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IN THIS ISSUE:
- Climate at a Glance Videos: Climate Fact Checks for Youths
- Video of the Week: Rethinking the Climate Change Consensus
- Scientists Are Ignoring CO2 Data That Is Inconvenient to the Alarmist Narrative
- Carbon Capture Raises Energy Prices While Reducing the Power Produced
- Podcast of the Week: CLIMATE CULT COLLAPSE – The People and the Market Speak Their Mind
- Climate Comedy
- Recommended Sites
Watch ALL the Presentations by the ALL-STARS of Climate Realism at the Archive of Heartland’s 15 Climate Conferences
Climate at a Glance Videos: Climate Fact Checks for Youths
The Heartland Institute has been a leading voice promoting sound science, economics, and policies concerning the issue of supposed human-caused climate change, in print, on radio and television, online, and at conferences and hearings.
Both independently and in conjunction with other experts and groups, we have published thorough peer-reviewed scientific studies and short booklets, like Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming, and lengthy, copiously referenced multi-authored, tomes in the multi-volume Climate Change Reconsidered series produced by the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change. We’ve also published original research demonstrating the flawed nature of the existing ground-based temperature measuring system which supplies biased temperature data for the United States and is incorporated into larger data sets and used to claim humans are causing unnatural rapid global warming.
Daily we published items at Climate Realism which refute the climate disaster du jour hyped by the mainstream media as further proof humans are causing a climate crisis. With this issue, we have now published 506 issues of Climate Change Weekly discussing climate science, economic, and policy matters that are being ignored by the mainstream media, politicians, and in many respects by academia. Often the scientific studies discussed in CCW indicate that much less is known about the causes and consequences of climate change than the purveyors and mongers of climate doom would have the world believe. These studies often suggest that climate change is driven by factors other than human energy use, that the Earth has experienced warming and cooling before, and that there is no climate catastrophe in the offing.
Heartland has hosted 15 international conferences on climate change, bringing together climate scientists, economists, political scientists, philosophers, and politicians to present and discuss the facts of climate change and the impacts of policies aimed at preventing it. These conferences were recorded and are available online for eternity.
Our most recent, ongoing educational effort is Climate at a Glance (CAAG), both the booklet for teachers and students, and the series of factual posts being updated regularly at the CAAG website, which concisely summarizes topical climate issues, providing the most important, accurate, and powerful information. The CAAG site is designed to provide a library of solid yet simple examinations of climate facts that legislators, teachers, students, and laymen can easily access to become factually informed on a topic, and to refute the exaggerations of the so-called “climate crisis.”
Our most recent educational effort is our growing foray into livestream and video presentations of climate change on YouTube and other social media platforms. Linnea Lueken, Jim Lakely, and myself, among others, have recorded a series of stand-alone videos discussing various climate and energy topics that are getting increasing amounts of attention. Our weekly hour-long Climate Realism livestream show recently aired its 109th episode to an audience of more than 600 viewers. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, more people watch the show online in the days and weeks following its live airing.
Which brings me to the newest in our series of videos. Evidence suggests many busy adults and youths get their information from non-traditional “new” media platforms, like podcasts and videos.
Youths, the research and surveys suggest, don’t get their information through traditional news outlets, be it television or radio news programs or newspapers and magazines, rather they get their information in byte-sized chunks (pun fully intended) through channels like Tik Tok, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Accordingly, Heartland understands that if we wish to educate youths—the next generation of American leaders and decision makers—concerning the truth about climate change and the dangers of climate alarm, we have to reach them where they live, access information, and exchange information with their friends and peers. Thus, we are expanding our online presence with a series of short, one-to-three-minute videos discussing climate topics in a pithy, fun, accessible, but still accurate, way. These videos are accessible on the platforms that kids get their information from.
Linnea Lueken, with contributions from Heartland’s media department, has produced a series of more than 30, three minute or less, topical fact-check videos on climate change, using CAAG as the information base. We will be releasing one or two of these videos each week over the coming months.
The series was launched this week with videos discussing the truth about climate change and the hazards facing coral reefs (hint: climate change isn’t prominent among them or causing their decline, despite what breathless media headlines regularly assert), and the second refuting the oft-repeated dogmatic tenant of the climate alarm narrative, that there is a scientific consensus that humans are causing a climate crisis—there isn’t. Within a day of their release, both videos had reached an audience in the thousands. As I write, Linnea’s brief coral reef video has been viewed more than 5,700 times, and her climate consensus video has been viewed an astounding, outstanding 28,000 times—all in the space of a single day, with no media attention or promotion.
We want to keep this success going and the reach of the videos growing. This requires your help. Algorithms operating on YouTube, Facebook, and other social media platforms regularly suppress or attempt to suppress climate realists’ videos and materials. Heartland’s videos are among those that have been blocked, labeled, or forced down multiple levels in search engine responses in the past, making it difficult if not impossible to find them. You can help us avoid the climate blacklist. I’m making a plea for you to go and watch our current CAAG fact checks on coral reefs and the so-called climate consensus, push the like button, and share the videos with your friends and colleagues so you can help us defeat the algorithms which have suppressed Heartland’s climate realist message in the past, and to expand the reach of our message. Every like and share makes it harder for the platforms’ algorithms to justify suppressing the videos.
Second, I ask you to look out for the release of the new videos in the series each week. And if you find them informative and entertaining, as I believe you will, once again, like and share them as they are released.
Finally, and I don’t believe I’ve ever done this before, I’m asking you to support Heartland’s work with a donation. No donation is too small. It is only through the support of our donors that we can keep Heartland’s content and messaging going. Your donation, whether in support of Climate Change Weekly, our new series of CAAG videos, or our other worthwhile efforts, will go to expand the reach of our message, in order to fight against bad legislation and regulations, and promote sound policies that simultaneously promote U.S. energy dominance, environmental quality, and individual freedom.
In short, keep reading, view those videos, share and like them, and cut a check. Any or all of these will help. Thanks for considering my request.
Sources: Climate at a Glance; Are Coral Reefs Disappearing?; Rethinking the Climate Change Consensus
NEW: Get Climate at a Glance on your mobile device!
Video of the Week
Is there a scientific consensus that says we should be worried about a looming climate catastrophe? No. A majority of scientists may believe Earth’s climate is changing, but most are not all that alarmed.
Read the brutal truth about how battery production for electric vehicles cause immense environmental destruction and human tragedy.
Scientists Are Ignoring CO2 Data That Is Inconvenient to the Alarmist Narrative
One of the common methods of reconstructing/estimating past temperatures is through the use of stomatal analysis, examining plant stomata—the pores found in the epidermis of leaves, stems, and other organs—which control the rate of gas exchange, including transpiration, between the internal air spaces of the leaf and the atmosphere. It is known that as temperatures and/or carbon dioxide increase plant stomata close or shrink, which improves water use efficiency.
As No Tricks Zone notes, temperature reconstructions derived from plant stomatal analysis have been common and widely accepted as providing valid paleoclimate reconstructions of historic atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. He provides a partial literature review of recent peer-reviewed studies which undertake such reconstructions. One such example he cites comes from the March 2024 edition of the journal Paleoworld.
For example, in a new study, 100-150 million-year-old stomata samples from Iran are shown to re-confirm global atmospheric CO2 levels hit 1,100 to 1,700 ppm during the Jurassic period. The authors proudly showcase how consistently their stomata-derived CO2 measurements compare to several other reconstructions reaching the same conclusion about past CO2 concentrations.
However, No Tricks Zone notes, when it comes to stomatal estimates of CO2 in more recent times, the climate science community largely ignores it, suggesting that while stomatal reconstruction of the past are fine, reconstructions of present CO2 levels are invalid. Why? No Tricks Zone surmises it is because they suggest the recent increase CO2 concentrations weren’t solely driven by human activities but rather nature contributed, perhaps in response to warming conditions.
No Tricks Zone writes about one 2022 paper, for example, published in the journal Science of Climate Change, noting how its analysis is treated differently than much more limited ice core re-analyses of CO2:
Dr. Ernst-Georg Beck’s compiled research with plant stomata-derived CO2 measurements was posthumously published in 2022. It’s an exhaustively-referenced paper detailing 97,404 direct near-ground measurement from 901 stations situated across the world, in both hemispheres. (This is very much unlike the ice core CO2 record in which only one continental location, Antarctica, is used; and yet this local record – contradicted by Greenland ice cores – is regarded as “global.”)
The research was recorded in 292 scientific papers (77 authors) covering stomata-derived direct CO2 measurements for the industrial era, 1800-1960.
These database compilations – ~60,000 global-scale measurements between the 1930s and 1950s alone – consistently show CO2 hit 380 ppm in 1943 and 372 ppm in 1950, with very small error margins after about 1870.
The currently accepted CO2 values for 1943 and 1950 are instead recorded as 310 ppm, and the 372 to 380 ppm values are not assumed to have been achieved until the mid-2000s. A data-driven portrayal of a decadal-scale decline in CO2 after the 1940s peak (shown in Fig. 24) contradicts the viewpoint that sharply rising anthropogenic CO2 emissions after 1945 led to tandemly increasing CO2 concentrations. Consequently, these direct CO2 measurements – tens of thousands of them from across the world – are rejected by the gatekeepers of the humans-did-it narrative.
Further, the stomata-derived CO2 values also indicate the temperature is the leading factor determining the CO2 concentration, with the CO2 changes correlationally (r = 0.67) lagging the temperature changes by about a year. This once again conflicts with the conclusion that CO2 levels are determined by anthropogenic emissions.
Climate alarmists, such as the scientists participating in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have largely ignored or dismissed stomatal analysis of recent years’ CO2 when describing and presenting in graphical form the recent CO2 rise data and comparisons to recent temperature rise. Ignoring an independent source of data is unjustified scientifically, although, since as Climate Realism, Climate at a Glance, and Climate Change Weekly have shown, climate alarm is largely not based on science but rather political considerations, such as comity, consensus, funding, and the power that it brings. It is perhaps not surprising that data inconvenient to the narrative humans are causing climate change is ignored by the media and in the literature cited by government bodies.
Sources: No Tricks Zone; Science of Climate Change
Heartland’s Must-read Climate Sites
Poll Shows American’s Still Rank Climate Change as a Low Priority
Frits Byron Soepyan, Ph.D., a research and science associate with the CO2 Coalition, recently produced an economic and power analysis of the Biden administration’s new power plant rule mandating 90 percent carbon capture on existing coal plant and new and upgraded natural gas plants.
It turns out the added costs will likely make the power plants uneconomic, especially since it will of necessity reduce the electric power output available for sale. It turns out the process of carbon capture itself requires a lot of power, reducing the electricity available to the grid.
Soepyan’s analysis uses the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) cost and performance estimates for retrofitting existing coal power plants with Shell’s CANSOLV CO2 capture system. Soepyan writes:
NETL’s baseline coal power plant had a net output of 650 megawatts (MW). But after retrofitting it with the CO2 capture system, the power output was reduced by 24% to 495 MW. In terms of money, the retrofit cost is about $988 million, or about $2 million/MW of net power output. …
Based on the U.S. Energy Information Administration, as of March 2024, the United States has 148 coal power plants in operation in the electric utility sector, with an average capacity of about 139,000 MW. Of these, 36 plants plan to retire completely on or before December 2040 and 8 plants plan to retire at least one steam turbine on or before December 2034, but not entirely. Taking the difference of 148 and 36, there are 112 coal power plants in the United States without any planned retirement year, having a total average capacity of about 96,000 MW.
Using the NETL estimates, if we were to retrofit these 112 coal power plants to enable 90% carbon capture, the 24% net power output reduction would bring electricity production down to about 73,000 MW. Applying the retrofit cost of about $2 million/MW of net power output to the plants’ reduced power output, we arrive at a projected cost of about $146 billion.
So, you are adding billions of dollars in cost to ratepayers’ power bills, while producing less power. And based on the evidence so far, the coal power plants—normally a reliable, dispatchable source of electric power—will become less so since, in testing, carbon capture systems are prone to regular breakdowns and failures—which is why the guinea pig-power plants using them in testing wound up shutting down; too many breakdowns.
And, of course that’s just the impact on coal power generation. Soepyan points out that the new rule also applies to new and refurbished gas plants, adding 78 percent to their costs, while reducing power output by 11 percent.
In the end, with any luck, this new rule will go the way of the previous Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan and never come into effect because federal courts will stay or block the rule. Twenty-Seven states, the National Mining Association, and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association have filed lawsuits challenging the rule.
Source: CO2 Coalition
Podcast of the Week
On episode 109 of The Climate Realism Show, we look at two recent polls that show climate change opinion is sharply waning in its perception as a threat to the public. At the same time, ESG funds have essentially collapsed as investors pull their money.
Subscribe to the Environment & Climate News podcast on Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to leave a positive review!
Climate Comedy
Recommended Sites
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
