IN THIS ISSUE:
- Climate Models Are Wrong: No Warming Surge Since the 1970s
- Aging Equipment Is Biasing Surface Station Temperatures Upward
- China Breaks Pledge, Keeps Building Coal Power Plants in Foreign Countries
- World Bank Can’t Account for Billions in Climate Spending
Climate Models Are Wrong: No Warming Surge Since the 1970s
The researchers applied statistical tools designed to identify structural changes in time series data over time, commonly called changepoint models, to four sets of global mean surface temperature records from 1850 to 2023.
The research team found a 53 percent increase in the slope (rate of change) of warming from 0.019 °C per year (1970–2012) to 0.029 °C per year (2013–2023), but this shift was not statistically significant. To qualify as a true surge, indicating more than a temporary or naturally occurring increase in temperatures, the warming trend would have had to be at least 0.039 °C per year, rising by more than 100 percent.
The team’s research suggests short-term temperature anomalies or changes in the rate of warming are not necessarily indicative of long-term climate change but rather are due to a combination of factors, such as “noise” in the data or naturally occurring temperature variations driven my large-scale cycles like El Niño and La Niña events, which obscure or are being confused with significant long-term temperature shifts. They write,
Our results show limited evidence for a warming surge; in most surface temperature time series, no change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s is detected despite the breaking record [sic] temperatures observed in 2023. …
This is important considering the warming hiatus discussion over the last decade and the more recent alleged warming acceleration.
Using the same statistical technique to weed out short-term anomalies in measurements, the researchers found the purported warming hiatus from 1998 to 2012 was a short-term anomaly, just like the much-ballyhooed “surge” from 2013 through 2023, supposedly the warmest year on record.
The long-term temperature trend has not changed since the 1970s: no dramatic decrease, flatline, or increase in the rate of temperature change. As a result, increasing CO2 can’t be honestly claimed to be proven as a factor driving a dangerous increase in temperatures.
Sources: Nature Communications; The Counter Signal
Aging Equipment Is Biasing Surface Station Temperatures Upward
Research published in the journal Science of Climate Change suggests the deterioration of aging equipment—such as the dulling, chipping, or erosion of the white paint and white plastic of the housings for temperature gauges—has biased the temperature record upward over time. As the paint erodes or fades or is covered with dirt, the housing absorbs more solar radiation, leading to inaccurate higher recorded temperatures. This is a factor separate from the known urban heat island effect.
Although this aging of the structures in itself introduces a small bias or error in the recorded temperatures over time, every time the stations are renovated, upgraded, or replaced the “homogenization” algorithms used to adjust the temperature values between the old station data and the new data from a refurbished or replaced (sometimes in a new location entirely) temperature station multiplies the error every time maintenance or replacement occurs.
“[This] results in a substantial systematic error … because steps in the temperature data series are corrected as if they were permanent, but this is not always the case, particularly not in case of weather station ageing and renewal,” writes Moritz Busing, the researcher who undertook the study. “An in-depth analysis of the weather station data sets (homogenized and non-homogenized) confirmed the presence of this systematic error, prov[ing] the existence of statistically significant ageing effects.”
Using NASA’s GISS Surface Temperature Analysis tool, Busing quantified the errors caused by aging and repeated homogenization adjustments, concluding that once the systematic errors are removed, the objective global average surface temperature increase between 1880 and 2020 is about 0.83℃ instead of the nearly 1.5°C often cited, with a confidence interval of 95 percent.
Source: Science of Climate Change
China Breaks Pledge, Keeps Building Coal Power Plants in Foreign Countries
In September of 2021 China pledged to cease financing or building coal-fuel power plants in developing countries. This surprised and delighted those concerned about climate change at the time, since China had plans to build dozens if not hundreds of coal power plants overseas as part of its geopolitical Belt and Road infrastructure initiative of outreach to foreign countries. Under Belt and Road, China was building influence and allies in the developing world through carbon-intensive development there, just as industrialized countries and the international aid and development banks they controlled were ceasing to fund such projects as part of their efforts to fight climate change (in this case on the backs of poor people).
As I noted in a Climate Change Weekly post at the time, an analysis of China’s move by the Global Warming Policy Foundation found it was a deft political ploy:
China’s cheap energy strategy will kill three birds with one stone:
1. By building up its coal-powered economy, it can continue to produce and export renewables much cheaper than most OECD nations. China will thus cement its role as the world’s foremost producer and exporter of renewable energy.
2. By ending support for building coal-fired power plants abroad it reduces the pressure on coal demand, improving China’s domestic coal market which is currently struggling with high coal prices.
3. By announcing this move, China is playing the green card in the run-up to COP26 in order to reduce Western pressure and kick the ball back into Joe Biden’s court.
China is still building coal-fired power plants abroad despite a pledge to stop financing such projects, made back in 2021. The information comes from Finland-based climate nonprofit Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
As reported in Oil Price, a recent report by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) finds China’s pledge was a ploy in a fourth way: China slowed but did not stop building coal power plants in developing countries. Although it initially cancelled many planned coal plants abroad, China never stopped building plants already under construction or well down the planning path, and the rate of cancellation of plants that were being considered or on the drawing board has slowed and new capacities have been added, CREA notes. In short, three years later China continues to build coal plants abroad despite its 2021 pledge and, based on current commitments, will be doing so for the foreseeable future.
Oil Price writes that China cancelled 15.9 GW of new coal power in developing countries in 2022 and 2023 combined, but in 2024 it cancelled only 5.6 GW of coal, building 7.9 GW of new coal capacity overseas during the same time period, bringing “the total operating coal capacity built by China in other countries to 26.2 GW … a significant increase from 2023, when total operating coal capacity overseas stood at 18.3 GW, and an even more substantial increase from 2022 when total operating Chinese-built coal generation capacity abroad stood at 9.2 GW,” writes Oil Price.
In total, Chinese-owned companies are currently constructing 52 coal-fueled power plants outside of China, in addition to the dozens being built in China. These have a combined capacity of 49.5 GW, which exceeds the amount of capacity China said it was cancelling in 2021. In fact, according to CREA, China’s new overseas coal construction includes 3.4 GW of new capacity that had not even been announced when it made its zero new overseas coal pledge in 2021. Additionally, 4.9 GW of new power are now in the pre-permit stage, more than 30 percent of which is coal, to be built in Kyrgyzstan, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
When is a pledge to stop undertaking an activity not actually a pledge to stop? Evidently, when it is China making the promise and it is pledging not to build new coal power plants outside its borders.
Source: Oil Price; Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air
World Bank Can’t Account for Billions in Climate Spending
Oxfam recently audited the World Bank’s climate spending from 2017 to 2023—more than $100 billion—and found nearly 40 percent of it, approximately $41 billion, could not be accounted for because of “poor accounting standards.”
The World Bank, officially the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and International Development Association, is funded by donor country governments, largely of wealthy industrialized nations, to fund development in the Third World.
The World Bank is the largest international funder of climate programs, or at least it may be since much of the funding supposedly granted for green (climate-friendly) infrastructure, power, transportation, and adaptation development can’t be accounted for.
Oxfam’s audit found the World Bank had no receipts or tracking data for tens of billions of dollars supposedly granted to nations for climate action.
“There is no clear public record showing where this money went or how it was used, which makes any assessment of its impacts impossible,” says a press statement issued upon the release of Oxfam’s report. “It also remains unclear whether these funds were even spent on climate-related initiatives intended to help low- and middle-income countries protect people from the impacts of the climate crisis and invest in clean energy.”
“The Bank is quick to brag about its climate finance billions—but these numbers are based on what it plans to spend, not on what it actually spends once a project gets rolling,” Kate Donald, director of Oxfam International’s Washington, D.C. office, said in the press release. “This is like asking your doctor to assess your diet only by looking at your grocery list, without ever checking what actually ends up in your fridge.
“Climate finance is scarce, and yes, we know it’s hard to deliver [and] not tracking how or where the money actually gets spent … that’s not just some bureaucratic oversight—it’s a fundamental breach of trust that risks derailing the progress we need to make at COP this year,” Donald’s statement continued.
In short, the auditors could not verify that billions of dollars in climate-dedicated donations were actually spent on programs to help low- and middle-income countries develop clean energy and protect their citizens from the effects of climate change.
The United States is the largest “shareholder,” or donor, to the bank, so U.S. taxpayers are footing much of the bill for what may be billions of dollars wasted on graft, bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, misallocation, or phantom spending on climate programs. Based on Oxfam’s audit, one just can’t know.
Although I don’t favor international spending on climate mitigation at all, climate finance will be at the center of the COP 29 meeting to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan in mid-November. If such funding continues, guidelines must be established to ensure transparent, standard accounting practices are used to link donations to grants, at the very least. In addition, individuals must be identified who will be subject to legal accountability for (mis)spending, before any further funds are committed.
Participants should know where the dollars go and whether the programs the money is being spent on have proved effective in advancing development, reducing poverty, and increasing adaptation to climate change, before committing to throw good money after what may be bad spending.
Source: The Daily Caller News Foundation; Oxfam
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.
