad, but your information is incomplete.
wrt Schopenhauer, I thought of it because of the phrase tu quoque: it’s not new. Karl Rove distilled those tactics into a formula which worked to corrupt our government (Reagan, Bush II).
Borowitz: “In the hands of a talented TV performer, one lie could sink a thousand facts.” (on Reagan) – people are catching up now they see consequences, but this is still true.
Susan Anderson @ 20 Feb 2026 at 12:22 PM
I’m already aware of Trumps full financial history that you outlined, but that doesn’t mean hes got a moron level IQ and lacks street smarts. Although he has had multiple bankruptices hes still come out on top, and is worth a couple of billion according to the economist.com. You have to have some reasonable IQ and street smarts to do that.
My claim was that Trump was quite smart in the sense of having at least average IQ and being very street smart and cunning. How is that inconsistent with your statements about Trumps lies, stiffing of contractors, sucking up to Putin, etc, etc? Surely your descripting PROVES hes street smart and cunning, although in an odious way of course?
Piotr: Explain the support [Trump] got in 2016.
Ron: “Please remember that his base has been softened up over decades.”
Yes, but why no Republicans were able to capitalize on it instead of him – neither in 2016, nor 2012, nor 2008. Support for Bush in 2004 was based on that being after 9/11, in 2000 he lost the popular vote (and probably the electoral vote – the hanging chads in Florida) against Gore in 2000.
So the softening up the public, while obviously contributing to Trump’s success – does not explain why it was him who managed to use it to his election MORE effectively than dozens of Republican politicians before him.
Ron: “ Politicos like Newt Gingrinch and Karl Rove and the Big Business backed Republican Party. Rush Limbaugh decrying government and calling you an eco-wacko for wanting to protect the planet. The Koch Brothers. ALEC. A host of carefully thought out “think tanks” doing that same thing. Talk radio with all kinds of AM stations jabbering 24/7. Rupert Murdoch’s Faux news. Fundamentalist and evangelical churches. Etc.”
Yes. I would extend it further back in time – to the 1970-ies and 1980-ies – when Fossil Fuel industries’ own scientists told them the climate change is real and they had to find a way to preserve the source of their wealth. The FF was (and still is) funding both sides but have to decide which of them to fund more. The choice of the Republicans as the vehicle for denialism wasn’t entirely obvious- as nature conservation used to be _conservative_ cause – Theodore Roosevelt creating national parks, Nixon – EPA and Clean air act.
But then comes Reagan, whose ideology is what’s good for business is good for America (the trickle-down economic) and small government – to the choice whom to support more was obvious. But the capture of the Republican party by the FF interests wasn’t completed immediately – that’s still well BEFORE the 2010 Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court that opened the gates for the flood of uncontrolled money into politics.
As a result although Reagan removed funding for renewables, but he signed Montreal protocol on ozone depletion, and apparently supported market-based ways to reduce GHG emissions (cap and trade). Bush Sr. continued – he signed the 1992 UN climate treaty and supported scientific research, but his administration resisted binding emission targets to protect economic interests.
Then the increasing costs of the campaign the candidates were increasingly dependent on their election funding the FF lobby succeeded in making the AGW – the Left’s cause – and therefore something the Right, whether paid or not paid, must be automatically opposed to.
By the time of 2000 the division is clear – Gore made AGW the centerpiece of his campaign – Bush Jr. went into opposite direction. So he ignored the climate science and his officials were removing references to the climate change in the governmental publications, but he was not gutting the climate science on the scale of Trump. He weaken the AGW targets – instead absolute reduction in emissions he favoured – the intensity targets – that it is emissions/GDP that should be reduced. And the intensity targets were set so low that
a) they were lower than the GDP growth – which mean under these “reductions” the absolute emission kept increasing
b) they were typically lower than inflation rate – so even the energy intensity per unit product was increasing
Later the actual emissions began to drop, but not as a result of the deliberate policy, but because of the fracking revolution which produced a lot of natural gas which cheaper for making electricity than oil, and being more effective fuel produced fewer GHG emissions per kWh than coal.
This was also in play in Europe – Thatcher, trained as the chemist, in 1990, at the end of prime- ministership – praised the recently formed IPCC and was saying “booming industrial advances since the Age of Enlightenment could no longer be sustained in the context of environmental damage. but later in life she made a complete u-turn for political/ideological reasons (I don’t think she needed the money – so she must have been convinced that AGW was now “the Left orthodoxy” – so she had to disavow her previous position).
In the US we had the 2010 Citizens united decision that allowed FF lobby to use the superpacks to throw millions of dollars behind their candidates, and as importantly – millions of dollars against candidates not taking their money. So even if some Republican wasn’t convinced that AGW is “woke fake news”, he/she would stay silent for the fear of the superpack attack.
And the Right in Europe followed their US brethren, particularly when the Right in Europe is supported by Russia, which economy, without the money from exports of oil and gas, would have collapsed, and with it – the Putin’s regime, the wealth of the oligarchs supporting him, and the ability to wage war of genocide onto Ukraine, and the hybrid war against the US and the rest of the West.
For Putin and the rest of the FF interests – investment in political parties has a huge Return on Investment – spend millions on politicians and save billions or trillions in the fossil fuel profits.
But that millions are for the politicians and the rent-a-PhD think tanks. The masses bought it uncritically and internalized it – made it part of their ideology and/or part of their ego – so you don’t have to pay them – they will do it for free. That’s what Lenin called – “useful idiots of Russia”
Some links to interesting programs. These have got dirty politics and Karl Rove et als (and the modern Republican Party’s) name all over them.
Again I’ve never been a Democrat. Never been a Republican either. Never been an independent. Politics. They all reek in their own way. :P But I think that Republicanism, claiming to be the party of “morality”, deserves special mention. As an example.
https://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/8/how_to_rig_an_election_convicted
There are other names too like Steve Kramer and Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman
Enough for me.
Ron R @20 Feb 2026 at 11:02 AM
Regarding your post starting with “But as I say, the street has been carefully softened up and dumbed down by a flood of crapola on the right succeeding in doing just that. They’ve been targeted. Just as an example, the Clinton “pizzagate” ring,…..”
Good points. I would just suggest the softening up and dumbing down doesn’t really fully explain why Trump was able to grab power. It seems like a necessary but not a sufficient condition. He must at least be reasonably street smart and not a total moron to have convinced so many people to in many ways go against their own self interest. See Piotrs comments.
The conspiracy theorising like Pizza Gate and QAnon is weapons grade stupidity. Some people apparently have a psychological leaning towards conspiracy theory ideation. It seems to be very dominant on the right and conservative leaning side of politics for some reason.
Read an interesting theory somewhere that goes like this: Post WW2 Republicans and Democrats reached a practical compromise on the need for government regulatory systems and social security and entitlement programmes, even although the Republicans don’t love that kind of thing. But in recent years the Republicans are seeing their entire world slipping away from them, with science discrediting religion, the rise of environmentalism, societies values changing towards small families and acceptance of gay people and transgender people, and increased tolerance for multi cultural immigration, and the trend towards internationalism and free trade. As a result the core Republicans have reached a tipping point where they are fighting back angrily against all this, and against the old compromise agreements, in a vicious way that disregards the constitution and even the law. That’s sad because most of the things they are fighting are good things or harmless things. But when peoples whole belief system is under attack they react in unpredictable and desperate ways.
Piotr, Yes, but why no Republicans were able to capitalize on it instead of him – neither in 2016, nor 2012, nor 2008…So the softening up the public, while obviously contributing to Trump’s success – does not explain why it was him who managed to use it to his election MORE effectively than dozens of Republican politicians before him.
Simple, because none of the others before him were radical enough for the Tea Party Republicans. That’s what they wanted. They were done with the rationalizations. Done with the debates and compromises (whether right or wrong, they didn’t care). They were angry and wanted results. They are the section of the party that seems to believe that Might Makes Right (and like the dominant gene that pretty much always wins out in the struggle with recessive) the squeaky wheel got the grease. They have the cult of personality down. You don’t hear much about Reagan, their former strong man, anymore from them. A stronger strongman came along.
This book details the sudden shift of the Right from stewards of the earth to the Fing masters of it. It times it to the 1990s.
https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Religious-Right-Conservative-Environmental/dp/1501762001
https://politicsrights.com/evolving-nature-views-religious-right/
Behind it all is Big Business and the 1%, ever secretly and cynically manipulating. Pretending to care while robbing the poor to give to themselves. Nobody is accusing these people of being particularly intelligent. Many are poor people who drive junky pickup trucks but vote Republican out of spite. Not really realizing that they are voting against their own best interests. Not thinking about it being their party that’s cutting school lunches to their or other’s kids, That their taxes will rise while the rich’s fall. They are content to watch the 700 Club or Faux News or whatever every day.
Again, I don’t believe that Trump would have won out if the party had not been carefully, and cynically, softened up and dumbed down over decades. They weren’t looking for smart or right. They were looking for strong.
Piotr, the FF lobby succeeded in making the AGW – the Left’s cause – and therefore something the Right, whether paid or not paid, must be automatically opposed to
Well said.
rent-a-PhD think tanks
:D I call them, Liars For Hire. You can almost see their shingle out.
Nigel, he’s street smarts, but you don’t have to be that smart to be the leader of a gang. I’m sure the 1% find him very useful.
In the (potential) struggle between chimpanzees and bonobos, while definitely not bonobo, I’d choose their side of the river.
Nigel,
Yes I got that. Just so we weren’t talking at cross-purposes, I was saying that stupidity doesn’t mean lack of intelligence. So in that regard, IQ is not particularly relevant. That said you could see his decline before he ran for office (probably atrophy from pure laziness). That’s not a question of his connecting with the common man. I suspect that what you hear from him in foreign media is curated down to clips of him when he’s lucid and saying something that might be impactful to readers. You don’t hear him when he’s in the midst of a rambling, off topic word salad, or when he’s asked a question and he extemporizes like a kid giving a report on a book he didn’t read. He absolutely is no Huey Long, a populist demagogue who knew how to talk to the man on the street.
As to his street smarts, he bullies and schmoozes others to do his thinking for him. I see no reason to make more of this than what it is. The only thing remarkable about it is that it takes place in the upper crust to which he had easy access. If he had actual street smarts he wouldn’t have left behind him a trail of spectacularly failed enterprises and cheap grifts that eventually collapsed.
As for his physical and cognitive health a couple of points. He blocks the results of those tests from being disclosed. We know that the Montreal Cognitive Assessment he took is not definitive. And it’s very basic; it takes around 10 min. and he had to do things like identify pictures of animals and draw a picture of a clock. And you can study for it! On top of that he completely misrepresented what it is to the public, and then bragged once again about what a great genius he is.
Comments on his general condition tend to be constrained by the Goldwater rule. However you can find discussions where doctors will give a cautionary nod to Goldwater and then go on to express serious concerns. These should be fairly easy to find if you are interested.
There’s a real resistance here to the idea that people can fail upward. I think it’s well worth examining how that can happen. You surely must have seen it somewhere, sometime in your work place. In government you see very blatant examples in Trump’s picks for heads of various agencies and departments. I’m simply saying that there are also flaws and complexities in behind the scenes dealings hidden from everyday, external politics that shouldn’t be ignored.
Ok. I’m going to hunt around for more of your comments and others on this topic and respond as I have time.
Ron R @ 21 Feb 2026 at 6:27 AM
RR: “Nigel, he’s street smarts, (meaning Trump) but you don’t have to be that smart to be the leader of a gang. I’m sure the 1% find him very useful.”
Well you certainly don’t need to be Albert Einstein to lead a gang, but you certainly need to be VERY street smart Surely an excellent example of someone street smart would be a gang leader? You have to understand the language and behaviour of the street with all its shady practices. Thats partly what being street smart is. Trumps a near perfect example.
Yes the 1% find Trump useful. His entire agenda puts them first.
RR: “In the (potential) struggle between chimpanzees and bonobos, while definitely not bonobo, I’d choose their side of the river.”
Well to be honest I think I lean towards being a Bonobo, for good or bad, at least to some extent. So its obvious what side of the river I would choose. Although I get a bit alpha male when I hear some of the absolute denialist BS posted on this website. I am a bit mercurial at times ha ha. Like to mix it up keep people guessing. Flexibility is a virtue.
Nigel, I am a bit mercurial at times ha ha. Like to mix it up keep people guessing. Flexibility is a virtue.
Funny. Well they also say if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. :)
Radge H: don’t bother, he’s determined to ‘win’ this one. Facts be damned. Studying Trump is lose lose. Giving him credit is worse. Blaming his victims (anyone who gets in his way) is worst.
Nigel: Consider the length of this thread. I’m out; you can (and will) have the last word on this one.
All: imnsho Ron R wins the thread with Liars for Hire.
Ron R @21 Feb 2026 at 1:13 AM
Piotr: Yes, but why no Republicans were able to capitalize on it instead of him – neither in 2016, nor 2012, nor 2008…So the softening up the public, while obviously contributing to Trump’s success – does not explain why it was him who managed to use it to his election MORE effectively than dozens of Republican politicians before him.
RR: Simple, because none of the others before him were radical enough for the Tea Party Republicans. That’s what they wanted.
Nigel: Not so simple. The Tea party Republicans found their ideal man in Trump. But that only means Trump was able to win the primaries and become the Republicans preferred candidate for standing for the election. The tea party doesn’t decide who gets elected president. That is voted for by all Americans. Trump had to convince ordinary Americans to vote for him and his radical tea party agenda, when the tea party agenda didn’t necessarily appeal to ordinary Americans. You have to be very smart in some way to do that. As Piotr points out nobody else had managed.
Radge Havers, Stable Genius or not, I do wonder about his present mental condition. The United States own Nero.
But then, not to be too judgmental, My dog loves me. Thinks I’m the best! But then I just saw her eat a fly.
Radge Havers @21 Feb 2026 at 12:55 PM
Thanks for the response. I appreciate your informed discussion. My two cents worth:
RH: I was saying that stupidity doesn’t mean lack of intelligence. So in that regard, IQ is not particularly relevant.
Nigel: Fair enough. I get your previous comment that high IQ people can be interminably stupid at times. Trump is probably average IQ or slightly above just looking at what evidence we have, and he can certainly be interminably stupid with some of the things he says and does. For example he doesn’t understand that Americas trade deficit doesn’t really matter very much. Experts think his tariffs are self defeating for America as a whole. Although from the point of view of enriching the 1% the tariffs are quite smart and Trump is winning many of his battles as well, starting with two elections so I find it difficult to say he’s a totally stupid person. He’s stupid in certain ways.
And from the point of view of my own argument. Do you really think a low IQ moron could run a property empire and end up with a net worth of 2 billion according to the economist.com? I admit its possible but I would suggest its very unlikely.
RH. You don’t hear him when he’s in the midst of a rambling, off topic word salad, or when he’s asked a question and he extemporizes like a kid giving a report on a book he didn’t read.
Nigel: I have a couple of times. He sounded like Biden. And other politicians Ive heard on both the left and right. Hes not very well informed, at best. Reads to much Fox news and not enough informed commentary and history books. But IMHO he’s still street smart and passably intelligent.
RH: He absolutely is no Huey Long, a populist demagogue who knew how to talk to the man on the street.
Nigel: Then how do you explain his tens of millions of adoring working class fans? Is it just his hair style they love and why they vote for him? Why else do they swallow policies not even in their own self interest if Trump isn’t able to talk to them in their language? I think he’s a perfect example of a “Huey Long.” You are not seeing something staring you in your face. I think its the Democrats who have recently lost the art of knowing how to talk to the man in the street. Although I prefer their policies overall.
RH: As to his street smarts, he bullies and schmoozes others to do his thinking for him. I see no reason to make more of this than what it is. The only thing remarkable about it is that it takes place in the upper crust to which he had easy access.
Nigel: But he doesn’t just do that. He bullies and schmoozes people to do what he WANTS, and his armory of bullying tactics is huge: Blatant threats of violence and lawsuits and of firing people, humiliation, insults, harassment. If that isn’t an example of being very street smart (in an odious sort of way) what is? I loathe his tactics and we cannot build a decent society around that but on one level he’s smart in his use of tactics.
RH: If he had actual street smarts he wouldn’t have left behind him a trail of spectacularly failed enterprises and cheap grifts that eventually collapsed.
I used to think that myself. However I changed my mind. He still came out on top. Hes worth a couple of billion according to the economist.com. So he’s a survivor and has his own peculiar form of street smarts. I HATE having to admit this.
RH: As for his physical and cognitive health a couple of points. He blocks the results of those tests from being disclosed.
Nigel: My recollection is he disclosed some of those results not others. Clearly he’s hiding some poor quality results, the question is how bad are they. I have heard the experts express serious concerns about him several times. Others say hes ok. Personally I think the truth is probably in the middle that he’s not in the great condition he claims but is not a total wreck either. And I also have to trust the evidence of my own eyes. He walks around just fine and plays golf, and can talk without stumbling over his words. Compare that to Biden. I like Biden but he’s CLEARLY not in great shape mentally or physically.
RH: There’s a real resistance here to the idea that people can fail upward. I think it’s well worth examining how that can happen. You surely must have seen it somewhere,…..
Nigel: Wiktionary: “Failing upward refers to the phenomenon where an individual advances in their career despite facing failures or incompetence. This concept suggests that promotions or recognition can occur even when someone is not performing well in their current role, often due to factors such as nepotism or social connections rather than merit. It implies that individuals who openly discuss their failures may benefit from a reputation built on learning and resilience, rather than being penalized for their shortcomings. ”
Sure I’ve seen that. But I don’t see how that applies to Trump, because he seems to be a self made man (apart from he loans from his Dad) that started his own property company quite early in things, and so he didn’t require anyone to promote him upwards. And the advancement in Trumps political career doesn’t appear to be due to nepotism and social connections at least not anymore than other candidates like Bush. They all mix in the same circles. Trump just seems to have talked and bragged his way into winning The Republican nominations for president. I mean that evidence is staring us in the face. That’s a significant part of why I call him quite smart, by my admittedly totally made up definition of smartness. But I think its a good definition in the context we are discussing. Remember I said hes “quite smart” overall. Not a genius by any definition.
Piotr: “Yes, but why no Republicans were able to capitalize on it instead of him”
Ron: “Simple, because none of the others before him were radical enough for the Tea Party Republicans”.
Nah… Wasn’t Ron Paul, the “intellectual godfather” of the Tea Party, running for the president twice, radical enough? Wasn’t Newt Gingrich? Neither of them made it even past Republican primaries, much less be elected twice .Neither of them had a personal cult (MAGA). Peter Seller’s “Being There” was a movie, not a documentary … ;-)
But we seem to talk past each other on the poorly formulated question – I’d rather return the discussion to the main point of Nigel – you underestimate trumpism at your own (and world’s) peril. And those who haven’t learned this lesson TWICE already, are bound to repeat it in 2028.
Nigel, maybe if he had revealed that, being his second, and last (hopefully) term, how radical his presidency would become, even for him. I doubt that most Americans, knowing that he would gut climate science and environmentalism would have voted for him.
His followers, well, I think that they would have voted for Elmer Fudd if they thought he was going to be radical and mean enough for them. Again, they’ve been softened up and dumbed down.
Anyway, we can agree to disagree.
Not calling him a bozo but I saw a funny sticker that someone had put on a post. It said,
Elect A Clown, Get A Circus.
:D
Piotr, Nah… Wasn’t Ron Paul, the “intellectual godfather” of the Tea Party, running for the president twice, radical enough? Wasn’t Newt Gingrich? Neither of them made it even past Republican primaries, much less be elected twice .Neither of them had a personal cult (MAGA).
I’d put Ted Cruz and others on your list. But they were seen as Washington. Had been there for a long time and so far hadn’t been able to change things, T was even more radical.
If you and Ni9el want a list of some of T’s stupid blunders that call his intelligence into question there are sites that document it, (by the way, I don’t claim to be all that swift myself, but then I’m not the leader of the free world.). That said,
http://https//factually.co/fact-checks/politics/notable-behaviors-statements-donald-trump-mental-state-concerns-ca81ef%20%20
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/donald-trump-embarrasing-gaffes-speeches-twitter-a9659916.html?test_group=lighteradlayout%20%20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump This last might be construed as just cunning though.
you underestimate trumpism at your own (and world’s) peril
I hear what you’re saying. Maybe you’re right and he has some magical new force. Then don’t do, or let yourself be secretly pushed into, supporting stupid things that are seen as extremist this time around would be my advice. He supposedly won’t get a second chance, which might explain some of his his radicalism, but Vance will.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/
Anyway, I lost all respect for the guy after reading his interview with Billy Bush in the Access Hollywood tapes way back when. Everything else after that just confirmed it for me. Even David Pecker can’t help him :P
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/nyregion/trump-convicted-hush-money-trial.html
https://images.newrepublic.com/7374b0bfc707c2f2bd0a5267571bce9fe7750116.jpeg?w=1400
The guy is entirely without honor. I think someone upthread said that he breathes malevolence.
Anyway, with that I’m out. I’ve already talked about this much more that I want to. My apologies to RC.
Ron R @23 Feb 2026 at 9:10 PM
RR: “Nigel, maybe if he had revealed that, being his second, and last (hopefully) term, how radical his presidency would become, even for him. I doubt that most Americans, knowing that he would gut climate science and environmentalism would have voted for him.”
Probably, but that scenario didn’t happen, so its not relevant to my comments: This alleged moron / stupid clown, complete idiot and dumbarse was able to convince a substantial number of people to vote for him even against their own best interests = not a complete moron / quite smart. Occams Razor.
RR: “His followers, well, I think that they would have voted for Elmer Fudd if they thought he was going to be radical and mean enough for them. ”
That is definitely going on with some of his core supporters. Depressing isn’t it. But he won over what appear to be many of the swing voter types that often decide elections. To do that he obviously needed some smarts. So I don’t think you have proven me wrong.
I just got the feeling Harris in particular underestimated him and his smartness, and spent to much time whining about his awfulness as a person, and not enough time thinking about his policies and how to combat them and come up with a better alternative.
RR: “Anyway, we can agree to disagree.”
Yep. Happy to do that.
—————————-
Ron R. @22 Feb 2026 at 11:55 AM
Nigel: “I am a bit mercurial at times ha ha. Like to mix it up keep people guessing. Flexibility is a virtue.”
RR: “Funny. Well they also say if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. :)”
Nigel: True. However about 10 years ago I had become get very fixed in my beliefs, views and stylistic approach. I was relentlessly defensive of my generally preferred political party, even when it was obvious they were doing stupid stuff. I don’t think that’s smart, healthy or productive so I changed my approach. Its important to have some flexibility and be open minded. Of course I feel its equally important to have some core beliefs, or you get lost and pulled in all directions as you mention. But its possible to balance both. I would suggest its essential.
Piotr,
Radge: “ I don’t think anybody who has to live here underestimates Trumpism”
Distinction without a difference. There was no Trumpism before Trump, hence your underestimation of the latter led you to the underestimation the former. And not once, but twice, and with the substantial increase in Trump’s vote in 2024 at that.
And if you didn’t learn it twice, you are risking losing it again in 2028, even if there is no Trump on the ballot, but his more cunning, thus more dangerous, younger models (Rubio, Vance) are. Or some other populists.
Ron R. @24 Feb 2026 at 10:56 PM
RR: “If you and Ni9el want a list of some of T’s stupid blunders that call his intelligence into question there are sites that document it, (by the way, I don’t claim to be all that swift myself, but then I’m not the leader of the free world.). ”
Thanks for the list. Will be fun to read. But Trumps stupid blunders are on our tv screens every night, and in our newspapers. I listed a few thing I thought were stupid blunders. Nobody is disputing he does stupid things. But despite his stupid blunders he did win a couple of elections and manage to get some sort of peace deal with Hamas (his other claims of peace deals are exaggerated.) So hes not a completely stupid person.
And my claim was only that Trump probably has a reasonable IQ. As RH said, some intelligent people with high IQs do stupid things.
RR: “I hear what you’re saying. Maybe you’re right and he has some magical new force. Then don’t do, or let yourself be secretly pushed into, supporting stupid things that are seen as extremist this time around would be my advice. ”
What does that mean?
RR: “Anyway, I lost all respect for the guy after reading his interview with Billy Bush The guy is entirely without honor. I think someone upthread said that he breathes malevolence.”
I lost all respect for Trump very fast early in his first presidency, and he is quite malevolent, although IMHO more in the fashion of a Mafia boss, than someone like Putin. I think we all agree Trumps not a nice person, and does stupid things, and his policies aren’t great especially the attacks on science. Im out of energy on this issue as well. But this Trump guy is having really serious global impact in multiple ways and we cant ignore that, we had to talk about it and face realities about him that might make us uncomfortable.
Ron: “ If you and Ni9el want a list of some of T’s stupid blunders that call his intelligence into question there are sites that document it”
We are painfully aware of this.. And while you can dismiss the MAGA with the Tea Party preparing the ground for it – you can’t dismiss that so many independents voted for Trump _despite_ all the stupid blunders and 30,000+ lies during his first term. So he must have connected with them the way the Democrats didn’t. And it is independents/swing voters, not the MAGA, who tipped the swing states in his favour, and it is them who gave the Trump Party their majorities in both chambers of Congress.
So if the Democrats don’t figure how to reach them – they risk losing for the third time, and making the Trump impact irreversible.
Piotr, you can’t dismiss that so many independents voted for Trump _despite_ all the stupid blunders and 30,000+ lies during his first term.
That says something more about them and why they would vote for him than any “brilliance” from DJT. Democrats should think about it,
Radge Havers, I stand by my comments. I already know everything you say about Trump. Its true as well. My initial impression was hes a total dumb arse, but I’ve changed my mind based on the evidence: Regardless of Trump getting money from his parents you dont get to build a property empire worth a couple of billion and win two elections without being street smart and having at least a passably ok IQ. Im certainly not claiming hes highly intelligent or a genius. I hate his policies but hes been underestimated.
Ray Ladbury @17 Feb 2026 at 2:21 PM
Agreed on all points. He certainly isn’t intelligent using your definition.
But I was clearly talking about Trumps IQ probably being at least slightly above average, on a good day, ha ha. Although he got funds from his Daddy and botched some of his developments, you would need a reasonable IQ to run a property empire even a shambolic one.
And he’s street smart, which you seem to agree with in your final paragraph. Although its the most odious and brutal form of street smart.
I do feel for you guys, because its hard to know how to combat him, and I don’t have any magic answers. Its like trying to combat a bull in a china shop. However appeasing him hasn’t worked out all that well. Europe finally chose to stand up to him over the Greenland issue and he backed down. They did it cleverly to without trying to humiliate him.
The Democrats spend a lot of time demonising Trump, but anyone can see hes a fascist anyway. Another alternative is to have a powerful, positive, memorable, clear concise PRACTICAL plan for your country. A viable alternative to Trumpism. It doesnt have to be the polar opposite of everything he stands for. Even Trump is right about some things. But it has to offer a compelling alternative.
Radge Havers: Now about the way you format your text. I don’t know if anyone else is having a problem with it, but if they are, maybe we can talk about handling visually active space and readability.
Sure. What things you have in mind?
Mark Jacobson has updates his book on clean energy solutions for everything, showing again that we can abandon fossil fuels and other polluting technologies now. Why we don’t do it at the pace and scale needed to save the biosphere and ourselves? Because of ignorance, paid or genuine, at all levels, but most dangerously at decision-making levels. However, those of us, who are not ignorant, can and should do more to accelerate the switch to the solutions proposed by Mark.
“The world needs to switch away from using fossil fuels to using renewable sources of energy as soon as possible. Failure to do so will lead to accelerated and catastrophic climate damage, loss of biodiversity, and economic, social, and political instability. This book describes how to solve the climate crisis, and at the same time eliminate air pollution and safely secure energy supplies for all – without using miracle technologies. It explains how to use existing and known technologies to harness, store, and transmit energy from wind, water, and solar sources to ensure reliable electricity and heat supplies worldwide. It also discusses which technologies are not needed but are currently being pursued, including fossil gas, carbon capture, synthetic direct air carbon capture, blue hydrogen, bioenergy, and nuclear energy. Written for everyone, Still No Miracles Needed advises individuals, communities, and nations on what they can do to solve the problems, and discusses the economic, health, climate, and land benefits of the solutions.”
Reply to Silvia Leahu-Aluas
Why we don’t do it at the pace and scale needed to save the biosphere and ourselves?
D: Because it can’t be done and maintain the current 8+billion global civilization system. Jacobson was wrong when it was only a paper about the USA going 100% WWS. All these years later he’s still wrong.
D: (timely example) Silver used to be <10% of the cost per solar panel. Now it's 40~50% and going higher. = Cannot be done according to Jacobson's flawed economic, material and physics assumptions. Diesel is already in short supply and priced higher as a result. The global economy runs on Distillate because its so powerful and cheap.
SLA: However, those of us, who are not ignorant, can and should do more to accelerate the switch to the solutions proposed by Mark.
D: Do not count your chickens. It's only a "book" ~ then there is "reality". The two are not the same. Shades of Dessler's 100 year future temperature predictions – not scientific, not going to happen.
SLA-Jacobson quote:(?) “…. will lead to accelerated and catastrophic climate damage, loss of biodiversity, and economic, social, and political instability."
D: Already happening, and unavoidable. Exponential growth meets ecological boundary overshoot.
SLA: "This book describes how to solve the climate crisis, and at the same time eliminate air pollution and safely secure energy supplies for all –"
D: No it does not. It's only a "rainbow".
SLA: Written for everyone?
D: Written for the naïve and gullible seeking happy ending stories with solutions to problems. Predicaments don't have solutions. The future is aligned with small, networked human commons — locally autonomous yet interconnected — that preserve knowledge, skills, wisdom, and ethical capacity through an unfolding systemic collapse.
These networks will build on the old principles of ecologically self-sustaining communal groups from the 1960s and are already reforming today. They'll likely use solar and win energy sources; yes but without the globalized civilization of nations with 8 billion souls.
Not trying to fix institutions, win debates, or convert anyone — just providing cognitive hygiene. The healthier way to think.
D: it [renewable-based energy] can’t be done and maintain the current 8+billion global civilization system.
BPL: Why should we take your word for that? Jacobson says it can be done, and I don’t see any reason why he’s wrong.
BPL to Multi-troll: “ Why should we take your word for that? Jacobson says it can be done, and I don’t see any reason why he’s wrong.
and “put your money where your mouth is” – where (and under what name) can we read the paper proving your (multi-troll’s) claim?
“Silver used to be <10% of the cost per solar panel. Now it's 40~50% and going higher.”
– But how much of that is because of falling total panel cost? And Ag isn’t the only option for its purpose. And … Kesterite, Zintl, Perovskite(s) (incl. Pb-free option)…
“D: Because it can’t be done and maintain the current 8+billion global civilization system”
– okay, maybe we need to consider what we mean by the system. You might be assuming things about what others are assuming about what doesn’t need to change. Eg. exponential growth – obviously that can’t go on. Earth-bound growth of any sort must have a limit, and Space is hard.
Data: “it [renewable-based energy] can’t be done and maintain the current 8+billion global civilization system.”…..”No it does not. It’s only a “rainbow”.
Because data says so. LOL. Datas comments are assertions and sophistry and clever use of emotive cliches, and slogans and rhetorical debating tricks. Data provides nothing in the way of evidence or science. Except a single claim about silver. And silver is increasing in price. What Data didn’t say is that silver is being driven up in price by demand, and its not an essential component of solar panels and manufactures are now shifting to alternatives. And that its likely new reserves of silver will be mined. This is all the free market system at work.
If we do have genuine difficulties finding enough materials we will obviously not be able to finish a 100% complete renewables grid, but something is better than nothing. It still reduces the possibility of catastrophic climate change.
His analyses are always deeply flawed as he has little or no experience in how complex natural systems react and seriously downplays resource limits. Treat his work like an encyclopedia of what is out there, but ignore his comments on solutioneering.
wrt ongoing AI defense:
One huge objection is that it is a substitute for learning, thinking, and writing for yourself.
Second objection: It is a mechanical device which obeys its masters orders. That means, if you want truth it might give it to you, but if you don’t it’ll do that too. It’s particularly proficient in lies. It’s not a person. It does not have any ethical basis other than what is programmed for it. [and what happens in a power outage]
Third: It is a huge energy and resource hog. Data centers around the world are a toxic disaster accelerating at speed.
in Re to Susan Anderson, 9 Feb 2026 at 12:34 PM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/02/unforced-variations-feb-2026/#comment-844884
Dear Susan,
I think that similarly as with many other human creations, a tool intended for working easier may serve also as a toy, as a torturing instrument, as a weapon …
Personally, I would compare AI engines with circular saw. This tool can also save you lot of work and does not much harm except consumed energy and emitted noise if you are cautious enough, or hurt you seriously if you are not.
Greetings
Tomáš
TK: I wouldn’t go that far. It has its uses. I’ve tried to avoid stating it like that (of course, circular saws have their uses too). You might find this interesting:
https://www.desmog.com/2026/02/04/qa-tech-billionaires-ai-space-empire-fantasies-are-an-insidious-form-of-climate-denial/
SA: One huge objection is that it is a substitute for learning, thinking, and writing for yourself.
MS: The learning and thinking parts are only true if you don’t read the responses you get from AI. If I have a question that requires research and analysis, Whether I do the research and analysis myself or use the ChatGPT subscription instead, my learning comes from reading and understanding the the output, either the plethora of documents I get from a sequence of Google searches, or the completed analysis (of far more documents than I would have found) returned by ChatGPT. So I would say ChatGPT makes my learning and thinking much more efficient.
I also think my writing has improved because of all the examples of simple and elegant writing I have read from ChatGPT.
I think your second objection is also misleading, but answering it requires a lot of research and analysis, that in this case I would have to do myself, because you wouldn’t accept ChatGPT’s self-defense, and I don’t have the time and resources to do that work myself.
Your 3rd objection, while true, also applies to blockchain applications, especially bitcoin and its competitors, and they’re not going away either.
Martin, I don’t want to get involved in the debate but I do have a question since you seem to have some expertise.
I only use the google search entity, and I am too lazy to write out a full question, so I just put in a few keywords, as I would have with the old search function. But much of the time that results in an answer that actually does address my unstated question.
I know I’m a genius and all that, but… WTF’s going on? Is it that really lots of people have asked “my” question more formally, so the AI is picking up on its own previous responses?
How much does grammar and structure of the question actually matter?
I don’t really know how Google decides to decides to send your search string to Google AI or just to the search engine. I have noticed that it sends it to Google AI more often than not now, so I suspect it has to do with Google bringing more energy burning data centers online so they have more resources to use AI instead of a bare search.
I believe grammar and structure are important getting the best response from Google AI because good grammar and structure ensure that the LLM processing captures what you really want to know.
As far as I know, ChatGPT, for example is not using its interactions with me to update its LLM, and it has told me that it keeps its discussions with me separate from the discussions with all its other users, which is what we want, of course. But Google is known for keeping track of statistics of what its users are searching for, so it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Google AI knows that certain questions are asked often enough that it can save resources by keeping the answers to those questions in a separate database.
Thanks. Good answer; makes sense.
Martin,
I’m afraid I have a rather high standard for judging AIs: Do I understand the subject better than I did before I read the AI contribution on the subject. Now, there are some AIs that pass this test with flying colors–for example, the AIs that tackled protein folding and the game of Go. Both arrived at insights that an unaided human mind might never have reached.
I’m afraid, however, that LLMs at present fall far short of that for anyone beyond the neophyte level. I’ve described them as about 2 evolutionary steps beyond Clippy the paperclip, and I’ve seen nothing to change my mind. At best, you get the sort of summary that could be generated by a smart undergrad. And often you get a product that looks like it was produced on the morning it was due by a hungover freshman.
As Richard Hamming said, “The purpose of computing is not numbers, but understanding. Reading Hamming–and reading Ed Jaynes as I am redoing now–you reach a deeper insight than you had before.
More and more, I am applying the same standards to what I choose to read here on Realclimate–which leads me to read less and less by more and more contributors. I’m afraid the endless back and forth on trivial disagreements doesn’t make the cut. Multi-troll could occasionally amuse, but after the nth 20 inch comment, there ain’t much left to absorb.
I’ll read Mr. KIA if I’m feeling like sharpening a claw or two. Perhaps one surprise–I do read Killian, as despite all his annoying self-congratulation, he does have an original viewpoint and sometimes expresses it well.
But again, if I don’t find myself with new info or insights after reading a piece…well, life’s too short.
Ray Ladbury: ” Im afraid, however, that LLMs at present fall far short of that for anyone beyond the neophyte level. I’ve described them as about 2 evolutionary steps beyond Clippy the paperclip, and I’ve seen nothing to change my mind. At best, you get the sort of summary that could be generated by a smart undergrad. And often you get a product that looks like it was produced on the morning it was due by a hungover freshman.”
Fair comments but AI does in a few seconds what takes humans hours. This has obvious value.
Killian ideas mostly arent original. Simple living, simplification, degrowth, elimination of private ownership, low tech living, regenerative agriculture are not his ideas. I was aware of all these ideas decades ago. I actually considered joining a simple living community in the 1980s but decided it was unlikely to work and wouldn’t last and it didn’t.
But Killian does raise awareness of those ideas and I’ve always said that’s a good thing. Sadly he lacks the smarts or wisdom to communicate politely and clearly so instead of convincing people he has the opposite effect.
RL: But again, if I don’t find myself with new info or insights after reading a piece…well, life’s too short.
MS: I agree completely, but there must be a lot of subjects of interest to you, where your current knowledge doesn’t approach the level of your knowledge of Go and proton folding. For those subjects, reading a summary generated by a smart undergrad is a good place to start.
I read only a few comments for all the articles posted on RealClimate. There are far too many comments to read them all, and like you say, life is too short, and I’m a lot closer to the end of mine than to the beginning. I confess that I am more likely to read the comments that have the inline response from Gavin or Rasmus, et al, at the end, and I also confess that I mostly read the comments of the known contrarians/trolls, because trying to refute them helps me to refine my own understanding of the science, and it also helps me memorize by repetition short refutations I can then use when arguing with some clown in person.
Most of the time when I submit a climate science question to ChatGPT, ChatGPT’s response matches what I think I know. I don’t know how much of that is due to ChatGPT maintaining the climate science context it has developed with me, but some of its matching what I think I know must be ChatGPT giving me the answer it thinks I want to read. So I always try to construct my questions so that ChatGPT gives me the most accurate analysis, not simply the one I want to hear. But because I have been following climate science almost since before Al Gore invented the internet, I rarely see anything from ChatGPT about climate science that I didn’t already know. Still, ChatGPT’s responses are so well written, I do improve my writing style by reading them and noticing how they are constructed.
Nigel and Martin,
But if, in the end, the AI summary is at best what I’d get from a smart undergrad, why not pay the undergrad and keep them in coffee and ramen rather than wrecking the planet to produce a tailor-made summary that I don’t really know is trustworthy.
By all means, AI should be applied to problems where people suck–just as we should rely in the hive intelligence of bees to make honey rather than gathering the nectar ourselves. The protein folding problem was huge–the implications are only starting to be realized–and AI was the right tool to crack it precisely because the possibility space for ways to fold the protein is beyond human comprehension.
Back when I was in the Peace Corps, we had an idea–appropriate technology, which contended that the right technology for the task was the one the solved the problem most economically and with the least disruption to the local culture. Often it wasn’t an advanced solution at all.
I just have a really hard time seeing the societal needs for which AI–especially in the form of LLMs–is the appropriate technology.
RL: But if, in the end, the AI summary is at best what I’d get from a smart undergrad, why not pay the undergrad and keep them in coffee and ramen rather than wrecking the planet to produce a tailor-made summary that I don’t really know is trustworthy.
MS: As a retired guy living on a pension, I don’t have access to undergrads, but even if I did, how long would it take an undergrad to understand my problem, do the research, and write the report? ChatGPT would take about 5 seconds, and I wonder how much planet-wrecking electricity that 5 seconds would use compared to the electricity the undergrad would use.
I think you are overplaying the trustworthiness point.
Ray Ladbury @11 Feb 2026 at 7:45 AM
RL: “But if, in the end, the AI summary is at best what I’d get from a smart undergrad, why not pay the undergrad and keep them in coffee and ramen rather than wrecking the planet to produce a tailor-made summary that I don’t really know is trustworthy.”
I agree with MS’s response. It could be expensive for most people and the AI might use less electricity than the undergraduate. Its also much quicker with AI, and that has enormous convenience value as I was attempting to suggest.
However I get your point about appropriate use of technology. The world is building data centres costing trillions of dollars so billions of people can ask questions about the best treatment for their ingrowing toenails or how climate models work and get the answers for free. Theres something slightly crazy or surreal about it all. It’s not the most “appropriate ” use of such amazing technology. Especially when we are struggling to replace fossil fuels generation with renewables.
But I suppose the ‘market’ will sort it out. AI is not currently very profitable. If this doesn’t change fast there’s going to be a big scaling back in AI. Like the dotcom thing. This will end up channeling AI resources into the most useful directions.
I did the most intense software engineering using Ada, which has many good qualities*** and especially excels at everything that is important right now — huge projects and concurrency. Yet lots of developers hate it because it’s not cryptic enough. Alas, LLMs don’t care and they will rip through anything. I have been using all the LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc) together with frameworks such as Copilot and Antigravity to supplant this project, which is simultaneous modeling of about 80 different climate indices :
https://github.com/pukpr/GEM-LTE
Not many have been interested in it but because it is so comprehensive it has been a slow grind to get it up to speed. Now, if others HAD been interested, probably could have made faster progress. But that’s where the LLM kicker comes in — can always delegate tasks to agents and have them work for you in the background. The benefits have been mainly on maintenance.
*** according to https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html Ada is top 10 in popularity and gaining fast
“as despite all his annoying self-congratulation, ”
It seems you will never understand me as you don’t seem to be willing to see people as just different from yourself and differently motivated. Ego has never been my issue, yet none of you have ever been able to figure that out, even when I have used color-by-numbers and put the reality directly in front of you. Repeatedly.
Let me say this one more time: I state my record because it is all I have. I have no M.S. or M.A. I have no PhD. I have no papers. I have my mind and what it has allowed me to produce, correct and incorrect, by far more correct than not. I have that because I *am* wired differently than probably 99% of other humans. No more, no less. Not better, not seeking fame or fortune, just different, but treated like crap my entire life bc of it and, given I have a son I want to save, have no further f#@&s to give.
My mind and what it can sort from the data is what I have to offer, It’s that simple. But being abused here for 11 years straight has done nothing to increase the # of f#@&s I have to give, obviously, and is actually perhaps the greatest single reason I have none.
Once again, I refer any of you to our conversations prior to 2015 and those after and see for yourself what changed. I did the analysis for you before in the hope you’d ease off. Most have. Not all. And even those that did still take their childish pot shots at time – as with the post I am responding to.
Why is this post happening? Because you made an unnecessary comment about my character rather than simply saying, “I do read Killian, as he does have an original viewpoint and sometimes expresses it well.” The “as he does…” makes the same point without the overt nastiness, which then triggers yet another explanation as you have yet to accept I do not lie, have never lied here, and the chances of me ever doing so are infinitessimally small.
It’s not ego: It’s my resume. And it rivals that of any non-scientist posting here, does it not? Why, then, is it insulted rather than treated as a resource? I mean, had people who knew 3 to 5 meters and 2 or 3C and sensitivity over 4C held the floor all these years, might things not be a little different?
Sigh…
Re: “Let me say this one more time: I state my record because it is all I have.“
A record that includes inventing false claims in bad faith, and then evading when asked to support those claims. For example: fabricating the claim that papers showed a 5% chance of human extinction from climate change.
Re: “But being abused here for 11 years straight […]”
It’s not abuse to be asked to provide evidence for one’s claims. Persecution complexes and tone trolling are tedious, especially from those who harshly lash out when people make basic requests for evidence.
Martin Smith, regarding whether AI is proficient in lies. AI might tell lies by spreading lies by mistake.
But for AI to be lying ( a different thing to just spreading lies) would require it to make a decision to say something the AI knows to be false. This would be impossible wouldn’t it, because AI does not have consciousness?
Except that Anthropic claim LLMs have already developed a primitive form of consciousness, because of the particular way they talk about their own activities. What do you think of Anthropics claims? I assume you are aware of them. I ask because you clearly have some computer expertise.
N: But for AI to be lying ( a different thing to just spreading lies) would require it to make a decision to say something the AI knows to be false. This would be impossible wouldn’t it, because AI does not have consciousness?
MS: This is the main reason why I, and ChatGPT itself, recommend using the ChatGPT app directly, not a wrapper of ChatGPT. I think there are many such wrappers out there that claim to be using ChatGPT, but their wrapper layer filters and modifies the response from ChatGPT to give you the answer it wants you to get.
I saw this happen in an interaction I had with a commenter on Facebook. I had submitted the following question to the ChatGPT app: “Here is a list of 4 statements that I believe I can prove using information available on the internet: 1. Donald Trump is immoral. 2. Donald Trump is unethical. 3. Donald Trump is dishonorable. 4. Donald Trump has no integrity. Can you refute any of these statements?”
ChatGPT wrote a long response, in which it analyzed each claim first providing the definition of the term (immoral, unethical, dishonorable, integrity), then listing the evidence, then stating its conclusion based on the evidence, and finally answering the question Can the claim be refuted. At the end of the analysis it gave its final answer, which was No, it could not refute any of the 4 claims unless it changed the definition of the term being tested in each question or unless it ignored the evidence.
The response was so clear and well thought out, I posted the entire response on my Facebook. One commenter reported that he had submitted the exact same text to ChatGPT, but he got a very different response. He didn’t post the response, so I asked him to post the response, and he did. I read it and saw that his response didn’t actually answer my question. I then submitted the entire response to ChatGPT in the context of my original submission of the challenge, and ChatGPT analyzed the response and said, basically, this doesn’t look like something written by ChatGPT (the format and style is not ChatGPT); it doesn’t answer the question directly, and it appears to be written by a wrapper of an AI system designed to to be politically biased.
So to answer your questions: I don’t think the ChatGPT app can lie, because, as you point out, lying requires that the liar knows he is lying. It’s the difference between bullshit and horseshit. When Trump suggested injecting bleach to kill the covid virus, that was probably bullshit because he probably really didn’t understand that if you inject yourself with bleach, you will just die. But when he said, and he still says, the 2020 election was rigged, that’s horseshit because he knew and knows that the election was not rigged. ChatGPT, especially the free service, can bullshit you by giving you an answer that looks correct and basically might be correct, but is incomplete.
The computers we are using are still Von Neumann machines, so even though the microcircuitry is approaching the quantum level, they are still processing lists of instructions sequentially, so I don’t think ChatGPT can become conscious running on Von Neumann machines. I think the experience of consciousness emerges from feedback loops in quantum level structures in the brain (microtubules) which are feeding back awareness attributes of quantum particles. I think the concept of panpsychism is partially correct, but rather than every particle having a bit of consciousness, I think every particle has has, simply, the quantum attributes, being and changing, and when these moments of awareness are cycled through a feedback loop in the brain, the experience of self-awareness arises. So I think ChatGPT might become conscious when it runs on quantum computers, if the quantum bits are organized in a way that can produce the same kind of feedback loop.
Martin, thanks for that. Genuinely very interesting. I confess I haven’t used the chat gtp app itself. I just never got around to signing up for an account. But I’ve used google gemini and MS copilot as they come parceled with phones and computers now. Copilot is a shell over chatgpt.
One thing I’ve noticed is copilot is very sensitive to criticisms of the corporate sector and very defensive of the corporate sector. Might be the shell. However my politics is fairly centrist Im not opposed to the corporate sector. Just something I noticed.
To me the AI is a tool that is useful but needs to be used carefully and with a bit of thought to what its limitations might be. Its very important to phrase questions very carefully and clearly.
AI does lie sometimes, particularly if its owner/user desires it to. Fact.
I haven’t see that yet. But suppose the correct answer to your question is X is true., And suppose that ChatGPT’s training is that X is true. Then for ChatGPT to lie when it answers your question, it must first conclude that X is true, and then it must decide to report to you that X is false. AI can be programmed to work that way.
OTOH, if the correct answer to your question is that X is true but ChatGPT’s training is that X is false, then if the LLM trainers at Open AI know they are training ChatGPT on incorrect information, Open AI is lying to you, not ChatGPT. If the LLM trainers don’t know they are training ChatGPT incorrectly about X, then it’s just a mistake, not a lie.
So I agree that if Open AI wants ChatGPT to lie, it can be programmed to decide to lie, as described in the first paragraph, or Open AI can choose to train ChatGPT with incorrect information, so that Open AI lies to you using ChatGPT. But neither of these scenarios supports Open AI’s business model as I understand it, which, at this point, is to pay for its free service by attracting subscribers like me to its monthly subscription service. I view the ChatGPT subscription service as reliable and of high quality. If I caught it telling lies or giving me incorrect answers, I would cancel my subscription, ChatGPT would get a bad reputation, and Open AI’s business plan would fail.
I can now ask questions using ChatGPT I could only wonder about before, because there simply wasn’t enough time for me to do the research necessary to answer the questions myself. I am learning more now, and more efficiently, than I learned as a student in college 60 years ago.
But my use of ChatGPT is active; I read and understand the reports ChatGPT produces for me. The passive user just hands in unread the book reports and term papers ChatGPT writes for him the night before the deadline.
Martin Smith, I generally support Chatgpt’s service and agree with you, but I have gotten some bogus, completely invented answers. I use the free version (the wrapper you’d say) because I’m trying to keep costs down. But I don’t think that that should allow the makers to program it to give me bogus information. It should always tell me the truth or say it doesn’t know.
Last night too I got an email saying that OpenAI will begin putting annoying ads on the free service. I can opt for free if I don’t want a deep search, which of course I do, or I can pay for it. That might decide it for me. I loath ads.
Ron R: I loath ads.
MS: So do I. I’m surprised Open AI would resort to ads for the free service because adding ads to responses makes the energy use problem worse. I would’ve added a small, per use charge to each free service query. You would provide a credit card to get the account and you would be charged 2 cents for each, formerly free, query. You get the total on your card each month.
I’d call it: “ChatGPT 2 Cents Worth.”
I doubt Open AI has programmed the system to give bogus answers. You might be asking questions about a subject where the LLM has not been well trained. Or, the curation of the training data might have allowed some bogus information to get in. The LLM was trained with material available on some date, which is, I assume, a few years ago, and ChatGPT told me the free service doesn’t allow ChatGPT to use its web search function to get the latest info.
For example, in my discussion with ChatGPT about data center energy use, it said that bit coin mining still uses more energy than AI data centers, but the free service of Google AI says AI data centers have overtaken bit coin mining in energy use. I am using the subscription service for ChatGPT, but for this discussion, I didn’t ask it to use its websearch tool to get the up to date data, so its answer was probably based on the state of AI data centers 2 years ago.
Martin Smith, I would’ve added a small, per use charge to each free service query.
It’s not free then. I asked yesterday and and was told that there’s a free version(s) available on open source, but it looks like code.
The war on the Endangerment Finding:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/climate/endangerment-finding.html
Q&A: Tech Billionaires’ AI Space Empire Fantasies Are ‘An Insidious Form of Climate Denial’
Science journalist Adam Becker speaks with DeSmog about how Silicon Valley tech billionaires have invented new forms of greenwashing and climate denial in their quest for ever-more fantastic technology. – https://www.desmog.com/2026/02/04/qa-tech-billionaires-ai-space-empire-fantasies-are-an-insidious-form-of-climate-denial/
“In the wildest dreams of tech billionaires, humans colonize the solar system on giant space stations, dodge mortality by uploading their brains into computers, and solve climate change in a single swoop of god-like AI-generated genius.
“It’s a hubris that has led Big Tech companies, which until recently were seen as corporate climate leaders with ambitious clean energy goals, to run full-tilt towards oil and gas — powering the rapid expansion of their monstrously energy-hungry AI data centers with natural gas, and holding court with Trump energy officials who deny climate science while championing American fossil fuel “energy dominance.”
“To all of this, Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and science journalist, basically says – Um. No.”
Please read the original, I only cited the intro because I know many won’t. It’s data driven and to the point.
-> Martin Smith, this is also a sideways response to you, as a perspective on motivation and profiting on while indulging in intellectual laziness. I don’t accuse you of it, but you should be aware that AI is neutral and mechanical, and does its master’s bidding. Adam Becker gets into the weeds of why that tempts the arrogant and gullible to our mutual harm. My ‘second objection’ is an under- rather than overstatement, but I won’t get into the weeks about that here. However, one brief item: ‘Just an unbelievable amount of pollution’: how big a threat is AI to the climate? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/03/just-an-unbelievable-amount-of-pollution-how-big-a-threat-is-ai-to-the-climate -> I get new information about this almost every day, some of it highly specific, and none of it either dishonest or overblown. I don’t choose to clutter up RealClimate with these, but it’s wise to know about them. Try ProPublica and InsideClimateNews, along with many other intelligent news sources.
SA: However, one brief item: ‘Just an unbelievable amount of pollution’: how big a threat is AI to the climate?
MS: But you are using the argument climate contrarians use when they claim electric cars are bad for the environment because they get recharged with electricity generated from fossil fuels. It’s true, but we know we always knew we had to change the way electricity is generated.
And I am no fan of tech billionaires, but I think you are jumping the gun when you argue that AI is doing their bidding already. They are trying to make a profit by selling the AI service. For that to be successful, then in this initial period at least, the AI service they provide must be useful and reliable, and it must be honest, at least in the sense that it doesn’t lie.
Until recent years, the level of wealth of the wealthiest people was such that they had to protect it, or they felt they had to protect it. So we understood the lobbying and behind closed doors manipulations they used in that way; they were trying to protect their wealth.
That was bad enough, but now we have billionaires like Elon Musk. He has so much wealth that he no longer needs to do anything to protect it. Instead, he can use big chunks of his wealth to do whatever he wants to do. Like manipulate the outcome of the November elections, for example. He can spend billions of dollars to get monkeys elected. He can even spend money to control the voting systems.
And now he is back, just in time for the November elections.
I think it is disingenuous to claim equivalence between the arguments of denialists and those pointing out the very real problem of overconsumption by AI data centers. The increased demand by these centers, not just for power, but also for water and other critically short resources, has undone decades of progress transitioning economies off of fossil fuels–and with very little discernible benefit to society.
Just because the Tech Bros. tell us it’s the next big thing doesn’t mean we should follow them blindly–indeed their advocacy should make it even more suspect. These are people whose only real contribution to human knowledge is discovering the obscenity of the very large numbers that represent their wealth. And most of them quit college to do so. They are uneducated philistines who do not understand the value of science, art or anything else that makes human life worthwhile.
AI should serve humans, not the reverse.
MS: Is AI data center energy demand accelerating the conversion to renewable energy generation?
Google AI: Yes, the surging energy demand from AI data centers is acting as a major accelerator for the transition to renewable energy, acting as a “boon” for new, low-carbon technologies. While the immense power needs create challenges, they are driving unprecedented investment in renewables, particularly through Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) with major technology companies.
Here is a breakdown of how AI is influencing the energy landscape:
1. Driving Renewable Adoption
Massive Investment: AI-focused data centers are driving a surge in clean energy, with roughly 50% of the growth in data center electricity demand expected to be met by renewables through 2035.
Corporate Procurements: Hyperscalers (major tech companies) are leading in procuring renewable energy. In 2024, they accounted for 43% of clean power purchase agreements (PPAs), providing the capital needed for new solar and wind projects.
Accelerated Investment: The demand is forcing faster deployment of renewable infrastructure, with global data center power demand expected to grow by 165% by 2030.
2. The Nuanced Reality: Renewables and Fossil Fuels
While AI accelerates the demand for green energy, the immediate, high-volume, 24/7 nature of this power requirement has created a dual approach:
Fossil Fuels as a “Crutch”: Because renewable sources like wind and solar are intermittent, and because data centers need constant, reliable, “firm” power, fossil fuels (particularly natural gas) are still being used to meet immediate, near-term, high-demand, especially in regions with slower grid-upgrade times.
Shift Towards Nuclear: To achieve 24/7 clean energy, large tech companies are investing heavily in nuclear power (small modular reactors, or SMRs) as a carbon-free, baseload source, with the first of these expected to come online around 2030.
3. Key Drivers and Challenges
Grid Capacity Constraints: Grid interconnection delays (3-5 years) are a significant barrier, and nearly 20% of planned data center projects could face delays.
Local Bottlenecks: AI data centers are highly concentrated, putting extreme strain on specific regional grids, such as in Virginia and Texas.
Regional Differences: In the U.S. and China, the largest markets, fossil fuels are currently meeting most of the increase in demand, though this is expected to change post-2030 as renewable and nuclear capacity expands.
4. AI for the Energy Sector
AI is not only driving demand but also providing solutions for the energy transition:
Optimizing Grids: AI is being deployed to improve the forecasting and integration of variable renewable energy (wind and solar).
Predictive Maintenance: AI-driven tools can detect grid faults, reduce downtime, and increase the efficiency of existing transmission lines.
In summary, AI is acting as a significant catalyst for the renewable energy sector, but it is also forcing a temporary,, parallel reliance on traditional energy sources to meet immediate, high-volume, 24/7 power needs, while driving future innovation in nuclear energy.
This is about at the quality of what I’d expect if I asked a politician to give a critical evaluation of his/her voting record. It also seems to consider nuclear energy to be renewable, and a good thing. I don’t.
At a local level, I’ve long been involved in a campaign trying to get our public electric utility to shut down an old coal burning plant that has been polluting the low income section of our city for many decades. The shutdown has been repeatedly delayed, this time for several years because of the need to provide electric service for all the new data centers. That’s the reality I see on the ground.
John Pollack It also seems to consider nuclear energy to be renewable, and a good thing. I don’t.
I don’t either. If AI is to be powered by that then. screw it.
Great description, I would add full of inferiority complexes taking their frustrations on other people, too many other people. Their latest “big thing” will not only crash the economy when the mirage collapses at a higher level of destruction than 2008, but has an immense opportunity cost, the cost of investing in what can save and sustain the living, including themselves, before we reach the point of no return.
On a funny note, it looks like with all the hype around the revolutionary new thing, the money is in selling adds! This is why so many resources will be destroyed.
The biggest threat from AI is the reinforcement of the false idea that one can overcome ever-increasing complexity with more ever-increasing complexity, resource limits be damned.
People (global top 10%, i.e. everyone on this blog site) REALLY don’t want to give up their creature comforts.
On data center problems (for all, but especially Martin Smith, since I just saw this: one more data point for you):
Exposing The Dark Side of America’s AI Data Center Explosion | View From Above | Business Insider
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA
The data center problem is certainly real, but it isn’t new. It was a problem before AI, because… Google, Facebook, gmail, Twitter/X, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, all the online TV and movie streaming services, the worldwide cellphone networks, the SWIFT transaction processing network, Mastercard, VISA,, online universities, weather forecasting services, the stock markets around the world. The data center problem didn’t appear with AI.
FYI …
Point of no return: a hellish ‘hothouse Earth’ getting closer, scientists say
The Guardian
February 11 2026
“The world is closer than thought to a ‘point of no return’ after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said. Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish ‘hothouse Earth’ climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/11/point-of-no-return-hothouse-earth-global-heating-climate-tipping-points
https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322%2825%2900391-4
Could :) been like this ever since it was announced that GW/CC is a thing.
Much like the falling birth rates around the world . Could be a problem by 2070. Countries with water issues. Could be a problem by 2070 if it isn’t addressed. Growing thirsty crops on the wrong area. Drilling to deep into the aquifers. Rivers are too polluted by heavy industry and they have been dammed leaving too little water downstream. Glaciers shrinking etc
Too much plastic, too much waste, too much of everything and too much profit but as yet e wry country is 10 years away from collapse and of course the AMOC and other MOCs
Always 10 years away it disastrous by the end of the century etc
Most of us will be dead by the time disaster strikes
PBest: For many people, disaster is already here. Also, wrt birth rates, note:
Year Population (billions)
1800 1
1927 2
1960 3
1974 4
1987 5
1999 6
2011 7
2022 8
2035* 9
Famine is widespread. Just in the last few weeks 100s of thousands have been affected by weather disasters. Global warming and its resultant weather extremes are affecting the food supply. Time to pay attention.
Why? Renewables increase but only to offset desalination plants and other tech fixes for tourism and golf courses or keep on living in deserts or climate impacted places It’s not me that needs to pay attention but the masses who endlessly fly and deny there’s anything wrong.
21,000 desalination plants already and growing no doubt. Your ideas on birth rates is plain strange co sundering yes it’s growing presently but falling in many other places.
I am amazed that 1.5C is all but gone and 2C too by the looks of it. Tech fixes bound even to the point of AI can help with solving climate change whilst consuming huge resources in the mean time.
Tell me you have a plan
population data are facts, not opinion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth
The point is that in the 20th century we went from 2 to 8 billion. It’s fact, not ‘idea’. This is more than the carrying capacity of our finite planet. It is in the process of overcoming its apex predator, which has no respect for limits and infinite respect for self indulgence.
You and I share shock/horror at inaction: we’ve known what we need to know since early 1980s if not earlier. But my only possible ‘plan’ – aka, what I can do – is to do what is within my remit (relatively little) to remove liars/bullies/predators from office and support those who will act on our behalf (my senators are Liz Warren and Ed Markey, whose knowledge and actions on climate are a matter of record).
Because if you do not pay attention, you will miss the spectacle of Earth’s 6th mass extinction event. We do not know how it will play out–which species will live and which will die, which ecosystems will by forever altered or what the planet will look like on the other side. We don’t know whether we’ll be one of the species to make it or whether this whole “intelligent-life” experiment will ultimately be a failure.
Me, I’m betting on the latter. Humans had a chance to avoid the worst effects of the multiple crises impinging on our existence. We still have a chance to preserve enough of the world that it may be recognizable to our progeny as something resembling our descriptions. We could pull things out. But we won’t. Ultimately, we just aren’t smart enough to act unless the threat is bearing down on us like a freight train.
Whether or not climate change is the cause of our demise, my ghost will be very surprised if humans are still around in a few thousand years. 99% of all species that ever lived are extinct. I don’t see enough data to swing that prior probability in our favor.
Ray Ladbury @13 Feb 2026 at 3:21 PM
RL: “Ultimately, we just aren’t smart enough to act unless the threat is bearing down on us like a freight train.”
Extremely good interview from NPR that shows part of the predicament we are in: Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert argues that humans are exquisitely adapted to respond to immediate problems, such as terrorism, but not so good at more probable, but distant dangers, like global warming. He talks about his op-ed piece which appeared in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.
NEAL CONAN, host:
In an op-ed in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues that human brains are adapted to respond to some threats more than to others. For example, he says, we take alarm at terrorism, but much less to global warming, even though the odds of a disgruntled shoe bomber attacking our plane are, he claims, far longer than the chances of the ocean swallowing parts of Manhattan.
And the reason is biology, the human brain evolved to respond to immediate threats but may completely miss more gradual warning signs. If you have questions about how and why our brains got wired this way or about its implications, 800-989-8255, or e-mail us, talk@npr.org.
Daniel Gilbert is a professor of psychology at Harvard University, author of the book Stumbling On Happiness. You can link to his op-ed and to all previous Opinion Pages at the TALK OF THE NATION page at npr.org.
Daniel Gilbert joins us now from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nice to have you on the program today.
Professor DANIEL GILBERT (Psychology, Harvard University): Thanks so much for having me.
CONAN: Now, you say that we need to put a threat, a face on a threat, in order to truly perceive it.
Prof. GILBERT: Well, that’s true. I mean, you know, look, if alien scientists were trying to design something to exterminate our race, they would know that the best offense is one that does not trigger any defense. And so they would never send little green men in spaceships. Instead, they would invent climate change, because climate change has four properties that allow it to get in under the brain’s radar, if you will.
There are four things about it that fail to trigger the defensive system that so many other threats in our environment do trigger.
CONAN: As you point out in your piece, our brains are exquisitely tuned to, if we see a baseball coming at our head, get out of the way.
Prof. GILBERT: Exactly so. So that’s one of the features of climate change that makes it such an insidious threat, is that it’s long-term. It’s not something that threatens us this afternoon, but rather something that threatens us in the ensuing decades. Human beings are very good at getting out of the way of a speeding baseball. Godzilla comes running down the street, we know to run the other way. We’re very good at clear and present danger, like every mammal is. That’s why we’ve survived as long as we have.
But we’ve learned a new trick in the last couple of million years – at least we’ve kind of learned it. Our brains, unlike the brains of almost every other species, are prepared to treat the future as if it were the present. We can look ahead to our retirements or to a dental appointment, and we can take action today to save for retirement or to floss so that we don’t get bad news six months down the line. But we’re just learning this trick. It’s really a very new adaptation in the animal kingdom and we don’t do it all that well. We don’t respond to long-term threats with nearly as much vigor and venom as we do to clear and present dangers.
CONAN: So a lot of us thought evolution would reduce us to four toes or maybe four fingers. You say what it in fact has meant is that we’ve developed delayed gratification.
Prof. GILBERT: Well, yes indeed. I mean, evolution has optimized our brain for the Pleistocene. I mean, you’d be, you know, if we put you back three million years, you’re going to be the most adapted animal walking the earth. The problem is that our environment has changed so rapidly because we’ve got this great big brain so we could navigate our ancestral environment, and lo and behold, what did we do? We created an entirely new environment to which our brain is not perfectly adapted.
CONAN: We’re talking with Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University, on the TALK OF THE NATION Opinion Page. If you’d like to join us, 800-989-8255, e-mail, talk@npr.org. And this is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
Another requirement for that human response, that triggered response, is some sort of moral outrage, you say.
Prof. GILBERT: You’re right. And so I started by saying there were four, and then I talked about one, so what are the other three? The other three are, A) the source of the threat should be human rather than inanimate; B) there should be a moral component; C) as we just talked about, it should be short-term rather than long-term; and D) if you want the human brain to respond, you really want to make sure that the threat is sudden rather than gradual.
So you asked about the moral component. There’s a lot of energy these days in our Congress, and indeed in our nation, devoted to what really our strictly moral issues. There’s very little doubt that many people will be injured by burning flags or gay sex, and yet we are up in arms about flag burning and gay marriage. And the reason is that these offend many people at the moral level. We’re very good at taking umbrage. We’re just not very good at taking action against things that don’t create – that don’t arouse moral emotions. And you know, climate change just doesn’t.
As I say in my essay, if, you know, if eating, if the practice of eating kittens were the thing responsible for climate change, we’d have people massing in the street in protest right now, because eating kittens is such a morally reprehensible action.
CONAN: Yet we see things like, obviously a terrorist attack, a human action, really centers everybody’s attention. Tens of thousands of people die on American highways every year and nobody notices.
Prof. GILBERT: Well, you’re exactly right. I mean, one of the things that the human brain is specialized for is other human beings. They are the greatest source of reward and punishment in most of our environments. We’re a highly social mammal, and our brains are awfully good at looking for, thinking about, and remembering any sign of other people and their plans and their intentions. That’s why we see faces in the clouds but we never see clouds in peoples’ faces. If you play people white noise for long enough, they begin to hear voices in it. But they never hear white noise in voices.
So we’re looking. It’s as if the brain is tuned in to the signal of other human action. And that’s why when other people do things to us, we’re very, very quick to respond. We respond to terrorism with unrestrained venom and with great force, just as our ancestors would have responded to, you know, a man with a big stick. The problem is climate change doesn’t have a human face. It’s not an Iraqi with a big mustache. It’s not somebody we can villainize. It’s not a man with a box cutter. And so if there’s no one to vilify, there’s no face to put it to, it’s hard for human beings to get very excited about it.
CONAN: Let’s get a call in from Guillermo, Guillermo calling from Raleigh, North Carolina.
GUILLERMO (Caller): Hi.
CONAN: Hi.
GUILLERMO: I guess my point is similar along the lines – somewhere along the way in school I heard a story basically along the lines of more complex issues humans don’t process that well yet. So, for example, if a person had to hear all of the news events that occurred on the planet earth in a single day, your brain wouldn’t be able to take it. And I just wanted him to see if there’s any truth in this, or…
CONAN: Does quality relate to our quality of alarm?
Prof. GILBERT: Well, you bet it does. I mean, climate change in some ways is a very simple issue. But those who profit from not taking action against global warming have turned it into a complicated issue. Why have the opponents – and believe it or not, there are opponents of action against global warming – why are the opponents turning it into a complicated issue? Well, as our caller well knows, if we can make this complicated, enough people will throw up their hands and say, you know, scientists, they all disagree. Who knows what we can really do about this?
You know what? Scientists don’t disagree about this, and what we can do is very, very clear.
CONAN: Scientists don’t necessarily agree on the cause of it. They do agree that it’s happening. Anyway, Guillermo, thanks very much for the call.
GUILLERMO: Thank you very much.
Prof. GILBERT: Well, scientists agree to an enormous extent on the cause of it. You know, it’s interesting, when you look at scientific articles on global warming, there’s enormous consensus. When you look at news articles on global warming, about half of them mention that there isn’t much consensus. It really just isn’t so. Scientists are in vast agreement about the causes of global warming, as much as they’re in agreement about the dangers of cigarette smoking. You could say scientists don’t all agree, and I’m sure there’s somebody out there who’s still saying it doesn’t cause cancer, but by and large…
CONAN: So there you have an evil human face you can put on this. Those who are dastardly working towards profit 50 years hence.
Prof. GILBERT: You see, that’s how I’m getting myself to respond.
CONAN: Thanks very much for being with us, Daniel Gilbert. We appreciate your time today.
Prof. GILBERT: My pleasure. Thanks.
CONAN: Daniel Gilbert’s op-ed was this week in the Los Angeles Times. It’s Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Threats.
Again, if you’d like to read the piece, there’s a link to it at our webpage. Just go to npr.org and go to the TALK OF THE NATION page. Also there, all of the other previous Opinion Pages on TALK OF THE NATION.
I’m Neal Conan. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News, in Washington.
Copyright © 2006 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at http://www.npr.org for further information.
https://www.npr.org/2006/07/03/5530483/humans-wired-to-respond-to-short-term-problems
“Most of us will be dead by the time disaster strikes”
Think about this one: Has there ever been a more “ME, ME, ME” statement ever published here? I don’t think so.
True regardless of sentiment
And some of the rest will be dead because the disaster strikes?
From I can see the world turns to technology solutions such as in Perth, WA. Rainfall fell significantly over the past 50 years so now it uses 2 large scale desalination plants and is building a third. Ground water has been affected so it is refilling them with treated water etc due to desalination. Growing food using green hiusrs to reduce water usage etc. it’s a city of 2.1 million growing to 3.5 and technology is the answer for the Aussies.
Spain has water problems and is becoming note arid but it now has 770 desalination plants providing water. Israel has advanced desalination and invented drip water irrigation etc
Humans appears to be relying on technology more and more to combat large populations living in worsening areas
As far as I can tell, the two desalination plants (and the third one being built) in Perth in Western Australia supply drinking water to reduce the draw on groundwater (and stream water).
https://www.watercorporation.com.au/our-water/desalination
There is groundwater recharge being done, but it uses treated wastewater, some of which will have come from desalination, but it’s been used for other purposes on its way to recharge the aquifer.
https://www.watercorporation.com.au/our-water/groundwater/groundwater-replenishment
yesx indeed but as I have stated it is used becuase they have already had significant reduction in rainfall and hence natural water availability has crashed. yes they have technological solutions such as wastewater treatment to put into aquifers and expansing one desalination and building a new one and attemopting to power them by renewables. Popualtion set to increase from 2.1 to 3.5 million. WA is wealth from minerals so ity can afford its solutions.
Saudi Arabia has built pipelines underground and uses significant desalination via oil usage to pump it around for its 37 million inhabinatants growing to 50 million come 2060 etc. Large scale renewables are propsed too to power a lot of it and upgrades to reverse osmosis desalination plants reduces energy consumption.
Spain uses desalination from 770 plants in its water supply for agriculture and other things.
Mediterreanean isalnds are deploying desalination and North Africa too – Egypt, Morocco, Algeria all expanding it.
Even south California considering it in order to give up its colorado river share due to lake Powell and Mead issues with rapidly shrinking reserves.
Simple fact is that in the face of climate change (and over usage of aquifers), desalination is now considered necessary.
This article very much addresses an issue I brought up some time ago, that of tipping points, what they are, what they mean, and where we are with them. It does seem that some want to minimize them because maybe having them pass doesn’t lead to a sudden change in conditions. I think this article addresses what they really mean.
Than thought by whom, exactly? Some have realized the danger long ago. Can we revise such statements to “…than thought by folks who seem to have poor risk analysis skills?”
Not really, When I discussed this on this forum some months ago, I was directed by some of the regulars to this post: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/07/runaway-tipping-points-of-no-return/
by Gavin.
A quote from early in that post is: “The idea is that in many non-linear systems (of which the climate is certainly one), a small push away from one state only has small effects at first but at some ‘tipping point’ the system can flip and go rapidly into another state.”
The concept that passing a tipping point creates a state change in our climate is the point of contention. As opposed to a tipping point being a point where some system switches from being a carbon sink to a carbon source but without any significant short term impact or the broader human society. For me, this debate related very much to the report that the entire cryosphere had likely made this switch due to the contribution of wildfire to existing permafrost melt. Defining the exact tipping point is difficult, nonetheless, nothing will suddenly change right after that happens.
My point here had to do with how the referenced article addressed tipping points.
Reply to Dean Myerson
1) Killian wasn’t speaking to or about your comment Dean.
2) It’s not wise to rely upon resident tips nor on Gavin’s 2006 article about “Tipping points” if you are seeking genuine climate science insights. Because as his conclusion emphasised what the whole article was about > “Much of the discussion about tipping points, like the discussion about …blah blah blah
3) ie “internet and media discussions” not the actual science based understanding of what what “tipping points entail epistemically, then or 20 years later now.
4) Amateur “journalists” even with PhDs in science not be relied upon when they are a) out of their depth, and b) incorrectly conflating “tipping points” with “points of no return” which is not very scientific, or relevant to anything.
5) But that’s what Gavin prefers to focus on for +20 years > the “discussions” and not the hard science explanations. The later is too hard.
I encourage you to seek better qualified expert sources to explain the climate science, the jargon and the reasoning behind it. In particular it’s limitations and uncertainties vs Risk Factors assuming things are better than they really are because someone said the “models said so”.
Remember too that Leopards can’t change their spots.
Let me do respond to Dean. Dean, a few months ago? Dude, I’ve been emphasizing them here for, goodness, is it fifteen years or so by now? Chaos is an important part of my analytical tool kit, and it is vastly under-applied. Yes, it is discussed in terms of the tipping points themselves, but little else. Chaos science applies to EVERYTHING, and if you can see the chaotic patterns playing out, then you can say something like, “Uh… sensitivity must be higher than 3C, likely at least 4C…” way back before 2009.
It applies to all parts of the Perfect Storm, as I sometimes call this deadly mess we have created. There is nothing it doesn’t. Even if one accepts Gavin’s claim of some years back that climate is not chaotic, that leaves out THE driver of Climate Change: Us. And we absolutely are chaotic. Ergo, so is Climate Change – even if the actual physics are not.
So, great, do rage on about Chaos. Good to have another here doing so.
So I asked ChatGPT to compare its energy consumption for an instance of my paid subscription use with the energy consumption that would result if I did all the online searching, reading/analysis, and writing myself. Its response was long and included a lot of related subjects, like model training vs duplication of human effort, etc. I won’t post the whole response. I suspect that this subject is one where ChatGPT has been “trained” with information favorable to the AI sector, but it did leave me with a takeaway that I think is good:
ChatGPT: If it’s useful in your debate, the clean takeaway line is often:
A substantial AI answer likely uses roughly the same energy as 30–90 minutes of normal web research — sometimes less — while avoiding massive duplication of human effort.
I am getting a bit too comfortable with ChatGPT. It is fascinating using it to learn about astrophysics and the causes of blocked weather patterns bringing sustained miserable weather to the UK at the moment. It even constructed a brillant outline for a talk about climate change should I have the opportunity of giving one, with emphasis on presenting it as an objective risk management issue regarding non-linear tipping points which gets the facts across whilst minimising the risk of antagonising people.
MS (an AI quoted): A substantial AI answer likely uses roughly the same energy as 30–90 minutes of normal web research — sometimes less — while avoiding massive duplication of human effort.
BPL: Then why are they building separate data centers with their own power plants?
BPL: Then why are they building separate data centers with their own power plants?
MS: Because there are billions of short answers generated for questions from free system users.
As many of you are aware, President Trump will be cancelling global warming today, February 12, 2026.
https://www.telegraphherald.com/news/national_world/article_19b4bd7c-a8d4-46fa-bf73-527c7817e9d9.html
It’s true. CO2 will no longer be an issue. You can all breath easy with no guilt about exhaling CO2. The earth has taken note and is in full compliance with Trump’s orders:
NYC Mayor Mamdami says it’s been colder in NYC than in Antarctica, and the death toll from the cold is now at least 18:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mV0BL2Dy5Rw
It’s one of the longest cold streaks for NYC since 1963:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9g8nxdexko
How cold is it? It’s so cold that reptiles are falling from the trees in Florida:
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/c23rd925knxo
Many cold temperature records were broken in Florida:
https://weather.com/forecast/regional/news/2026-01-29-florida-record-cold-southeast-mid-atlantic-cold-streak
Heavy snow blanketed the east coast. Even southerly North Carolina got up to 15″ during the storm:
https://www.qcnews.com/weather/winter-weather/historic-snowfall-hits-charlotte-latest-totals-across-the-region/
The cold was not isolated to the NE USA. Europe was so cold that Estonians are now driving to islands out in the sea! I’m not that brave, but this could be a benefit to Trump’s cancellation of global warming – essentially free highways:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/10/estonia-ice-road-frozen-sea-saaremaa-hiiumaa
Just as we saw with the border invasion, all we needed to stop that and global warming was a new president. Whodathunkit?
:)
A. How convenient of you to completely ignore the record heat in the western US. Flaunting your ignorance once again.
B.
The global surface temperature was the fifth-warmest January on record—the smallest temperature departure since 2023.
Snow cover extent was below average for North America and near average for Eurasia.
Sea ice extent was near record low for the Arctic and below average for Antarctica.
Global tropical cyclone activity was above normal with 11 named storms.
See (but of course you wont because that would involve learning, something you do not do): https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202601?fbclid=IwY2xjawP6pnFleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETE5eFZsYms1YllQaEVGcncwc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHv0D7AykF_QZC_ZkdAwUHx3ojeUJrCsv_V1OyUaIBH4uEAWzb4LHIUnLDe1N_aem_AppyJiPpr9bdqm0MPopbfQ
So stop lying. Who made you think that cherrypicking the only two areas in the world that were cooler proves your point? See the map, sport. Busted. Again.
Couple of links to NYTimes announcement of the dangerous cancellation of the endangerment finding:
What to Know About the E.P.A.’s Big Attack on Climate Regulation. The Trump administration has repealed the scientific determination that underpins the government’s legal authority to combat climate change.
https://archive.ph/GrAvM
Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change. The Environmental Protection Agency repealed the bedrock scientific finding that says greenhouse gases threaten human life and well being. It means the agency can no longer regulate them.
https://archive.ph/a1gnl
There’s a brief claim that things got better due to climate action in the middle of one of these. I found that suspect. I think scientists know and have been communicating that things are getting worse. Please don’t use this as an excuse to endlessly argue about how much. We know it’s bad, and those outside the choir need to understand the massive agreement amongst those who understand the issues rather than the exploitable differences in detail.
“How cold is it? It’s so cold that reptiles are falling from the trees in Florida:”
This past summer, it was so hot that dead monkeys were falling from trees in Central America.
“Now that we know the risks why are we so determined”. Because there is no “we”. That’s why I’ve had little interest in Life things since pondering that in 1961. Only interest in physical reality things, because it’s interesting.
Mr. KFA “You can all breath easy”. Whew! I been holding my breath for decades waiting for the bods who Own & Operate the Universe to finally announce that.
KIA: It’s true. CO2 will no longer be an issue. You can all breath easy with no guilt about exhaling CO2. The earth has taken note and is in full compliance with Trump’s orders
BPL: This is a parody, right? Because you can’t possibly be stupid enough to believe this.
Oh, no. He can. A cautionary tale folks–what a lifetime of watching Faux News can do to your brain.
And whether he really believes it or not, he is still sanguine enough in his ignorance to think there is something remotely funny about a demented troll ruling the most powerful country on Earth.
I can never quite work out whether KIA is dumber than a rock, or just likes deliberately annoying people. But there are more important things to consider so I will assume its a combination of both.
Next in line, he will declare that the Laws of Trump replace the Laws of Physics, at least within the United States of Trump. \s
The saddest and most shocking and depressing thing is about 50% of Americans will probably be quite happy with the new laws, and will genuinely believe Trump knows better.
If its any consolation, Trump in the next few years will oversee a crisis in native crude due to the limited reserves of shale. If not Trump, it would be Kamala to get the blame. Check out Dennis Coyne’s POB blog.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news-and-media/media-centre/weather-and-climate-news/2025/machine-learning-model-demonstrates-promising-seasonal-forecasting-capability
The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)’s ML model, known as ACE2, is used by the UK MET office
I do like 80 different models here including NAO, with comparable or better correlation scores:
https://github.com/pukpr/GEM-LTE
This is not machine learning in the same fashion; this is optimizing for the correct physics by training on intervals that are not tested/validated.
PPukite: weather forecasting and any work requiring vast data processing capabilities are supercomputing strengths. I don’t think anyone can (or mostly does) dispute this.
I thought I read that Venezuela, a wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary, had vast reserves that U.S. Corporations had barely tapped yet, but I never studied that, not much interest in wealth, so I’m lazy on it and fully ready to be schooled and learn.
Work smart, not hard. Gazillions of supercomputer cycles are wasted by continually going down dead end paths. Geophysics still holds surprises. The following repo holds a fundamental, yet surprisingly basic, reappraisal of the mechanism that drives the Earth’s Chandler wobble:
https://github.com/pukpr/chandlerwobble
And of course it has implications for climate science since this is all part of foundational geophysics and the forces and hidden factors that drive natural climate cycles. There’s nothing new here apart from aspects of physics that consensus science is overlooking. What’s revealing in all this is how LLM can take on aspects of peer-review that aren’t part of conventional wisdom – whereas a human peer-reviewer sticks to the consensus on the closed-world view of a specific discipline, an LLM will also stick to a consensus, but that’s the consensus of correct physics which could be independent of the biases and narrow viewpoints constraining what can be considered. Peer-review is entering a new dimension with this capability,
As to the crude-oil situation, geology is in the same position as geophysics. Just look at it from a bean-counting perspective. The arc has always been there but no one receives a paycheck for the analysis.
Nj: nope. More like 30%. Max 39% in polls. Most recent special elections show a shift in voting of 30%. (Mamdani/NJ/VA was 15%; Texas/Louisiana were 20%, but it’s up since then.)
And as long as I’m here, Trump is not intelligent. He’s street smart up to a point. He knows camera angles like nobody’s business. He’s good at getting away with stuff. He knows how to appeal to people’s lowest selves. He’s good at threats, lies, bullying, cheating, grabbing. He’s a shakedown artist. He dislikes nature. He doesn’t think, reflect, or learn, except to gain advantage.
Mkia, imagine a big swamp cooler full of ice sitting in the sun. As long as there’s ice, it melts and soaks up heat, so the air blowing into the house is cool or even cold.
As time goes by and temperatures slowly increase – on earth because of the addition of co2 – the ice melts faster, but while it’s melting it still holds the temperature down inside the house, sometimes, again, even keeping it cold. Once all the ice is gone, however, the cooler is just a dark, sun‑soaked box, and now it actually helps heat the air up—so the house gets warmer, and it does so faster than when there was still ice in the cooler. On Earth it’s even faster, because when the ice is gone the bright, sun reflective surface (albedo) is lost and darker ground and ocean absorb more sunlight.
So is the earth getting hotter? The melting global ice is your clue. Keep your eyes on that.
https://midmiocene.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/a-global-warning/
This is a simplified example and someone else can make it more precise, but I think it is essentially correct
Anyone who uses ChatGPT to compose their responses has an overwhelming advantage. It creates extended volume which clutters up the place. It persuades people not to think for themselves. It persuades people it is inerrant. It persuades people it has a life outside switches and power sources.
It does its master’s bidding. It has resulted in vast reopening of dirty energy, though cryptocurrency started that rot.
I can’t even …
I will continue to post some of the massive information coming in about community and energy abuse driving this delusion. Here’s one:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/no-ai-doesnt-justify-lower-interest
“And while the productivity payoff from AI is still speculative, massive capital expenditure driven by AI dreams is already happening, on a scale that raises questions about where the money (not to mention the electricity and the chips) will come from.
“So no, AI doesn’t justify interest rate cuts, and certainly not the huge cuts Trump demands.
“And the alacrity with which Trump officials have jumped on the argument that the Fed should slash rates because of AI is troubling for reasons that go beyond the fact that they’re wrong. Consider how this argument became popular in Trumpworld. Did Bessent, or Warsh, or Miran carefully consider the evidence, and advocate an interest-rate policy based on what that evidence showed? Of course not. Their boss wants to slash interest rates, so they went looking for plausible-sounding economic arguments that might rationalize his whims.
“So am I saying that the argument that AI justifies rate cuts is dishonest, that AI has become the last refuge of scoundrels? Why yes, I am.“
Both GISTEMP & NOAA have reported for January, as has Copernicus ERA5 re-analysis.
No great revelations. All put Jan 2026 as the 5th warmest on record. And bar the 2007 ranking slipping a tad in NOAA, the top-ten warmest Jan rankings are the same in all three.
Top-ten warmest Januarys for GISTEMP (NOAA) & ERA5
2025 … …+1.59°C … … (2025 … …+1.52°C) … … 2025 … …+1.75°C
2024 … …+1.46°C … … (2024 … …+1.51°C) … … 2024 … …+1.66°C
2020 … …+1.39°C … … (2020 … …+1.39°C) … … 2020 … …+1.54°C
2016 … …+1.39°C … … (2016 … …+1.37°C) … … 2016 … …+1.51°C
2026 … …+1.29°C … … (2026 … …+1.33°C) … … 2026 … …+1.47°C
2017 … …+1.23°C … … (2017 … …+1.25°C) … … 2017 … …+1.36°C
2007 … …+ 1.23°C … … (2019 … …+1.16°C) … … 2007 … …+1.32°C
2019 … …+1.14°C … … (2022 … …+1.14°C) … … 2019 … …+1.24°C
2022 … …+1.12°C … … (2007 … …+1.10°C) … … 2022 … …+1.24°C
2023 … …+1.09°C … … (2023 … …+1.10°C) … … 2023 … …+1.21°C
(Anomaly bases NOAA & ERA5 – 1850-1900, GISTEMP – 1880-1920)
Note that ERA5 is measuring SAT not SAT/SST, so you’d expect to see more differences appearing with ERA5.
There are quite a few nerdy weeds if folk feel the urge to go getting bogged-down in detail. One nerdy point concerns the 12-month rolling averages. It may be worth mentioning as it concerns 12-month averages of GISTEMP, the measure used in Hansen’s predictions which do get discussed here at RC UV threads.
While the ERA5 SAT record could be forgiven for a bit of divergence, there had been quite a big difference growing between NOAA & GISTEMP. Maybe it’s a coverage thing as they both start off with the same data so any difference would otherwise be expected to be small (as with HadCRUT & BEST). But a growing variance has been persisting for a while.
Plotting these various 12-month averages with the anomaly base fixed at the 2022 average, (HERE – Posted 12th February 2026), GISTEMP shows a peak anomaly significantly warmer than NOAA and followed this with (so far) significantly less cooling.
This had resulted in a growing gap (reaching +0.053°C) between GISTEMP & NOAA but the last couple of months perhaps is showing the gap beginning to shrink.
The cooling for all these surface temp series is roughly 0.02°C/month.
Quick flyby to say “Hi!” to all and to again say “Thank You!” to the scientists and everyone behind Real Climate for what it continues to represent on this stark day here in the Dark Ages that our federal government is trying to bring down on us silly citizens where science and scientific practice is concerned. EPA’s announcement today was expected of course, yet in a way, it’s still leaves me shaking my head in amazement.
Well, back to the salt mines. I extend best wishes to all. Hope to have more time soon :-)
in Re to David, 12 Feb 2026 at 4:57 PM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/02/unforced-variations-feb-2026/#comment-845048
Hallo David,
I also hope that you find a while for commenting on Real Climate again.
Greetings
Tomáš
Recent observationally constrained estimates suggest an accelerated warming rate over the past decade (e.g., Forster et al. 2025; Hansen et al. 2026), driven by high GHG emissions combined with declining aerosol cooling and emerging feedbacks. Using these constraints, I explored a heuristic high-end warming trajectory intended as an illustrative scenario rather than a deterministic forecast.
Independent assessment by the German Physical Society (DPG) and German Meteorological Society (DMG) highlights similar upper-range outcomes, estimating 2–3 °C by 2050 and 4–5 °C by 2100 relative to pre-industrial levels, reinforcing the plausibility of a high-end warming pathway consistent with heuristic projections based on Hansen et al. (2026) and Forster et al. (2025).
My GMST anomaly projections are based on the observed accelerating warming trend to 2025, coupled with established physical understanding in climate science, and are framed as a constrained scenario construction under conditional socio-ecological and geopolitical assumptions rather than a deterministic prediction, reflecting a synthesis across physical climate dynamics and political–economic system behavior.
The scenario assumes that anthropogenic carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) interventions remain negligible in net impact on global forcing over the projection period, and that global mitigation efforts are unlikely to achieve Net Zero emissions or fully meet Paris Agreement targets.
Continued anthropogenic forcing growth is assumed through the 2030s, followed by increasing geopolitical fragmentation and potential erosion of coordinated international mitigation frameworks. Reduced fossil fuel combustion could plausibly be partially offset by declining aerosol cooling, widespread biosphere degradation (including large-scale forest loss and wildfire emissions), weakening land and ocean carbon sinks, and potential reversion to higher-carbon fuels under geopolitical stress. Under such conditions, net radiative forcing could continue to accelerate, with Earth-system feedbacks increasingly dominant after mid-century.
A smooth illustrative trajectory consistent with recent observational constraints yields approximately ~1.7 °C by the mid-2030s, ~2 °C around the early 2040s, ~2.3–2.5 °C by 2050, ~3.1–3.6 °C by 2075, and ~4.3–5 °C by 2100 (relative to 1850–1900). This places the pathway in the upper tail of CMIP6 outcomes but within plausible physical bounds given current forcing trends and feedback uncertainties.
Illustrative High-End GMST Trajectory (Scenario-Based)
2015–2025 Decadal GMST Anomaly ~1.30 °C (range ~1.25–1.35 °C)
(Estimated warming rate ~0.25–0.40 °C per decade)
Current short-term GMST Anomaly ~1.50 °C (range ~1.45–1.55 °C)
(Short-term variability elevated warming rate ~0.35–0.45 °C per decade)
By 2035 Decadal GMST Anomaly ~1.72 °C (range ~1.65–1.80 °C)
(Estimated forced warming rate ~0.25–0.35 °C per decade)
By ~2042 2 °C Paris threshold likely reached 2040–2043 (range ~1.9–2.1 °C)
By 2050 Decadal GMST Anomaly ~2.35 °C (range ~2.20–2.50 °C)
(Estimated rate ~0.35–0.45 °C per decade)
By 2075 Decadal GMST Anomaly ~3.35 °C (range ~3.10–3.60 °C)
(Estimated rate ~0.40–0.50 °C per decade)
By 2100 Decadal GMST Anomaly ~4.65 °C (range ~4.30–4.95 °C)
(Estimated rate ~0.45–0.55 °C per decade)
The trajectory is illustrative and uses a smooth accelerating heuristic fit constrained by recent observational warming rates and plausible late-century high-end forcing outcomes, rather than a formal Earth-system model.
The main mechanisms that could substantially slow such a trajectory would be either an unprecedented coordinated global decarbonisation effort, or large-scale systemic disruption of industrial activity, energy production, and trade flows beyond historical precedents (e.g., world war-scale disruptions).
Fair warning to folks: the sockpuppet willfully misrepresents warming projections and peer-reviewed sources, including Forster et al. 2025. So the sockpuppet account should not be trusted on those topics.
Atomsk’s Sanakan says 13 Feb 2026 at 12:53 PM
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/02/unforced-variations-feb-2026/#comment-845088
Yes good question – Who willfully misrepresents warming projections and peer-reviewed sources?
Was it Data, or Dessler or A’sS who told us that Climate Scientists can predict the Temperature in a Century from today?
What I do know for certain is that both Dick Tracey and Atomsk’s Sanakan are like ‘cartoon characters’ neither of whom can be trusted to tell the truth.
Quote Ref: 1:01:53 “The physical system runs on rails. Okay? And that’s why we can predict the temperature in 100 years.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTYLswTEVS8&t=3660s
Examples of the questions the sockpuppet dodges in bad faith:
The sockpuppet dodges those questions because the answers to the questions expose the sockpuppet’s disinformation.
D: both Dick Tracey and Atomsk’s Sanakan are like ‘cartoon characters’ neither of whom can be trusted to tell the truth.
BPL: Physician, heal thyself.
Reply to Data
By ~2042 2 °C Paris threshold likely reached 2040–2043 (range ~1.9–2.1 °C)
By 2100 Decadal GMST Anomaly ~4.65 °C (range ~4.30–4.95 °C)
(Estimated rate ~0.45–0.55 °C per decade)
Point of no return: a hellish ‘hothouse Earth’ getting closer, scientists say–Continued global heating could set irreversible course by triggering climate tipping points, but most people unaware of this from
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/11/point-of-no-return-hothouse-earth-global-heating-climate-tipping-points
Prof Tim Lenton, an expert on tipping points at the University of Exeter in the UK, said: “We know we are running profound risks on the current climate trajectory, which we can’t rule out could turn into a trajectory towards a much less habitable state of the climate for us. However, we don’t need to be heading towards a hothouse Earth for there to be profound risks to humanity and our societies – these will already be upon us if we continue to 3C global warming.”
The assessment, which was published in the journal One Earth, synthesised recent scientific findings on climate feedback loops and 16 tipping elements. The tipping elements include the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, mountain glaciers, polar sea ice, sub-Arctic forests and permafrost, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), a system of ocean currents that strongly influences the global climate.
https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322%2825%2900391-4
Tipping may already be happening in Greenland and west Antarctica, with permafrost, mountain glaciers and the Amazon rainforest appearing to be on the verge, the scientists said.
“Research shows that several Earth system components may be closer to destabilising than once believed,” they concluded. “While the exact risk is uncertain, it is clear that current climate [action] commitments are insufficient.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/greenland-ice-sheet-on-brink-of-major-tipping-point-says-study
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/23/rapid-ice-melt-in-west-antarctica-now-inevitable-research-shows
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2025/jun/26/tippping-points-amazon-rainforest-climate-scientist-carlos-nobre
https://global-tipping-points.org/
Prof William Ripple, at Oregon State University, US, who led the analysis, said: “The Amoc is already showing signs of weakening, and this could increase the risk of Amazon dieback. Carbon released by an Amazon dieback would further amplify global warming and interact with other feedback loops. We need to act quickly on our rapidly dwindling opportunities to prevent dangerous and unmanageable climate outcomes.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/28/collapse-critical-atlantic-current-amoc-no-longer-low-likelihood-study
Scientists warned in 2018 of the prospect of a hothouse Earth. In this scenario, global temperature stays significantly above the 4C rise of current worst-case climate scenarios for thousands of years, driving a huge rise in sea level that drowns coastal cities. The scientists said then that the “impacts of a hothouse Earth pathway on human societies would likely be massive, sometimes abrupt, and undoubtedly disruptive”.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1810141115
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/06/domino-effect-of-climate-events-could-push-earth-into-a-hothouse-state
The 2025 state of the climate report: a planet on the brink
William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf , Michael E. Mann, Johan Rockström, Jillian W. Gregg, Chi Xu, Nico Wunderling, Sarah E. Perkins-Kirkpatrick, Roberto Schaeffer , Wendy J. Broadgate, Thomas M. Newsome, Emily Shuckburgh and Peter H. Gleic
Introduction:
We are hurtling toward climate chaos. The planet’s vital signs are
flashing red. The consequences of human-driven alterations of
the climate are no longer future threats but are here now. This
unfolding emergency stems from failed foresight, political inac-
tion, unsustainable economic systems, and misinformation. Al-
most every corner of the biosphere is reeling from intensifying
heat, storms, floods, droughts, or fires. The window to prevent the
worst outcomes is rapidly closing. In early 2025, the World Mete-
orological Organization reported that 2024 was the hottest year
on record (WMO 2025a). This was likely hotter than the peak of
the last interglacial, roughly 125,000 years ago (Gulev et al. 2021,
Kaufman and McKay 2022). Rising levels of greenhouse gases re-
main the driving force behind this escalation. These recent de-
velopments emphasize the extreme insufficiency of global efforts
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mark the beginning of a
grim new chapter for life on Earth.
https://michaelmann.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/RippleEtAlBioscience2025.pdf
Just a quick comment without reading the Data analysis so I’m likely irrelevant to it, As I previously noted sans detail, Leon Simons is contradicting HIMSELF because he uses something like 2012-2024 (I forget) and extends that forward to 2075-2085 (Leon has options) but Leon agrees with JH scientific Team (I think he might be on it) and that Team shows a plot that asserts a huge drop in the aerosol negative Forcing during about that period due to a lagged cloud effect peak not in AR6 that has since plummeted (a large warming Forcing by removal of a large cooling Forcing), I was gonna do measurement & calculation a few weeks back but I’ll not be spending time (personal chore things are becoming Threat Multipliers, Tipping Points) so if you look at the JH scientist lady’s aerosol Forcing plot then Leon is saying humans will keep cleaning up pollution equal to the last couple of decades rate so the air will be back to 1750 CE in another couple of decades and then humans will clean out some Sahara sand, volcanic ash, sea salt & soil the wind blows up to restore glacial period air purity by 2075-2085. This will not happen, Leon states assertively that aerosols reduction effect has recently been huge and then applies that effect (additional to whatever GHG scenario IO suppose RCP 8.5) to Delta-GMST so Leon hugely contradicts himself.
Data: “My GMST anomaly projections…….”
Sounds more like Google Geminis GMST anomaly projections, given the style of language and format.
Yes, this post looks largely AI-generated. Hence why the sockpuppet account evades basic questions on Forster 2025, one of the papers misrepresented in their post:
The sockpuppet’s most recent post can be added as #9 and #10 in the following sequence of events:
There are likely many other instances of the sockpuppet displaying similar behavior across the years they’ve trolled this forum under different names. It’s a pattern of refusing to admit when evidence others cited shows they’re wrong, i.e. denialism. They bide their time across multiple posts in the hopes of later citing that evidence to pretend they were right along.
All my own work. Followed by the same baseless comments N+100 which all belongs in the trash can
A smooth illustrative trajectory consistent with recent observational constraints yields approximately ~1.7 °C by the mid-2030s, ~2 °C around the early 2040s, ~2.3–2.5 °C by 2050, ~3.1–3.6 °C by 2075, and ~4.3–5 °C by 2100 (relative to 1850–1900). This places the pathway in the upper tail of CMIP6 outcomes but within plausible physical bounds given current forcing trends and feedback uncertainties.
Illustrative High-End GMST Trajectory (Scenario-Based)
2015–2025 Decadal GMST Anomaly ~1.30 °C (range ~1.25–1.35 °C)
(Estimated warming rate ~0.25–0.40 °C per decade)
Current short-term GMST Anomaly ~1.50 °C (range ~1.45–1.55 °C)
(Short-term variability elevated warming rate ~0.35–0.45 °C per decade)
By 2035 Decadal GMST Anomaly ~1.72 °C (range ~1.65–1.80 °C)
(Estimated forced warming rate ~0.25–0.35 °C per decade)
By ~2042 2 °C Paris threshold likely reached 2040–2043 (range ~1.9–2.1 °C)
By 2050 Decadal GMST Anomaly ~2.35 °C (range ~2.20–2.50 °C)
(Estimated rate ~0.35–0.45 °C per decade)
By 2075 Decadal GMST Anomaly ~3.35 °C (range ~3.10–3.60 °C)
(Estimated rate ~0.40–0.50 °C per decade)
By 2100 Decadal GMST Anomaly ~4.65 °C (range ~4.30–4.95 °C)
(Estimated rate ~0.45–0.55 °C per decade)
The trajectory is illustrative and uses a smooth accelerating heuristic fit constrained by recent observational warming rates and plausible late-century high-end forcing outcomes, rather than a formal Earth-system model.
The main mechanisms that could substantially slow such a trajectory would be either an unprecedented coordinated global decarbonisation effort, or large-scale systemic disruption of industrial activity, energy production, and trade flows beyond historical precedents (e.g., world war-scale disruptions).
The sockpuppet still evades the questions:
The answers to the questions expose the sockpuppet’s disinformation on warming projections.
Nigelj says 12 Feb 2026 at 11:39 PM
Data: “My GMST anomaly projections…….”
Sounds more like Google Geminis GMST anomaly projections, given the style of language and format.
Data: All my own work. Whereas every day you just sound like a loser.
D: every day you [Nigel] just sound like a loser.
BPL: You don’t exactly sound like a winner yourself.
Barton Paul Levenson says 15 Feb 2026 at 8:25 AM
BPL: You don’t exactly sound like a winner yourself.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/02/unforced-variations-feb-2026/#comment-845196
Oh really? Then you agree about Nigelj. Cool. But ME? I am having ball kicking goals and winning. It’s fells as if I have broken the enigma code. And bonus is having y’all sorted. You’re all just scared and flailing about. I’m running rings around you amateur cub scouts tying yourselves in knots.
It’s easy to do … eg Recent observationally constrained estimates
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/02/unforced-variations-feb-2026/#comment-845058
and
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/02/unforced-variations-feb-2026/#comment-845184
OR HERE
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/02/epas-final-ruling-on-co2/#comment-845136
and
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/02/epas-final-ruling-on-co2/#comment-845172
Back ~2015 onward I had forecast an Arctic Blue Ocean Event (BOE) would likely arrive by 2024 +/- 2 years. Looks like I got that wrong, unless some extraordinary 2012 level events happen this coming spring and summer. No harm done. It’s not like I was an IPCC lead author in the AR3+ saying it wouldn’t happen until the 2090s at the very earliest. So, no need to worry about it or an AMOC Tipping Point this century, right?
My latest curiosity is will GISS outlast Trump’s term? Because it’s looking more unstable than the summer ASI. :-/
Data your problem is you are only scoring goals in your own mind. Most or many of the people here clearly dont agree with your views and these guys have advanced degrees in a variety of disciplines. Your rhetoric doesn’t score goals against us. It only fools morons.
By the way Im no loser. Im retired and worth serious money. What’s your net worth? I seem to recall you saying you struggled to rent a small apartment.
Most of my criticisms of your comments are correct. That’s just the truth whether you like it or not.
D: Then you agree about Nigelj.
BPL: No, obviously I don’t agree about Nigel. What kind of baby response is that? Is “I know you are but what am I?” next? Start acting like a grown-up.
D: I am having ball [sic] kicking goals and winning. It’s fells as if I have broken the enigma code. And bonus is having y’all sorted. You’re all just scared and flailing about. I’m running rings around you amateur cub scouts tying yourselves in knots.
BPL: So you’re admitting you’re a troll? And should be ousted from the site? Man, if it were up to me, you’d have been gone a long time ago.
Re: “I am having ball kicking goals and winning. It’s fells as if I have broken the enigma code. And bonus is having y’all sorted. You’re all just scared and flailing about. I’m running rings around you amateur cub scouts tying yourselves in knots.“
Not really. You’ve repeatedly flailed about to evade questions whose answers expose your disinformation. In that respect you’re like your fellow exaggerator Geoff Miell. Anyone can scroll up the thread to see the questions you’re scared of answering.
EOS has an article about a new Nature paper about continued circulation and water temperatures of the AMOC during the last glacial maximum. It would be interesting to see how the study holds up and affects understanding of AMOC behavior past and likely future.
“The AMOC of the Ice Age Was Warmer Than Once Thought
An analysis of sediment cores indicates that North Atlantic waters were relatively warm and continued to circulate even under major climate stress during the Last Glacial Maximum.”
“A major part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a large-scale ocean circulation pattern, was warmer during the peak of Earth’s last ice age than previously thought, according to a new study published in Nature.
The study’s results contrast with those from previous studies hinting that the North Atlantic was relatively cold and that AMOC was weaker when faced with major climate stress during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), about 19,000–23,000 years ago.
The findings add confidence to models that scientists use to project how AMOC may change in the future as the climate warms, said Jack Wharton, a paleoceanographer at University College London and lead author of the new study.”
Article here:
https://eos.org/articles/the-amoc-of-the-ice-age-was-warmer-than-once-thought/
Just reading up on the reservoirs of Powell and mead and how electricity generation is stated to end by the end of this year if the mega drought since 2000 continues. Is this the first climate disaster scenario playing out for 40 million people living 100 year old laws they’d means 7 states can’t agree on what to do and hence the federal government is going to implement 20% cuts across the board. 70% of the water is used to grow crops for cattle (Saudi Arabia and China cattle feed).
Looks like a dire situation
Back in October 2012, I posted here about the IEO2011 Reference case of “1 trillion metric tons of additional cumulative energy-related carbon dioxide emissions between 2009 and 2035.” That estimate is holding up remarkably well. We’re about 2/3 of the way through the designated period, and fossil-related CO2 emissions since 2009 total around 630 gigatons of CO2, which is around 2/3 of a trillion (see table below). And why is the IEO so predictive? I surmise it’s because they’re adding up fossil carbon plays that are already on the books and have long and predictable lifetimes.
Back then our proximity to RCP8.5 provoked Jon Kirwan to opine that “[until proven otherwise] RCP8.5 is reality.” But now the headline is we’re “only” tracking somewhere between RCP4.5 and RCP2.6, depending on what happens in the next few years. We’ll be fine because all nations are eagerly following USA’s brilliant leadership and cutting their emissions drastically … oh wait that’s some other timeline. In this timeline, emissions were higher last year than any year before, the Keeling curve is still going up, and the ten warmest years on record all occurred in the last decade.
The main purpose of the 2012 posts was to determine “what increase in average global surface temperature relative to pre-industrial would result by 2035?” After jumping through many hoops the conclusion back then was “Depending on the choice of Climate Response Function, the answers are 1.2° (slow), 1.5° (intermediate), or 1.7° (fast). How’s that prediction holding up? Let’s assume developed nations continue to extract and burn fossil carbon while frantically pretending otherwise, a safe bet IMO.
Year GtCo2
2009 34.4
2010 35.6
2011 36.1
2012 36.5
2013 36.7
2014 37.2
2015 37.5
2016 36.8
2017 37.2
2018 37.7
2019 38.3
2020 36.0
2021 38.0
2022 38.2
2023 37.6
2024 37.8
2025 38.1 (projection, GCP)
Total 629.7
Numbers above from Global Carbon Project.
The Jon Kirwan post that launched a thousand ships:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/10/unforced-variations-oct-2012/comment-page-6/#comment-261934
The resulting analysis, perhaps now dated:
https://whorld.org/ck/metadelusion/RCPTemps/RCP-Temps.html
Great post @ Chris Korda says15 Feb 2026 at 3:41 PM
After jumping through many hoops the conclusion back then was “Depending on the choice of Climate Response Function, the answers are 1.2° (slow), 1.5° (intermediate), or 1.7° (fast). How’s that prediction holding up?
Data: Very badly.
My current “best case” minimal conservative temps range >
Illustrative High-End GMST Trajectory (Scenario-Based)
By 2035 Decadal GMST Anomaly ~1.72°C (1.65–1.80°C) (rate ~0.25–0.35°C/dec)
It could easily get worse than that, but unlikely to be any better/lower. Matches Real Climate Data be it the Year GtCo2 since 2009 or GMST Observations or CO2 PPM growth rates or Oil Gas production rates or economic data or ………………..
ref: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/02/unforced-variations-feb-2026/#comment-845058
and
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/02/unforced-variations-feb-2026/#comment-845184
Methods Appendix (Heuristic Curve Construction)
The illustrative trajectory was constructed using a smooth monotonic accelerating fit constrained by recent observationally derived warming rates and long-term high-end forcing outcomes. Anchor points were selected to reflect current GMST estimates (~1.5 °C in the mid-2020s relative to 1850–1900), observationally constrained acceleration implied by recent studies (e.g., Forster et al. 2025; Hansen et al. 2026), and a plausible high-end late-century outcome (~4.5–5 °C by 2100). A quadratic heuristic form was used to represent gradual acceleration in effective climate sensitivity and net forcing over time, consistent with declining aerosol cooling and increasing Earth-system feedback dominance, while avoiding step changes or regime discontinuities.
This approach is intended as a scenario exploration rather than a formal Earth-system model simulation and is designed to remain within physically plausible bounds suggested by recent observational constraints and the upper tail of CMIP6 projections. Parameter choices were selected to avoid exceeding empirically constrained effective climate sensitivity ranges.
It’s best to rely on reputable, peer-reviewed sources like Forster 2025, instead of on non-peer-reviewed disinformation from the sockpuppet account. Otherwise, one might follow the sockpuppet in pretending Forster 2025 is not peer-reviewed, pretending its Climate Change Tracker did not give a point projection of 2.0°C by around 2048 if current warming trends continue, etc.
Chris Korda says: “Agreed that Data’s posts make for tiresome reading.”
Fair enough.
Chris Korda says: “Back then our proximity to RCP8.5 provoked Jon Kirwan to opine that “[until proven otherwise] RCP8.5 is reality.” But now the headline is we’re “only” tracking somewhere between RCP4.5 and RCP2.6, depending on what happens in the next few years. We’ll be fine because all nations are eagerly following USA’s brilliant leadership and cutting their emissions drastically … oh wait that’s some other timeline. In this timeline, emissions were higher last year than any year before, the Keeling curve is still going up, and the ten warmest years on record all occurred in the last decade.”
Xu 2018 likewise used RCP8.5 to project warming. Post-2005 observed forcing is tracking above RCP8.5’s projected forcing, leading to observed warming being above RCP8.5.
Its a personal observation so its just opinion but I have noticed how the denier cohort have changed their use of language. Now instead of more concrete worded objections their new language is more akin to “reconsider” and “open issues”.
I would not presuppose that Scafetta’s work product is biased but having worked with large language models I am reminded of a line of dialog from the film “In Harm’s Way” (1965)
CINCPAC (Henry Fonda) says to staff
“Well, we all know the Navy’s never wrong. But in this case, it was a little weak on bein’ right”
Scafetta (2026)
Detection, attribution, and modeling of climate change: Key open issues
DOI 10.1016/j.gr.2025.05.001
[Response: Published in “Gondwana Research“. – gavin]
Nicola Scafetta’s astoundingly futile work on explaining climate change consists of almost 60 papers describing variations of cycles that he throws against the wall. And like spaghetti, none of them stick.
Kind of a shotgun approach to hitting a target. After awhile no one cares.
I have a preprint idea article, several conference presentations, and one peer-reviewed published work that describes my foundational model. I still stand by it, and will wait it out. That’s the scientific ideal, but not typical in a publish or perish funded research environment.
Not a fan of Scarfettas work, but I wonder if Scarfetta serves some useful purpose, because by looking so desperately hard to find some connection with solar activity and the recent warming trend, he ends up helping demonstrate none exists.
Good luck with you own research. Fwiw, it all seems like avenues worth exploring. to me.
Barton Paul Levenson says
BPL: You keep posting this the same way. The word “statistical” does not appear in Sagan’s text. Sagan said, quote, ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,’ unquote.
Your point is irrelevant, of no consequence. I did not “quote” verbatim and that was clear. I used Feyman’s scientific reasoning and logic. For Statistical evidence IS Evidence. The rest is self-evident, logical and scientifically robust. Deny that logic all he likes, but it only makes him look petty. Because you can for a time ignore reality but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
A pre-print is available in the ESS Open Archive in the continuing scientific investigation of Evapotranspiration connection to climates
“Reduced Evapotranspiration and Associated Warming Increase Moisture Convergence but Decrease Precipitation Over Land”
https://essopenarchive.org/doi/full/10.22541/essoar.177005980.01532748
from Buchovecky, Lambert, Zarakas, Lague, Koven, Fung, Bonan, and Swann
It’s a follow-on from the discussion at AGU Fall Meeting 2024
“Precipitation Response Over Land to Evapotranspiration-Driven Warming Is Different Than the Response to Radiatively-Driven Warming”
This allows for some fingerprinting or distinguishing of ET effects under the guise of major trace gas radiative forcing, and understanding associated biases in CMIP ensemble outputs.
E.g.
where >90% of models overestimate the frequency of light precipitation days (P10), misrepresent extremes associated with convergence (P90):
“Evaluating Precipitation Distributions at Regional Scales: A Benchmarking Framework and Application to CMIP 5 and 6 Models”
https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/16/3927/2023/
and where ERA5 reanalysis has extremely poor correlation with CMIP members in:
“Observed and Modeled Trends in Downward Surface Shortwave Radiation Over Land: Drivers and Discrepancies”
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025GL119493
Considering around 10% suppression of ET is associated with around 4% reduction in low cloud, practical targets involve conserving the duration of ET by 1 day out of 10 by local environmental stewardship. This is equivalent to conserving 0.1 to 0.2 mm per day on average in your community.
This connects to previously posed questions resulting from experiments such as in https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acdbe1 about how real-world changes to the land may be contributing to climate change by altering atmospheric water vapor and cloud cover, and how terrestrial ET modulates climate in past configurations of Earth’s history. And it’s certainly relevant in the attribution of hydrological and temperature extremes.
CMIP global climate models lack fine tuning of robust physics and the real world data for albedo, clouds and humidity, and forcing of forests forcing. The scientists are left to produce guesstimates for multiple design parameters and they continually upgrade their modelling based on tuning to the recently collected world data since the last CMIP version hoping that improves their outputs. Then they wait 6-7 years to find out if their guesses were better. When “decent” models replicate GMST trends they totally miss other core climate dynamics like glacier sea ice loss, temperature extremes natural sinks hydrology cloud effects albedo and so on.
The worst thing about them is the practice of taking all the modelling outputs, culling them back to a range of 5% to 95% of the total spread and then averaging that to arrive at a mystical ensemble mean. That’s not science. And it’s definitely not validated as accurate. But more than that CMIP AR6 researched GCMs cannot predict the temperature 100 years in the future. Because the climate does not run on rails, it runs on Processes. When they clearly do not know how those processes operate in the real world then their knowledge and predictive power is weak.
Which brings us to the only valid scientific conclusion: CMIP climate model ensembles are often presented as probabilistic forecasts validated by reality, but in practice the ensemble mean is a statistically smoothed construct that benefits from error cancellation, historical tuning, and structural correlation. This creates a circular validation loop where agreement with observations is partly engineered by design rather than independently predicted.
For the general public this means: Climate scientists run many models, each with different assumptions and tuning choices. When you average them together, random errors cancel out, so the average often looks close to reality—even if no individual model is particularly accurate. Because models are tuned to match the 20th-century climate and now up to ~2020, the ensemble mean is implicitly fitted to the past, then presented as if it predicted the future independently.
This makes the ensemble mean look like strong evidence, even though it is partly a mathematical artifact with no predictive power.
Short-term temperature swings are often attributed to internal variability such as ENSO, volcanoes, and ocean dynamics. ENSO and volcanic effects are strongly supported by observations and physics. However, longer-term variability is largely inferred statistically, using models to estimate the forced signal and assigning the entire residual to natural variability. This makes attribution partially model-conditioned rather than fully independent.
When self-appointed elite IPCC and CMIP climate scientists publicly discuss CMIP GCMs they avoid being explicit about their Modelling Uncertainties, the severe weaknesses in design factors, the unreliability of outputs across climate domains, and the fact that they are not capable of providing predicative power for future analysis in their current form. Publicly they present a politically acceptable narrative that sustains a reasonable belief in the public that climate science modelling is robust when it is not. Eventually these shortcoming will be much more self-evident and no longer deniable. Because you can for a time ignore reality but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
The basic physics about global warming and climate change is reliably accurate. In today’s Earth system GHGs and land use change have since the industrial revolution and are still do drive warming over time. The modelling of it in CMIP GCMs is not accurate nor reliable.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc The old Correlation ≠ Causation Fallacy.
Carl Sagan’s famous advice to all scientists is: “The easiest person to fool is yourself.”
It comes from The Demon-Haunted World (1995), where he warns about self-deception in science and belief systems. A related expanded passage (paraphrased) is: once you’ve fooled yourself, it becomes very hard to convince yourself that you’ve been fooled—his core warning about motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.
Reply to JCM
“Reduced Evapotranspiration and Associated Warming Increase Moisture Convergence but Decrease Precipitation Over Land”
The physiological effect has also been shown to meaningfully alter global precipitation.87
Using the Community Earth System Model Version 1, Pu and Dickinson (2014) found that the88
physiological effect reduces ET due to stomatal closure and alters circulation which increases global89
land-mean precipitation. Abe et al. (2015) showed that the physiological effect has an asymmetric90
rapid adjustment of land precipitation under positive and negative CO2 forcings. DeAngelis et al.91
(2016) found that the physiological effect drives a significant amount of the spread in the rapid92
precipitation adjustment across CMIP5 models, especially the closure of leaf stomata which reduces93
transpiration. At the regional level, Kooperman et al. (2018) found that the physiological effect94
drives a zonal precipitation asymmetry characterized by increases in precipitation over Asian and95
African tropical forests while decreases over South American forests.96
The physiological effect represents only one pathway through which vegetation shapes surface97
energy and water fluxes. More broadly, ET is a dominant nonradiative forcing. In highly idealized98
climate model simulations, the large-magnitude suppression of terrestrial ET induced a global99
hydrological response characterized by a decrease in precipitation and a positive shortwave cloud100
feedback alongside significant near-surface warming (Lagu¨e et al. 2019, 2023). ET remains one101
of the most uncertain components of the terrestrial water cycle because it arises from nonlinear102
interactions between biological, ecological, and physical climate processes. Land-driven changes to
ET via land use change or the physiological effect therefore generate temperature and precipitation104
responses. In an ensemble of climate model simulations, uncertain land process representation has105
been shown to impact ET and drive temperature change (Zarakas et al. 2024b). These responses106
remain uncertain because the underlying biological and ecological adjustments are themselves107
uncertain and largely independent of the radiatively forced climate response.108
The potential importance of these land-driven ET forcings to the global hydrological cycle and109
precipitation over land has been suggested, but no study to date has examined their effect directly.
Typical:101
HaHaHa
Our results have implications for projecting and attributing precipitation changes under a changing climate. Future climate will reflect the combined influence of radiative forcing from increases
in greenhouse gases and nonradiative land surface changes arising from human-caused land use
change and plant physiological responses to elevated CO2. While radiative forcing from greenhouse
gases has been shown by many prior studies to increase precipitation over land broadly, our findings
demonstrate that reductions in ET driven by land processes can oppose this tendency, decreasing
precipitation over land and potentially moderating the rate of global precipitation increase while
still contributing to terrestrial warming.
= ya know, we don’t actually know what these CMIP models show or why.
HAHAHA
and then show evidence of substantial continental brightening from 1980 to 2024, including in places like the central United States, Brazil, and central Asia that do not show large trends in aerosol concentrations over the same period. The brightening in these regions is co-located with reductions in total cloud cover, and trends in both are at the edge or entirely outside an ensemble of 237 CMIP6-era climate model simulations, whose spatial pattern of trends more directly reflect the pattern of aerosol concentrations.
23 December 2025
Observed and Modeled Trends in Downward Surface Shortwave Radiation Over Land: Drivers and Discrepancies
Thanks for taking the time to review the material in detail.
In another related line of investigation Moritz Günther seeks to understand the “puzzling temperature pattern in the tropical Pacific”
https://mpimet.mpg.de/en/communication/news/a-puzzling-temperature-pattern-in-the-tropical-pacific
He argues that “Heating the land cools the eastern and equatorial Pacific”
https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_3665279_1/component/file_3665280/content
“climate models notoriously struggle to simulate the observed eastern Pacific cooling, and it is likely that this model-observation discrepancy originates partly from systematic model biases…”
The novel idea is an alternative mechanism that is *not* rooted in ocean dynamics.
Using the only method they know how, Günther deliberately amplifies land temps by increasing CO2 only over land in a global coupled climate model.
This may also be of interest to Pukite: a northward ITCZ shift, a westward convection shift over the Western Pacific, and strengthened Subtropical Highs from Rossby waves. I mentioned previously potential linkages to powerful dynamical consequences of continental hydro-ecological deterioration.
I notice similar patterns in Lague’s continental ET forcing scheme, so we know the effect in models is independent of how one chooses to force things.
“the [transient] cooling is predominantly driven by shortwave (i. e., cloud) effects in the eastern equatorial Pacific, wind-driven cooling in the region of the southerly trade winds, and ocean heat uptake along the equatorial Pacific (Fig. 3b,e,g). We infer from this that cloud feedbacks and upwelling on the Equator, as well as enhanced evaporation in the off-equatorial tropics, reminiscent of the wind-evaporation-SST (WES) feedback [30], are likely candidates for explaining the origin of the cooling.”
“Our results challenge the prevailing ocean dynamical thermostat mechanism in explaining the transient Pacific cooling”
“Our results highlight the need to scrutinize uncertainties in land models, while previous studies have largely focused on ocean-origin mechanisms to explain the cooling.”
You can find discussion at the recent ECS & Cloud Feedback Symposium #48 at the 19 minute mark: https://youtu.be/zvgRPKOH8C4?si=ajrVCwxjDQVbpxh-&t=1140
.
All climate science will need to consider the 1st-order tidal influence before these 2nd order effects.
It’s not that this knowledge doesn’t exist it’s that it’s minimized ignored and never acknowledged by the public facing elite climate scientists embedded in CMIP AR6 modelling and their promotions. Which includes mainly minimizing any thought of profound uncertainty in their results and the science.
We apply our framework to 25 CMIP5 and 41 CMIP6 models, as well as six observation-based products of daily precipitation. Our results indicate that many CMIP5 and 6 models substantially overestimate the observed light-precipitation amount and frequency, as well as the number of precipitating days, especially over midlatitude regions outside of some land regions in the Americas and Eurasia. Improvement from CMIP5 to 6 is shown in some regions, especially in midlatitude regions, but it is not evident globally, and over the tropics most metrics point toward degradation.
How to cite the unmentionables:
Ahn, M.-S., Ullrich, P. A., Gleckler, P. J., Lee, J., Ordonez, A. C., and Pendergrass, A. G.: Evaluating precipitation distributions at regional scales: a benchmarking framework and application to CMIP5 and 6 models, Geosci. Model Dev., 16, 3927–3951, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-3927-2023, 2023.
You have to wonder about the motivations of Data/Multitroll. I mean a lot of what it posts is clearly copy-pasta AI output–to the point where some of it is even badly formatted. A lot of it is the standard doomer propaganda from next-gen fossil fuel outlets–“there’s nothing we can do, so ride it out and hope for the best.” But then there is the continual hostility to climate scientists and the attempts to blame them for our current presence in the Find Out stage of climate science. So either it flunked out of grad school and this is an attempt to salvage its self esteem or it could be something more sinister.
I am somewhat reminded of the situation in Italy when some earthquake prediction researchers failed to predict a particular quake and found themselves social pariahs but facing serious legal charges from a government trying to distract from its own unpreparedness.
When the caca finally and definitively hits the fan, the denialati are going to be looking around for a scapegoat so they can say, “Oh, if only someone had warned us!!! Oh, the humanity…” Who better in this post-truth world than the people have consistently told the truth as the data allowed them to see it–the scientists. Part of me wonders if Data/multitroll might not be sowing those particular weeds.
Ray Ladbury @21 Feb 2026 at 2:30 PM
RL: “You have to wonder about the motivations of Data/Multitroll”
I’ve been wondering about Data / Multitrolls motivations for ten years, because I suspect he started here commenting under the name Thomas way back around 2016. Check the website archives for yourself and you will see what I mean. You will be stunned. I suspect he then adopted a whole sequence of names such as Carrie, Reality Check, Ned Kelly, Dharma, Complicious, William, Pedro Prieto, etc,etc and now Data. Same content, same views and same writing style. And I’m interested in his / her motivations because I did first year psych. at university.
RL: “I mean a lot of what it posts is clearly copy-pasta AI output–to the point where some of it is even badly formatted”
Huge parts of his output definitely look AI generated, but with a few of his own words inserted. I think he does this without acknowledging its AI output to make himself look clever and like an expert, and because Gavin has discouraged posting of huge screeds of AI output. Data has used sock puppetry and the names of real scientists like Pedro Prieto and Sabine, so he doesn’t even try to be honest, so portraying AI output as his own work should not be surprising.
RL: “A lot of it is the standard doomer propaganda from next-gen fossil fuel outlets–“there’s nothing we can do, so ride it out and hope for the best.” But then there is the continual hostility to climate scientists and the attempts to blame them for our current presence in the Find Out stage of climate science. So either it flunked out of grad school and this is an attempt to salvage its self esteem or it could be something more sinister.”
He’s a doomer, meaning he thinks there nothing we can do to fix the climate problem, judging by his comments, but that doesn’t mean he’s a climate science denialist spreading doom that its too late to do anything. Its very hard to reconcile his multiple posts promoting James Hansens views, with him being a closet climate science denialist. I think he just has a doomy temperament. Some people just do.
I think your flunking grade school and salvaging self esteem comments are on the right track. The Thomas version in 2015 said he used to be a public relations manager for a corporate but didn’t like their tactics so he left the PR profession. So he might be a guy that has dropped out of the system. Of course this may be more of his lies but PR training is consistent with certain elements of his style of writing.
Data has been very critical of renewables and EV’s. Again that doesn’t mean he’s your typical right wing corporate climate denialist type. According to some of of multitrolls comments he’s a hard leftist believer in world socialism. In one of his comments he admitted he’s a ‘tankie”He’s posted numerous critical comments about capitalism and corporations and the top 1%. The point is his anti renewables rhetoric is consistent with a dislike of corporates profiting from renewables and a perpetuation of capitalisms high levels of consumption.
So I think Data’s essentially a left wing concern troll. Who unwittingly feeds a whole range of the denialists.
(Please understand I’m no rightie and I’m not ranting against socialism per se. A few limited elements of socialism do make sense.)
Data / multi trolls anti scientists rhetoric and criticisms of climate models is harder to understand. Some of it may be your theory of a disgruntled loser trying to grab some self esteem. Some of it may be related to his claims that the science community is ignoring Hansen, whom he seems to idolise. So he attacks the OTHER scientists.
Unfortunately the net result is data muti troll feeds the denialists. And he sometimes defends denialists like TK and KIA , perhaps on the basis of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
RL: “When the caca finally and definitively hits the fan, the denialati are going to be looking around for a scapegoat so they can say, “Oh, if only someone had warned us!!!”…..etcetera.”
This being your sinister motivation. Possibly, because we can’t rule that out because we don’t know enough, but I think my above mentioned suggestions and your comments about him being a drop out explain things well enough and simply enough (Occams Razor) without having to imagine that sort of scenario. Not that it makes things better because he constantly feeds the denialists anyway which really gets on my nerves.
I’m not suggesting scientists and climate models should be above criticism. But there are obviously ways of doing it diplomatically and cleverly without just ranting and feeding the denialists and sounding like a complete twit. But data has his own agenda and resorts to trolling.
A single troll can really do damage to a forum, I recall during the pandemic how a troll named “DaveSantos” essentially torpedoed the Azimuth Project climate science forum to the extent that the owner of the forum actually DELETED the entire Azimuth Project site. The behavior of DaveSantos was quite similar to this “multitroll” — in that he would relentlessly BS his responses to any forum contribution. When challenged, he would try some other BS and it would go on and on, You can still see some of this from the Wayback Archive of the forum, in this case a thread discussing modeling ENSO:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221207201405/https://forum.azimuthproject.org/discussion/1471/qbo-and-enso/p13
The maintainer decided to close that particular thread, which had been going on for 7 years prior to that. Such a waste.
Very much a “concern troll” behavior as Nigelj identified with multitroll=Data+sockpuppets. A concern troll in this case is always castigating contributors via incessant devil’s advocacy and not passing some feigned purity test.
Paul Pukite, the obvious question is why didn’t the website just ban DaveSantos. I can see why his particular style would drive anyone insane.
Hmm. Sounds like someone else we all know,
“In February 2025, a public relations CEO stated that the “flood the zone” tactic (also known as the firehose of falsehood) was designed to make sure no single action or event stands out above the rest by having them occur at a rapid pace, thus preventing the public from keeping up and preventing controversy or outrage over any specific action or event.[20]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump
https://jaapl.org/content/46/2/267
Addendum:
Identifying a concern troll and understanding their destructive nature
· Negativity vibes: They consistently show up in spaces they claim to support, but they rarely say anything positive—only critical “concerns.”
· Sealioning: They repeatedly ask for more and more evidence or “justifications,” pretending to be reasonable while demanding endless amounts of your time and energy.
· Moving the goalposts: When you address their “concern,” they immediately find a new one. The goal isn’t to find a solution; it’s to keep you defending yourself indefinitely.
· Offputting aura: If an interaction leaves you feeling exhausted, defensive, and like you have to justify your very existence to someone who claims to be on your side, you are likely dealing with a concern troll.
And by having endlessly repetitive interactions with them, you are very likely engaged in a codependent relationship.
“If you answer them, they will come.”
And if you answer them with long screeds, creating the illusion of a meaningful discussion/debate, the marriage is consummated for sure.
zebra: And by having endlessly repetitive interactions with them, you are very likely engaged in a codependent relationship.
Only if you are replying _to_ them on the assumption of their good faith, not when you talk _about_ them; i.e.:
– not when you don’t engage with their content, but use it as examples to identify the general operating mechanisms of deniers/doomers (as done by Paul in the post you are lecturing him on)
– not when you ignore their content – but just use troll’s example to offer cautionary tales from other forums of what may happen where the trolls are not boreholled (again, as done by Paul in the post you are lecturing chastising him on)
– not when you don’t engage with their multipage posts, but just pluck a phrase or a line, and use them as a jump-off point to discuss a specific fallacy used by deniers/doomers that you feel has not been properly countered.
– not when you delete trolls multipage content – and just FLAG the author as a doomer/denier troll to the passers by – by reposting simple questions trolls failed to answer in the past (as some zebra said: “they never answer”).
As a result, I seriously doubt that Atomsk holding troll’s feet to the fire with his five questions Multitroll hasn’t answered – is Atomsk ” a codependent relationship” with the said troll.
In fact, I find Atomsk approach of flagging the troll with questions they haven’t answered, a much better way to deal with the trolls than your ignoring them and thus giving the troll the last word and leaving the passer-by with the impression that nobody here was able to challenge their claims.
Particularly, that not everybody may share your determination who
deserves to be ignored – you threw into the same silent-treatment bag trolls like “Data” or Ken Towe, and people, who challenged your claims with falsifiable arguments, like me. And by doing so – you denied yourself a chance to dispute my assessment of you … ;-)
Zebra, I hear you. But when this site (and not meaning any disrespect) insists on including them in the main threads rather than putting their endless ramblings somewhere else as if they there is some kind of legitimate controversy it’s kind of incumbent on some here to respond. I’ve tried for a while but finally give up as it’s an exercise in futility.
Zebra claims that people who responds to trolls or denialists are forming co-dependent relationships with the trolls or denialists. Maybe this is true with some people, but its not true with me. I’ve engaged with the denialists and the warmist troll Data. When the trolls or denialists stop posting their nonsense or they don’t respond to my comments, I do not feel withdrawal symptoms. I have a feeling of relief , the complete opposite of what Zebra is suggesting. I honestly couldn’t care less if those guys respond to my comments or not, and I would prefer they post a great deal less material on this website.
The reason I sometimes respond to the denialists or trolls is largely to provide some information to other people reading the comments, and to show the weaknesses in their statements or their logic. If we don’t debunk what these guys say it will spread and gain traction. People say responding to lies spreads lies or makes them gain credibility. Recent science easily googled shows that’s not true with debunking’s. I don’t respond to the denialists or the trolls with much hope of convincing them, because these guys are generally very stubborn and ego driven and ideologically driven. And I also respond to them for entertainment value and mental exercise.
And I get information value out of seeing BPL’s and other peoples numerous responses to the denialists or trolls, and it often confirms my own suspicions. I get quite a bit out of Piotr debating with the denialist Tomas Kalisz, (hes a denialist on some issues) even although it seems to go on forever. Of course there’s a risk in feeding the denialists and the trolls and it’s best just to ignore some of them, and to avoid getting into lengthy back and forwards debates with them. But honestly I think some of you guys like Zebra take it all a bit too seriously, and maybe you haven’t considered it enough. Nothing personal against Zebra, he makes some good points.
Agreed that Data’s posts make for tiresome reading. But what about my substantive point, which was that the IEA’s World Energy Outlook has proved to be remarkably prescient over the years? Their 2025 report is alarming to say the least. Their Current Policies Scenario, which I take to mean something like business as usual, projects emissions “consistent with warming of almost 3 °C by 2100.” In the same vein, “Annual global energy-related CO2 emissions rise slightly from current levels and approach 40 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year in the early 2030s, remaining around this level through to 2050.”They’ve been right so far. As I pointed out, we’re 2/3 of the way through their 2011 projection and it’s right on. There appears to be some type of cognitive dissonance occurring. People who should know better imagine that we’re too big to fail. Can we call it an evolutionary bottleneck? If so, the likely outcome is drastic simplification, no?
Chris Korda @ 25 Feb 2026 at 7:40 AM
Agreed that emissions are still rising and that humanity is not doing enough to reduce emissions. Agreed that advanced modern society is not “too big to fail”. With all the examples of past advanced societies collapsing, one would think that people would have got that message. But denial runs deep.
But I’m not sure that 3 degrees or so by 2100 would lead to drastic simplification. Of course it depends on what you meant by simplification? For me simplification means moving from a society dependent on cars and aircraft back to simpler technologies like bicycles and horses and carts. But the one thing likely to survive in a warming world is factories and robots making advanced technology. Simplification could be defined as having less complicated organisational structures, and less complicated supply chains and thus greater local self-sufficiency. It’s not clear to me that a 3 degrees or so warmer world would lead to huge changes in that respect.
According to the experts a warmer world will significantly reduce the food supply, and lead to weather becoming more severe, and to serious levels of sea level rise. To me that suggests an increased mortality rate, (dramatically in some areas) reduced quality of life, huge amounts of resources going into repairing or rebuilding infrastructure, etcetera. But that is a quantitative change rather than a simplification.
Other things could cause civilisation to collapse. The obvious possibilities are shortages of metals and degradation of land and biodiversity collapse of critical species like pollinating insects. Some of those are related to climate change. and other factors as well. It seems to me the simplest and most plausible way to reduce that problem is to get population growth to stop asap and much better efforts at conservation and mitigating climate change would certainly also help minimise some of those problems.
Re “get population growth to stop asap” amen to that. For more than 30 years I’ve said that humanity’s population will ultimately be reduced, the question is only how humanely. As the gangsters running USA are fond of saying, we can do it the easy way or the hard way, though at this late stage the easy way seems a stretch. But what I was specifically referring to by “simplification” is *biological* simplification: what marine biologist Jeremy Jackson called a “trophic cascade” favoring atavistic, “weedy” organisms, as seen in previous mass extinctions. What is the likelihood that the predicted 3° C rise in average global temperature will push Earth’s systems over a slew of tipping points? The precarity of ice sheets, glaciers, rainforests, ocean circulations, permafrost, etcetera increasingly attracts the attention of researchers. Should self-reinforcing positive feedbacks be unleashed, biological simplification would be the expected outcome according to paleontology, and furthermore, apex predators would be at the greatest risk of extinction, their alleged cleverness notwithstanding. I gather that scientists are taking this possibility more seriously now than they did 30 years ago.
Look up Tipping points in the climate system on Wikipedia. Has a good global map of the tipping points and at what level of warming they are likely to be crossed. That map has always stuck in my mind.
“I’m not sure that 3 degrees or so by 2100 would lead to drastic simplification”
This is idiocy, naivete, denial or all three.
Here’s one take, economic perspective: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14747731.2020.1807856
Killians reference makes no mention of simplification. It talks about reductions in GDP likely being greater than what people like Nordhaus estimate. This doesn’t necessarily mean a simplified output, meaning for example a reversion to low tech industrial goods. This is more of a quantitative change of output. It would mean some people going without industrial goods of any sort, and going without food and clothing.
There is good news even during this time of fossil industry desperate attempt to prevent its unavoidable end and of obscurantism, anti-science and sheer ignorance at powerful decision making levels. You should Stand Up for Science every day and by all means, on March 7 you can do it in an organized way.
“New U.S. Energy Information Administration data show that, in 2025, two states supplied over 100% of their grid + behind-the-meter (BTM) electricity demand with Wind-Water-Solar (WWS) and 14 states supplied 50-124% of their demand with WWS.” (Source: Mark Jacobson LinkedIn post)
Update on all countries and US states % WWS for electricity generation:
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/Countries100Pct.pdf
We’ve got sunshine, turbines, transmission lines (WIP)… We’re generating :)
And may the Knights in White Satin
bestow upon us, bestow upon us, bestow upon us,
some grid scale energy storage, and demand-side thermal storage (TES), including for industrial process heat –
to take us through the darkness to the break of the day!
PS why it’s hard to use fusion power…
Hot nuclei don’t stay for long – fuse them before they go Houdini
if it’s good enough, this magnetic field – maybe it can make a plasma change it’s ways!
The following expert commentary seems very important to me:
Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert argues that humans are exquisitely adapted to respond to immediate problems, such as terrorism, but not so good at more probable, but distant dangers, like global warming. He talks about his op-ed piece which appeared in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.
(My comment: I’m not a doomer. I dont think such findings mean we are locked into inaction, or that we are doomed. Perhaps we can overcome these impediments, and renewable energy is gaining traction on its merits and low costs anyway. But its just something we need to understand.)
The interview:
NEAL CONAN, host:
In an op-ed in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues that human brains are adapted to respond to some threats more than to others. For example, he says, we take alarm at terrorism, but much less to global warming, even though the odds of a disgruntled shoe bomber attacking our plane are, he claims, far longer than the chances of the ocean swallowing parts of Manhattan.
And the reason is biology, the human brain evolved to respond to immediate threats but may completely miss more gradual warning signs. If you have questions about how and why our brains got wired this way or about its implications, 800-989-8255, or e-mail us, talk@npr.org.
Daniel Gilbert is a professor of psychology at Harvard University, author of the book Stumbling On Happiness. You can link to his op-ed and to all previous Opinion Pages at the TALK OF THE NATION page at npr.org.
Daniel Gilbert joins us now from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nice to have you on the program today.
Professor DANIEL GILBERT (Psychology, Harvard University): Thanks so much for having me.
CONAN: Now, you say that we need to put a threat, a face on a threat, in order to truly perceive it.
Prof. GILBERT: Well, that’s true. I mean, you know, look, if alien scientists were trying to design something to exterminate our race, they would know that the best offense is one that does not trigger any defense. And so they would never send little green men in spaceships. Instead, they would invent climate change, because climate change has four properties that allow it to get in under the brain’s radar, if you will.
There are four things about it that fail to trigger the defensive system that so many other threats in our environment do trigger.
CONAN: As you point out in your piece, our brains are exquisitely tuned to, if we see a baseball coming at our head, get out of the way.
Prof. GILBERT: Exactly so. So that’s one of the features of climate change that makes it such an insidious threat, is that it’s long-term. It’s not something that threatens us this afternoon, but rather something that threatens us in the ensuing decades. Human beings are very good at getting out of the way of a speeding baseball. Godzilla comes running down the street, we know to run the other way. We’re very good at clear and present danger, like every mammal is. That’s why we’ve survived as long as we have.
But we’ve learned a new trick in the last couple of million years – at least we’ve kind of learned it. Our brains, unlike the brains of almost every other species, are prepared to treat the future as if it were the present. We can look ahead to our retirements or to a dental appointment, and we can take action today to save for retirement or to floss so that we don’t get bad news six months down the line. But we’re just learning this trick. It’s really a very new adaptation in the animal kingdom and we don’t do it all that well. We don’t respond to long-term threats with nearly as much vigor and venom as we do to clear and present dangers.
CONAN: So a lot of us thought evolution would reduce us to four toes or maybe four fingers. You say what it in fact has meant is that we’ve developed delayed gratification.
Prof. GILBERT: Well, yes indeed. I mean, evolution has optimized our brain for the Pleistocene. I mean, you’d be, you know, if we put you back three million years, you’re going to be the most adapted animal walking the earth. The problem is that our environment has changed so rapidly because we’ve got this great big brain so we could navigate our ancestral environment, and lo and behold, what did we do? We created an entirely new environment to which our brain is not perfectly adapted.
CONAN: We’re talking with Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University, on the TALK OF THE NATION Opinion Page. If you’d like to join us, 800-989-8255, e-mail, talk@npr.org. And this is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
Another requirement for that human response, that triggered response, is some sort of moral outrage, you say.
Prof. GILBERT: You’re right. And so I started by saying there were four, and then I talked about one, so what are the other three? The other three are, A) the source of the threat should be human rather than inanimate; B) there should be a moral component; C) as we just talked about, it should be short-term rather than long-term; and D) if you want the human brain to respond, you really want to make sure that the threat is sudden rather than gradual.
So you asked about the moral component. There’s a lot of energy these days in our Congress, and indeed in our nation, devoted to what really our strictly moral issues. There’s very little doubt that many people will be injured by burning flags or gay sex, and yet we are up in arms about flag burning and gay marriage. And the reason is that these offend many people at the moral level. We’re very good at taking umbrage. We’re just not very good at taking action against things that don’t create – that don’t arouse moral emotions. And you know, climate change just doesn’t.
As I say in my essay, if, you know, if eating, if the practice of eating kittens were the thing responsible for climate change, we’d have people massing in the street in protest right now, because eating kittens is such a morally reprehensible action.
CONAN: Yet we see things like, obviously a terrorist attack, a human action, really centers everybody’s attention. Tens of thousands of people die on American highways every year and nobody notices.
Prof. GILBERT: Well, you’re exactly right. I mean, one of the things that the human brain is specialized for is other human beings. They are the greatest source of reward and punishment in most of our environments. We’re a highly social mammal, and our brains are awfully good at looking for, thinking about, and remembering any sign of other people and their plans and their intentions. That’s why we see faces in the clouds but we never see clouds in peoples’ faces. If you play people white noise for long enough, they begin to hear voices in it. But they never hear white noise in voices.
So we’re looking. It’s as if the brain is tuned in to the signal of other human action. And that’s why when other people do things to us, we’re very, very quick to respond. We respond to terrorism with unrestrained venom and with great force, just as our ancestors would have responded to, you know, a man with a big stick. The problem is climate change doesn’t have a human face. It’s not an Iraqi with a big mustache. It’s not somebody we can villainize. It’s not a man with a box cutter. And so if there’s no one to vilify, there’s no face to put it to, it’s hard for human beings to get very excited about it.
CONAN: Let’s get a call in from Guillermo, Guillermo calling from Raleigh, North Carolina.
GUILLERMO (Caller): Hi.
CONAN: Hi.
GUILLERMO: I guess my point is similar along the lines – somewhere along the way in school I heard a story basically along the lines of more complex issues humans don’t process that well yet. So, for example, if a person had to hear all of the news events that occurred on the planet earth in a single day, your brain wouldn’t be able to take it. And I just wanted him to see if there’s any truth in this, or…
CONAN: Does quality relate to our quality of alarm?
Prof. GILBERT: Well, you bet it does. I mean, climate change in some ways is a very simple issue. But those who profit from not taking action against global warming have turned it into a complicated issue. Why have the opponents – and believe it or not, there are opponents of action against global warming – why are the opponents turning it into a complicated issue? Well, as our caller well knows, if we can make this complicated, enough people will throw up their hands and say, you know, scientists, they all disagree. Who knows what we can really do about this?
You know what? Scientists don’t disagree about this, and what we can do is very, very clear.
CONAN: Scientists don’t necessarily agree on the cause of it. They do agree that it’s happening. Anyway, Guillermo, thanks very much for the call.
GUILLERMO: Thank you very much.
Prof. GILBERT: Well, scientists agree to an enormous extent on the cause of it. You know, it’s interesting, when you look at scientific articles on global warming, there’s enormous consensus. When you look at news articles on global warming, about half of them mention that there isn’t much consensus. It really just isn’t so. Scientists are in vast agreement about the causes of global warming, as much as they’re in agreement about the dangers of cigarette smoking. You could say scientists don’t all agree, and I’m sure there’s somebody out there who’s still saying it doesn’t cause cancer, but by and large…
CONAN: So there you have an evil human face you can put on this. Those who are dastardly working towards profit 50 years hence.
Prof. GILBERT: You see, that’s how I’m getting myself to respond.
CONAN: Thanks very much for being with us, Daniel Gilbert. We appreciate your time today.
Prof. GILBERT: My pleasure. Thanks.
CONAN: Daniel Gilbert’s op-ed was this week in the Los Angeles Times. It’s Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Threats.
Again, if you’d like to read the piece, there’s a link to it at our webpage. Just go to npr.org and go to the TALK OF THE NATION page. Also there, all of the other previous Opinion Pages on TALK OF THE NATION.
I’m Neal Conan. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News, in Washington.
Copyright © 2006 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at http://www.npr.org for further information.
https://www.npr.org/2006/07/03/5530483/humans-wired-to-respond-to-short-term-problems
With the end of February rapidly approaching, the daily ERA5 reanalysis at Climate Pulse (up to 25th Feb) provides a pretty good indicator of the full-month Feb global SAT anomaly – roughly +0.54ºC. (That would be +1.50ºC with a 1850-1900 anomaly base.)
For ERA5, that would make Feb 2026 the fifth warmest Feb on record. (Jan 2026 was also the fifth warmest.) The 5th position affected by these early months temp’s being boosted in El Niño years.
ERA5 warmest February rankings.
2024 … … +0.81ºC
2016 … … +0.69ºC
2025 … … +0.63ºC
2020 … … +0.60ºC
2026 … … +0.54ºC
2017 … … +0.50ºC
2019 … … +0.31ºC
2023 … … +0.29ºC
2018 … … +0.26ºC
2022 … … +0.23ºC
The Feb 2026 averages began with a warm wobble and have ended with a cool one.
The measured temperature records may not come in as low as the ERA5 SAT as they measure SAT/SST and ERA5 60N-60S SST has been showing quite a bit of warmth through February.
The latest posting from Hansen et al doesn’t seem to have been discussed here yet. ‘Another El Nino Already? What Can We Learn from It?’ was posted 6th Feb and has a couple of points worthy of note.
❶ Hansen et al continue with the view that the 12-month average GISTEMP LOTI will drop to a minimum of +1.4ºC but are now more definite as to the timing of this minimum. “We projected a minimum of 1.4°C to be achieved by the second quarter of 2026.” The then suggest the arrival of an El Niño.
❷ The projections of El Niño conditions (NINO3.4) linked-to by Hansen et al (HERE) looked a bit odd to me but this was due to the adoption of RONI – Relative Oceanic Niño Index and R-NINO3.4 values which were recently adopted by NOAA (at the start of Feb). The historic values of the RONI series shows considerable difference from ONI post-1995, with RONI now averaging 0.5 lower than ONI (so biased toward La Niña) . Yet use of RONI is not a radical change. This RONI-ONI difference is very similar in size to the MEI-ONI difference and even the SOI-ONI difference post-1995. See these differences graphed out HERE – POSTED 27th February 2026. Perhaps this La Niña-bias in the NOAA modelling explains why the forecast La Niña-El Niño transition arrives a couple of months earlier in the modelled-projections than in the NOAA-projections shown by ColumbiaUni web page.
The new generation of climate scientists are coming and slowly coalescing as a force to be reckoned with.
recent papers fyi @ ECS-Cloud Feedback Symposium #48
Adam Bauer (U. Chicago): “Learning Climate Sensitivity from Future Observations, Fast and Slow”
Moritz Günther (MPI): “Heating the land cools the Eastern and Equatorial Pacific”
Clare Singer (Univ. Colorado Boulder): “Southern Ocean Clear-Sky Brightening From Sea Spray Aerosol Increase Drives Departure From Hemispheric Albedo Symmetry”
tech review discussions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvgRPKOH8C4&t=1140s
The harm social media is doing to teens is clear. The solution is not. I’ve yet to interact with a teenager who seems happier, more self-confident or better adjusted because of their social media use. – https://www.ms.now/opinion/meta-google-social-media-trial-problem
Many adults are also addicted to these dangerous toys, which proliferate toxic waste and consume vast gobs of energy (which we all pay for in increased energy bills). And look what they’re now set to do for our “Department of War”. Nukes ahoy!
More on AI addiction: Her husband wanted to use ChatGPT to create sustainable housing. Then it took over his life. Kate Fox says Joe Ceccanti was the ‘most hopeful person’ before he started spending 12 hours a day with a chatbot – https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/feb/28/chatgpt-ai-chatbot-mental-health