You don’t need me to tell you that the defence secretary quit last week because of the reluctance of Keir Starmer to fund defence properly.

Opposition parties have naturally suggested raiding the bloated welfare budget to find the money needed to protect the UK adequately. But what about cancelling Net Zero instead (or as well!), which could save the Government hundreds of billions?

Currently we are spending £65 billion a year on defence, which is equivalent to 2.5% of GDP, (under the NATO definition of what should be included, which is slightly more than just MOD spending). This figure is due to rise to 2.6% next year, as was laid out in the November 2025 Budget.

Last year, the Strategic Defence Review was commissioned to set a 10-year vision of how to transform our Armed Forces and the technology they are equipped with. According to John Healey, the Treasury was only prepared to increase the already budgeted 2.6% to 2.68% in 2030 – effectively an extra £2 billion a year.

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This is the sixth in a series of 12 articles challenging climate change orthodoxy commissioned by Professor Gwythian Prins. We will be publishing the articles at a rate of one a week (read the first article here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here and the fifth here). The hope is that they can be collected into a book for Sixth Formers and university students.

According to the BBC, climate change has become more alarming during the 21st century. What they once called global warming they now call global heating; what they once called climate change they now call the climate crisis. If it is a crisis, then official estimates of the damage that climate change has done and will do if the models prove accurate should be easy to obtain. They are not.

The technical term for this damage is ‘the social cost of carbon’, meaning the net value in dollars of harm done today and in the whole of the future by each tonne of extra carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere. This includes damage to people’s living standards, to infrastructure, to peace of mind, to the natural environment, to everything.

Yet here is a strange thing. The British Government, though obsessed with carbon, no longer estimates or considers the social cost of carbon – at all. Its official position is that “carbon valuation for policy appraisal no longer uses the social cost of carbon”. It gave up estimating this measure of the net harm from future climate change in 2008.

Why? That’s easy: because scientists and economists just could not get the number up high enough to surpass the cost of reducing emissions. As the economists Sir Nicholas Stern and Joseph Stiglitz put it in a recent paper: “The interim values produced by the Interagency Working Group (IAWG) on the SCC range from $62 by 2030 to $85 in 2050 (assuming an average discount rate of 3%) — values far lower than those needed to limit warming to well below 2°C or reach net zero by 2050.”

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Says a former senior UK official: “It was embarrassing. You see we couldn’t find a mitigation policy with an abatement cost even close to the Social Cost, let alone below it.” Policies that cost more than the damage they are intended to redress do not make sense.

In his eponymous report in 2006, Stern had tried to solve this conundrum by adopting unusually low discount rates, so that damage done 50 years from now is treated as almost as harmful as damage done today. But this was not convincing: in the real world nobody values a pound of harm 50 years hence the same as a pound of harm today. After all, your grandchildren will be much richer than you when they face future harms, according to official projections. As Bjorn Lomborg has shown, the United Nations expects the average person by 2100 to earn 434% of today’s income – reduced from 450% by climate change – so it’s a bit harsh to ask today’s poor to pay the bills of tomorrow’s rich. Posterity can pay posterity’s bills.

Stern later tried a different approach, abandoning the social cost of carbon and replacing it with a “marginal abatement cost” which “aims to produce a price pathway that efficiently moves policy and economic activity toward a given target”. In other words, don’t estimate the damage, just assume it’s big enough to justify the cost of preventing it. Hey presto!

The American government took a different approach. It stuck with the social cost of carbon but bumped it up as high as it could. In 2023, the Biden administration quintupled its estimate of the social cost of carbon in 2030 to $220 per tonne, assuming a 2% discount. It justified this mostly by referring to a 2017 paper that had reanalysed another set of data on the effect of climate change on agricultural yields, published in 2014. Increasing future crop yield damage was the biggest contributor to the new cost, dwarfing the cost of damage from storms, droughts, sea-level change and other effects.

The 2014 study, which was a meta-analysis of many different studies, had, awkwardly, concluded that the net effect of extra carbon dioxide on crop yields was, and would continue to be, positive, not negative. The 2017 re-analysis, done by scientists from California-Davis, Stanford and Purdue universities, reversed that conclusion. This struck the economist Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph in Canada as peculiar. After all, commercial greenhouses routinely spend money purchasing carbon dioxide to pump into the air inside them, because it boosts the yield of tomatoes, strawberries and everything else.

So McKitrick went back through the studies considered by the meta-analysis, all 1,722 of them, and recalculated the effect on crop yields. He found that the 2017 reanalysis had omitted 360 perfectly valid sets of data on the effect of carbon dioxide itself on crops, and considered climate change alone. He put these data back in and – bingo! – the overall effect of carbon dioxide on crop yields goes from $100 per tonne negative to significantly positive, and will remain so even if the world warms by a highly unlikely five degrees Centigrade.

For example, the 2017 study had found wheat yield would fall by 36.7% with a two-degree warming, and rice by 4%; McKitrick corrected that to a rise of 8% and 7% respectively by including the effect of carbon dioxide fertilisation. Yes, you read that right: by leaving out carbon dioxide’s direct effect, the previous study had wrongly turned net benefit into net harm.

Scores of laboratory studies and so called FACE studies (free-air concentration experiments) have over the past few decades surprised plant scientists by showing that the ‘greening’ effect of extra carbon dioxide is large even in forest ecosystems. They had expected other factors such as water and nutrients to be limiting, but no, for many ecosystems and crops, extra carbon dioxide can increase growth rates well beyond this century’s probable levels.

Moreover, it has now been proved beyond all doubt that the world is indeed a greener place than it was 40 years ago thanks to the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The numbers are striking. Satellite data show that almost all ecosystems, from the Arctic to the tropics, from desert to rainforest, from farmland to wilderness, have grown greener in the past four decades – by about 15% in 33 years. So have marine ecosystems, whether based on phytoplankton, corals or seaweed: all are growing faster.

It may seem surprising that such a slight change in the composition of the atmosphere – from just below 0.03% carbon dioxide to just above 0.04% in four decades – could have such a large effect on the world’s ecosystems. But it is no more surprising than that such a small change could affect the world’s temperature. Plants must open their pores – stomata – to inhale CO₂ and in doing so they lose water, so any increase in CO₂ levels helps them reduce water loss.

Moreover, the greening trend is continuing, indeed slightly accelerating, and ingenious analysis shows that the biggest cause is the increase in carbon dioxide rather than warming, wetting, farming or tree planting – though reforestation is also contributing to global greening and now exceeds deforestation globally. The effect is strongest in arid areas and is huge: equivalent over the course of 33 years to adding an area of green vegetation “about two-times the size of mainland USA” in the words of Zaichun Zhu of Peking University. Global greening is, in fact, a more certain scientific fact than global warming, where doubt persists over the relative contribution of man-made and natural causes.

Putting a monetary value on greener forests, with more food for caterpillars and monkeys, is not easy but can be done. Higher crop yields are easier to value. They have a monetary worth in themselves but by reducing hunger, lowering food prices and lowering the amount of land needed to feed the world, they also add materially to human welfare.

Global greening is thus the biggest and most conspicuous effect of rising carbon dioxide emissions. Remember that the effects of greenhouse gases on much of the climate have so far refused to show up: storms, cyclones and tornados have not grown stronger or more frequent; wild fires are less frequent than in centuries past except where poor land management practices have encouraged them; floods have shown no consistent trend except where deforestation and drainage have made them locally worse; droughts have slightly declined on a global scale, as warmer oceans release more moisture into the atmosphere.

Heatwaves and sudden downpours are showing a very slight signal of increased intensity but neither is very harmful on a global scale. Note, too, that fatalities caused by all meteorological phenomena are falling, not rising: deaths from famine, flood, fire and storm are down by 96% in a century – from 485,000 per year in the 1920s to 18,362 per year in the 2010s. This is not because weather is less dangerous but because we are better at warning, protecting and assisting people.

True, rising sea level as a result of melting glaciers and thermal expansion of sea water is the biggest of the potential costs of carbon dioxide. The rate at which sea level is rising has accelerated from about 2mm a year in 1992 to 4.5mm a year in 2024 or less than two feet per century. But it will have to accelerate faster than that to do significant harm this century. Most Pacific and Indian Ocean islands are gaining land from the sea, and Antarctica is currently gaining rather than losing ice.

Oh, and do not forget that the warming that results from the greenhouse effect is stronger at night, in winter and in the north. That means it is weaker in the daytime, in summer and in the tropics. The upward trend in daytime temperatures in tropical regions is small. Far more people live in the tropics than the Arctic, and most are active in the daytime so again the impact of global warming is correspondingly less. Around nine times as many people die of cold than heat worldwide.

An honest accounting of the net effects of carbon dioxide emissions would include the social benefits of carbon, especially global greening’s impact on crop yields, land use and natural vegetation; plus the benefits of warming itself, which include less drought and fewer cold deaths.

Beside, global warming has been slower than originally expected. The 1990 first report of the IPCC predicted 0.3 degrees of warming per decade and the rate of warming since then has been less than 0.2 degrees per decade. This fits with recent estimates that climate sensitivity is lower than previously thought, which in itself drastically reduces realistic estimates of the social cost of carbon. Once you do all this, you find that it is impossible to justify the word ‘crisis’.

Now compare the small, possibly negative cost of carbon with the large and rising cost of the green transition, especially fuel poverty, indoor air pollution and deforestation in Africa (caused by the West refusing to help Africans replace firewood with natural gas). This must include the environmental impact of the land grab for unreliables, resulting in – just one example -- the imminent extinction in the wild of the Great Indian Bustard, caused by wind farms and solar farms (fossil fuels by contrast have caused zero extinctions so far).

But still you have not finished. You cannot forget the opportunity cost of spending fortunes on climate change while ignoring invasive species, ocean overfishing and other much more urgent environmental threats. Or the cost of stranded assets: blowing up and replacing power stations before the end of their useful lives, wasting useful investment.

Once you take all this into the calculation, and if you use reasonable discount rates, it is difficult to get the social cost of carbon as a net harm at all, even in the distant future, let alone make it bigger than the cost of the transition. The effect of global greening thus trumps the effect of global warming. But to admit as much would threaten the careers of many thousands of activists, politicians, scientists and journalists. So psychologically, they will be very reluctant to admit it.

Matt Ridley is a British science writer, journalist and businessman. Author of The Rational Optimist and many other books of popular explanation, he writes on science, the environment and economics.

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• “The model that works” – In WUWT, Willis Eschenbach discusses the implications of his peer-reviewed paper and sets out why he believes his climate model stands apart from the rest.

• “India’s record crops reject food, warming alarmism” – India’s agricultural boom, aided by CO₂-enriched air and favourable growing conditions, makes a mockery of climate doomsday predictions, writes Vijay Jayaraj in WUWT.

• “Climate alarmists now using natural phenomena to support their claims“ – Alarmists are now switching to purely natural phenomena like El Niño to secure their positions, notes Pierre Gosselin in the No Tricks Zone.

• “Dartmoor ponies could be put to death under biodiversity plans” – Natural England’s demand that 75% of livestock grazing on Dartmoor land be removed is forcing farmers to choose between centuries-old tradition and their livelihoods, reports the Times.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Is Al Carns Really a Member of the Reality-Based Community or Just Another Apologist For the Security State?” – Al Carns urges us to put ‘security’ at the heart of everything – but is it realism or just the same old security state in greener clothing? Ben Pile thinks it’s the latter.

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According to the Telegraph, Al Carns has issued a “veiled attack on Ed Miliband’s Net Zero policies”. In the same newspaper – a curious organ in which to set out leadership bids in anticipation of a contest for Keir Starmer’s job – Carns sets out his mercifully short argument for putting ‘security’ at the centre of everything. “Energy is not an environmental issue, but a security one,” he writes. “North Sea oil and gas, small modular reactors, energy storage and, of course, renewables, are all options that would reduce our exposure,” he continues. “A serious country would be using all of them,” he says, bemoaning that “we are not” and that “this is a choice, and we are paying for it”. But what really are the implications for Labour’s flagship policies – Miliband’s agenda?

Many in the wake of both increased geopolitical repolarisation and the consequent exposure of Britain’s military incapacity have welcomed Carns’s comments. They seem, at face value, to put realism at the centre of policymaking, where commitments to abstract concepts – i.e., emissions-reduction – have been put before cost, security of supply, and practically every application that requires energy. The problems are obvious to all but the green agenda’s dwindling number of advocates, who continue to promise benefits.

But this welcoming of realism is a naïve hope. It isn’t realism. On these pages, we’ve discussed the Conservative Party’s new attachment to Net Zero scepticism, then the growing tensions within the green blob itself, and ultimately this tension pulling the Labour camp in two directions, with Tony Blair and his minions on one side and Ed Miliband and his on the other. Both the Conservatives and Blair have turned on green targets, and urge us to put practical necessity before ideological ambition. Hurrah. However, I have been arguing against handing out medals for those who are now stating the obvious – their epiphanies seem insincere, their U-turns self-serving, and their new positions no more founded in principle and reason than their last.

And I find Carns’s “veiled attack” precisely of this genre. We need unveiled attacks if we are to lift the veils. And I don’t think Carns departs from the political problems that have plagued Britain this century as much as he epitomises them. As refreshing as it is to hear politicians ditch climate orthodoxy, it didn’t emerge in a vacuum.

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• “End wind farm scandal to halt energy bills, Miliband urged” – Consumer champion Will Hodson is calling on Energy Secretary Ed Miliband to abandon his drive to more than double offshore wind capacity by 2030, warning that the expansion is fuelling the energy bills crisis, says the Times.

• “Tories pin hopes on oil and gas in Aberdeen South by-election” – Kemi Badenoch is targeting Aberdeen South as a winnable seat, with the SNP mired in scandal, Reform distracted and Labour damaged by Ed Miliband’s opposition to North Sea drilling, notes the Times.

• “EV charging companies threaten to axe £2 billion investment if Starmer softens Net Zero targets” – Electric vehicle charging firms are warning they will pull £2 billion of planned investment if Sir Keir Starmer waters down Labour’s Net Zero commitments, claims the Telegraph.

• “‘Gender gap’ threat to electric car sales” – Research for Autotrader finds that 17% of women cite a lack of knowledge about electric vehicle technology as a barrier to purchase, raising fresh concerns about a gender gap undermining EV sales, according to the Times.

• “Time for judicial review of 7th carbon budget?” – On his Substack, David Turver writes that the Climate Change Committee’s seventh carbon budget relies on renewables cost assumptions far lower than the Government’s own latest estimates, raising serious questions about whether the process is legally defensible.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Meet Tessa Khan, the Climate Activist-Litigator Waging War on the North Sea” – Funded by European and American philanthropists, Tessa Khan uses the courts to impose Net Zero policies voters have rejected at the ballot box, says Tilak Doshi

Last November, an invitation-only gathering of politicians, journalists and policy figures assembled at Westminster Central Hall to hear what was billed as an authoritative, expert-led “National Emergency Briefing” on the UK’s climate and energy crisis. The final speaker, awarded the “energy transition” slot, was Tessa Khan – lawyer, campaigner and founder of an NGO called Uplift. Her message was crisp: fossil fuels are the root cause of the UK’s energy price shocks; roughly half of all British recessions since 1970 have been caused by fossil fuel price volatility; and a fully renewable, electrified energy system will deliver lower bills, energy security and a just transition for workers and households alike. The audience, carefully curated, received this vision with the reverence one might accord a scientific briefing. No awkward questions followed about system costs, grid reliability, or the fate of the 100,000-odd workers in the North Sea supply chain. The “emergency” format, it seems, does not lend itself to inconvenient complications.

There is a peculiar growth industry that has flourished in the green movement: the professional climate litigator. Funded by an interlocking web of American and European philanthropic foundations, staffed by lawyers with no grounding in economics, energy engineering, or the lived realities of working people dependent on affordable power, this industry pursues a singular goal – to achieve through the courts what democratic electorates have repeatedly declined to endorse via the ballot box. Nowhere is this enterprise more vividly embodied than in the career of Tessa Khan.

Khan is the founder and Executive Director of Uplift, a UK-based NGO whose stated mission is to support “a rapid and just transition away from oil and gas production in the UK”. She is also, by her own account, an “international climate change and human rights lawyer, campaigner and strategist”. Before setting up Uplift, she was co-founder and co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, a project of the Urgenda Foundation – a Dutch NGO that first pioneered the strategy of suing national governments to force them to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by court order. In 2019, Time magazine named her one of 15 women “leading the fight against climate change”. She is, by the standards of the green movement, a star.

What are her qualifications? Khan holds a Bachelor of Laws (with Honours) and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Western Australia, and a Master of Laws (with Distinction) from Oxford. She has spent time working in Thailand on women’s rights advocacy, in Egypt, India, the Netherlands and Australia. She’s an expert adviser to UN human rights bodies and has served on the steering committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. What she has never done – at any point in this impressive-sounding bio – is work in the energy sector, study economics, or demonstrate any understanding of what it means to depend on affordable, reliable energy for heat, transport, or employment. Her background is that of an activist, not a dispassionate analyst of complex (or, for that matter, simple) energy and economic trade-offs.

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• “Carns warns Miliband: energy is about security, not environment” – Al Carns has delivered a veiled attack on Ed Miliband’s Net Zero policies, declaring that energy policy is a security issue rather than an environmental one, reports the Telegraph.

• “Bran flakes to be classed as junk food under Labour health plan” – Kellogg’s warns that Labour’s proposed junk food classifications could “undo years of work” to make breakfast cereals healthier, notes the Telegraph.

• “Keir Starmer overrules Ed Miliband on electric car sales targets” – Sir Keir Starmer is moving to water down Net Zero electric vehicle targets after sustained pressure from business and the Unite union over the threat of widespread job losses, says the Times.

• “‘We had to wait nine months to plug in our electric car’” – Homeowners installing electric vehicle chargers and heat pumps are discovering that Britain’s ageing electricity supply cables simply cannot cope with the demand, reveals the Times.

• “Piketty’s eco-Marxist utopia: why degrowth and global redistribution will trap the poor in poverty” – Thomas Piketty’s newly unveiled Global Justice Report, with its embrace of degrowth and wealth redistribution, would condemn the world’s poorest to permanent poverty, argues Tilak K. Doshi in RealClearEnergy.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Millions of Homes at Risk from Climate Change, Claims British Geological Survey in New Report Relying on Discredited Modelling” – Millions of homes are at risk from climate change, the British Geological Survey has claimed in a new report – but it relies on the IPCC’s discredited RCP8.5 modelling, says Paul Homewood.

Millions of homes are at risk from climate-related subsidence, according to an analysis by the British Geological Survey (BGS).

The Guardian reports:

As hotter, drier summers driven by global heating become more frequent, the ground under houses can shrink and drag down a property’s foundations. The most vulnerable areas include London, Essex, Kent and a tranche of land from Oxford up to the Wash on England’s east coast, according to scientists, who say mitigation measures will be needed.

Anna Harrison, a scientist at the BGS, said: “By combining geotechnical information about volume change potential with data about projected rainfall and temperature scenarios for the coming century, we have been able to identify the areas of Great Britain most likely to become susceptible to shrink-swell subsidence.” ...

In 2025, the UK experienced the warmest spring on record and the driest in more than 50 years. There were £153 million of subsidence-related insurance claims in the first six months of the same year. With climate crisis projections indicating that hotter, drier conditions are likely to become increasingly frequent over the coming century, the number of properties susceptible to subsidence-related shrink-swell is on the rise. ...

Harrison said: “Dry weather and high temperatures are a major factor in the emergence of shrink-swell subsidence. Looking ahead, these increases in hotter, drier summers are projected to continue.”

I am not quite sure why they are mentioning one dry spring last year. Extremely dry springs used to be much more common:

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• “Green Party considers ban on circumcision for young children” – The Green Party is considering a ban on circumcision for young children, a procedure common in Jewish communities, says the Mail.

• “‘Zionism is Racism’ motion back on the Green agenda” – A motion declaring Zionism to be racism has returned to the Green Party’s agenda after it failed to pass at the spring conference when members filibustered to prevent it being heard, according to the Mail.

• “Will the Hinkley C nuclear power station ever open?” – The prospect of Britain facing a period with zero nuclear power is looking increasingly likely as questions mount over whether Hinkley C will ever come online, writes Ross Clark in the Spectator.

• “Miliband front-runner to be Burnham’s chancellor” – Ed Miliband is pushing to be made Chancellor should Andy Burnham become Prime Minister, according to Labour sources, reports the Telegraph.

• “Miliband comes for underfloor heating in Net Zero drive” – Ed Miliband is set to ban the sale of underfloor heating systems deemed to use too much power as part of his latest Net Zero push, according to the Telegraph.

• “‘Our heat pump broke down in the depths of winter and my wife got pneumonia’” – A reader’s account of being left without heat during winter after their pump failed – and the poor customer service that followed – raises serious questions about the reliability of the technology, says the Telegraph.

• “Is Gulf Stream collapsing? Mysterious cold blob found in Atlantic” – Scientists warn that a mysterious “cold blob” detected in the North Atlantic signals that a critical ocean current may be on the verge of collapse, reports the Mail.

• “BMW’s legendary M3 is going green: 1,000bhp performance EV teased” – BMW has teased an electric M3 producing more than 1,000bhp, raising the question of whether such brute performance can finally win over committed petrolheads, notes the Mail.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“The Climate Skeptic Podcast | Episode 48” – On the show this week, guest host David Shipley speaks to Dr Gwythian Prins, Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics and convenor of the Hartwell Group, on the fatal technical, economic and security flaws of Net Zero, why climate models are fundamentally broken, the impossibility of a renewables transition and how this green madness weakens Britain in a dangerous world.

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Our guest post today is an excerpt from Canary in a Climate World: Climate Realism vs. the Net Zero Myth, a newly released book bringing together 38 Climate Canaries from across science, climatology, geology, engineering, economics, medicine, law, journalism, public policy and independent research. The chapter below, by Princeton physicist Professor William Happer, is one of many thought-provoking contributions examining climate science, energy policy, Net Zero and the wider climate debate. Filled with fascinating essays, scientific discussion, investigative analysis and thought-provoking perspectives, Canary in a Climate World is now available on Amazon here.

Fifty years from now, academic treatises will be written about the climate madness that prevailed when these canary songs were written. I hope the songs will clarify the Zeitgeist of this bizarre interval in the history of human folly.

Many people with inadequate scientific knowledge are convinced that Planet Earth is in mortal danger from global warming due to humans. If Planet Earth were really in great danger from humans, any means to protect it would be justified. Some extremists propose reducing Earth’s eight billion population of people to no more than one billion. How this is to be done has always been a bit vague. Genghis Khan made a good start by slaughtering some 40 million people in the 13th century. In our day, Prince Philip, father of King Charles III of the United Kingdom, opined that: “If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”

The climate alarmism of our time is a malignant alliance of ignorant fanaticism, like that mentioned above, and opportunism: the lust for power, fame and wealth. Like all fanatical movements, climate alarmism is doing great collateral damage, most notably to the reputation of my own profession of science. Generous research grants from governments and private foundations have created a new discipline of ‘climate science’. Traditional, rigorous disciplines like atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, meteorology or palaeontology were quick to cash in by renaming themselves with some variant of ‘Centre for Saving the Planet’. They were generously rewarded with research grants, new laboratories, professorships, elections to learned societies, prizes and other tokens of gratitude.

This largess came with strings. If your research did not show that the planet needed to be saved, you would be expelled from the elect. Many credible scientists made no public mention of doubts they had about the party line. But a few refused to accept this new ‘science by consensus’ and remained faithful to the traditional criterion: the validity of a scientific theory is how well its predictions agree with all available observations, and how successfully it predicts previously unobserved phenomena. In the laconically accurate words of Karl Popper: “One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” By this criterion, climate alarmism is not a scientific theory, since it has made many alarming predictions and none have turned out to be true. Rather climate alarmism is more like astrology or the cargo-cult science described so graphically by Richard Feynman.

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Climate alarmism is centred on the dogma is that ‘carbon dioxide is the control knob of Earth’s climate’. This dogma is false, but because of frenzied propaganda for over half a century it is as widely accepted today as was the geocentric universe in the days of Giordano Bruno. In the year 1600, Pope Clement VIII, the Vicar of Christ’s Church of Faith, Hope and Love, had Bruno burnt alive for promoting heliocentrism and other ideas deemed heretical. Less than 50 years later, Galileo Galilei barely escaped the same fate by recanting his heretical promotion of heliocentrism -- that Earth moves around the Sun, and not vice versa. Galileo, the inventor of the astronomical telescope, knew perfectly well from direct observation that planets moved about the Sun and planetary moons moved around the planets. Supposedly he muttered “eppur si muove” (and yet it moves) as friends, relieved at his acquittal, hustled him away from the inquisition before he could get into more trouble.

Many of the songsters of this collection, especially those from academia, will recall being the targets of fanatical hatred, similar to that experienced by Bruno and Galileo, for suggesting that carbon dioxide is not the control knob of climate.

The dogma that CO₂ is the control knob of Earth’s climate has the ring of plausibility. Similarly, an immobile Earth, with celestial speres rotating around it seemed obvious to Ptolemaic astronomers. CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, that is, a gas that is nearly transparent to shortwave, visible and near-visible sunlight, but partially opaque to the longwave infrared radiation that dumps excess heat from the Earth into the cold darkness of outer space. Greenhouse gases do little to hinder the heating of the Earth by sunlight, but they readily absorb and re-emit thermal infrared radiation, making it harder for Earth to release thermal radiation directly from its surface to space, and requiring higher temperatures to get rid of the heat than would otherwise be needed if there were no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

But the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor, H₂O, not CO₂. When the effects of clouds are included, water in all of its phases, vapour, liquid and solid, has a much bigger influence on radiative transfer of heat than CO₂. And radiative transfer is only part of what controls Earth’s climate. Huge amounts of heat are transported by air and ocean currents from the tropics, where maximum sunlight is absorbed, to polar regions, where much more thermal radiation is released to space than is absorbed from the Sun.

In fact, the climate of the Earth has no single control knob, and all theoretical and empirical evidence points to CO₂ being a relatively unimportant factor. The most important influences on Earth’s climate are the Sun and cloud cover. Neither the Sun nor clouds are understood as well as they should be. What understanding we have has been set back at least 50 years by the manic focus on greenhouse gases.

A particular irony of the demonization of CO₂ is that increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ are benefitting life on Earth. Satellite measurements show a clear greening of Earth, especially of arid areas, due to the modest increases in CO₂ that have already occurred. CO₂ really is plant food, one of the three key ingredients of photosynthesis: sunlight, water molecules, H₂O, and CO₂ molecules. More CO₂ has contributed to the agricultural abundance that has characterised the past 50 years.

Parts of the climate alarm establishment have evolved into protection rackets. According to Wikipedia:

A protection racket is racketeering scheme, usually perpetrated by a criminal organisation, that coerces payments on a regular basis from an individual or group in exchange for agreeing to not harm them (or for supposedly ‘protecting’ them). The threat of harm may be indirectly communicated or implied, and it may include violence, robbery, ransacking, arson, vandalism, etc. The payments are called ‘protection money’ or a ‘protection fee’.

Courts of law have been flooded with lawsuits against fossil fuel companies that have supposedly been knowingly killing the planet for years by providing the coal, oil and gas. It does not matter that these fossil fuels have facilitated the most prosperous economy the world has ever known, with ordinary citizens today living like the nobility of past centuries.

Not only businesses, but every citizen of the world is being hectored to pay up for protection against the non-existent threat of human-induced climate change. Trial lawyers, well-paid expert witnesses, a meretricious mass media and many other hangers-on are benefitting from, or hope to benefit from, this racket.

The huge influxes of research funding for compliant scientists have made it difficult to oppose the fable of a threatened planet. Any scientist who speaks up against the cacophony of nonsense about a climate threat is treated like Dr Thomas Stockmann in Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People. Rather than being thanked for discovering that the water of his town’s popular spa is contaminated with deadly disease organisms, Dr Stockman and his family are viciously ostracised by most of the town’s citizens, who are making a good living by promoting the supposed health benefits of the spa.

Climate nonsense will eventually end and will be dumped onto the ash heap of history where it belongs. But the longer the cult goes on, the more damage is done. We should all do what we can to stop the madness as soon as possible.

Professor William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton University and a distinguished physicist whose work spans atomic physics, optics and atmospheric science. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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• “Labour’s rail nationalisation dream hurtles toward disaster” – Despite ministers’ upbeat assessments, the mounting debacle surrounding Britain’s ailing railway system suggests Labour’s nationalisation ambitions are heading for a costly reckoning for taxpayers, writes the Telegraph.

• “Piketty’s eco-Marxist utopia: why degrowth and global redistribution will trap the poor in poverty” – Thomas Piketty and the World Inequality Lab have unveiled their Global Justice Report at a Paris conference, arguing for degrowth and global redistribution – a programme critics say would condemn the world’s poorest to permanent poverty, reports RealClearEnergy.

• “But she’s got high hopes” – A paper intitled “Do climate emotions matter? Investigating their role in pro-environmental behavior,” was published this month in the Journal of Environmental Psychology by Paula Blumenschein and colleagues.

• “Smartphones given ‘kill switch’ to deter thieves” – The new measure stops thieves from reactivating stolen handsets rather than permanently disabling them, in a bid to curb Britain’s surging phone theft epidemic, notes the Telegraph.

• “Wegovy pill weight-loss drug approved for use in Britain” – The tablet form of the once-weekly Wegovy injection has been greenlit by health officials, offering a new oral option for patients seeking weight-loss treatment, reports the Mail.

• “How the British state came to turn its back on the white majority” – On his Substack, CJ Strachan argues that a key clause in the Equality Act, rushed through Parliament in the dying days of Gordon Brown’s government, has driven the toxic spread of DEI across Britain’s public institutions.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“The Left-Wing Plan to Impose a 90% Global Income Tax to ‘Save the Planet’” – Ben Pile says don’t be fooled by the highfalutin language. No amount of tax can ‘save the planet’.

On Monday, the Financial Times published a book review by Pilita Clark — the paper’s Associate Editor who writes on “corporate life and climate change” — that opened with the following lament:

The UK is a G7 country with a famed civil service that has been delivering world-leading climate change policies for the best part of 20 years. So how could it be so bad at dealing with the floods, heatwaves and fires wreaking so much damage on its people and economy?

The four books under her approving gaze carried titles freighted with millennial dread. Reviewing them cursorily but approvingly, Clark concluded that “the state of the climate is disturbing for any parent today” and that “adults have much to learn from children, not least their moral clarity about a climate problem that will be the defining challenge of their lives”. The salmon-pink newspaper, it seems, has extended its remit from capital markets and corporate earnings to the moral instruction of British parents.

One might be forgiven for reading this as satire. It is not. It is, rather, a characteristic specimen of what has become the dominant mode of climate journalism in the mainstream Western press: a seamless fusion of advocacy, emotional appeal and selective empiricism in which no counterevidence need intrude and no sceptical voice need apply. Like the BBC, which long ago decided that ‘balance’ on climate was a form of irresponsibility, the FT operates on the settled premise that the science is closed, the catastrophe is imminent and the only honourable response is alarm. What the FT’s Pilita Clark offers her readers is not objective journalism but liturgy.

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• “The global Left wants to turn laziness into a virtue” – Progressive economists have unveiled a scheme purporting to halt climate change and eliminate inequality that will lead to worldwide penury, warns Annabel Denham in the Telegraph.

• “Miliband defies Starmer over cuts to fund defence” – Sources tell the Telegraph the Energy Secretary is resisting demands to reduce Net Zero spending in order to free up funds for defence.

• “Here comes the super mega ultimate hyper giga Godzilla El Niño” – The media’s breathless arsenal of climate alarm vocabulary – “super”, “monster”, “cataclysmic”, “apocalyptic” – is skewered as a pattern of serial fear-mongering by Charles Rotter in WUWT.

• “What’s up with the Endangerment Finding litigation?” – The legal battle over the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding – described as the most consequential and destructive regulatory action in federal history – is examined in detail by Francis Menton in the Manhattan Contrarian.

• “Women climate scientists being harassed, insulted by sceptics, claims Berkeley Earth researcher” – A Berkeley Earth researcher claims that women climate scientists are being subjected to harassment and insults from sceptics, notes Pierre Gosselin in the No Tricks Zone.

• “Pierce Brosnan reads fear-mongering climate doom message for ‘World Environment Day’ from his oceanfront compound in Hawaii” – The actor delivered a climate alarm message for World Environment Day while residing at his oceanfront Hawaii compound, notes Breitbart.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“New Welsh Temperature Record Set at Junk Site” – The Met Office has claimed a new Welsh temperature record for springtime. But it was recorded at Bute Park, a Class 5 junk site where hot air is frequently vented from greenhouses, says Paul Homewood.

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The Met Office has claimed that a new Welsh temperature record for springtime was set in Cardiff last month.

The place where it was recorded, Bute Park, is a Class 5 junk site and is arguably one of the most inappropriate places to measure temperatures.

The weather station at Bute is just yards away from the large plant nursery, full of greenhouses and banks of solar panels on the roof of the visitor centre.

As the Bute Park information video relates, all its greenhouses are very carefully temperature controlled during hot weather. This means the venting of hot air.

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• “Cold kills 9x more than heat – and it blows up the WHO’s climate health crisis” – In Climate Change Dispatch, Thomas Richard notes that the WHO is pushing climate change as a public health emergency, but the cold kills far more than heat while overall weather-related deaths have fallen dramatically.

• “Multibillion pound data centre project risks collapse over Government delays” – A major data centre developer blames the AI minister for failing to secure planning permission, putting a multibillion-pound project in jeopardy, reports the Telegraph.

• “BP drops Net Zero division in wake of boardroom turmoil” – BP has relegated its Net Zero division in an overhaul aimed at increasing its focus on oil and gas, just weeks after the company’s chairman was dismissed, according to the Telegraph.

• “Meet the Green councillor who demanded ‘heads on sticks’” – In the Spectator, Andrew Gilligan profiles Green councillor Michael Chessum, who has a long record of wild statements including a call for “heads on sticks”.

• “Bonfires of the batteries” – In Watts Up With That? Richard Ellenbogen argues that the apparent exemption of the battery industry from regulations applying to every other industry is now presenting major complications for communities in New York State.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“The Left-Wing Plan to Impose a 90% Global Income Tax to ‘Save the Planet’” – Ben Pile pours scorn on Thomas Picketty’s latest wheeze – a punitive wealth tax that would immiserate us all.

Sadly, most of us will not be here to see 2100. And that means that we will not be around to witness the dream for that year, set out by the Global Justice Project last week, turn into reality. In just 75 years, the average citizen of the world will have a monthly income of €5,000 but work only a 19-hour week. Every child will have an education that’s worth €8,400 a year, and the health budget will be €14,400 per capita. Women will be completely equal to men. And climate change will have been stopped at 1.8°C – under the IPCC’s arbitrary 2°C threshold.

€5,000 a month (£51,800 or $69,270 per year) is more than I earn now, and I work all the time, so why would I be looking for the catch in this programme for sustainable global equality? Yes, I might be a climate sceptic who bangs on about ‘basic arithmetic’ all the bloody time, but I surely ought to be tempted by these numbers, both selfishly and selflessly.

The Global Justice Project (GJP) combines the work of 45 direct contributors and a further 200 researchers around the world, with the project based at the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics (PSE). The PSE itself and the GJP were co-founded by former adviser to then Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, professor of socialist economics, Thomas Piketty. And as one might expect for a project directed by someone who believes that inequality is the cause of so many of the world’s problems and redistribution is its cure, the GJP’s vision is based around the creation of two global institutions: the Global Justice Fund and the World Sovereign Fund.

The Global Justice Fund will seemingly take over the current functioning of the UN and Bretton Woods organisations – the IMF and World Bank – which currently have less than 0.4% of global GDP at their disposal. By big contrast, the fund will reach an average of 10.3% of global GDP between now and 2060, and this is necessary to drive “climate investments”, which will “represent 3-4% of world GDP” per year. That’s nearly $5 trillion per year (greater than the nominal GDP of Japan) to spend on solar and wind farms and things of that kind. The World Sovereign Fund will be “an active portfolio of sustainable assets reaching 10% of the world capital stock (or equivalently, to 60% of the world GDP)”.

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This is the fifth in a series of 12 articles challenging climate change orthodoxy commissioned by Professor Gwythian Prins. We will be publishing the articles at a rate of one a week over the next 12 weeks (read the first article here, the second here, the third here and the fourth here). The hope is that they can be collected into a book for Sixth Formers and university students.

Is the UK Government seeking ‘dynamic alignment’ with the European Union to save its favourite policy agendas, like Net Zero? Despite the Common Understanding achieved in May 2025 to “respect each other’s decision-making autonomy” and despite the June 2016 referendum, some are now warning about the “quiet reversal of Brexit”. That Common Understanding requires “linking” the UK and EU’s carbon emissions trading systems, thereby aligning climate, energy and industrial policies, making them again the prerogative of the ‘rule-maker’ and Britain a ‘rule-taker’. Starmer and the other fanatical anti-Brexiteers have cargo-cult like expectations that the EU will fulfil their desires. That fervent faith may soon be dashed by irony. Starmer’s prostration before the EU and capitulation to all its vengeful punishments actually seals Net Zero’s doom, not its salvation. Let me explain. We are prisoners in double bondage.

Rather than some clandestine manoeuvring behind the public’s back, the more credible explanation for Brexit’s reversal is even more humiliating: that those now running the British state are venomously infantilised. Politicians and civil servants alike despise their own people and country and simultaneously defer to superordinate powers in the United Nations and European Union. The 2008 Climate Change Act is one of Blair’s Rings of Power: Five Acts to rule us all and in the darkness bind Britain; Acts that sacrifice the Common Law of England on the altar of ‘international law’ – a perversion of which the Attorney General for England and Wales, Richard (Baron) Hermer is High Priest.

The then Labour government believed that the planet’s first ‘legally-binding’ emissions-reduction policy would lead the world, but there’s a catch. Laws can require emissions reduction, but they cannot compel the wind to blow or the sun to shine. If the rest of the world was watching Britain’s ‘leadership’, then what they have seen since 2008 is deindustrialisation, GDP per capita stagnation and the democratic deficit widening into a traumatic repolarisation of politics.

Rather than demonstrating ‘leadership’, climate unilateralism – making laws that lawmakers have no idea how to implement – is an oath of fealty to institutions not accountable to electorates. Once the global climate apparatus was created, ‘international law’ and ‘Britain’s standing in the international community’ replaced mandates from the public. The Paris Agreement compels prohibitions and diminishes the role of the state in decision-making. This way legitimacy in Britain’s implied social contract dies.

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EU Directives, often gold-plated in Westminster, required the closure of coal-fired power stations or the reduction of waste sent to landfill among a blizzard of ex cathedra regulations. These policies increased costs and reduced levels of service. Similarly, acting on the insidious precautionary principle, UN agencies set levels of various substances in the environment with zero democratic mandate and without much by way of discussion about scientific evidence. These limits in turn stoked and validated levels of hysteria among the Believers, evinced in neopuritanism such as veganism or local authorities’ war on cars. They also licensed ‘lawfare’. Through national and supranational courts any sufficiently funded NGO could force government to bend its policies; but it does so at its peril, even when, under Mark Carney’s hand, government made global financial institutions into human shields in the business of carbon governance. And there’s the rub.

In a 2012 interview on the BBC’s Hard Talk, Christopher Huhne, the then secretary of state for energy and climate change in the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, said this: “All through human political history, you have had governments that have tried to set up particular objectives and have realised they can only go so far so fast without the rest of the world going along with them.” Citing the “bad old days of communism”, almost as Stalin himself had, Huhne concluded: “You can’t have environmentalism in one country.” His deliberate paraphrase unintentionally highlighted their common problem: what if the population doesn’t want these “particular objectives”? It’s a question that advocates of “particular objectives” rarely ask.

Environmentalism’s resonance with communism is dissonant because Stalin at least wanted factories and agriculture, whereas Greens celebrate their destruction. However, there is similarity in that radical policy agendas which, lacking popular legitimation, necessarily require top-down apparatus. Supranational institutions offer political power and cash to force or bribe alignment. But for how long can that hold? The European project’s environmentalism, though seemingly at the core of its agenda and authority, is contingent on public prioritisation of the ‘ecological crisis’. And there are clear signals across the Continent that the green king’s clothes are threadbare.

In France, carbon taxes sparked a year of violent clashes between those demanding Macron’s resignation and the police. Only the intervention of the COVID-19 episode boosted the state’s authority. French politics is left polarised by Macron’s ‘extreme centrism’. Whether or not Marine Le Pen successfully appeals her criminal conviction for embezzlement, polling suggests that a National Rally (RN) candidate will contest the Presidency on a rising wave. According to Le Monde, the RN is ready to exploit the tensions created by climate policy, and last May a vote in the National Assembly repealed the country’s “Zones à faibles émissions” – clean air zones equivalent to London’s Ulez. The decision was, according to the Times, backed by 80% of the public and by Left and Right parties alike. The Green Blob’s hitherto unshakable consensus is already shaken at its Mecca.

If France rejects extreme centrism, it will be following Rightward shifts in Italy and The Netherlands. The aggressive implementation of UN and EU nitrogen limits led directly to the Citizen Farmer Movement (BBB) and caused the repolarisation of Dutch politics. Similarly, Poland recently appointed independent conservative nationalist and defender of coal, Karol Nawrocki, as President. But it is in Germany, the industrial powerhouse, that the growing change of mood against the green agenda may be most significant.

The Energiewende, which made electricity a luxus strom, coincided with waves of immigration. Combined, both have created a sharp counter-wende in politik. A snap federal election last year saw Alternative für Deutschland’s vote share double to nearly 21%. The factors behind this change are varied, but the country’s deindustrialisation is widely cited. The thermodynamic truth of Germany’s wind turbines was revealed in the wake of Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Germany’s status as an icon of green industrial growth was fraudulent, dependent as it was on cheap imported gas.

The fallout from this falling out is not only political. Federal Employment Agency figures show that in 2024 120,000 jobs were lost from Germany’s industrial sector. According to Welt, union representatives have called on Chancellor Friedrich Merz to suspend the Energiewende, calling promises of green growth “smoke and mirrors” and stating that: “Never before has our electricity supply been so expensive and uncertain.” Nor are the unions on this in antagonism with their bosses. Welt reports steel giant Arcelor Mittal refusing a 1.3 million Euros bung of subsidies offered by the government for hydrogen-based steel production because it would be uneconomic.

Europe’s political shifts mirror changes in American politics. The USA had been a signatory to the Paris Climate Agreement for barely a year when, in June 2017, Trump explained that that he would “put no other consideration before the wellbeing of American citizens”, and that “the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country”. In anticipation of Trump’s speech, the FT’s Pilita Clark revealed that “China and the EU have forged a green alliance to combat climate change and counteract any retreat from international action by Donald Trump”. This pivot to the east was a “a stark realignment of forces”, which saw the Rose Garden speech coincide with an EU-China summit. “The alliance struck by the EU and China is a concrete expression of international frustration with Mr Trump,” said the adamantly pro-EU and pro-climate Clark. But who benefits?

In interesting symmetry, between 2017 and 2023, China’s CO₂ emissions increased by nearly a fifth to just under 12 billion tonnes, while the EU 27’s emissions fell by the same proportion. Meanwhile, the USA’s CO₂ emissions fell spontaneously by 6% while drill baby drilling.

From the high point of the Paris Accord in the Obama years, many Left-leaning Establishment and elite preoccupations have been knifed. But the global Blob refused to accept rebuff and sought to use state power to reverse the reversals, ignoring one of the great laws of politics: the more that power has been used, the more it has waned. Blobbish intransigence has summoned up countervailing forces. Europe has discovered that its flagship green agenda, which it wanted to impose on the world, has instead made it impotent in the face of its energy-abundant, industrial powerhouse enemies to the east, on which it remains dependent.

Facing her own crisis of legitimacy, and ahead of a no-confidence vote, Ursula von der Leyen, at an EU Parliament plenary on EU-China relations, all but admitted that, rather than creating opportunities for European manufacturers, her ‘Green Deal’ had undermined them. Blaming China’s “subsidised overcapacity” for trade deficits, the EU President promised to “build a more meaningful partnership with China”. But China aggressively subsidises manufacturing for geostrategic reasons, allowing it to dump on and dominate other markets. The naïve EU and YooKay instead subsidise green self-harm.

European and YooKay governments in thrall to the catastrophist cultists chose to create and sustain comparative disadvantage, putting emissions-reduction targets before consideration of the consequences for domestic industries, employment and consumers. Surely they knew that subsidising domestic green energy production meant subsidising the purchase of goods manufactured in China, using coal? We know that they knew, because they were complaining about it in the 2000s, but did nothing about it, except to impose tariffs, thereby increasing the cost to consumers, while their destruction of Europe’s coal-fired power stations continued. Expressing this ideological myopia, oxymoronic von der Leyen opined that “Beijing is at once a staunch competitor in the clean tech race, and a vital partner for global decarbonisation”.

No. China is not a competitor. There is no race. There is only China. It is not decarbonising. And its advantages were created in very large part by climate policy which now creates tension within European countries, and between the EU and its members.

I don’t claim that the rise in populist, nationalist and largely conservative movements across the continent and the West that have been summoned up are either stable or committed to an ‘anti-climate’ agenda. But I do claim that such electoral signals in turn make intergovernmental organisations an increasingly unsustainable basis for climate politics. The EU President came to power on an extremely weak mandate, in the wake of the Grand Coalition’s collapse, and her presidency, not unlike Macron’s, has been marked by the continued Rightward and populist shift in European parliamentary arithmetic.

Similarly, Labour won the 2024 election with a massive Parliamentary majority, but with its joint third worst share of the electorate’s support since 1918, including its losses. Despite the most humiliating victory in British electoral history, the Government has pressed ahead with a doomed rhetoric: false promises of ‘lower bills’ and ‘green jobs’ in the face of deindustrialisation, job losses, economic stagnation and rising prices. Polls show that this deafness has at last summoned up in Reform an actual opposition to the climate agenda, to give voters a choice. The Government’s problems thereby mirror the crises in the EU, to which hapless, blinkered Starmer now turns, hoping to ease his dire domestic predicament.

Yet in their obsession to cancel Brexit by following ‘dynamic alignment’, Starmer and his party fail to see that the already collapsing European green policy agenda will take YooKay Net Zero with it, likely sooner than would be the case if the UK tried to maintain climate unilateralism. Starmer leads a zombie party in which Miliband is immensely popular. They will not allow him to dilute climate ‘ambition’. Labour’s living dead want to stumble back into the collapsing EU where they will be hoist with their own petard. What delicious irony indeed in these topsy-turvy times.

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• “New study: solar photovoltaic and wind power fail to meet annual energy demands 62% of the time” – A new study finds that solar photovoltaic and wind power fail to meet annual energy demands 62% of the time, writes Kenneth Richard in the No Tricks Zone.

• “No, New York Times, climate change is not making tennis players ill” – The New York Times is taken to task by ClimateRealism for shoehorning climate change into its coverage of players suffering from heat at Roland Garros.

• “Ancient artefacts prove glaciers come and go naturally – no CO₂ required” – Ancient artefacts emerging from melting ice demonstrate that glaciers have retreated and advanced throughout history long before industrial CO₂ emissions, notes Kelvin Kemm on Climate Change Dispatch.

• “North Sea can still fuel 20 million cars to 2030, claim experts” – Fresh investment in the North Sea could supply fuel for 20 million cars until the end of the decade, according to a new analysis reported by the Mail.

• “Poultry farmer debunks Sainsbury’s brown egg ban” – A poultry farmer has comprehensively dismantled Sainsbury’s climate-based justification for its ban on brown eggs, revealing the supermarket’s reasoning as scientifically unfounded, reports Paul Homewood on Not a Lot of People Know That.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Massive Curriculum Changes Required for UK School Geography After Met Office Climate Projections Ruled ‘Implausible’” – Massive curriculum changes are required for UK school Geography after the Met Office’s climate projections were ruled “implausible” by the IPCC. But don’t expect the revisions any time soon, says Chris Morrison.

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The world of geography teaching in the UK is in crisis following guidance from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that a collection of assumptions used in climate computer modelling known as RCP8.5 is “implausible”. The ruling has effectively trashed the Met Office’s 2018 climate projections report (UKCP18) which only used this scenario to produce a variety of always ridiculous forecasts. To widespread mainstream media acclaim at the time, it was said that summer temperatures could rise by over 5°C in 50 years. Since 2018, UKCP18 has been embedded in UK school geography teaching as a core forecasting source. Its predictions are assessed, used for impact studies and underpin public examinations. The “implausible” ruling means that geography teaching materials particularly at A-level now require a major rewrite of core textbooks involving the removal of all the junk predictions.

Preferably by the start of the Autumn term in September.

It’s not as if teachers can argue that only the ‘high emissions’ pathway of RCP8.5 can be ignored. At the time, the Met Office only ran RCP8.5 assumptions through its super-computer, the results of which it then described as “plausible” as it promoted them in bold type. Using only RCP8.5 was justified on cost grounds since it enabled the available computer time to produce results – guesses might be a more accurate description – down to 2 kms. School resources do note that lower emissions results are available, but these were statistically derived by the Met Office from the RCP8.5 results. This means that all the Met Office projections are compromised and a thorough cleansing needs to be undertaken of all the flawed information wherever it occurs in the teaching environment.

Of course, as the Daily Sceptic has previously reported, the cleansing of UKCP18 is a major job since it has become a foundational source for much UK government and private company climate change regulation and spending. Similar cleansing also needs to take place in mainstream media, but this is a relatively easy job. Since almost every reported scare story over the last 15 years is based on RCP8.5, the climate catastrophising codswallop just needs to be taken down en masse. This will leave chastened, if wiser, journalists free to start again with a clean sheet.

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