This month’s open thread on climate topics. Please be constructive and keep nonsense to a minimum.
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106 Responses to "Unforced Variations: Sep 2026"
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On Nigel using AI to evaluate Nabil Swedan’s “thermodynamic” alternative to the modern climate science
Nigel, thanks for (unintentionally?) proving how badly AI can drop the ball. here is the context:
– Tomas: “ Swedan is silent about solar radiation as well as about infrared radiation from Earth to space, as if none of them would have existed. Swedan treats Earth as an isolated thermodynamic system, what might be the most fundamental flaw of his article.”
– AI: “ Swedan argues that under pre-industrial conditions, the Earth reached a stable thermal equilibrium. In this steady state, incoming solar radiation perfectly matched outgoing space radiation.”
This proves nothing nor even addresses Tomas’ point: in Swedan’s “thermodynamic approach” there is no incoming solar radiation NOR “outgoing space radiation: neither explicitly- as he dismissed “radiative approach as “ incorrect physics” and “violating the laws of thermodynamic” – nor implicitly – as he presumes that the only source of AGW is human oxidation of C to CO2, i.e. implies NO effect of extra CO2 on the outgoing radiation, and then calculates AGW as the amount of heat accumulated in the last 250 years, i.e. AS IF NONE OF IT was lost to space by outgoing radiation.
That’s what Tomas means by saying: “Swedan treats Earth as an isolated thermodynamic system [as if neither] solar radiation nor infrared radiation existed”. And that’s what your AI failed to notice and address.
Nor did it pick on the fact that Swedan in his calculations treats Watts is if they were the units of ENERGY
and self-confidently calls them as such:
Nabil Swedan: “ No, Sir, and this is your confusion. Chapter 8 of IPCC AR6 is clear, radiative forcing (W/m2) is not a power term, it is an energy term
To sum up, your AI failed to see that the Nabils’ reasonable assumption (“that under pre-industrial conditions, the Earth reached a stable thermal equilibrium”) was made on his belief that no radiation leaves the Earth, and therefore to be in ” a stable thermal equilibrium”) – no solar radiation is absorbed by the Earth.
Therefore, it provides his argument with more credibility (“he used a reasonable assumption!”) than it deserves.
Piotr, I acknowledge that the AI didn’t do a great job. One example. The AI said ” Swedan argues that under pre-industrial conditions, the Earth reached a stable thermal equilibrium. In this steady state, incoming solar radiation perfectly matched outgoing space radiation.” However TK said he couldn’t find it in NS’s thermodynamic paper. When I asked the AI where it got this information from it gave a rather opaque, circuitous suspicious looking answer and I responded to TK on last months UV thread suggesting the AI might have been hallucinating.
However if NS does really believe all that about solar radiation, and its hard to believe he doesn’t, the point I was making is if solar radiation is absorbed and then the radiation escapes at top of atmosphere and given he believes theres no such thing as a greenhouse effect to slow that down how does he think that waste heat wouldn’t do the exact same? He seems to think it is contained within the atmosphere and that the atmosphere is a closed system just for for waste heat, but that is an absurdity. Its also an absurdity whatever he thinks about solar radiation.
However you appear to be saying something quite different in another of your posts about why NS’ s thesis doesn’t work, namely that NS makes his maths work by assuming each CO2 molecule of burned fossil fuels keeps on generating waste heat over and over again (?) which is of course impossible. But where did he do that in his calcs? I mean can an engineer really believe something so obviously impossible?
in Re to Nigelj, 2 Sep 2026 at 6:07 PM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/09/unforced-variations-sep-2026/#comment-850843
Hello Nigel,
I think that you characterized the absurdity of Nabil’s article correctly.
As regards Piotr’s metaphor about (also absurd) repeated release of the heat of combustion from once burned fuel, I suppose he tried to address the nonsensical Nabil’s defence of his calculation error that afforded his value of “cumulated” radiative forcing for the 1750 – 2005 period 2.57 W/m2, allegedly fitting with the value in an IPPC report. In reply to my objections, Nabil asserted that the radiative forcing for the 1750 – 2005 period “logically” results as a sum of 0.01 W/m2 incremental contributions from individual years throughout this period.
In this respect, I would say Piotr’s metaphor was somewhat unfortunate because although we can assume that throughout the entire 1750 – 2005 period, the forcing from fuel combustion was 0.01 W/m2 (resulting from Piotr’s example considering 18 Gt of CO2 produced by carbon combustion per year), it is obvious that this amount of carbon dioxide formed any time from another portion of fossil fuel continuously extracted from Earth’s crust, not from the same carbon somehow miraculously combusted again and again.
On the other hand, I think that another Piotr’s metaphor he used to show the absurdity of Nabil’s explanation, namely by comparison Nabil’s thinking with equally absurd “velocity accumulation”, is precise and perfectly appropriate.
Greetings
Tomáš
Tomas Kalisz: “As regards Piotr’s metaphor about (also absurd) repeated release of the heat of combustion from once burned fuel, was somewhat unfortunate because although we can assume that throughout the entire 1750 – 2005 period, the forcing from fuel combustion was 0.01 W/m2.”
First – it was no “metaphor” – but the straight argument – a logical consequence of Swedan’s multiplying annual oxidation heat production rate, 0.01 W/m2, by 250 years, if were to allow outgoing radiation (needed if the Earth DID exchange energy with space, as he had lectured you when discussing the definition of closed thermodynamic system).
Second – I left out his secondary error of constant emissions, because I didn’t want to distract the reader from the PRIMARY fallacy – Swedan’s chemical perpetuum mobile – where atom of C continuously emitting heat of oxidation for centuries after the initial oxidation from C to Co2.
Third, the same secondary error of assuming constant emissions of CO2 – applies EQUALLY to your (no-outgoing-IR fallacy) “metaphor” (as the falsehood of the assumption of no increase in outgoing IR would have been MUCH less obvious 250 years ago when human emissions of Co2 were MUCH smaller).
Nigel: “But where did he do that in his calcs? ”
In the part where he calculated the current warming from burning fossil fuels (heat of oxidation) in one year – which gives 0.01 W/m2, and then multiplied, it first by 200 years, then corrected himself and multiplied it by 250 years to get closer to radiative forcing of 2.5 W/m2 to be able to claim “equivalency” with the IPCC’s observed values.
Since his “thermodynamic approach” presumes that the only source of AGW is heat of human C to CO2 oxidation, then one could ADD annual mean C oxidation forcings …. over 250 years ONLY in two situations:
1. that each molecule of CO2 keeps emitting the same amount of energy of oxidation as it did the first time it got oxidized from C to CO2, year after year for 250 years – as oonly then radiative forcing from one year could be added to those from the other 249 years to get from 0.01 W/m2 to 2.5 W/m2 )
2. OR if AGW = the sum of the heat generated from C oxidation over the last 250 years = THEN none of the extra IR emitted by the warmer Earth makes it into space
Nigel: “I mean can an engineer really believe something so obviously impossible?”
This “doctor of chemical engineering” is on record stating that “greenhouse effect is a fiction”, that Earth radiative budgets “violate the laws of thermodynamics” and claimed that IPCC report says that Watts are not units of power but energy”, so wouldn’t put anything past him.
Piotr yes that makes sense to me. I hadnt considered two possible situations. I had thought NS must think the radiative forcing of 2.5 w /m2 was total accumulated heat content since 1750, so multiplied 0.01w/m2/ year by 250 to get 2.5w/m2/250 years, so wrong definition of w/m2 in equals bad maths out, and to make it work he had to assume no heat loss to space over the 250 years. All that hard work and impossible assumptions when the greenhouse effect explains things adequately.
Tomas Kalisz 31 Aug 2026 at 4:03 PM : Although I do not know what JCM exactly meant by the “atmospheric flywheel effect”
who cares what it means. Fancy moniker proves nothing.
TK “ I guess that by “unnatural surface moisture limitation”, he meant anthropogenic interferences with land hydrological regime that decrease water availability for evaporation.
That’s obvious. How about you answer the points I was making to that “unnatural surface moisture limitation”?
Maybe climate scientist not taking you up on your repeated demands that they explain things to you and/or do the research to substantiate your ideas – have a good reason – the doubts on your “research proposal” may be linked to the fact that you can’t answer the three questions I keep asking you and JCM, repeated in the post to which you are ostensibly replying:
====
JCM: “ I encourage our academic counterparts to explore [sic!] what I would label “the atmospheric flywheel effect” as a practical method to quantify unnatural surface moisture limitation”
Piotr: Maybe the reason why nobody so far has taken you and Tomas up on your continuing demands that “the academic counterparts” take their time and run their models to test your ideas- is NOT that all scientists are too dense to come with the ideas you and Tomas came up, but that some of them considered it in the past, but decided against doing it as ineffective use of their research time and resources.
In short, an academic counterpart would ask themselves:
1. Would it produce an actionable proposal for AGW mitigation? The answer is: NO, since from the paper you brought up yourself (Lague et al. ) we already know that we CAN’T change that moisture ENOUGH to mitigate AGW in any meaningful way. See also the fate of the Sahara irrigation proposal by your fellow waterboy, Tomas. Do you have a BETTER plan?
2. Would it improve our climate models? Answer again: NO. The availability of water for evaporation is already either calculated or more likely parametrized for each surface grid element in the general circulation models (GSMs) – so in these models we already account for this effect the best way we can.
3. Is there any new valuable theoretical insight to be gained? Again – I don’t see one – What new insight would we get – if from the results of a GCM that already calculates/parametrizes surface moisture – we found that out the total, say, 3C of warming in a given grid element, 1C. was due to natural surface moisture limitation, and 0.1C due to unnatural surface moisture limitation?
—– end of quote ——
And since unlike other RC deniers, you went from blowing the smoke to … actually looking for money:
Tomas: “ I have therefore launched an initiative to ensure that the next round of the European Horizon grant programme includes funds specifically earmarked for this research. I would like to achieve this by gathering advocacy for this idea from as many scientists working in climatology, hydrology and related fields as possible.
– you owe us the honest, documented, answer to these 3 questions.
I hope any scientist considering supporting your proposal to the European Horizon, an organization whose principal goal is to fight climate change – will ask you these 3 questions. And since Tomas Kalisz “proposal” is a part of “anything but CO2” denialism, I hope they would consider how this research, if funded, would be used:
Russia, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the “drill baby drill” interests would love to spread the message that a significant part of global warming were attributed NOT to CO2, but to the limitation in the evaporation from land, about which we can’t do enough to make any difference , thus getting them off the hook for CO2 emissions. While the fact that the only way to stop this feedback is to stop increasing CO2 conc. – will be missed by the general public and glossed over by the “drill, baby, drill” politicians,
“Tomas, will you be submitting also negative voices about your proposal?” he asked rhetorically…
In Re to Piotr, 1 Sep 2026 at 9:52 AM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/09/unforced-variations-sep-2026/#comment-850817
Hello Piotr,
Thank you very much for your feedback. Let me address your objections starting from the end.
1) “Tomas, will you be submitting also negative voices about your proposal?”
A good question. My primary criterion is the extent and weight of the collected support. If it will be weak, I am afraid that even in absence of negative voices, the proposal may have only poor chance anyway. On the other hand, in case the proposal gains support from relevant climate science professionals across a few different countries, I think that its submission might be worth of try even should negative voices about it prevail. In the submission, I would include both the positive as well as the negative voices, to provide the programme committee with as accurate information as possible.
2) I do not think that the proposed research could reveal that “a significant part of global warming (should be) attributed NOT to CO2, but to the limitation in the evaporation from land”.
I hope that it could answer the open question if climate sensitivity towards radiative forcings depends on water availability for evaporation from the land, and if so, how. Even in case that it would have clarified that decreasing water availability from the land increases climate sensitivity towards rising CO2 concentration, I do not think that this result could be interpreted the way that anthropogenic interferences with land water cycle contributed to the observed global warming, because we do not know yet if (and if so, how much) global water cycle or at least the land/sea precipitation distribution changed significantly during the Holocene, nor how much human activities contributed to these yet mostly unknown changes.
3) In this respect, I do not think that the proposed research could anyhow undermine credibility of climate science. Quite oppositely, I hope that if the findings of the proposed research show that climate sensitivity indeed does depend on land hydrological regime, it might serve as an incentive for filling the above mentioned existing knowledge gap with respect to past changes in land hydrological regimes and that the gained knowledge could, finally, enable climate model testing not only by hindcasting of past temperatures but also by hindcasting past precipitations. I believe that such a double scrutiny could significantly improve further climate model development.
4) With respect to your question 3:
“What new insight would we get – if from the results of a GCM that already calculates/parametrizes surface moisture – we found that out the total, say, 3C of warming in a given grid element, 1C. was due to natural surface moisture limitation, and 0.1C due to unnatural surface moisture limitation?”
To be honest, for me, this question does not seem to make much sense. I do not understand how certain model parameterization can make a distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” water availability. I am afraid that water availability is either parameterized in global circulation models, or could be deliberately defined in certain scenarios, like in the 2023 study by Lague et al. I think that the research proposed by me could at least help recognize if studying certain scenarios may be desirable or necessary.
5) With respect to your question 2:
“Would it improve our climate models? Answer again: NO. The availability of water for evaporation is already either calculated or more likely parametrized for each surface grid element in the general circulation models (GSMs) – so in these models we already account for this effect the best way we can.”
The proposed research should extract in an explicit form the information about the relationship between climate sensitivity and water availability for evaporation that is already implicitly comprised in existing climate models. With respect to this information, climate models are still like encrypted messages comprising a potentially important information. We cannot decide if the information is indeed important nor anyhow work therewith until we decrypt the message. In a next step, various climate models could be compared, to see how much the encrypted information differed across them. That is why I think that although your reply in NO, the proposed research still does make sense.
Nevertheless, as I strived to explain in my previous point 3), development of climate models might profit from the proposed research later, if it will expand in the future and combine with palaeoclimatological research of past hydrological regimes, as I hope.
6) With respect to your question 1:
“Would it produce an actionable proposal for AGW mitigation? “
Of course not, but I do not think that it must or should be primary goal of any research. I rather think that research proposals are justified if they address an existing knowledge gap, and I think that the absence of the explicit knowledge if (and if so how) climate sensitivity to radiative forcings depends on water availability for evaporation from the land is a knowledge gap that may deserve the proposed research.
Nevertheless, I cannot exclude that the gained knowledge could be once at least partly applied to mitigation of anthropogenic climate change. For example, I can imagine that if we finally find out that in a given climate, we must retain certain intensity of small water cycle to prevent a landscape from desiccation and switching to an arid hydrological regime, we might become more willing to reconsider your mantra that “we CAN’T change that moisture enough” and start seeking the ways how to keep water in the landscape or return it actively thereto.
By the way, the “impossible” proposal of Sahara irrigation to enable its afforestation is not mine but originated in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-009-9626-y
Greetings
Tomáš
Re Tomas 1 Sep.. Tomas, why didn’t you answer my 3 questions – directly under them, so anybody can see if/how you are answering them? INSTEAD your posted a couple of pages of mishmash – partial quotes, partial answers, tangential points, unrelated points, and for some reason in the reverse order to the asked questions
To impose some order to your chaotic answers, I’ll repost my questions and try to locate the snippets of your answer that might be relevant to a given question:
“ 1. Would it produce an actionable proposal for AGW mitigation? The answer is: NO, since from the paper you brought up yourself (Lague et al. ) we already know that we CAN’T change that moisture ENOUGH to mitigate AGW in any meaningful way. See also the fate of the Sahara irrigation proposal by your fellow waterboy, Tomas. Do you have a BETTER plan?”
Tomas: “ Of course not, but I do not think that it must or should be primary goal of any research. ”
Sure, if you were submitting your paper to journal “Entropy”, or other Nabil’s publishers, But if since you apply for funding from the ” Horizon Europe”, whose first priority is “ to tackle climate change” – your proposal having “no implication for AGW mitigation, of course” might be a problem…
“ 2. Would it improve our climate models? Answer again: NO. The availability of water for evaporation is already either calculated or more likely parametrized for each surface grid element in the general circulation models (GSMs) – so in these models we already account for this effect the best way we can. ”
Tomas admits “ I do not think that the proposed research could reveal that “a significant part of global warming (should be) attributed NOT to CO2” and then he …. changes the subject, trying to snatch a victory from the jaws of the defeat: T: but to the limitation in the evaporation from land”
WHAT FOR? You had just admitted it has no influence on the objective of the Horzion Europe funding (“tackling climate change”) AND as I have already pointed out – these LOCAL effects ARE ALREADY ” either calculated or more likely parametrized for each surface grid element in the general circulation models (GSMs)” – so there is no improvement in climate models if the funding for climate modelling were to be diverted to your proposal quite the opposite – if a valid proposal underfunded because of the diversion of the money to your nothing-burger proposal.
3. “What new insight would we get – if from the results of a GCM that already calculates/parametrizes surface moisture – we found that out the total, say, 3C of warming in a given grid element, 1C. was due to natural surface moisture limitation, and 0.1C due to unnatural surface moisture limitation?”
Tomas To be honest, for me, this question does not seem to make much sense. I do not understand how certain model parameterization can make a distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” water availability.
The inability (or refusal?) to comprehend even such a SIMPLE question – is not a valid excuse. The question was in effect SO WHAT? what new insight will we gain if we “made a distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” water availability” , given that:
a) both the natural and unnatural components are ALREADY being calculated by the models,
b) from earlier studies (e.g. Lague et al.) we ALREADY know the MAXIMUM effects of evaporation limitation – and have show on RC that realistic effects are on;ly a tiny farction of the maximum range.
c) by combining “b)” with our knowledge of the water budgets – we ALREADY know that humans simply can’t increase evaporation from land ANYWHERE EVEN close to help with Horizon Europe goal of “tackling the climate change” (see the fate of your famous “Sahara irrigation proposal”, and JCM’s posts condemning “artificial fixation and overemphasis” of the role of CO2 by climate science.)
Given a), b) and c) – WHAT’S THE NEW INSIGHT from your proposal to …. label a portion of the output of a climate model “natural limitation of evaporation over land” and another “human limitation of evaporation over land”???
Or as I have already simplified for you”
“3. What new insight would we get –[ if ] we found that out the total, say, 3C of warming in a given model grid element, 1C. was due to “ natural surface moisture limitation, and 0.1C due to unnatural surface moisture limitation ?”
=============
P.S. Piotr 1. Sep ” “Tomas, will you be submitting also negative voices about your proposal?” he asked rhetorically…”
It was tongue in cheek (hence: “he asked rhetorically…”) – it wasn’t really about submission, but about whether you honestly consider the criticisms BEFORE the submission, or like Nabil Sweden, brush them aside, and double down on your original “idea”, and hope, like Nabil, for the incompetent and/or biased in favour of your “anything but GHGs” denialism reviewers.
in Re to Piotr, 4 Sep 2026 at 10:29 AM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/09/unforced-variations-sep-2026/#comment-850876
Hello Piotr,
The main reason I took time to respond—and focused on specific points you found inappropriate—is simply that your questions were originally addressed to JCM, not to me.
For instance, I couldn’t adequately react to your prompt asking “WHAT’S THE NEW INSIGHT from your proposal to… label a portion of the output of a climate model…” because I never made such a proposal.
On the contrary, even if we knew the answers to my questions and confirmed that human land-use changes altered preindustrial climate sensitivity, I am doubtful we could cleanly separate the global warming observed since 1750 into preindustrial land-use effect versus industrial CO2 emissions effect.
Are you implying that my questions about climate sensitivity are unnecessary because you believe such attribution is already straightforward—and would show anthropogenic preindustrial contribution to anthropogenic global warming to be negligible anyway?
Greetings,
Tomáš
Tomas: “ The main reason I took time to respond—and focused on specific points you found inappropriate—is simply that your questions were originally addressed to JCM, not to me.
That’s a disingenuous answer – since you replied to my points by saying what YOU plan to do (with your proposal). Furthermore, my 3 points apply to any “anything-but-CO2” deniers – be it you, JCM or Nabil Swedan.
– Piotr: “3. “What new insight would we get – if from the results of a GCM that already calculates/parametrizes surface moisture – we found that out the total, say, 3C of warming in a given grid element, 1C. was due to natural surface moisture limitation, and 0.1C due to unnatural surface moisture limitation”
– TK:” I am doubtful we could cleanly separate the global warming observed since 1750 into preindustrial land-use effect versus industrial CO2 emissions effect.”
So it’s even worse! Let’s recapitulate:
– The central goal of the funding agency your are applying for money is “ to tackle climate change” .
– Your proposal would NOT lead to ANY actionable ways to tackle the climate change, (but may take the money from a proposal that could)
– It won’t improve our climate models, because the availability of water for evaporation is already either calculated or more likely parametrized for each surface grid element in the general circulation models (GSMs) – so in these models we already account for this effect the best way we can. ”
– So . “What new insight would we get ?”
– by essentially …. repeating what Lague et al. did in 2023 (sensitivity of the model to the avialability of moisture for evaporation is the difference between unlimited moisture (Lague’s Swampland simulation) and realistic moisture availability (akin to Lague’s “middle” simulation using more realistic parametrization of evaporation from continents)
-by obtaining a number that…. doesn’t offer any new insight – if you calculate that “GMST would be lower by X deg. C, if instead of realistic evaporation we had unlimited evaporation” – SO WHAT?
– and now you admit that you won’t even be able to separate the human effect on evaporation from the preindustrial one – even though for climate CHANGE we are interested in the human effects, because only them have CHANGED..
And to get this nothing-burger, you ask for money to be diverted to your proposal from other studies that could possibly help us mitigate AGW?
in Re to Piotr, 8 Sep 2026 at 5:23 PM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/09/unforced-variations-sep-2026/#comment-850962
Hallo Piotr,
Even if I accept that your three points apply to me, it will not help because I still do not know what JCM meant by natural and unnatural surface moisture limitation. Nor do I know what you mean thereby in your point 3. Moreover, you seem to assume that attribution of the calculated warming to assumed sources thereof is possible individually in each grid element of a model. I do not have a tiniest clue if something like this is indeed possible and already for this reason, I do not know how I can reasonably comment on such a difficult question.
I at least tried to find out if I could somehow translate your point 3 to the language of my questions:
“I am doubtful we could cleanly separate the global warming observed since 1750 into preindustrial land-use effect versus industrial CO2 emissions effect.
Are you implying that my questions about climate sensitivity are unnecessary because you believe such attribution is already straightforward—and would show anthropogenic preindustrial contribution to anthropogenic global warming to be negligible anyway?”
If you tried to respond, I must admit that I have not recognized the answer in your comment. Let me therefore ask again:
Should I read your repeated objections the way that you believe we can already now say with a reasonable certainty that if climate sensitivity depends on water availability for evaporation from the land, then e.g. in case of a 3 °C global warming since 1750, the maximal contribution that could be attributed to anthropogenic preindustrial interferences with land hydrological regimes will be 0.1 °C?
Oppositely, if I misunderstood your point 3, could you clarify what you exactly meant thereby?
Greetings
Tomáš
Tomas Kalisz:” Even if I accept that your three points apply to me, it will not help because I still do not know what JCM meant by natural and unnatural surface moisture limitation.”
Could you tell your brain not to drift away on a tangent? If you accept that my 3 points apply to you, then to your defense of YOUR claims it is irrelevant what JCM meant or didn’t mean. Got it?
TK: For instance, I couldn’t adequately react to your prompt asking “WHAT’S THE NEW INSIGHT from your proposal to… label a portion of the output of a climate model…” because I never made such a proposal.
So when you read:
Piotr: “my 3 points apply to any “anything-but-CO2” denier – be it you, JCM or Nabil Swedan.”
which part of “any” you are unable do understand?
And it’s even better – the 3rd questions with which you are taking specific issue here: “What new insight would we get?” is a universal question applying to ANY scientific inquiry – whether you want to study climate, microbial physiology, or the dark matter.
So you’d better have a good answer to justify to the Horizon Europe which a part of their funding toward their goal of “tackling climate change” – should be “earmarked” for your proposal, at the expense of not funding other proposals .
in Re to Piotr, 11 Sep 2026 at 5:36 AM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/09/unforced-variations-sep-2026/#comment-851015
Hello Piotr,
If you, by your third question, meant just “What new insight would we get?”, I would answer “an explicit / quantitative knowledge how climate sensitivities of selected climate models depend on water availability from the land”.
To the additional question “what for?”, I would reply that this knowledge may change the way how climate models are used. For example, if the foreseen dedicated experiments show that climate sensitivity towards changes in CO2 atmospheric concentration depends on water availability for evaporation strongly, it may become clear that CO2 emission scenarios are to be combined with hydrological scenarios.
Greetings
Tomáš
Tomas Kalisz: “ If you, by your third question, meant just “What new insight would we get?”. I would answer “an explicit / quantitative knowledge how climate sensitivities of selected climate models depend on water availability from the land”.
And as I already explained to you DOZEN’S of times – that’s a nothing-burger insight, using professionally-looking words to suggest the importance of your modest proposal.
Therefore again:
What NEW USEFUL insight do you promise, given that:
1. this effect is ALREADY represented in EVERY climate model that calculates or parametrizes your “water availability from the land” in every of its projection (and not only in some arbitrarily selected by you models and projections)?
2. given “1” – your “explicit quantification” offers ZERO improvement to the climate models
3. it is a passive feedback, which we can’t do anything about, and which is already modelled by models – thus your “ explicit quantification ” provides the Horizon Europe funding agency with ZERO information relevant to its goal of “tackling the climate change”
4. since there is no practical insight – what NEW USEFUL theoretical insight would you get if after succeeding in your diversion of the money, computational resources, and research effort, AWAY from the proposals helpful in “tackling the climate change”, you “ explicitly quantified” that …. today’s T increase over land would be say, 1 C smaller, than the one on …. a hypothetical Earth from alternative universe where there is no water availability issue (let’s call it “Swampland Earth”) – because that’s the only way to “explicitly quantify” the model sensitivity.
What is your rationale to think that you would get qualitatively DIFFERENT AND BETTER
answers than those by Lague et al. who ALERADY “ explicitly quantified [ the effects of] water availability from the land” in 2023?
The “atmospheric flywheel effect” (originally described by scientists Richmond and Matsushita in 1975) refers to a hysteresis-like delay in the upper atmosphere, where winds and currents continue to circulate due to sheer physical inertia long after the initial force driving them has shut down.
Just like a mechanical flywheel stores kinetic energy and keeps spinning after you stop pushing it, the upper atmosphere acts as a giant planetary shock absorber and energy reservoir.
In re to Tomas https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/08/unforced-variations-aug-2026/#comment-850803
congratulations on your initiative – it’s refreshing to see evidence of positive efforts and contributions to the world on these pages.
Circle-in Sarosh on as he notes their analytical framework provides potential to independently infer moisture limitation from readily available observables, which I suppose offers potential to identify parameterization bias and correction for complex numerical schemes that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. I can imagine more direct applications without the nuisance of passing it through such schemes too.
From the work previously cited:
“””Our approach shows that DTR contains imprints of surface evaporative conditions as the water availability at the surface directly affects the energy input into the lower atmosphere. This implies that information on surface water limitation is included in observations of the diurnal temperature range. It may be possible to exploit this relation to infer water limitation and evaporation rates directly from widely observable temperature observations without accounting for additional parameterization to represent surface water limitation. This interpretation is consistent with recent approaches that only use near-surface meteorological observations to estimate evaporation rates (McColl et al., 2019; McColl & Rigden, 2020).”””
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2024GL113595
I’ll be mostly offline over the coming month, supporting our partners with soil remediation work on location abroad.
keep up your enthusiasm and positive efforts.
cheers
JCM “ congratulations on your initiative – it’s refreshing to see evidence of positive efforts and contributions to the world on these pages.
Yeah! It’s a high time somebody stood up to those climate modellers responsible for the degradation of up to 40% of Earth ecosystems with their …. artificial fixation and overemphasis!
“ It’s hard to imagine denying or actively minimizing the consequences to realclimates due to an artificial fixation and overemphasis on the outputs of trace gas and aerosol forced model estimates.” (c) JCM
But don’t just stand approvingly there – help Tomas! Help him convince European Horizon how its goal of “fighting climate change” will be advanced by funding an “anything but CO2” denier, whose work, if successful, will be used by Russia and other fossil fuel interests to argue that a significant part of global warming can be attributed NOT to CO2, but to the limitation in the evaporation from land, about which we can’t do enough to make any difference, which, by deliberate ignoring that the only way to reduce this feedback is to reduce GHG emissions, would get Russia and other beneficiaries of the fossil fuel use – off the hook.
Or perhaps you can help Tomas falsify my 3 conditions for his proposal being worth of the funding money, because the poor guy has had a terribly hard time doing it. Particularly that all three were originally directed at you, when it was you who were soliciting:
JCM: “ I encourage our academic counterparts to explore [sic!] “the atmospheric flywheel effect” as a practical method to quantify unnatural surface moisture limitation ”
Piotr: Your “academic counterpart” would ask:
1. Would it produce an actionable proposal for AGW mitigation? The answer is: NO, since from the paper you brought up yourself (Lague et al. ) we already know that we CAN’T change that moisture ENOUGH to mitigate AGW in any meaningful way. See also the fate of the Sahara irrigation proposal by your fellow waterboy, Tomas. Do you have a BETTER plan?
2. Would it improve our climate models? Answer again: NO. The availability of water for evaporation is already either calculated or more likely parametrized for each surface grid element in the general circulation models (GSMs) – so in these models we already account for this effect the best way we can.
3. Is there any new valuable theoretical insight to be gained? Again – I don’t see one – What new insight would we get – if from the results of a GCM that already calculates/parametrizes surface moisture – we found that out the total, say, 3C of warming in a given grid element, 1C. was due to natural surface moisture limitation, and 0.1C due to unnatural surface moisture limitation?
—– end of quote ——
So far – nothing from Tomas on this, nothing from you, bupkus.
in Re to JCM, 1 Sep 2026 at 2:23 PM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/09/unforced-variations-sep-2026/#comment-850819
Hello JCM,
Thank you for your feedback.
If I understand correctly, by the “atmospheric flywheel effect”, you meant the stabilizing effect of latent heat flux on surface temperature, discernible e.g. from moderate diurnal temperature ranges (DTR) as shown by Ghausi et al, am I right?
Do you think that replacement of present parameterizations of water availability for evaporation in climate models with moisture availability limitations derived from DTR observations could represent a feasible way towards further climate modelling improvement?
Greetings
Tomáš
With the interest in the El Nino brewing, don’t neglect the AMO in the Atlantic. In my research, I apply tidal forcing as a driver for modeling climate indices, and have long noticed that a balanced ~120-year cycle emerges via interactions with the annual cycle. This produces large excursions both + and -, which is interesting because it was legendary oceanographer Walter Munk who proposed that large forcing of subsurface fluid volume produces frictional loss independent of the sign of a fluid’s velocity. The implication is that the ~120-year tidal cycle is rectified to produce a ~60-year cycle, which hints at the AMO 50-70 year cycle. Moreover, the model of the tidal cycle produces a ragged stepped staircase over that long period, of which the individual steps also map to the fast cycles of AMO (easily seen in NAO as well).
I have an extended optimizing simulator for this project, but I factored out the essential features for a one-pass model fit to the AMO data here: https://gist.github.com/pukpr/05687a46cf1a5b76b2ba6ae589343172
Munk & Wunsch (2002) – “Millennial Climate Variability: Is There a Tidal Connection?”
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/15/4/1520-0442_2002_015_0370_mcvita_2.0.co_2.pdf
KM: If domination isn’t an aberration but a predictable output of the game board we’ve built, what does that mean for how we try to fix it? Is it possible for an entire civilization to behave psychopathically even when the vast majority of the individual people inside it are empathetic and pro-social? And if the ultimate goal is to steer toward a more pro-social system, is there a way to ‘win the game’ and re-write the rules without also resorting to psychopathic strategies and behaviors?
MS: I think the psychopathy of corporations is the natural and necessary face of capitalism. Individually, we all exhibit the same psychopathic traits of corporations to some degree sometimes, but we also have the empathy trait that override our psychopathic traits. The empathy trait is missing from capitalism, and I don’t think it can be added to it. Instead, the empathy trait must be implemented by government in the form of regulations.
The solution is to stop thinking of the economy as capitalism as a standalone system. It can’t stand alone. True free markets are psychopathic. Instead, the economy must be seen as capitalism AND government regulation. Maybe even stop calling it the economy and start calling it the society.
We already have this system in place. We just aren’t doing the government part right.
Martin Smith says 2 Sep 2026 at 2:11 AM
“Instead, the economy must be seen as capitalism AND government regulation. Maybe even stop calling it the economy and start calling it the society. We already have this system in place. We just aren’t doing the government part right.”
Except that, as Greg Elliot makes perfectly clear, Governments and the political system institutions are equally affected by the very same things that Corporations are. That is in all kinds of political systems be they western, capitalist, the US empire system, or China or Russia or Saudi Arabia. It might be a good idea to read listen to what Greg Elliott’s research says about these matters, before commenting on a simple reference comment that said: “hey look at this.”
Unfortunately a few other extracts posted here on the topic bit the dust. Greg Elliott’s Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis is wide-ranging scientific complex and dense. A useful starting point is the Links posted in Aug UV, or go buy his book from Amazon. On Substack you can speak directly to him, and put your questions opinions or doubts there.
I argued a similar thing to MS on last month’s UV thread, namely that yes corporations tend to be psychopathic, but that government constrains corporate behavior with laws and lawsuits, so government acts as a type of conscience for the system as a whole, although not well enough some times. I quoted the example of the state governments suing meta.
I think its stretching credibility or hugely generalising for researchers to also argue governments are inherently psychopathic. I mean government itself where politicians make decisions.
Several left leaning and socially liberal governments in New Zealand have been the opposite of psychopathic and were quite empathetic. There are obvious reasons why corporates might be psychopathic but other organisation’s are structured differently with different goals so may not behave the same.
However psychopthy is not that well understood and is thought to be a spectrum issue where psychopaths are at the extreme end of the spectrum. So claiming corporates or governments are psychopathic is in the realms of speculation.
Like a typical sophist, Kobayashi Multitroll (KM) – answers his opponents by …. redirecting their criticism of him – back at them:
Kobayashi Multitroll (KM): “ To demand “you must have a perfect solution” argument is a trap.”
Says the guy who posted 100s of post dismissing the existing technologies (renewables, EVs, energy efficiency) and existing AGW mitigation policies on the “all-or-nothing” principle – by demanding that each of them provides … “a perfect solution” to AGW. e.g. that the renewables are pointless because on their own, they can’t by themselves stop AGW.
And after years of demanding from other “perfect solutions”, now portrays himself as a … victim of such intellectually-dishonest demands of “perfect solution”, while, in reality, we have asked KM not whether he has a “perfect” solution, but whether he has …. ANY solution:
Martin Smith to KM: “we are tired of you repeatedly identifying a problem we were already aware of (i.e. emissions are projected to rise despite the conversion effort being well underway), and instead focus […] on proposing a solution.”
I.e “a solution”, not “the perfect solution”.
And so far I have seen from you only two vague ideas of solutions, neither with any details of how do you propose to implement them:
1. An overthrow of world’s political, economic and cultural systems, and changing the human nature – from egoism to altruism, from favouring oneself, one’s family, nation or race – and creation a New Man willing to sacrifice himself and his family for the Idea (the good of other people/for the future of the humanity). You offered no implementation details so let’s go by the fruits of your predecessors who tried it – tens of millions of victims of Soviet Communism (with a cult of Pavlik Morozov, who denounced his father to the Soviet political police , resulting in his execution, used as a role model for tens of millions of Soviet preschoolers and elementary students), tens of millions of victims of Chinese Communism’s Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and other campaigns, a quarter of the Cambodian population exterminated by Pol Pot.
2. Rapid cutting the human population to size. Martin asked you: ” What are the particulars of your proposed solution? How do you propose to [reduce the Earth’s population]? ”
Since you, for some reason, didn’t offer any particulars – I have done it for you:
– assuming that you see the urgency of AGW mitigation – we would need to get at least to the net zero within a few decades. Even if allow that carbon storage AND direct air capture could reach 10% of current emission – the net zero would require 90% reduction in Co2 emissions which would demand the extermination of 90% of humans, or 50% of human population if we exterminated only the wealthier half.
Given your predecessors in solution No.1 and the numbers demanded by solution No. 2 – we can agree that the appropriate name for your ideas on AGW mitigation should be:
KM’s “final solution”
KM: Except that, as Greg Elliot makes perfectly clear, Governments and the political system institutions are equally affected by the very same things that Corporations are.
MS: I don’t know what Greg Elliot actually showed. I can certainly agree that capitalists have taken over the federal government with Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United, and with lobbying and making federal elected office races cost tens of millions of dollars, but those problems can be fixed because they are not in the constitution.
So my argument still stands. And again, what is your proposal for a solution? Everybody knows capitalism is amoral at best and psychopathic at worst. Everybody knows the federal government is not working. Everybody knows capitalists have too much power in the federal government because they have money. Everybody knows nothing can be done to change capitalism, and everybody knows we have to (and can) fix the federal government.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
— From the book of Leonard
We went through this with you on the conversion to renewable energy project. We don’t need you to lecture us on capitalism and government. What is YOUR proposal for fixing the government?
Martin Smith says 3 Sep 2026 at 9:36 AM
We went through this with you on the conversion to renewable energy project. We don’t need you to lecture us on capitalism and government. What is YOUR proposal for fixing the government?
Weak as water. Lightweight. Fraudulent and dull. So dull in fact he doesn’t even realize how badly he lost the “what’s it worth” predicament. He is saying here he still doesn’t even understand what was being said. It’s what people do when they do not understand the discussion nor the facts; they have no argument to propose; have no solutions to anything themselves.
The demand for a “solution” is a fraudulent rhetorical trap — because it attempts to shift the burden. When it is the people who designed and defended this system are the ones who should be explaining why it failed — not the people who pointed out the failure.
Martin Smith’s and Nigel Jones’ false framing assumes that identifying a problem is worthless unless you can also solve it. That’s absurd.
When someone says “What’s your solution?” what they’re really saying is: “I have no response to your critique, but I can’t admit that, so I’ll make you jump through a hoop I know you can’t clear in one sentence.”
When Martin says “We don’t need you to lecture us on capitalism and government. What is YOUR proposal for fixing the government?” he is essentially saying: “If you are so smart, go solve world hunger, redesign global governance, and fix the UN—all in one sentence—or be quiet.”
It is a cheap debating / logical fallacy trap designed to be impossible to answer.
Because it is impossible to answer, it has nothing to say about—no relevance whatsoever to—my own commentary or reasoning or the evidence those are grounded in. Martin is pulling another one of his acts. Next step he’ll beg AI for an answer to protect the belief he’s always right.
Know that the perfect solution fallacy (or “nirvana fallacy”) is the exact rhetorical trap they are setting up. No one is required to propose a flawless new system to have the right to identify catastrophic flaws in the current one.
I found a search result where Tim Lenton uses the same metaphor to describe why the “you must have a perfect solution” argument is a trap. He writes that we are on a ship that “has seen the proverbial iceberg and need to be steering away from it as hard as possible” . The point is that you don’t need to know how to build a new ship, redesign the engine, and write a new navigation manual before you are allowed to say, “There’s an iceberg dead ahead and the current steering mechanism is locked hard to starboard. ”
Ref Oxford University Press 2025/05/22
Averting Disaster – must act to avoid potentially fatal climate tipping points. The Titanic disaster provides a fitting metaphor.
https://preview.academic.oup.com/book/60007/chapter-abstract/513485912
You don’t demand a full blueprint for steering the ship from the lookout who just shouted “Iceberg!” – before you’ll respond to the warning. The demand itself is the weak fraudulent deflection.
The same result came up in a recent analysis by Therese Lindahl and colleagues. They point out that while it is easy to dismiss institutions like the UNFCCC because they are failing, this is a mistake. Those institutions are still essential, and the goal is to identify the failures within them in order to push for “modifications to the funding model” and increased “transparency” .
Ref: https://beijer.kva.se/news-item/titanic-lessons-fpr-spaceship-earth/
In other words: the problem isn’t having an institution; the problem is that the current structure of that institution (a consensus-based, lowest-common-denominator model) is designed to fail.
The urgent question right now is not “What’s the perfect new system?” It’s: “Why did the existing system systematically underestimate every major climate metric — and why is it still doing it?”
That question has an answer. And it’s not “because we didn’t try hard enough.”
Unfortunately it is the dull and historically ignorant who do not have a clue. The greatest social changes in history — abolition, suffrage, civil rights, environmental protection — were driven by people who named the injustice first. The solutions came later, and they came from collective action, not from a single critic having a 10-point plan ready on demand.
References:
perfect solution fallacy (nirvana fallacy)
https://www.skepdic.com/perfectsolution.html
https://news.nus.edu.sg/nobel-laureate-steven-chu-warns-climate-crisis-is-a-titanic-battle-that-demands-urgent-change-in-course/#1
https://www.tricountyindependent.com/story/lifestyle/faith/2014/12/09/shayne-looper-are-you-infected/35777100007/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2021/03/07/letters-like-the-titanic-we-know-a-disaster-is-coming-but-we-are-ignoring-what-it-means-for-our-planet/#1
KM: Martin Smith’s and Nigel Jones’ false framing assumes that identifying a problem is worthless unless you can also solve it. That’s absurd.
MS: I think you misapprehend, KM. We don’t say that identifying a problem is worthless until you can solve it. We say we are tired of you repeatedly identifying a problem we were already aware of (i.e. emissions are projected to rise despite the conversion effort being well underway), and instead focus your prodigious intellect on proposing a solution.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, KM. Jump in with both feet. Here are your claims so far:
1. Converting the worlds energy systems and vehicle fleets from fossil fuels to renewable energy and nuclear energy will fail.
2. Government is just as psychopathic as capitalism, so neither capitalism nor government can solve the problem in 1.
That doesn’t leave you much room to move, KM. In fact, I would say you haven’t just dug yourself into a very deep hole, you have pulled all the dirt back in on top of you.
Reply to Martin Smith
Strawman.
Reply to Martin Smith and Nigel Jones again, the OP presented the discussion on TGS with Nate. Most people who took the time to watch that or read the linked transcript would not be making the kind of inaccurate comments you two made.
It’s like imagining you can do a good book review on Plato’s Republic without ever once reading it from cover to cover.
KM: Reply to Martin Smith and Nigel Jones again, the OP presented the discussion on TGS with Nate. Most people who took the time to watch that or read the linked transcript would not be making the kind of inaccurate comments you two made.
MS: I live in Norway. The Norwegian government is not psychopathic. Capitalism is fairly well regulated here. We have universal single-payer health insurance/care. Workers are paid livable wages. Daycare is free. Higher education is free. The people own the oil and gas. Everyone gets a livable pension. Everyone gets 5 weeks paid vacation.
When you say the Norwegian government is psychopathic, what exactly are you referring to? Don’t give me a wall of text from somewhere else, or a video from someone else. Just tell me in your own words where the Norwegian government is psychopathic.
I’d love to live there.
Notice how KM multitroll doesnt answer MSs question. He rarely answers the hard questions. Because he cant. He runs away and posts some new BS.
Martin,
I’m not going to summarize a 2+ hour discussion for you in a paragraph. The transcript and video were provided precisely so that people could engage with the actual substance, rather than rely on my paraphrasing or a strawman version of the argument.
If you watched it and disagree with a specific point Nate or I made, I’m happy to read what you say.
But your demanding a bespoke, spoon-fed summary while refusing to engage with the primary source-and the material as presented-is not a good-faith request—it’s a deflection. The work has been put on the table.
The rest is all on you.
MS isnt asking for a summary of the video and its generalized claims. Hes asking you to briefly explain in your own words why the Norwegian government is psychopathic. If you wont its likely because you cant and dont really understand the issues.
The fact that anyone would suggest Norways government is psychopathic in any substantial or overall sense would make me question their own sanity. The defining feature of psychopathic is severe lack of conscience and empathy, and typically huge levels of dishonesty. Norways government with its human rights legislation, its generally reasonably inclusive attitude to minority groups, its social and economic policies and foreign aid budgets do not fit that description.
I live in New Zealand and our government has similar policies, with the exception of one cruel, heartless government in the 1990s. Hence I decided to post a quick response.
KM, I don’t have to watch a lengthy video to know that researchers, making generalised claims that governments are psychopathic doesn’t stand scrutiny. Like I said I know of several that are NOT psychopathic, by any normal definition of psychopathy. That is real world data and evidence. Its enough to raise questions about their claims.
And I do know of some governments in my country that have displayed psychopathic traits. The Trump administration looks rather psychopathic at times. But my point is not ALL governments. have done that.
But I think Nate Hagens is interesting and makes a useful contribution. I just dont read an awful lot of that sort of commentary these days as it gets to be doom scrolling. Thats why I didnt watch all his video.
And I’m very much on Martin Smiths side that we don’t need lectures on capitalism and government. We need solutions. I would add they need to be sensible solutions, not ideas like rapid simplification or rapid degrowth, or world socialism ver. 2.0.
The first measured numbers for Aug 2026, UAH TLT for August is posted at +0.68ºC, the highest anomaly of the year-to-date (which had ranged +0.35ºC to +0.53ºC).
August 2026 becomes the 2nd warmest August on record behind 2024 (+0.75ºC) and ahead of 2023 (+0.61ºC), 2025 & 1998 (both +0.39ºC) & 2016 (+0.32ºC).
In the all-month rankings, it sits down at 16th behind the sequence of months Sept 2023-Oct 2024 plus Feb 2016, this all-month ranking topped by Apr24 +0.94ºC.
TLT do show far bigger wobbles through an El Niño. So 2026 was always going to require far more than a run of “bananas!!!” monthly anomalies to snatch the warmest-year-on-record from 2024. For that, Sep26-Dec26 would now have to average an incredible +1.39ºC.
With the anomalies for Sept-Dec2026 set to be high, 2026 snatching 2nd-place in the warmest year rankings is assured.
(Note that based on the first half of the year, Zeke Hausfather’s article on the chances of a record 2026 gave varying probabilities BEST & GISS 65%, HadCRUT 35%, NOAA 24% and just 9% for ERA5 & JRA-3Q SAT. The TLT numbers would always have been much lower again.)
Annual UAH TLT rankings
1st … … 2024 … +0.77ºC
2nd … … 2025 … +0.47ºC
Jan-Aug . 2026 … +0.46ºC
3rd … … 2023 … +0.43ºC
4th … … 2016 … +0.39ºC
5th … … 1998 … +0.35ºC
6th … … 2020 … +0.35ºC
7th … … 2019 … +0.29ºC
8th … … 2017 … +0.27ºC
9th … … 2010 … +0.19ºC
10th . … 2022 … +0.15ºC
Reply to MA Rodger
…. varying probabilities BEST & GISS 65%, HadCRUT 35%, NOAA 24% and just 9% for ERA5 & JRA-3Q SAT.
Cool, which record setting prediction should I bet on @ https://polymarket.com Rodger?
All the media is full of UN warnings about the already here EL NINO.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/03/el-nino-supersizing-before-our-eyes-united-nations
Temps set to reach 1.75C above pre industrial (0.2/0.3C temp surge) before it falls back but never returns to what it was before EL NINO (apparently it is what James Hansen stated).
It is even argued that 2026 will temporarily beat 2024, before 2027 takes the crown.
The IPCC Consensus was the filter, not the science.
By 2026, the IPCC’s “gold standard” consensus isn’t just conservative—it’s systematically wrong on every major metric. And not by accident. By design.
The structure was built to absorb scientific warnings and output conservative policy safety instead. Uncertainty wasn’t resolved—it was weaponized, as designed. Critical gaps (clouds, aerosols, ice dynamics) were left unfunded and “too hard,” giving cover to keep sensitivity low and timelines long. CMIP became a monoculture of convenience, not a reliable tool for prediction—because averaging blind spots and guesstimates doesn’t create truth. It creates locked institutional groupthink.
The result? 2024–2025 blew past every AR6 trend projection. Arctic ice, Antarctic sea-ice, permafrost. Regional and global heating, wildfires, droughts, and AMOC—all moving decades ahead of the “consensus” timelines. The 2026 Super-Duper El Niño is already here, and the real record-breaker—2027—is coming hot on its heels. But the consensus still can’t see it.
This IPCC “scientific consensus” baloney wasn’t a failure of science. It was a failure of geopolitical governance—the complete opposite of the UN of 1948—instead deliberately engineered to delay, dilute, deny responsibility, and protect the status quo for the wealthy powerful elites.
Is it time to abandon the fiction yet, or have we not had enough already? The consensus is not the ceiling of risk—it’s the floor of denial from all quarters.
Where’s that grand climate science consensus at today?
I’ll tell you: it no longer exists.
“The (IPCC) structure was built to absorb scientific warnings and output conservative policy safety instead. Uncertainty wasn’t resolved—it was weaponized, as designed. Critical gaps (clouds, aerosols, ice dynamics) were left unfunded and “too hard,” giving cover to keep sensitivity low and timelines long. ”
Firstly it should be mentioned that the IPCC doesn’t do research on things like clouds, aerosols or anything else, and doesn’t pay for getting research done! Its not the IPCCs job to do that. It also has no powers to demand what research be done. Research is done by private interests, government institutions, academia, etc, etc. The IPCC REVIEWS that evidence. If you want to complain about underfunding of research, or how the IPCC is structured to operate, at least direct it clearly at the actual culprits which could potentially be governments.
And KM provides no evidence that research on clouds, ice dynamics and aerosols is underfunded. Because I’ve seen many, many published papers on those issues! For example scepticalscience.com publishes lists of new research every month.
And determining cloud dynamics, and the effects of aerosols IS hard. We cannot put the earth in a laboratory and do a controlled experiment on it against another earth. At best you can only model that sort of thing.
Yes the IPCC tends to be a conservative body, but beyond that I feel that KMs assertions arent adequately proven,
Nigel,
Frankly, I could not care less how you feel about anything. My assertions are self-evident and they’re sourced. Reality is what it is.
The problem is not that I haven’t provided enough—it’s that you consistently misrepresent what I say and what the research shows which I both quote from and referecne. Time and again. Including above.
I can’t fix that for you. That’s work you have to do yourself.
This applies to your comment here as well – Nigelj says 5 Sep 2026 at 11:36 PM – where pejoratives are easy; critical thinking is hard.
KM. Your assertions are in your own words that ” research on clouds, ice dynamics and aerosols is underfunded”. You say these assertions are sourced, but you have provided no named sources, no quotes from those sources, no evidence, nothing.
And as I pointed out sceptical science website lists dozens of papers on aerosols etc, etc. So it appears plenty of studies are well funded. So yes Im entitled to say I feel you haven’t proven your assertion.
I think you live in a fantasy world and have some sort of delusions of grandeur.
Correction addendum:
The lowest-common-denominator consensus1 is not the ceiling of risk—it’s the floor of denial and minimization from all quarters—it is not just the governments and corporate lobbyists throwing their weight around either.
The “lowest-common-denominator” dilution happens before the politicians ever get their hands on it—inside the scientific community itself. The quest for consensus encourages premature agreement among experts where none exists,2 with the loudest voices often taken to be more representative than they actually are, while silent actors fall in line with what they perceive to be the trend.
This allows enabling certain actors to disproportionately direct the consensus through dominance hierarchy pressures and what Greg Elliott’s Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis3 describes as the institutional “entrapment” dynamics that reward conformity and punish dissent. This “scientific reticence” leaves the more extreme—and often more plausible—possibilities on the cutting room floor.4
References: Hidden in plain view and buried in the ‘noise.’
1.1 “because it is a consensus document, its conclusions are the lowest common denominator” 2013 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ipcc-report-released-no-s_b_4037784
1.2 “lowest-common-denominator texts that are cautious in tone, downplay urgency” 2026 https://www.stockholmresilience.org/5.7776dc9119e48bc873634d6.html
1.3 “consensus rule… has always been the Achilles heel … often led to outcomes that can only be described as the lowest common denominator…” and ” how the UN’s requirement for unanimity holds back environmental policy,” 2025 https://www.newscientist.com/article/2493475-how-to-tackle-environmental-issues-when-the-world-cant-agree/
1.4 “Consensus, it was said, would be the aim; but then the veto was introduced. This is the very opposite of consensus! ” 2025 https://theecologist.org/2025/jan/16/how-get-consensus-cop30
1.5 “The IPCC process suffers from all the dangers of consensus–building in a complex arena, leading to “least drama” and lowest-common-denominator out-comes which overlook critical issues.” 2025 https://canadiancor.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Is-scientific-reticence-hindering-climate-understanding-.pdf
2 A Critical Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2022
https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/api/core/bitstreams/5f30137d-9c76-4cb9-91bf-6d2e1618e3ab/content#33
Mike Hulme (Chapter 19) examines why and how the IPCC seeks scientific consensus and some of the limits of such consensus-seeking. In similar fashion, Kari De Pryck (Chapter 20) examines the process through which shared ownership of IPCC reports is reached between authors and governments, in particular during the line-by-line approval of the Summaries for Policymakers (SPMs). Finally in this part, Martin Mahony (Chapter 21) carefully interrogates the injunction for IPCC assessments to be policy relevant yet policy neutral, and the practices by which the institution navigates this boundary.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/critical-assessment-of-the-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change/41595DD505026B0DAB58F975C03594E6
2.1 Part IV – Processes https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/critical-assessment-of-the-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change/processes/2F1169BE15602EC4E2F6F61DBBA40F52#4
2.2 19 Scientific Consensus-seeking
“Yet among observers and participants of the IPCC, there are ambiguities about whether consensus statements reflect ‘a lowest common denominator consensus view of the vast majority of scientists’ (Edwards & Schneider, Reference Edwards and Schneider1997: 13), or whether the IPCC ‘brings controversy within consensus, capturing the full range of expert opinion’ (Edwards, Reference Edwards, Schneider, Miller and Edwards2010: xvii). https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/critical-assessment-of-the-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change/processes/2F1169BE15602EC4E2F6F61DBBA40F52#CN-bp-20
“As future assessments engage more directly with policy solutions to climate change – and as the IPCC furthers its enlistment of more diverse forms of knowledge and expertise – informal modes of consensus-making relying on unstructured deliberation will be found wanting. For example, future engagement by the IPCC with more explicitly value-based forms of knowledge (see Chapter 13) will question whether consensual statements are epistemically, or even ontologically, appropriate or politically desirable. ” https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/critical-assessment-of-the-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change/scientific-consensusseeking/50A8E2D67589C12FA3C96E83A602E8B6
2.3 20 Governmental Approval
“This type of consensus tends to reduce the diversity of perspectives by converging on the most robust and unanimous conclusions….. ”
“Social scientists, however, have increasingly challenged such views and presented a more complex, social and political analysis of the approval process. It has been argued that such a process, while creating a ‘shared scientific understanding’ of climate change (Lidskog & Sundqvist, Reference Lidskog and Sundqvist2015: 12) can also be conflictual and lead to ‘least-common denominator generalities’ (Vardy et al., Reference Vardy, Oppenheimer, Dubash, O’Reilly and Jamieson2017: 59). ”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/critical-assessment-of-the-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change/processes/2F1169BE15602EC4E2F6F61DBBA40F52#CN-bp-20
3. The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis 2026 https://brapodd.se/podd/the-great-simplification-with-nate-hagens/avsnitt/the-psychopathic-selection-hypothesis-the-rules-of-the-game-keep-us-trapped-with-greg-elliott-tgs-231#1
4. “lowest-common-denominator outcomes, which overlook critical issues. This is particularly the case with the “fat-tails” of probability distributions, ….” and “a 4°C future “is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’,…This is a commonly-held sentiment amongst climate scientists.” 2019 https://www.epa.govt.nz/assets/FileAPI/proposal/EEZ100018/Submissions-and-or-comments/e01ef879f0/Deacon_Peter_H_00222_submission.pdf#29#23
5. Martin Vermeer FCD @martinvermeer@fediscience.org
@avuko @edwiebe That, and actually it is true that, compared to individual climatologists, many of whom are excellent communicators, the IPCC has been a bit slow to acknowledge the urgency of the climate crisis. This is 1) because it operates by consensus and thus publishes a lowest common denominator, and 2) it is interGOVERNMENTal. The interests of governments, esp. of petrostates, are often aligned against candour. 2025 https://fediscience.org/@martinvermeer/114229313645273412
6. “The consensus decision rule is a procedural norm by which a collective body treats a proposal as adopted when no member registers a formal objection, distinguishing it sharply from majority voting, qualified-majority voting, or unanimity in the strict sense. Consensus does not require active assent from every participant; it requires only the absence of a stated dissent strong enough to block the text. ” 2026 https://modeldiplomat.com/learn/glossary/consensus-decision-rule
7. Assessing and governing extreme climate risks needs to be legitimate and democratic
“We agree that extreme climate risks are neglected, and integrated catastrophic climate assessments are needed. We also agree that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is not a perfect venue for assessing catastrophic climate risks. It is slow and its consensus decision-making tends to lead to lowest-common-denominator outcomes (3) and poses a challenge for extreme risk analysis.” Kemp, Luke; Chi Xu; Joanna Depledge; Timothy M. Lenton… Timothy A. Kohler 2026 https://www.santafe.edu/research/results/papers/745-reply-to-ruhl-and-craig-assessing-and-governin or https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217404119
8. THE UNDERESTIMATION OF RISK pps 107-125
“A 2013 study by Prof. Naomi Oreskes and fellow researchers examined a number of past predictions made by climate scientists. They found that scientists have been “conservative in their projections of the impacts of climate change” and that “at least some of the key attributes of global warming from increased atmospheric greenhouse gases have been under-predicted, particularly in IPCC assessments of the physical science”. and
“They concluded that climate scientists are not biased toward alarmism but rather the reverse of “erring on the side of least drama, whose causes may include adherence to the scientific norms of restraint, objectivity, skepticism, rationality, dispassion, and moderation”. This may cause scientists “to underpredict or downplay future climate changes”. “and
“A deceptively optimistic picture is painted when the potential impacts from the degradation of
permafrost and methane hydrates are underplayed” and “IPCC reports have underplayed high-end
possibilities and failed to assess risks in a balanced manner. The failure to fully account for potential future changes to permafrost (frozen carbon stores on land and under the seabed) and other carbon-cycle feedbacks…” https://www.epa.govt.nz/assets/FileAPI/proposal/EEZ100018/Submissions-and-or-comments/e01ef879f0/Deacon_Peter_H_00222_submission.pdf#29#23
KM says 3 Sep 2026 at 3:21 AM
The IPCC Consensus was the filter, not the science.
The lowest-common-denominator consensus is not the ceiling of risk—it’s the floor of denial and minimization. And where’s that grand climate science consensus at today? I’ll tell you: it no longer exists.
–
There’s a flood of material on this now, even though it was ‘invisible’ for years.
That’s because the physical world has forced the issue. 2023-2025 record global temperatures. Rapid global warming acceleration rates. Deadly European heatwaves and wildfires. Record OHC SST temperatures, Super-sized El Nino the strongest in 1,000 years. Deadly catastrophic Himalayan glacier collapse.
You can’t keep pretending the consensus is real or working when 2024–2026 are screaming at you. The references (Kemp et al. 2026, the Santa Fe Institute paper, the Cambridge volume) are all from the last 12–18 months. That’s not coincidence. That’s the dam breaking.
The fact that the New Scientist and The Ecologist and Canadian Cor are carrying this—while Nature and Science still run cautious editorials that minimize the scientific findings—tells you everything. The mainstream scientific journals are institutionally captured (Elliot PSH 2026). They can’t criticize the IPCC too openly because their own editors and reviewers are IPCC authors. So the critique and/or the individuals (Hansen et al) gets exiled to the margins.
Anyone who posts material like this, if their comment on multiple forums or climate scientists’ substacks, is not deleted will be met with: “You’re cherry-picking.” – “You’re not a climate scientist.” – “The IPCC is the gold standard.” – “You’re just amplifying denialist talking points.” – “The science consensus is solid, you just don’t understand it.”
None of which is true or engages with the substance contained in the references. Because they can’t! Not when the references are all from IPCC authors, Cambridge University Press, and Santa Fe Institute. They’d have to admit that their own side is saying this—and that’s politically impossible for them.
It’s situation normal then. That’s the grim humor of someone who’s been watching this for 25+ years and has seen every iteration of the same dance. And—it’s not my problem. I have constantly done my part as a sane rational well informed global citizen. Repeatedly I have laid out the truth, sourced it, and framed it in a way that no one can honestly dismiss.
References:
Three Things, All at Once, All the Time
James Hansen Jan 14, 2026
Our research approach involved giving equal attention to paleoclimate data, global climate modeling, and modern observations of ongoing climate change.
https://jimehansen.substack.com/p/three-things-all-at-once-all-the
Global Temperature in 2025, 2026, 2027
James Hansen Dec 19, 2025
Later in 2026, we expect the 12-month running-mean temperature to begin to rise, as dynamical models show development of an El Nino. We project a global temperature record of +1.7°C in 2027, which will provide further confirmation of the recent global warming acceleration.
https://jimehansen.substack.com/p/global-temperature-in-2025-2026-2027
‘Supersizing before our eyes’: UN warns of record El Niño approaching
– 3 Sep 2026 – better late than never? Event is likely to be largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into a world already in a climate crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/03/el-nino-supersizing-before-our-eyes-united-nations
Published: 16 April 2026
A major 2026 scientific study in Nature identified 219 “hanging glaciers” in the Alaknanda Basin (Central Himalaya)—glaciers perched on steep slopes that can detach catastrophically without warning
Basin-scale inventory and exposure assessment of hanging glaciers, Central Himalaya
Nandu Krishnan, Ashim Sattar, Anil V. Kulkarni & Harendra Singh Negi
npj Natural Hazards volume 3, Article number: 44 (2026)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44304-026-00205-8
Rain Where It Should Snow: Tracing The Roots Of Nepal And Uttarakhand Disasters – The floods that struck Raini in Chamoli district in February 2021 bear a striking resemblance to the disaster in Nepal
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/rain-where-it-should-snow-tracing-roots-of-nepal-and-uttarakhand-disasters-11969749
Expert analysis notes permafrost thawing is a key factor—the frozen ground acts as “glue” holding steep Himalayan slopes together
https://www.ndtv.com/opinion/opinion-every-glacier-is-different-our-failure-to-prepare-is-always-the-same-11988954/amp/1
Tsunami of dirt: what caused Nepal’s deadly glacial flood?
The Conversation By Levan Tielidze
https://www.abc.net.au/asia/tsunami-of-dirt-what-caused-nepal-s-deadly-glacial-flood-/107085968#1
How does a collapsing glacier turn into a lethal wall of mud and water? An expert explains what happened in Nepal – Stuart Dunning; Professor of Applied Geomorphology, Newcastle University
https://theconversation.com/how-does-a-collapsing-glacier-turn-into-a-lethal-wall-of-mud-and-water-an-expert-explains-what-happened-in-nepal-290677#1
In the wake of deadly floods, one expert’s case for nature – We can’t prevent every flood, landslide or glacial event — but we can reduce our vulnerability to them, says a Conservation International expert.
https://www.conservation.org/news/news-spotlight-in-the-wake-of-deadly-floods-one-experts-case-for-nature
So the IPPC is accused of being too cautious and conservative. But although I tend to think climate change will be towards the upper end of projections, I feels its good they are a bit conservative.
Consider this. If the IPPC had adopted Hansens 1990s claims that SLR could be 5 metres this century, I believe the IPPC would have been totally discredited and subsequently completely ignored by governments. His claims would have been very hard to defend. We know that as even Hansen has abandoned them.
The denialists would have completely won the debate. There would have been no mitigation of the problem at all.
Then the KM multi troll doomer would probably be accusing the IPPC of exaggerating things!
Nigel: “ Consider this. If the IPPC had adopted Hansens 1990s claims that SLR could be 5 metres this century, I believe the IPPC would have been totally discredited and subsequently completely ignored by governments
And that’s one of the oldest plays of the deniers – find the most extreme prediction, and when it looks that it is not likely to come true – discredit the entire climate science by association.
See the deniers trying to discredit the climate science along the lines:
– “because you all were warning about global cooling and the next glaciation”,
– “because you all predicted ice-free Arctic by 2013”
– “because you all use the most extreme GHG emission scenario SSP5-8.5 to predict the future.”
– “because you all predicted weakening of AMOC due the weakening the thermohaline deep water formation near Greenland due to Greenland melt”, but you have been discredited by a recent paper argued that a much smaller …. wind, contributor to AMOC will likely persist!”
– “because you all predicted 5meter SLR by 2100”
– etc. etc. etc.
And if you were so wrong in even one of the above arguments – how can we trust ANYTHING you say. In the words of Nabil Swedan. Doctor of Engineering:
“ There is no way that they can make correct projections unless it is fixed. Until then, and in the absence of correct numbers, I think we should continue to drill.”
KM: Is it time to abandon the fiction yet, or have we not had enough already? The consensus is not the ceiling of risk—it’s the floor of denial from all quarters.
MS: The fertility rates in all the developed nations is already below the replacement level. To reduce the fertility rate in the subsaharan nations, where it is highest, requires educating girls there and increasing economic development there. The world was trying to do those things there, until the Evil Clown stopped it.
Meanwhile, the conversion from fossil fuels to renewables continues apace. What are the particulars of your proposed solution? How do you propose to reduce the fertility rates of undeveloped nations?
Martin Smith to Kobayashi Multitroll (KM):” What are the particulars of your proposed solution? How do you propose to reduce the fertility rates of undeveloped nations?”
Given the urgency of the AGW – the need to achieve the net zero in the next few decades
– without growth in renewables and electrification – CANNOT be achieved by the population control by means other than a GENOCIDE of several billions of people:
ALREADY assuming a massive drop in the fertility rates of undeveloped nations” UN projects the Earth population to be 9.8 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100 (https://www.un.org/en/desa/world-population-projected-reach-98-billion-2050-and-112-billion-2100). Even if we optimistically assumed that carbon sequestration and direct air capture could reach 10% of the current emissions – then obtaining the net-zero via reduction of the Earth population as the main strategy – would require EXTERMINATION of 90% of population (8-10 billion of people).
Talk about Doomer’s cure being worse than the disease.
There will never ever be Net Zero, because in many countries there will also be long cold and snowy winters like Canada where I live. The heavy industries, the heavy transportation system, agriculture, cars, SUV’s, light trucks will always use large amounts of fossil fuels. Large amounts of fossil fuels will always be used for space and water heating in households and commercial buildings, and for cooking food.
There is no AGW because the vast majority of humans live in poverty.
H. Pierce: “There will never ever be Net Zero, because in many countries there will also be long cold and snowy winters like Canada where I live, Large amounts of fossil fuels will always be used for space and water heating in households and commercial buildings, and for cooking food”
I live in Canada too.. All my “space and water heating, and cooking” are done with electricity, with heating via heat pumps. Electricity in my province is predominantly from renewables – the remaining fossil fuel generation is being phased out/ kept as a back up if the transmission lines failed, So much for your “Large amounts of fossil fuels will always be used”
As for your . “ The heavy transportation system, agriculture, cars, SUV’s, light trucks ” they are using less and less fossil fuels per unit, and will use less and less in the future as the efficiency and degree of electrification increases.
Sure there will be some residual emissions – but that’s why the goal is “net zero” and not “absolute zero” , with those emissions that are impractical to replace being compensated by CO2 sequestration, and various direct air capture – via enhanced biological uptake, enhanced geological weathering and/or other methods.
And whoever sold you on AGW mitigation being an all-or-nothing – either we cut our absolute emissions to zero, or we could do as well nothing – was counting on your ignorance and/or on confirmation bias. The concluding sentence point toward the former:
HP: “There is no AGW because the vast majority of humans live in poverty.
So looking at that https://berkeley-earth-wp-offload.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/13155613/2025-Time-Series.png you see a … flat line (“There is no AGW”)?
Piotr said: “would require EXTERMINATION of 90% of population”
Actually, it would only require extermination of the richest 10% of the population, who produce 90% of the greenhouse gas emissions.
Extermination of the richest 10% of the population might not reduce total global emissions very much because their jobs, wealth and assets will be transferred to other people and so the emissions continue.
Instead to get huge and reasonably rapid emissions reductions with a population strategy we may need to quickly get rid of billions of people to take substantial amounts of production and demand out of the system. Which is obviously unrealistic and inhumane and barking mad crazy.
“Hmmm,” he said, fingering his guillotine.
SA: “Actually, it would only require extermination of the richest 10% of the population, who produce 90% of the greenhouse gas emissions.”
Not exactly: “ the wealthiest 10% of the global population contribute approximately 45–49% of global GHG emissions, while the bottom 50% contribute only 7–13%” Nat Commun. 2025 Jul 4;16:6180.
So cut human emissions to 10% via population control the Doomers would still have to exterminate half of the Earth populations..
P.S. There may be some practical problems with realizing this Doomers’ “final solution”:
– the wealthier 4-5 billions, given its military and economic resources, might not want to go gentle into that good night
– how are you going to tell who is in the wealthiest half of Earth population? The old Bolsheviks’ test used on the conquered nations – “Show me your hands!” (if they were not dirty, poorly manicured nor callused – made you a candidate for an on-spot execution)
may no longer be effective today (a cashier in a dollar store might not pass the test)
– if the previous revolutions are any indication – some of the leaders of the Doomers New Brave World would likely have came themselves from the affluent background (Marx’s father, was a successful lawyer who owned vineyards, later in life Marx was a supported by Engels, whose family owned textile manufacturing interests. Lenin – a son of “high-ranking public school inspector who attained hereditary noble status”). But the again as in any revolution – everybody is equal, but the leaders are more equal than others.
Reply to Secular Animist et al
The world’s population has already long been being “exterminated” by collective human activity be it from war, genocide, aerosols, lead poisoning, climate breakdowns and catastrophic impacts now running on steroids within a global population of +8 billion poor souls.
Population overshoot itself drives “extermination” or whatever emotional button pushing trigger word the propaganda extremist chooses to deploy. Where the “final solution” is embedded within the interconnected global Economic Systems governing this planet.
Exponential Growth Arithmetic, Population and Energy,
The astute educator Dr. Albert A. Bartlett Professor Emeritus (RIP)
Department of Physics University of Colorado, Boulder
The Table of Options-“…remember our conclusion of one person per square meter, we concluded that zero population growth is going to happen. Let’s state that conclusion in other terms and say it’s obvious nature’s going to choose from the right hand list and we don’t have to do anything, except be prepared to live with whatever nature chooses from that right hand list or we can exercise the one option that’s open to us and that option? Is to choose first from the right hand list-we got to find something here we can go out and campaign for!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=kZA9Hnp3aV4&t=962s
ESD – POST NET ZERO Warming Continues – Exploring climate stabilisation at different global warming levels in ACCESS-ESM-1.5
https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1353/2024/#section4
Why have climate impacts been underestimated?
Records are tumbling and impacts not expected until mid-century are now hitting every continent – what happened?
Gérard COLLIN and Tom Harris Sep 02,
If you wanted to summarise the countless published observations and studies on climate disruption [Breakdown] in a single word, it would be the noun: underestimation.
https://drtomharris.substack.com/p/why-have-climate-impacts-been-underestimated
Sept 9 Greg Elliott – A 10-minute guide to symbolic selection, game emergence, realizable strategy spaces, institutional mirroring, and why destructive systems become difficult to escape
https://gregelliott2000.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-selection-hypothesis
1.25 Million Hiroshimas per Day And why we are more ph***ed than ever.
Prof. Eliot Jacobson Sep 06,
This rate of warming is due to the so-called Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI), which measures the net difference between incoming solar radiation and outgoing radiation (reflected shortwave plus emitted longwave). That difference has been measured very accurately since March, 2000, based on data collected by the CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) satellites. You can find the data right here if you want to check for yourself.
This heat is not to be confused with the explosive power of these bombs.
Just take the heat the bombs generate, all 1.25 million of them per day. The way it works out, about 89% of that heat goes into warming the oceans, 5% goes into warming land, 4% goes into melting glaciers, sea ice and ice sheets and the final 2% goes into heating the atmosphere.
https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/125-million-hiroshimas-per-day
Bill Hicks – It’s Just A Ride
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgzQuE1pR1w
Piotr says 4 Sep 2026 at 11:43 AM
Given the urgency of the AGW – the need to achieve the net zero in the next few decades…
What urgency? There is none. Snails and turtles move faster the 40 year global drive (sic) to address global heating and climate breakdown.
Net zero won’t ever be achieved until post-collapse. Which is a long slow process over decades up to a century from now. By which time it will be the last of the pockets of surviving human communities daily challenges.
Besides, the UN projections for Earth population are as reliable as the CMIP/IPCC climate projections are not.
While GENOCIDE and EXTERMINATION are Piotr’s chosen words, tells you where his thinking is at; it’s nowhere to be seen! Maybe if he was thinking straight he’d long ago have been calling for an equivalent of Nuremburg-The Trial of Major Corporate Criminals-before an International Judges Tribunal?
If Piotr has worked out the fossil fuels companies, same as the tobacco companies, and the corporate criminals behind the deaths of millions from addictive opioid medications; are already guilty of murder, genocide and extermination-the same as the Nazis were-then he never will.
Reference : The real-life horrors of corporate crimes Interview Wed 2 Sep 2026
Rogue corporations commit terrible harms. They kill, addict and ruin on a huge scale – and often get away with it. A new book ‘Corporate harms: a horror story’ draws on the horror genre to highlight the dual horrors of corporate malfeasance: the harms done, and the harms multiplied when the law fails to address them.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/corporate-harm-horror-law-crime/107107942
Guest: Penny Crofts, Professor of Law at UTS, co-author with Dr Honni van Rijswijk of Corporate harms: a horror story
https://www.routledge.com/Corporate-Harms-A-Horror-Story/Crofts-vanRijswijk/p/book/9781032513171
Piotr says 4 Sep ” Given the urgency of the AGW – the need to achieve the net zero in the next few decades…”
Kobayashi Multi-troll (KM): “ What urgency? There is none. Snails and turtles move faster the 40 year global drive (sic) to address global heating and climate breakdown.”
You are not the sharpest knife in drawer, are you? We are NOT discussing other people, we are discussing the consequence of YOUR solution (population reduction) WITHIN YOUR assumptions, i.e. on whether YOU think “that we need to achieve the net zero in the next few decades” (or less).
If your answer is yes – then mitigation of AGW via population control would require:
– extermination of 90% of people, if we ignored difference in individual emissions,
or
– extermination of 50% of people, If we targeted the extermination at the wealthier half of the world population (for some practical problems with that strategy – see my answer to Secular Animist)
Martin Smith says 4 Sep 2026 at 2:14 AM
KM: Is it time to abandon the fiction yet, or have we not had enough already? The consensus is not the ceiling of risk—it’s the floor of denial from all quarters.
MS: The fertility rates in all the developed nations is already below the replacement level. To reduce the fertility rate in the subsaharan nations, where it is highest, requires educating girls there and increasing economic development there. The world was trying to do those things there, until the Evil Clown stopped it.
Meanwhile, the conversion from fossil fuels to renewables continues apace. What are the particulars of your proposed solution? How do you propose to reduce the fertility rates of undeveloped nations?
KM: Again, there are the distortions of what I was presenting. Changing the subject again. The denial of the content again. Again there’s the strawmen being lined up too. But the projection in these performative questions are “interesting” nevertheless.
I did not propose a solution. Not even to the flawed consensus systems, the lack of credible mitigation or adaption actions; let alone “solutions” to population growth-which I did not speak to at all. So, there are no particulars. The question is moot. I did not propose to reduce the fertility rates of un/under developed nations either. That question is also moot.
But, seeing you’ve asked; I will answer directly regarding the topic you’ve raised: I’ve come to as simple realization and acceptance that the solution is collapse. The best plan is not to do anything that slows that collapse. To emotionally let it go. To grieve the loss. To step aside. To save what whatever human wisdom we each individually treasure and are able to save. To pass that on to whoever may survive us.
That’s all. There’s nothing to know and nothing to plan. There’s no proposal and not one size fits all Fix. People just need to fix themselves, relax, get out the way and just let it collapse however that unfolds. Because the ‘Solution’ is in Collapse.
In the future, those who come after us will work it out for themselves. It’s not up to us to tell them how to live. What will be will be.
Martin is essentially saying: “If you are so smart, you go solve global ghg emissions, global heating and population trends and fix the UN—all in one sentence—or be quiet. Show us your 100 point Plan!”
To demand “you must have a perfect solution” argument is a trap. No one is required to propose a flawless new system to have the right to identify catastrophic flaws in the current one. Wise people don’t demand a full blueprint for steering the ship from the Titanic lookout who has shouted “Iceberg!” – before you’ll respond to the warning.
In this global case there is no possible solution or series of solutions which will address the Diagnosis. The only solution-the only direction-is global Collapse because nothing is sustainable now. The population is unsupportable. Population collapse will automatically resolve any fertility concerns without lifting a finger. Logic says collapse is the destiny.
This is the essence of the science of complex systems. The problems we are seeing in front of us are all connected, and cannot be solved acting on single ones.
The global system is a moral failure and a structural trap. It cannot be reformed. It will collapse. And the only honest work left is to live through that collapse with integrity—holding the wisdom of those who came before, naming the truth without illusion, and passing it on to whoever is ready to receive it.
This systematized extraction of Wealth is the primary multi-century driver of today’s climate destruction, mass extinctions, digitized distortions of reality, and breaching of planetary boundaries. Global collapse is the logical outcome. It’s already begun.
—
References: Is a classless society impossible? Wed 19 Aug 2026
Is true social equality an impossible dream? The German philosopher Dr Hanno Sauer argues that class hierarchy is a permanent feature of human societies. Old elites may fall, but new ones fill the void. Rank, hierarchy and privilege, stubbornly persists.
Guest: Hanno Sauer, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Utrecht University, author of Klasse, and The Invention of Good and Evil: A History of Morality
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/hanno-sauer-class-philosophy/107054900
AFTER EQUALITY Festival of Dangerous Ideas
Hanno Sauer [NDL/GER] Chaired by Matt Beard
Why class will never disappear.
Philosopher Hanno Sauer challenges one of the foundational assumptions of contemporary politics: that a truly classless society is possible. Drawing on history, psychology and moral philosophy, he argues that hierarchy is not a bug of civilisation but one of its permanent features
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/after-equality/
Philosopher Hanno Sauer sees lasting inequality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN-9OU0CCM8
How We Tamed Ourselves and Invented Good and Evil (with Hanno Sauer)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwQgXVFDIUs
Our civilisation is obviously at risk of collapse due to pushing past environmental limits or other reasons. Some author’s on collapse theory are Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter. But nobody can say a catastrophic collapse is inevitable. We just dont have that level of knowledge, analytical certainty and evidence.
So believing a collapse of our civilisation is inevitable and giving in to this and doing nothing is just being lazy and running away from the problem.
At the very least we can likely do some things that reduce the severity or probability of a potential collapse. For example encouraging population groth to stop. The fact is population growth has aleady slowed and is likely to stop due to efforts at contraception and women’s education and this has likely already reduced the severity of any possible collapse. We could work to further speed up the transition to lower fertility rate, meaning small families.
Philosopher Hanno Sauer is not saying anything all that new. Its been known for many decades that humans are fundamentally hierarchical creatures, from studies in behavioral biology and sociology, and psychology. We are still capable of learning to be egalitarian, to a limited extent, as in hunter gatherer society. I posted a Harvard University study on all this on this website a few years ago.
The communist countries tried a classless society and it was a disaster. I dont think a classless society would work. But I feel that minimizing class differences makes life more pleasant and leads to better outcomes. and is maybe achievable given our fundamental hierarchical nature, but ability to learn and adopt egalitarianism to some extent. Thats not a bad outcome.
Dont let the perfect be the enemy of the good (Voltaire).
KM: To demand “you must have a perfect solution” argument is a trap.
MS: No one here demanded that you must have a perfect solution. I asked for your proposal.
KM: But, seeing you’ve asked; I will answer directly regarding the topic you’ve raised: I’ve come to as simple realization and acceptance that the solution is collapse. The best plan is not to do anything that slows that collapse. To emotionally let it go. To grieve the loss. To step aside. To save what whatever human wisdom we each individually treasure and are able to save. To pass that on to whoever may survive us.
That’s all. There’s nothing to know and nothing to plan. There’s no proposal and not one size fits all Fix. People just need to fix themselves, relax, get out the way and just let it collapse however that unfolds. Because the ‘Solution’ is in Collapse.
MS: wow… That’s actually what I believed you would say, but it is still shocking to see you actually say it.
Here’s the thing. You advocate for ending all activities that will slow what you believe is the inevitable collapse, and the collapse will cause tens of millions of deaths, if not hundreds of millions or even billions of deaths. What you advocate will lead directly to immeasurable human and animal suffering.
But you don’t know that the collapse you predict is inevitable. You haven’t proved it. Your walls of text don’t prove it. Even if we simply assume that the best we can achieve with our current technologies is some decades of reprieve before the collapse, you don’t know what new technologies will be developed during those decades.
So what you claim is not a proposal for a solution actually is a proposal for a solution. You propose total collapse as the solution. And that’s evil.
It also means that what you are doing here at RealClimate.org is evil. It is one thing to argue that the process of converting from fossil fuels to renewables won’t succeed in time to prevent total collapse; it is quite another thing to argue that we should therefore just give up.
Yes. I think that one huge mistake KM is making is thinking a total collapse of society will lead to the emergence of a better society. Sort of like a hard reset of a computer fixes things.
But history is not on his side. In fact the survivors of a collapse may just recreate the old system or something worse. Rome was an advanced society, which became corrupt and collapsed and was replaced by the dark ages. Not a great improvement. The subsequent middle ages / medieval period wasnt much better.
Seeking utopian solutions also sometimes seems to involve deliberately killing millions of people. Examples are Communism and the Crusades. Then when the killing is over the new society is often worse than the old society.
The issue was lack of understanding of human nature, and the causes of the problems and a tendency to scapegoat groups of people, like intellectuals, wealthy elites, athiests, homosexuals, dark skinned people, jews, anyone they can find. Wrong diagnosis of the problem equals bad outcomes. George Orwells novel Animal Farm is amusing and insightful.
The difference in being critical of climate denialists and blaming them in part for slow progress in mitigating the climate problem, is the hard evidence is on our side. The criticism is soundly based, although we need to understand there are other equally important reasons for the slow progress.
in Re to Martin Smith, 8 Sep 2026 at 12:49 AM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/09/unforced-variations-sep-2026/#comment-850931
Hello Martin,
I was not surprised because the Multitroll already made the same confession under another name one or two years ago. This is simply the faith of all djihadists of the world, irrespective of time and place wherein they emerge.
In Multitroll’s case, an interesting feature might perhaps be the declared value of preservation of some unspecified achievments – I have at least a feeling that I noticed such a declaration somewhere in his confession but I cannot find the original anymore in the present flood of KM publishing to be able to check. Anyway, he has never specified these achievments not how this preservation should be achieved in the mid of overall collapse, nor demonstrated any own effort to actively contribute thereto.
In this respect, it is therefore my suspicion that in Multitroll’s perception, the achievments that should persist may be his own “revolutionary” thoughts and similar products of the fellow-thinkers he loves; perhaps this is the reason why he poisons this website with this stuff again and again.
Greetings
Tomáš
KM: Where’s that grand climate science consensus at today?
I’ll tell you: it no longer exists.
BPL: Are you an authority on the subject?
Barton Paul Levenson,
Do you need to ask?
In his above comment, I noted the fool’s reference to Kemp et al (2026) (also calling it “the Santa Fe Institute paper”), which isn’t something I have come across. And it appears not to exist. Presumably what the fool meant to reference was Kemp et al (2022) Reply to Ruhl and Craig: Assessing and governing extreme climate risks needs to be legitimate and democratic repeating the reference of his babbling comment immediately prior (where it is labelled 7 in his list of god-knows-what. Or should that be AI-bot-what-not). Of course, Kemp et al (2022) is not “from the last 12–18 months” like wot the fool says.
(The fool’s other “from the last 12–18 months” reference he calls “the Cambridge volume” is presumably also 2022 as this also appeared in the prior comment labelled 2.3 20.)
It should be noted that while the fool blasts the IPCC and insists its consensus has lost all credibility, his quote from Kemp et al (2022) was cherry-picked as he cut away the final sentence from the quoted paragraph which runs “Yet, it (the IPCC) offers legitimacy, credibility, and experience that few other bodies can match.”
The IPCC came in for considerable stick with the 2005-12 hiatus and, while the view that ‘internal variability’ was responsible for the reduced warming trend, most work adding nails to the hiatus coffin lid tended to cease when, post-the-event, normality returned. From what I read of such work, I got the impression that the IPO was getting most of the blame.
So now our fool is wielding the bunch of “absolutely gobsmacking bananas” SAT anomalies as proof of IPCC ineptitude. (Or is it complicity in covering up ineptitude.)
But here’s a thing.
While the previous suspect, the IPO, is behaving as expected, do I espy some strange behaviour by its cousin, the PDO? Normally PDO bounces happily around with ENSO but since 2023, its been stuck strongly negative. So what’s with that?
Reply to MA Rodger
Is that all you have? How sad.
MAR: about KM’s school of quoting:
“while [KM] blasts the IPCC and insists its consensus has lost all credibility, in his quote from Kemp et al (2022) he cut away the final sentence from the quoted paragraph, which runs:
“Yet, it (the IPCC) offers legitimacy, credibility, and experience that few other bodies can match.”” ”
-)
Ladies and Gentlemen, Kobayashi Multi-troll – at his truest.
BPL: Are you an authority on the subject?
C’mon, Barton, Kobayashi Multitroll (KM) is _the_ authority on _any_ subject.
He is a Lenin-class figure – bringing the enlightenment to the masses and suffering for the humanity the criticisms at the hands of non-believers/class enemies. And when the Doom. a.k.a. the Rupture, he shall be seated at the right hand of his Father, comrade Lenin, in the heavenly version of the 1937-38 NKVD sentencing troika – to sort out the true believers. destined to rule the Earth, from the wretched masses of the IPCC and other heretics, to be dispatched for the eternity to Hell, warming up at 0.5C per decade or more!
Yes
Well, we’ve known the problem for a very long time: compute limitations force oversized and under sampled grids.
Amazing how fast plenty of compute, water, capital, and bypassing of laws and rights is done for other usage, eh?
FYI:
“Global heating will reach at least 1.8C under even the most optimistic future, well beyond the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C, according to a UN report that warns every fraction of temperature rise intensifies destructive extreme weather, glacier melt, ecosystem loss, and island and coastal city submersion.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/02/global-heating-warming-1-8c-best-case-scenario-un-united-nations-environment-programme-report
https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshoot-navigating-exceedance
Reply to Secular Animist
KM: I honestly believe you’d be better off posting that kind of information to a website forum with contributors and readers who care about such things. Which means almost anywhere but here.
KM wrote: “I honestly believe …”
With all due respect, you are a boorish narcissistic blabbermouth whose “contribution” to this forum consists of tedious, interminable, pompous, self-congratulatory banalities, and I could not care less what you “believe”.
NET is the main technology in all the main climate reports even though it didn’t exist then and still doesn’t in any meaningful or scalable way.
Whereas soar and wind now has more global
Capacity than coal does.
A Deep Adaption paper update: 12 Facts about climate change peer-reviewed by Reality
See: https://jembendell.com/2026/08/28/a-dozen-disputed-but-now-demonstrable-facts-about-climate-change-from-the-consequential-deep-adaptation-paper-of-2018/
These comments aren’t conspiracy theorizing. It’s recorded institutional failure (G. Elliot PSH 2026)— one that’s been documented, studied, and now confirmed by observational data. The question is whether climatology will learn from its mistakes or repeat them.
Jem Bendell concluding excerpts on climatologists’ responsibility and responses:
Siloed science
“Why did the mainstream miss a dozen key insights on climate change at the time, yet someone analysing their research from the outside identified them? And why did many mainstream scientists feel confident enough about their incorrect readings of the situation to join the criticism of Deep Adaptation?”
“It’s neither corruption and conspiracy, nor laziness and stupidity, that led to deficient understandings of the climate crisis by mainstream climatology and the environmental climate policy community.”
Peer esteem
“Nine out of ten climatologists anonymously told a newspaper they did not believe humanity would manage to stay below 2C global warming. That was 17 years ago. Despite working on sustainability, I did not hear about that for nearly a decade. In that time, like so many people, I worked incredibly hard (making personal sacrifices) on what some scientists were privately regarding as a redundant agenda. They were the experts paid to determine what is happening in our world but felt the need to self-censor their intuitive processing of the situation when communicating publicly. ”
Modernist culture
“Giving homage to the secular God of positivity and progress is widely assumed to be the ‘permission slip’ for being respected. In private, the story is often different.”
“Recognising that science always gains and loses something from institutionalisation doesn’t mean we just shrug our shoulders and move on. What is key, is that once observational data clearly disproves some established understandings and challenges the focus of scholarship, and the related policies, is that professionals seriously admit their mistakes. ”
Occupational closure
“To seriously, not superficially, admit mistakes, involves: first, recognising the materiality of those mistakes to society; second, to be open to the possible causes of those mistakes; third, to make efforts to not make new mistakes in future that would derive from those causes. Therefore, simply correcting past mistakes is not enough, as it means the person might be making new ones due to the same dynamics. ”
Journalistic deference
“In the field of climatology, that means if a scientist says they predict a far greater amount of heating and damage by 2050, that is not good enough. To do so, without introspection and openness, on how to not make new mistakes, would display an unseriousness. That would not matter as much if we weren’t talking about something so existential for humanity.”
“To encourage urgent learning, we must ask:
What might be the blind spots in climatology today, due to the various factors that shape and limit any institutionalised field of inquiry?
What topics are journalists not taking the time to explore and challenge, to bring focus on what’s important?”
So I’ll leave those questions there. Because if we can’t answer those honestly, we’re not learning anything truly important — we’re just waiting around for the next set of inconvenient facts about the real climate to prove us wrong yet again.
A Deep Adaption paper update: 12 Facts about climate change peer-reviewed by Reality
See: https://jembendell.com/2026/08/28/a-dozen-disputed-but-now-demonstrable-facts-about-climate-change-from-the-consequential-deep-adaptation-paper-of-2018/
PART TWO
Posted on August 28, 2026 by jembendell
“In the months and years after the paper went viral with a million downloads, there was a backlash from top climatologists and environmental professionals. One of the main arguments from experts dismissing the paper was the lack of peer review. But years later, it’s been reviewed by reality, in the form of observational data about our current climate.”
“There were a dozen claims in Deep Adaptation which were disputed by mainstream climatology but are now considered decided by science, or demonstrable by observational data. In 8 years, these dozen claims went from contentious to near consensus.”
“Although some top climatologists may wish to claim they warned us about what is happening to our world, the truth is they didn’t predict the extent or speed of current changes and publicly claimed that they were avoidable with the right policies.”
“After interrogating the claims in this essay, I believe you will agree that the recent data and research confirm that the alarmists on climate were mostly right, and our critics were wrong, so we could all learn from that to guide a better response today.”
The 12 Claims covered in the essay:
Claim 1: Sea-level rise is accelerating worldwide.
Claim 2: The rate of ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica is increasing.
Claim 3: The Gulf Stream and other key ocean currents are slowing.
Claim 4: Permafrost is thawing and releasing methane and CO₂.
Claim 5: The Arctic is warming much faster than the global average.
Claim 6: Extreme weather events (heatwaves, floods, droughts) are becoming more frequent and severe.
Claim 7: Crop yields are already being negatively affected in multiple regions.
Claim 8: Ocean acidification is accelerating and threatening marine food webs.
Claim 9: Global temperatures are rising faster than IPCC models projected.
Claim 10: Climate feedback loops are being triggered sooner than expected.
Claim 11: Social and economic disruptions linked to climate are already underway.
Claim 12: The window to prevent catastrophic warming has effectively closed.
Page 13 – Deep Adaption – Apocalypse Uncertain (extracts):
“The truly shocking information on the trends in climate change and its impacts on ecology and society are leading some to call for us to experiment with geoengineering the climate… The unpredictability of geoengineering the climate… make it unlikely to be used.”
“We do not know if the power of human ingenuity will help sufficiently to change the environmental trajectory we are on. Unfortunately, the recent years of innovation, investment and patenting indicate how human ingenuity has increasingly been channelled into consumerism and financial engineering.”
“We might pray for time. But the evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and probably uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war.”
“When we contemplate this possibility of ‘societal collapse’, it can seem abstract… But when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.”
“In this paper I cannot prove the likelihood or certainty of societal collapse, and experts in the field of collapsology say that within such complex systems any attempt to prove within modalities of modern scholarship whether collapse will or will not happen would be futile. However, they also conclude that this does not mean that our limits in prediction within complex systems should restrict us from sense-making about our predicament.”
“As we are considering here a situation where the publishers of this journal would no longer exist, the electricity to read its outputs won’t exist, and a profession to educate won’t exist, I think it time we break some of the conventions of this format.”
References and Support:
Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy
Professor Jem Bendell BA (Hons) PhD
2018, Revised 2020, full text:
https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf
Geography Professor – Ex-Corporate Sustainability Director
Dr. Jem Bendell: What if it’s too late?
2 Sept 2026 interview with The Seeds Will Grow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU7WQmM4lQA
BREAKING TOGETHER Free Book Launch
https://jembendell.com/2023/07/10/breaking-together-for-free-and-my-launch-speech/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dOkARRGTmk
T-shirt quote:
“DOOMSTERS: grow our own food, make our own music, use our own currencies, and have more fun.”
Jem Bendell, Glastonbury Town Hall, June 18th 2023.
The Metacrisis Initiative provides its participants with the insight and support to live well within fracturing societies. That ‘living well’ involves being helpful and kind to oneself, others, and wider nature (that can involve moments of difficult emotions and conflict, as long as there is awareness of why one experiences that).
https://jembendell.com/metacrisis-initiative/
Deep Adaptation Forum
https://www.deepadaptation.info/
How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for our Times
Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens, Andrew Brown (Translator)
ISBN: 978-1-509-54139-3 June 2020
Today, utopia has changed sides: it is the utopians who believe that everything can continue as before, while realists put their energy into making a transition and building local resilience. Collapse is the horizon of our generation. But collapse is not the end – it’s the beginning of our future. We will reinvent new ways of living in the world and being attentive to ourselves, to other human beings and to all our fellow creatures.
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/shop/general-introductory-environmental-studies/how-everything-can-collapse-a-manual-for-our-times-p-9781509541393
A Deep Adaption paper update: 12 Facts about climate change peer-reviewed by Reality
See: https://jembendell.com/2026/08/28/a-dozen-disputed-but-now-demonstrable-facts-about-climate-change-from-the-consequential-deep-adaptation-paper-of-2018/
Part 3 excerpts:
Jem: “I want to see climatologists and environmentalists look at whether carbon might only be half the story for explaining the most recent climate changes from human impacts. The only potential good news about the recent awful spikes in global temperatures is that they might not only be due to background warming from carbon gases. The clue is the rapid drop in the reflectivity of the planet, due to the loss of cloud cover [47 48]
Some people with an audience on climate and environment are beginning to change their public explanations. One of my past critics, from the research nonprofit Berkeley Earth, told Propublica that meeting goals to limit global warming has become “functionally impossible.” [49] ”
That would be> Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with the research nonprofit Berkeley Earth (IPCC AR6/7 author; DACCS corporate executive), that there is little remaining choice. “We’ve just wasted so much time,” he said, that meeting goals to limit global warming has become “functionally impossible.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/wedges-climate-research-bp-fossil-fuel-princeton
and “A few famous environmentalists now state publicly that it is too late for stopping catastrophic change, despite telling those of us who said that before to “shut up”.[50] ”
That would be> ‘It’s too late’: At 89-years-old, David Suzuki spoke about recently coming to the conclusion that humanity has lost the fight against climate change, as well as the need to begin preparing for more severe and destructive natural disasters. “We have failed to shift the narrative and we are still caught up in the same legal, economic and political systems,” said David Suzuki. “For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down.”
https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuki-says-the-fight-against-climate-change-is-lost/
Bonus: Tom-Do the Math
“Not thinking it to be a problem is not at all the same as the universe agreeing that it’s not a problem. We miss a helluva lotta stuff in these brains of ours. It’s just that too few want to give up short-term comforts and baubles even if it means ecocide. As a form of placation, we can busy ourselves in measuring the many ill effects as we circle the drain.”
Deep Adaption paper update: 12 Facts about climate change peer-reviewed by Reality
The classic quote by Robert A. Heinlein is “Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.”
KM: Be right too soon anyway.
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” – said Arthur Schopenhauer
KM: Tell the truth anyway.
The Paradoxical Commandments were written by Kent M. Keith in 1968 as part of a booklet for student leaders.
“The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.”
https://www.paradoxicalcommandments.com/
The Gargantuan Climate Lie with Adam McKay on Climate Chat and Dan Miller
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFU7LqchidY
He’s no climatologist but he’s not stupid either.
@ 5:22 tidied up transcript
Adam McKay:
“But in the case of climate, we have a really exact moment where the oil companies figured out that yes, they were destroying the livable climate at an incredibly fast rate—and they very clearly decided to lie about it. They had a moment where they could have said, “Hey, we want to work with mankind. We don’t want billions of people to die.” But they chose instead to lie.
So the argument I put forth in the piece I wrote is that, given the stakes—which we all know are billions of deaths, devastation across this planet, drought zones, desertification, fires, the AMOC shutting down, and crazy cold—there has never been a lie like this told.
But I zoomed in specifically on what I believe is the heart of the (bigger) lie. It’s not people who deny climate change—they tend to be fringe. It’s the moneyed, educated, generally speaking, white liberal moderate who believes that climate change is a real thing but is not urgent. And they are the group that has killed us.”
followed by @ 7:53
“The gargantuan lie is this: climate change is a serious problem, but we have more time.
That single lie is on the verge—I really believe in the next 6 to 18 months—of killing millions of people. And as we all know, when you start to approach 2°C warming above pre-industrial levels, you start to look at billions of deaths. In light of that, I don’t think there’s ever been a more significant lie.”
Dan Miller:
“And you’re not just making up that “billions of deaths” number yourself, by the way. That number comes from the University of Exeter’s Faculty of Actuaries. These are not people known for radical thinking—they just look at risk and produce insurance-type numbers. They published that if we hit a certain temperature by 2050, we’re on track for—I think it was two degrees—two billion deaths. And if we hit three degrees, which we are actually on track for right now around the 2050–2060 timeframe, they said it could be up to four billion deaths. That’s half the people on the planet.”
Adam McKay:
“And look, these are projections, of course. One thing we’ve all learned from looking at temperature models and Earth system models is the moral hazard—using an economics term—where the money is behind being optimistic. That includes news media and a certain swath of scientists that the New York Times loves to quote and put on TV.
But at this point, there’s a great voice in the climate realism movement—Professor Elliott Jacobson, we just had him on. He’s the best. He points out the obvious fact about projecting climate collapse: if you were an insurance company, you would not constantly look at the most optimistic outcomes. That’s the reason he’s become a prominent expert on looming climate collapse—whether you want to call him a realist or a doomer.”
Link to Adam’s Current Affairs essay:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-massive-climate-lie-that-will-destroy-human-civilization
The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate
Thinking we have time left to address climate change, or that “Net Zero by 2050” will save us, is driving us toward full social collapse in ways that become more obvious with every new broken temperature record.
Adam McKay filed 06 August 2026
“It’s the moneyed, educated, generally speaking, white liberal moderate who believes that climate change is a real thing but is not urgent. And they are the group that has killed us.”
That is a huge evidence free generalization. Asked an AI to provide some polling studies and researchstudies. Answer:
The Ideological Driver: According to data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, political ideology is the single strongest indicator of climate concern. Their tracking shows that 65% of liberal Democrats view global warming as a critical factor for their governance voting, compared to just 4% of conservative Republicans. [1]
(https://www.carbonbrief.org/who-are-you-calling-a-skeptic-new-survey-identifies-diverse-views-on-climate-change-among-us-republicans), [2]
(https://climatecommunication.gmu.edu/all/climate-change-in-the-american-mind-politics-and-policy-fall-2025/)
The Urgency Correlation: An ABC News poll highlights that seeing climate change as a “very” serious problem peaks heavily among liberals (92%) and Democrats (90%). Crucially, the poll notes that among those who view it as a very serious problem, 73% state it is an urgent matter requiring immediate government intervention. [1]
(https://abcnews.com/Politics/favor-steps-climate-change-public-divides-urgency-poll/story?id=81095145)
The Income Layer: Studies targeting high-income demographics, such as data compiled by ScienceDirect, reveal that high-income earners behave as outliers regarding their ecological footprints, yet their motivation to support climate policies heavily depends on their socio-political values rather than their tax brackets. When high-income individuals lean liberal, they align tightly with broader progressive data—overwhelmingly prioritizing systemic climate action. [1]
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800924002842), [2]
(https://abcnews.com/Politics/favor-steps-climate-change-public-divides-urgency-poll/story?id=81095145)
26:30 Dan Miller
“My Joe Biden story was I met him once when he was vice president at a fundraiser for a congressman. And afterwards, they had a little Q&A with maybe there were like 30 of us and standing around a little half circle around him. And he said, you know, any questions? Of course, I put my hand up right away and said, “Uh, you know, Vice President Biden, why didn’t you and President Obama do more about the climate crisis?” And he looked at me and he said, “Oh, you’re one of them.”
Adam McKay
Wow. Wow. Whoa. Okay. All right. There you go. One of the craziest things I’ve seen it’s like friends of mine, family, like really loving Joe Biden, who by the way, for anyone who’s paying attention, is one of the most famously corrupt, horrible politicians in the modern era. President Biden he’s one of the worst, yeah it’s wild.
I really think the driving force between, you know, behind what we’re experiencing is when lying and propaganda became scientific. When it jumped from in the late 19th century something that you could do but it would only work to a degree, to the rise of Edward Bernay’s and the scientific structure of advertising propaganda. Now it’s algorithmic manipulation. I don’t think there is any way you get 8 billion people to sit there and be slowly cooked to death, or have all their money taken, or their health care denied, or forced to fight in wars that have nothing to do with them, without a serious rise in the efficacy of misinformation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFU7LqchidY
I think that’s debatable it couldn’t happen before Bernays, but ‘ya gotta love those dema-crats a’right.’
When issue is they’re ‘all americans’ no matter who they are.
The comments about Biden being famously corrupt are false are beyond stupid. Internet search:
Whether former U.S. President Joe Biden is a “corrupt politician” is a subject of intense political debate, but multiple congressional and federal investigations have found no verifiable evidence that he ever abused his official power or accepted bribes to enrich himself. [1]
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jan/10/biden-bob-woodward-james-comer-book), [2]
(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/politics/biden-inquiry-republicans-johnson.html), [3]
(https://abcnews.com/Politics/republican-allegations-evidence-biden-impeachment-inquiry/story?id=103535926)
KM uses argument by some guy said as a way to claim Joe Biden was corrupt without actually claiming Joe Biden corrupt and without including any evidence that Joe Biden was corrupt.
Some guy said “Uh, you know, Vice President Biden, why didn’t you and President Obama do more about the climate crisis?”
Do you recall, KM, that when the Obama/Biden administration took office they had to deal with the imminent collapse of the world economy? No, you didn’t recall that because it completely explains why the Obama/Biden administration didn’t “do more about the climate crisis.”
And then Joe Biden became POTUS, and he had to deal with the economic collapse caused by the COVID pandemic and the rest of the mess left behind bystanders Trump.
Let’s hope Mark Kelly becomes the next POTUS.
re MA Rodger and E. Schaffer (cont. from last month’s UV thread):
I think there may have been a mix up on the question of where a particular flux goes.
For vertical flux densities, upward F↑ and downward F↓, you can:
Take the difference at a given location to get the net value, eg:
net F↑ = F↑ − F↓ = − net F↓
or/and/also
Take the difference of either ↑, ↓, or net F between two different heights to get the vertically integrated divergence or convergence (depending on order of subtraction) of that F over the layer between the two positions, eg. sfc and TOA:
F↑(sfc) − F↑(toa) = ∫ convergence into the atmospheric column of F↑ (a net radiant heating)
F↓(sfc) − F↓(toa) = ∫ divergence out of the atmospheric column of F↓ (a net radiant cooling)
1st minus 2nd above is ∫ convergence into the atmospheric column of net F↑ (a net radiant heating) (PS if negative, then it is a positive net radiant cooling)
— —
Considering specifically LW F:
LW F↑(toa) = OLR and LW F↓(toa) = 0
using global time average values :
https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Climate/Climate_Science/EarthsEnergyBalance.html
LW F↑(sfc) – LW F↑(toa)
= 390 W/m² − 235 W/m²
= 155 W/m², which could be considered to be absorbed according to the distribution of convergence of F↑, ie. ∂(F↑)/∂[downward vertical coordinate]
LW F↓(sfc) − LW F↓(toa)
= 324 W/m² − 0 W/m²
= 324 W/m² , , which could be considered to be emitted according to the distribution of divergence of F↓, ie. −∂(F↓)/∂[downward vertical coordinate]
— —
Unlike these ∫ divergence , ∫ convergence F values, absorption of the radiant flux density which is passing through or from a particular position will simply be distributed according to the absorption of those photons (minus stimulated emission of course), and in some bandwidths, this can/will be concentrated in a thinner (by mass) layer, but emission will also tend to be greater in such bandwidths, so there will tend to be some partial cancellation of the net radiant heating and cooling, with the combination being the convergence or divergence of either LW F(↑ or ↓) of those bandwidths, depending on specifics. ( https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/08/unforced-variations-aug-2026/#comment-850394 )
At some point the value of 129 W/m² = 324 W/m² − 195 W/m², which is the difference between LW F↓(sfc) and the part of OLR emitted by the atmosphere, was brought up. This is related to the vertical variation in temperature, but it is not itself a flux that is coming from or going anywhere in particular. Adding, rather than subtracting, would give a ∫ net radiant cooling that excludes absorption of the LW F↑(sfc).
(will a link for an as-of-yet unpublished comment work? Cont. from https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/09/unforced-variations-sep-2026/ #comment-850953 )
Correction:
“= 324 W/m² , , which could be considered to be emitted according to the distribution of divergence of F↓, ie. +∂(F↓)/∂[downward vertical coordinate]”
ie. the negative sign was wrong there.
—
324 W/m² − 155 W/m² = 169 W/m² is the column total atmospheric LW net cooling, which balances
67 W/m² of solar heating of the air (from memory, this is I believe largely H2O, and then clouds, in the troposphere and O3 in the stratosphere but with some contributions from O2, CO2, …?)
+ [ 24 W/m² + 78 W/m² = ] 102 W/m² of convective heating,
given an equilibrium climate.
( https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Climate/Climate_Science/EarthsEnergyBalance.html )
When there is a GHE increase, the OLR drops, and there is a column total sfc+atm warming. The vertical distribution of that warming will vary with the GH agent, though (eg. forcing by CO2 vs H2O or cloud feedback; IRF or SARF – note implications for convective flux changes and transience of them – PS any good review articles about that? I think I once saw an IRL mid-lat summer clear sky calculation for vertical heating distribution for CO2 and H2O … by Ramanathan? ).
patrick o twentyseven,
I’m not sure of the particular to-&-fro in August UV between myself & E. Schaffer (who seems to have gone quiet of late) that you refer.
That said, myself, I don’t consider I am “mix(ed) up on the question of where a particular (energy) flux goes”
As for E. Schaffer, I don’t think he has moved from his position that insists CO2 cannot emit IR without excitation from incoming IR. Such a situation would put a lot of energy into the lower levels of the atmosphere and would need some explanation of how this energy is shed by said levels of air. As I have pointed out, it is enough energy to turn said levels of air into plasma within the day.
Explaining why there is an upward IR flux, I think it is better described by considering some arbitrary vertically-spaced air packets with, first consideration of the temperature gradient in the atmosphere, and then the density gradient.
An air packet at altitude h, will be shooting off IR in all directions F(h)↓= F(h)↑ = F(h) → = F(h)← dependent on its temperature. Here we are only interested in vertical flux F(h)↓& F(h)↑. As the packet-above h+1 is cooler, it will be shooting less IR down F(h+1)↓ F(h).↓
The lapse rate can be considered as constant which is a reasonable approximation for the troposphere. So for equi-spaced air packets, there is an upward flux, Fup, proportional to the lapse rate.
Thus we get a simple upward flux Fup(h-1) = F(h-1)↑ – F(h)↓ and Fup(h) = F(h)↑ – F(h+1)↓.
But we also have a drop in density so the IR received from below will be from a closer packet than the IR received from above. The air packets are thus not equi-spaced within our constant lapse rate. So relative to packet h, the further-away upper packet will have a little-bit more temperature difference than the nearer lower packet. Thus our upward flux will diminish with the drop in density as F(h-1)↑ – F(h)↓ > F(h)↑ – F(h+1)↓. This means air packets h et al will be warming due to the drop in Fup with altitude, dropping from Fup(surface) = 324Wm^-2 (as per back radiation) to Fup(toa) = 195Wm^-2 (this from differing altitudes). And in steady-state that warming of the atmosphere will be matched by cooling via non-radiative means.
I note I’ve suddenly somehow become Al Rodger, presumably due to some AI-assisted nonsense at work somewhere.
And I should say t my F(h-1)↑ – F(h)↓ > F(h)↑ – F(h+1)↓ has the > the wrong way round and should be F(h-1)↑ – F(h)↓ < F(h)↑ – F(h+1)↓. Thus the mechanism is cooling not warming. (In all fairness, it's not the first time I've confused myself over this.)
Hi, guys. The weather is perfect for midterms, eh?
A patent attorney is looking over the provisional patent (it will take bucks to do it right; fortunately I deferred my pensions to keep my financial powder dry. (Nigel will have a real decision to make soon).
The biggest recent development is hydroblocked rings. Ring friction dominates engine friction and is proportional to ring tension, which is the traditional way to prevent the ring from compressing away from the cylinder, creating a gap for gas to escape.
Simultaneous combined cycle uses steam in the cylinder (combustion above), so water lubrication and sealing is used. The water is retained between AND BEHIND the two rings. The rings armor the water. The water provides the seal while blocking ring compression. Essentially no friction.
… (will a link for an as-of-yet unpublished comment work? Cont. from https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/09/unforced-variations-sep-2026/#comment-850953 ) …
Read carefully…
“The UK government has refused to release an unredacted copy of a report from the country’s intelligence agencies about ecosystem collapse amidst rising temperatures, but we do know that it predicts the very real possibility of widespread food shortages by 2030, resulting in “price rises, migration, political destabilisation and possible war… fueled by the human-induced climate crisis.”
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/reality-intrudes?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2p8sjz
yeah food shortages just means paying more for it from elsewhere and the less well off in society really beiong clobbered.
children go to bed hungry, grow up with malnutrition affecting their lifelong health and longevity, starvation deaths arise from famine, the whole society suffers, governance social connectivity and support services spirals out of control, people dying on the street is what means
yes and that is whose fault is that presently considering obesity is rising globally.
Global Warming: The Collapse of Science
I predicted the downfall of climate science in 2012. It is happening!
Ugo Bardi Sep 07
extracts
In 2012, I noticed some evident similarity between the downfall of the Limits to Growth study of 1972 and the ongoing trends of demonization of Climate Science. I published my impression on the subject on my old blog, Cassandra’s Legacy. I am sorry to have to report that I was right. We are facing an unexpected situation: the more the disaster of global warming becomes clear, the more the idea is rejected, demonized, and ignored.
Climate mostly goes unmentioned in traditional media. In social media, the noise of aggressive contrarian positions seems to be increasing. Some memes, such as that “CO2 is food for plants,” and hence more of it is a good thing, have been pushed so successfully that by now they have become accepted as an obvious truth.
It is worse than that. Climate science is being actively rejected and demonized.
A recent paper on how climate information (and misinformation) is diffused on the Web was published by Storani et al. It is a complicated story, but their attempt to disentangle “reliable” from “unreliable” climate information may have been successful. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-03082-9
We shouldn’t try to extrapolate these data into the future, but the basic concept is confirmed: climate science may be going through the same process that, decades ago, condemned The Limits to Growth to neglect and ridicule.
This is a systemic failure of the very element that makes us what we are: our minds. But nobody ever said that humans behave rationally, as we are proud to think we do.
https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/global-warming-the-collapse-of-science
Oddly enough much of the neglect and ridicule of The Limits to Growth research came from science, and climate science quarters in particular, even the more refined 30 year and 50 year analyses;
Updated 2022 research evaluating The Limits to Growth confirmed that empirical global data continues to closely track the original 1972 “business-as-usual” computer simulation, pointing toward ongoing risks of resource overshoot and systemic decline
https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/earth4all-ltg-model/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jiec.13442
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
it has been like this ever since it was put forward by James Hansen (and before I am sure) as being endlessly questioned and the main reasons for it being ignored is political (hegemony) and economic (Status Quo is best).
This is why I think ion most climate reports (UN, IPCC etc) NET is used a lot as burn now and extract it later features a lot. However progress is being made in renewables and transport, batteries and energy storage, electrification via solar and wind has offset some emissions and in the sunnier and winder areas of earth these technologies are being deployed aggressively. OK maybe not as fast as they could be due to peoples resistance to it all and other factors but progress is being made just not as fast as it needs to be. Avoiding 2C seems unlikely but above that we migt avoid.
PB. Agreed on all that.
I would just suggest that although the IPCC promote net zero, its only in the sense that there are parts of the economy that are difficult to decarbonise and in those limited relatively small instances extracting CO2 from the air makes sense and is economic. The IPCC dont promote extraction of CO2 as a major stand alone strategy.
I think that the IPCC are in awkward position. They have a chapter on mitigation. The impression I get is they list all the options. They then get accused of promoting things like geoengineering or direct air capture of carbon, or over promoting renewables. But all they are really doing is listing options and their positives and negatives. Its up to governments to adopt options that make sense in their particular circumstances and do it wisely. And they often dont.
But if the IPCC DIDN’T list all the options they would be accused of running an agenda to suppress certain things. So the IPCC are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.
Most of the criticisms of the IPCC make me sick. Its unfair, ignorant, scapegoating.
The main problem is governments who wilfuly misinterpret what the IPCC says ,or adopt solutions and apply them wrongly. Like thinking net zero means just do nothing, and hope we can suck all the CO2 out of the air at some future point when miracle technology appears.
Ok. End of rant.
OK, we have to consider all options but een so CCS/BECCS arnt really viable presently whilst a lot of technologies are – so hopefully these terchnolgies will grow faster than ever expected.
I confess I’m undecided about the value and viability of DAC (meaning direct air capture of CO2 with fans). I alternate between scepticism and some limited optimism, as follows. I recall reading a media article on DAC about 8 years ago, I cant find it now, but the article was discussing one of the first prototype DAC instillations. It was in one of the Scandinavian countries I think. In the simplest possible terms it sucked CO2 out of the air with fans and chemical processing. It cost approx. $20 million (US) to build.
The DAC plant sequestered only 29 SECONDS worth of one years total global CO2 emissions! Meaning you would need about one million DAC instillations to sequester a years emissions. A good reason to be sceptical. If it was used to sequester one quarter of the yearly emissions. you would need 250,000 instillations. The total cost for all those instillations would be about 1.5 trillion dollars excluding actual CO2 storage, and running costs, – and its energy intensive. And it would use vast quantities of construction materials. So I was initially very sceptical.
That said you could use electricity generated by renewables when demand is low. And total global gdp per year is 120 trillion dollars. So the DAC is a small percentage of that total. And what price do we put on the risk of devastation from climate change?
Other forms of carbon sequestration like enhanced rock weathering appear to be somewhat more economically efficient from numbers I’ve seen, and its a reliable long term carbon store, but the processes are slower to absorb CO2 and energy intensive. Other options like planting trees and regenerative agriculture are lower cost but face problems storing CO2 long term. BECCs is viable and the technology is practical, but BECCS uses vast areas of land and it needs high quality land so competes directly with agriculture.
I have a suspicion that all the CO2 sequestration systems including the high technology and more natural approaches, are about equally viable, given a FULL CONSIDERATION of their positives and negatives. There may not be one carbon sequestration solution that is a clear winner. Although BECCS may not be viable because of its land use issue.
NIgel: “ Most of the criticisms of the IPCC make me sick. Its unfair, ignorant, scapegoating. The main problem is governments who wilfuly misinterpret what the IPCC says ,or adopt solutions and apply them wrongly. ”
But there is nothing to gain for the scapegoaters from blaming governments. We already know that most of the governments has been captured by the big money, so there is little to gain for the scapegoaters from blaming governments, because the bar of expectations is already so low.
Blaming the scientists is an entirely different story, say:
– if I, a burger flipper from Ohio, who can’t get a date, post from my room antivaxer conspiracy theories, then I, despite my lack of the education and achievements in health sciences, can see what the best professionals in epidemiology are either incapable to see, or refuse to see, then _I_ must be very, very smart, just like that janitor from the “Good Will Hunting”, as well as an unwavaring the guardian of the truth, and as such – my life is not as pathetic as it looks.
or, on RC:
-if I, Kobayashi Multitroll (KM), or I, JCM, despite not having the education nor achievements in climate sciences – can see the things that the best minds in climate science can not, or refuse to see ^* – then I, KM, or I, JCM, must be very, very, very smart, and a brave guardian of truth, and my life is not as pathetic as it may look from my posts on RC.
——
^* See:
– Kobayashi Multitroll (KM) and his hundreds of posts, under dozens of names, attacking “IPCC”, “scientific consensus”, or anyone knowing anything about climate and not fully agreeing with every single statement of Hansen. And his defense of the deniers, who like him, also are trying to discredit the climate science. Les extrêmes se touchent
and
– JCM, blaming the degradation of up to half of Earth natural ecosystems on the climate scientists:
“ It’s hard to imagine denying or actively minimizing the consequences to realclimates due to an artificial fixation and overemphasis on the outputs of trace gas and aerosol forced model estimates” [(c) JCM ]
A fellow traveler with JCM
Carbon Tunnel Vision — 38:21
…I think you also took that a step further in your climate book, Climate: A New Story. You argue that reducing the ecological crisis to carbon alone repeats the same reductionist thinking—the same pattern. Find the one thing you know, apply it to a min-max problem, and then you know what to do in every situation. What’s the lowest-carbon alternative? Then you equate that with “green.”
Whether you’re talking about the war on drugs, the war on viruses, or the war on carbon, the danger is the same: what do you leave out?
from Can Humanity Choose What’s Next? with Charles Eisenstein
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhagrdvic1I&t=2301s
—
This couples with Jem Bendell’s recent commentary, a ref already posted here in Part 3 excerpts:
Jem: “I want to see climatologists and environmentalists look at whether carbon might only be half the story for explaining the most recent climate changes from human impacts. The only potential good news about the recent awful spikes in global temperatures is that they might not only be due to background warming from carbon gases. The clue is the rapid drop in the reflectivity of the planet, due to the loss of cloud cover [47 48]…
A Deep Adaption paper update: 12 Facts about climate change peer-reviewed by Reality
See: https://jembendell.com/2026/08/28/a-dozen-disputed-but-now-demonstrable-facts-about-climate-change-from-the-consequential-deep-adaptation-paper-of-2018/
The establishment climate consensus is fracturing-much like the climate system is breaking down all around us.
The Imperial wars by Russia and the Epstein Class (US’s owners and Israel primarily) are beginning to destroy significant amounts of fossil infrastructure that will be too expensive and risky to replace given that fossils are on the way out. A 40 year investment won’t have time to pay out.
So, are the wars a blessing or a curse? Would it be better or worse for the players to finish the job of erasing middle east and Russian fossil fuel systems?
Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios
Luke Kemp, Chi Xuc ,Joanna Depledge, Kristie L. Ebi , Goodwin Gibbins, Timothy A. Kohler, Johan Rockstrom,
Marten Scheffer , Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Will Steffen, and Timothy M. Lenton
Edited by Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA;
received May 20, 2021; accepted March 25, 2022
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2108146119
Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-
to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such
potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropo-
genic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse
or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a
dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample
reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a
global catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for these
extreme consequences could help galvanize action, improve
resilience, and inform policy, including emergency respon-
ses.
rticulate reasons for concern about cat-
astrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a
research agenda. The proposed agenda covers four main
questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change to
drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms
that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3)
What are human societies’ vulnerabilities to climate-
triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political insta-
bility, and systemic financial risk? 4) How can these multiple
strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—
be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe
assessment”? It is time for the scientific community to grap-
ple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic
climate change.
Is there an emoticon for the Middle Finger? Imagine there is:
So what do we owe those with whom we might profoundly, even radically, disagree? In our time, the answer increasingly seems to be: Nothing. Absolutely nothing. We’ve come to regard our opponents as not much more than obstructions in the road, impediments standing between us and our desired end. They are there to be overcome, and whatever future we might envisage will be achieved either through their grudging acquiescence, or simply through their quiescence. We have therefore grown disinclined to consider what it might mean to go on together meaningfully as partners in a shared democratic project. To put it bluntly, we see no future with our political opponents because we feel we have nothing to learn from them.
This is reflected most starkly in the way we characterise one another: it’s not that our opponents are partial, uninformed, mistaken, unwise, naive, that they are either overly cautious or needlessly impatient, or perhaps that they are simply animated by a different hierarchy of values that yields a moral intensity distinct from, but nonetheless commensurate with, our own. Instead, we tell ourselves, and anyone else who will listen, that our opponents are sub-rational, bigoted, toxic, dangerous, malignant, wilfully ignorant, cynically self-interested, fundamentally dishonest – in a word, inferior in every way that matters – and hence incapable of good-faith disagreement. They become reduced to tribal avatars: symbols to be appropriated for the prosecution of our politics. What matters, then, is not what these people actually say or do, but rather what we have decided they stand for, what their real agenda is. To borrow Agnes Callard’s classification, we replace “literal speech” – where we “read [people’s] words purely as vehicles for the contents of [their] beliefs” – with “messaging culture” – where we ignore the words and instead find the “evil intent or ulterior motive” behind them. As Callard explains:
What makes speech truly free is the possibility of disagreement without enmity, and this is less a matter of what we can say, than how we can say it. “Cancel culture” is merely the logical extension of what we might call “messaging culture,” in which every speech act is classified as friend or foe, in which literal content can barely be communicated, and in which very little faith exists as to the rational faculties of those being spoken to. In such a context, even the cry for “free speech” invites a nonliteral interpretation, as being nothing but the most efficient way for its advocates to acquire or consolidate power.
Once we take that approach towards our opponents, there is no longer any possibility of reasoning with them, because their stated reasons for why they believe what they believe cannot be taken at face value. And because rational debate is not possible, there is no point even taking part in the pretence of deliberation.
https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2022/09/uncivil-wars/extract
Don’t read it-none of you will like it-or believe you’re your own problem.
Insert emoticon:
KM: Is there an emoticon for the Middle Finger? Imagine there is
MS: Yes, Look it up on your phone.
KM: Once we take that approach towards our opponents, there is no longer any possibility of reasoning with them, because their stated reasons for why they believe what they believe cannot be taken at face value. And because rational debate is not possible, there is no point even taking part in the pretence of deliberation.
MS:Are you trying to say you have been mistreated without saying you have been mistreated? I don’t think you have been mistreated. You finally admitted that you believe we should give up trying to stop global warming and just continue on the path to the destruction of civilization because the destruction of civilization is inevitable.
Given those are your stated beliefs, there is no point in reasoning with you. You should just steps aside and live your life of burning fossil fuels and using as much energy as you want, and no one will stop you. But please stop posting long discussions from other people who agree with your civilization is doomed position. We don’t need to see more guys saying the same thing you say.
But we will continue trying to stop global warming, so you might at some point have to buy an EV or pay a lot to fill up your tank with diesel. BTW, today’s Aftenposten reports that in northern Norway, it now costs $161 to buy a full tank of diesel, and it costs $2.15 to fully charge an EV.
Consider this. You might be arguing that we can’t stop global warming because it is your new way to argue for continuing to use fossil fuels. Your we-can’t-win-so-let-the-world-crash argument might just by a cynical ploy to prevent us from making more progress converting to renewable energy and nuclear. You failed to convince the world global warming is fake; you failed to prove the warming isn’t natural; you failed to prove the science is wrong, and you failed to prove the worst of global warming won’t be so bad.
So all you can do now is to argue we can’t win so we should just give up and keep burning fossil fuels.
KM: “Don’t read it-none of you will like it-or believe you’re your own problem.”
You are the same dude who regularly using multiple names attacks, insults, and demonises scientists, The IPCC, Liberals, Joe Biden a basically harmless old dude, the wealthy billionaires, and many of us who post comments here, Maybe fix that first or at least acknowledge it, before lecturing us.
There were some resent promising results in AI proving a conjecture related to Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics, but don’t see it being applied to a practical problem yet
I signed up for this https://mathathonchallenge.com/, but then started thinking about what $2 million in token credits means for solving a problem. That’s apparently 100,000 kilowatt-hours in energy. That’s a lot of energy used up if all that happens is you end up spinning your wheels.
There was another challenge, sponsored by Google Gemini, called XPrize. I submitted something to that but then realized they wanted to see some business/financial results showing some sort of “success”, so I went in it half-hearted. Looking at the 100 top finalists, it really is all surface sheen and bells & whistles. https://gxp.moonshots.com/
“You are not in debt because you live beyond your means, but because you are denied the means to live.” Astra Taylor
In a new book, “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World,” the influential thinkers activists authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue that a powerful coalition of religious fundamentalists, ethnonationalists and tech oligarchs (Elon Musk, Peter Theil, Alex Karp, Jeff Besos, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg chief among them) is actively — and successfully — hastening the destruction of the world as we know it.
Why? Because they believe that they’re primed to thrive on the other side of catastrophe, everyone else be damned.
Is the End of the World Now on the Table?
The Interview | A Podcast From The New York Times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GDKpDkieh0
David Graeber vs Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go
Peter Thiel: We live in an advanced, technological society which is too sophisticated for a “radical democracy.”
Also, In spite of all our advanced, technologicalology, we can’t handle the complexity of a “radical democracy”
And : “Radical democracy” would require too much planning and bureaucracy, which is not ideal. – “As a libertarian…” – Architect of the most advanced surveillance system ever built
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF0cz9OmCGw&t=2067s
The End of the Future with Peter Thiel (Fascist?)
Nov 2022 – Stanford Academic Freedom Conference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibR_ULHYirs