Environment
The United Nations Couldn’t Be More Wrong When It Comes To Climate Change
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By JASON ISAAC
They still haven’t learned their lesson.
For decades, politicians and climate activists have been setting deadlines for humanity, brazenly preaching that we have just a few years left to stave off our fiery doom. In fact, we were supposed to have passed the deadline for taking dramatic action to save the world in 2000, 2012, 2016 2020, and 2023.
The United Nations is now ramping up their rhetoric again, with climate executive secretary Simon Stiell boldly (and, apparently, not rhetorically) asking: “Who exactly has two years to save the world? The answer is every person on this planet.”
As usual, the U.N. couldn’t be more wrong when it comes to climate change. In fact, the science to which it demands blind loyalty shows there has never been a better time in human history to be alive.
One Obama energy advisor described our culture’s understanding of climate change as having “drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false.” He was not wrong. While celebrities, activists, politicians, and left-leaning CEOs are crying that the sky is falling, data shows that “[c]limate-related disasters kill 99% fewer people” than they did a century ago. Even though the world’s population has quadrupled over the same time period, the risk presented by mild warming has grown smaller and smaller.
Interestingly, our resilience to climate-related disasters is improving at a far faster rate than deaths from other natural disasters like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Clearly, the weather isn’t the culprit here.
In fact, even if the U.N. and its climate cartel were right, there is remarkably little we could do anyway. The data models their scientists use to project future warming show that even cutting every drop of oil and every grain of coal from our society would change global temperatures by at most a few hundredths of a degree. Those models, by the way, have overshot warming every time, making them a highly suspect justification for spending trillions to force our society to make dramatic changes for climate change.
In fact, new studies cataloging 420,000 years of historical geological and weather data suggest that manmade greenhouse gas emissions are not strong enough to affect global temperatures.
So many of us, in our comfortably air-conditioned and Wi-Fi-enabled lives — far removed from the blue-collar energy producers toiling every day to power our society — have forgotten just how essential fossil fuels are to our existence. Our agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, public safety, utilities, banking, construction, entertainment and more would collapse without constant access to affordable, reliable energy.
Fossil fuels are the reason that the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has plummeted all over the world. In the pre-Industrial Revolution era, most of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty; 50 years ago it was about half the world population; today, it is less than 10%. Infant mortality, malnutrition and infectious diseases have plummeted while GDP, education, gender equality, economic freedom and life expectancy have skyrocketed.
The average child born today in any part of the world has a better chance at a long, healthy, and fruitful life than ever before — thanks, in part, to the life-saving and life-improving benefits of abundant energy.
We need only look to the pockets of the world still suffering from energy poverty to understand just how fortunate we are to live in 2024 instead of 1724. In communities without electricity — which nearly a billion people still don’t have and billions more have only sporadic access to — life expectancies still hover in the 50s and mere survival requires physical toil unimaginable to the average American.
Women walk for hours to collect unsanitary water and firewood or dung to burn in close quarters, exposing themselves to sexual assault and their whole families to deadly water-borne and lung disease. Children are fortunate to reach adulthood at all, let alone receive an education. Economic opportunity is close to nonexistent, even for men, outside subsistence farming.
Instead of protesting the fossil fuels that power our comfortable lives and spending trillions to possibly produce minute temperature change centuries from now, perhaps our world leaders should focus on solving the real problems facing real men, women, and children today. One of the easiest ways to do so is sharing the access to affordable, reliable energy we take for granted in the West.
I’ll keep embracing my high carbon lifestyle and hope that others get to do the same. See you in two years.
The Honorable Jason Isaac is CEO of the American Energy Institute and a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
From Clintel.org
By Vijay Jayaraj
Underestimating Clouds: A Climate Mistake We Cannot Afford
A new paper by physicists W. A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer, Radiation Transport in Clouds, suggests that clouds affect atmospheric temperature more than CO2, says Vijay Jayaray of the CO2 Coalition.
Carbon dioxide (CO₂) has been predominantly portrayed as the chief culprit driving global warming. For decades, this misconception has guided international policies, prompted ambitious targets for reducing CO2 emissions and driven a shift from reliable and affordable energy resources like coal, oil, and natural gas toward problematic wind and solar sources.
However, this theory overlooks important factors that influence Earth’s climate system, including a critical variable in the climate system – the role of clouds, which remains woefully underestimated.
Recent work by physicists W. A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer challenges this prevailing paradigm: Their new paper, Radiation Transport in Clouds, suggest clouds affect atmospheric temperature more than CO2 because they have a greater impact on the comparative amounts of solar energy entering Earth’s atmosphere and escaping to outer space.
The Overshadowed Influence of Clouds
Clouds simultaneously reflect incoming sunlight back to space (cooling the Earth) and trap outgoing heat (warming the Earth). This dual nature makes clouds both powerful and perplexing players in our climate system. The net effect of clouds on climate is a balance between these opposing influences, thus a central component of the Earth’s energy budget.
A recent study by van Wijngaarden and Happer, titled “Radiation Transport in Clouds,” delves into this complexity. The 2025 paper says the radiation effects of clouds can easily negate or amplify the impact of CO2. The researchers highlight that clouds have a more pronounced effect on Earth’s radiation budget than greenhouse gases like CO₂.
For instance, their research reveals that a modest decrease in low cloud cover could significantly increase solar heating of the Earth’s surface. In comparison, a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations reduces radiation to space by a mere 1%: “Instantaneously doubling CO₂ concentrations, a 100% increase, only decreases radiation to space by about 1%. To increase solar heating of the Earth by a few percent, low cloud cover only needs to decrease by a few percent.”
This stark contrast highlights the disproportionate influence of cloud dynamics compared to CO2 fluctuations. Most state-of-art climate models are still in their infancy. We need more accurate measurements of clouds’ properties and their influence on the electromagnetic components of solar radiation if they are to be useful inputs for climate models.
Implications for Energy Policy and Reliability
Current strategies assume a direct and dominant link between CO2 emissions and global temperatures to justify aggressive “decarbonization” efforts and an increase in the use of solar and wind energy.
However, solar and wind are inherently intermittent, rendering them unreliable and very expensive as components of a power grid. The infrastructure required to support these technologies entails substantial upfront investments, higher operating costs and increasing utility bills for consumers.
Blackouts, energy shortages and price spikes are becoming increasingly common in regions that have prematurely decommissioned fossil fuel plants without adequate backup solutions. This trend disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, exacerbating energy poverty and hindering economic development.
The major justification for using solar and wind has been that they counter global warming by reducing CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. If small variations in cloud cover actually overwhelm the effects of CO2, then the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is being significantly overestimated. This has profound implications for policy.
Attributing global warming predominantly to CO₂ emissions from the use of fossil fuels is a gross oversimplification. While CO2 undoubtedly has a warming effect, it is relatively modest and beneficial, mainly moderating the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures. On the other hand, clouds, with their multifaceted interactions and feedbacks, represent a critical and underappreciated component of this puzzle.
The findings of van Wijngaarden and Happer highlight a broader issue within climate science: the tendency to oversimplify complex systems for the sake of political expediency. As the global energy landscape continues to evolve, it is imperative that decisions be based on sound science rather than political dogma.
The time has come to reassess our approach to both climate science and energy policy. The stakes are too high to continue down a path of destructive policies based on erroneous analyses. We must prioritize reliable, affordable energy sources and grid stability over useless reductions in emissions of a harmless gas.
Click here to access the entire Radiation Transport in Clouds paper.
This commentary was first published at BizPac Review on February 10, 2025
From LifeSiteNews
Outgoing President Joe Biden announced a new climate target of reducing American carbon emissions from 61-66% over the next decade, even though President Trump would be able to undo it as soon as next month.
Outgoing President Joe Biden announced December 19 a new climate target of reducing American carbon emissions of more than 60% over the next decade, even though returning President Donald Trump would be able to undo it as soon as next month.
“Today, as the United States continues to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy, President Biden is announcing a new climate target for the United States: a 61-66 percent reduction in 2035 from 2005 levels in economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions,” the White House announced, the Washington Free Beacon reports. The new target will be formally submitted to the United Nations Climate Change secretariat.
“President Biden’s new 2035 climate goal is both a reflection of what we’ve already accomplished,” Biden climate adviser John Podesta added, “and what we believe the United States can and should achieve in the future.”
The announcement may be little more than a symbolic gesture in the end, however, as Trump is widely expected to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement upon resuming office in January, in the process voiding related climate obligations.
Trump formally pulled out of the Paris accords in August 2017, the first year of his first term, with then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley stating that the administration would be “open to re-engaging in the Paris Agreement if the United States can identify terms that are more favorable to it, its business, its workers, its people, and its taxpayers.”
Such terms were never reached, however, leaving America out until Biden re-committed the nation to the Paris Agreement on the first day of his presidency, obligating U.S. policy to new economic regulations to cut carbon emissions.
In June, the Trump campaign confirmed Trump’s intentions to withdraw from Paris again. At the time, Trump’s team was reportedly mulling a number of non-finalized drafts of executive orders to do so.
Left-wing consternation on the matter is based on certitude in “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) or “climate change,” the thesis that human activity, rather than natural phenomena, is primarily responsible for Earth’s changing climate and that such trends pose a danger to the planet in the form of rising sea levels and weather instability.
Activists have long claimed there is a “97 percent scientific consensus” in favor of AGW, but that number comes from a distortion of an overview of 11,944 papers from peer-reviewed journals, 66.4 percent of which expressed no opinion on the question; in fact, many of the authors identified with the AGW “consensus” later spoke out to say their positions had been misrepresented.
AGW proponents suffered a blow in 2010 with the discovery that their leading researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, East Anglia Climate Research Unit, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had engaged in widespread data manipulation, flawed climate models, misrepresentation of sources, and suppression of dissenting findings in order to make the so-called “settled science” say what climate activists wanted it to.
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