In a world where the climate narrative is often dictated by model outputs and moral panic, this week's roundup steps back and examines whether the science, as in chemistry, physics, and empirical measurement, still matters. The media downplays the quietest hurricane start in half a century while spotlighting Pacific gusts as evidence of climate chaos. Simultaneously, peer-reviewed studies continue to affirm the overwhelming buffering capacity of Earth's carbon sinks and the limited warming potential of marginal CO₂ increases.
Meanwhile, ESG doctrine marches on: Canadian transition planning aims to restructure capital allocation around speculative risks, McKinsey’s sustainable growth mantra assumes the premise without testing it, and Coke’s “equity” efforts resemble marketing more than material impact. Add in the renewable energy cost illusions and a climate fiction shortlist that reads like a séance for lost objectivity, and the week’s absurdities practically write themselves.
Amid it all, real science (thermodynamics, Henry’s Law, and the atmospheric window) tells a different story. One worth hearing.
CHART OF THE WEEK
SCIENCE
IPCC misrepresentations: comments made by former IPCC contributors after cutting ties with the politicized body — so scientists no longer subject to professional repercussions.
IPCC scientist #32 - Dr Roger Pielke: “All of my comments were ignored without even a rebuttal. At that point, I concluded that the IPCC Reports were actually intended to be advocacy documents designed to produce particular policy actions, but not a true and honest assessment of the understanding of the climate system.”
Two weeks ago we cited Roger Pielke Jr. that hurricane season was off to a quiet start. How quiet? There had been no tropical cyclones in the Northern Hemisphere at all by May 30 and, he added, if there weren’t any by June 5 it would be the quietest start since 1970. And at the risk of seeming cynical we accused alarmists of a double standard with regard to windy seasons or even just predictions of one being proof of climate change, and calm seasons being unworthy of mention. So guess what? No tropical cyclones by June 5 brought this June 11 headline in the Washington Post: “Hurricane season is off to a fast start – at least in the Pacific Ocean”. Have they no shame?
So what has the Washington Post to say on the quietest hurricane season globally since 1970? Why, it was completely quiet about it.
Yes. “This spurt of activity” is actually how they describe the quietest start to a season in more than half a century. Satire can’t keep up. And no matter how cynical you get, it’s not enough.
Carbon dioxide is an equally important requisite for life on Earth as oxygen. Plants need CO2 for their living (the photo synthesis), and humans and animals breath out CO2 from their respiration. In addition to this biogeochemical balance, there is also an important geochemical balance. CO2 in the atmosphere is in equilibrium with carbonic acid dissolved in the ocean, which in term is close to CaCO3 saturation and in equilibrium with carbonate shells of organisms and lime (calcium carbonate; limestone) in the ocean through the following reactions (where s indicates the solid state, aq is the aqueous state, and g is the gaseous state):
A buffer can be defined as a reaction system which modifies or controls the value of an intensive (i.e. mass independent) thermodynamic variable (pressure, temperature, concentration, pH, etc.). Our carbonate system above will act as a pH buffer, by the presence of a weak acid (H2CO3) and a salt of the acid (CaCO3). The concentration of CO2 (g) and of Ca2+ (aq) will in the equilibrium Earth system also be buffered by the presence of CaCO3, at a given temperature. If the partial pressure of CO2 (g) is increased, the net reaction will go towards the right because of the Law of Mass Action.
If the temperature changes, the chemical equilibrium constant will change, and move the equilibrium to the left or right. The result is that the partial pressure of CO2 (g) will increase or decrease. The equilibrium will mainly be governed by Henry's Law: the partial pressure of CO2 (g) in the air will be proportional to the concentration of CO2 (aq) dissolved in water. The proportional constant is the Henry's Law Constant, which is strongly temperature dependent, and lesser dependent on total pressure and salinity (Drummond, 1981).
Questions have been raised about how strong this buffer is. It has been postulated (Bolin & Keeling, 1963) that an increase in atmospheric CO2 will be balanced when only approximately one tenth of this is dissolved in the ocean. This postulate fails for a number of reasons. An increase in atmospheric CO2 will namely increase the buffer capacity of ocean water, and thereby strengthen the ocean's capacity to moderate an increase of atmospheric CO2; maximum buffer capacity for the system CO2 - H2O is reached at 2.5 to 6 times the present atmospheric partial pressure of CO2, depending on temperature and alkalinity (Butler, 1982). According to Maier-Reimer & Hasselmann (1987) the borate system also increases the ocean storage capacity for CO2 by more than 20% over an ocean with the carbonate-system alone.
Furthermore, this carbonate buffer is not the only buffer active in the atmosphere / hydrosphere / lithosphere system. The Earth has a set of other buffering mineral reactions. The geochemical equilibrium system anorthite CaAl2Si2O8 - kaolinite Al2Si2O8(OH)4 has by the pH of ocean water a buffer capacity which is thousand times larger than a 0.001 M carbonate solution (Stumm & Morgan, 1970). In addition we have clay mineral buffers, and a calcium silicate + CO2 calcium carbonate + SiO2 buffer (Maclntyre, 1970; Krauskopf, 1979). These buffers all act as a "security net" under the most important buffer: CO2 (g) HCO3 (aq) CaCO3 (s). All together these buffers give in principle an infinite buffer capacity (Stumm & Morgan, 1970).
Water vapor is the most important "greenhouse gas". Man's contribution toatmospheric CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels is small, maximum 4% found by carbon isotope mass balance calculations. The "Greenhouse Effect" of this contribution is small and well within natural climatic variability. The amount of fossil fuel carbon is minute compared to the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere. The atmospheric CO2 lifetime is about 5 years. The ocean will be able to absorb the larger part of the CO2 that Man can produce through burning of fossil fuels. The IPCC CO2 global warming model is not supported by the scientific data. Based on geochemical knowledge there should be no reason to fear a climatic catastrophe because of Man's release of the life-governing CO2 gas. The global climate is primarily governed by the enormous heat energy stored in the oceans and the latent heat of melting of the ice caps, not by the small amount of heat that can be absorbed in atmospheric CO2 ; hence legislation of "CO2 taxes" to be paid by the public cannot influence on the sea level and the global climate.
Our take: This paper offers a comprehensive systems-level analysis of carbon dioxide distribution among the atmosphere, oceans, and lithosphere, concluding that the influence of anthropogenic CO₂ on the global greenhouse effect is minimal. The author highlights the immense buffering capacity of the oceans and geological sinks, which regulate atmospheric CO₂ through natural equilibrium processes. By situating human emissions within the vast natural carbon cycle, the paper effectively debunks the idea that slight increases in atmospheric CO₂ from fossil fuels could significantly disrupt Earth's thermal balance. It reinforces the view that climate policy should be grounded in scale-aware, system-level science and not alarmist abstractions.
In a paper recently published in the international peer-reviewed journal Energy & Fuels, Dr. Robert H. Essenhigh (2009), Professor of Energy Conversion at The Ohio State University, addresses the residence time (RT) of anthropogenic CO2 in the air. He finds that the RT for bulk atmospheric CO2, the molecule CO2, is ~5 years, in good agreement with other cited sources (Segalstad, 1998), while the RT for the trace molecule CO2 is ~16 years. Both of these residence times are much shorter than what is claimed by the IPCC. The rising concentration of atmospheric CO2 in the last century is not consistent with supply from anthropogenic sources. Such anthropogenic sources account for less than 5% of the present atmosphere, compared to the major input/output from natural sources (~95%). Hence, anthropogenic CO2 is too small to be a significant or relevant factor in the global warming process, particularly when comparing with the far more potent greenhouse gas water vapor. The rising atmospheric CO2 is the outcome of rising temperature rather than vice versa. Correspondingly, Dr. Essenhigh concludes that the politically driven target of capture and sequestration of carbon from combustion sources would be a major and pointless waste of physical and financial resources.
Examination of the radiation budget at the surface of the Earth shows that there are five primary factors affecting the surface temperature; the amount of solar radiation absorbed by the atmosphere and by the surface respectively, the amount of heat emitted from the surface in the form of thermals and evaporation, and the proportion of infrared radiation emitted from the surface directly into space. The Greenhouse Effect equations are solved by calculating the downwelling flux from the atmosphere and substituting this in the equation for the radiative balance at Earth’s surface. If there were no leakage, the upwelling infrared radiation from the Earth’s surface would be equal to the incoming solar radiation absorbed by the atmosphere plus twice the solar radiation absorbed by the surface. At current levels of solar absorption, this would result in total upwelling radiation of approximately 398.6 W/m2 , or a maximum surface temperature of 16.4°C. Allowing for leakage of infrared radiation through the atmospheric window, the resulting emission from the Earth’s surface due to the Greenhouse Effect is reduced to 372.5 or 388.6 W/m2, depending on the treatment of thermals, corresponding to surface temperature of 11.6 or 14.6°C. Absorption of infrared radiation by greenhouse gases is determined by the absorption bands for the respective gases and their concentrations. Examination of the absorption of the black body spectrum of terrestrial infrared radiation after passing through the atmosphere indicates that all emitted radiation that can be absorbed by greenhouse gases, primarily water vapor, with a small contribution from carbon dioxide and ozone, is already fully absorbed, and the leakage of around 5.5 percent corresponds to the part of the infrared red spectrum that is not absorbed by greenhouse gases. Emissions in the carbon dioxide absorption bands are most likely fully absorbed. In these circumstances, increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, and carbon dioxide in particular, will have no further effect. [emphasis added] The surface temperature is probably at the thermodynamic limit for the current luminosity of the sun. Satellite-based measurements since 1979 suggest that any recent increase in the surface temperature may be due to an increase in total solar irradiance, which we are still a decade or two from being able to confirm.
Several financial institutions and pension funds are backing a new initiative by some of Canada’s best-known sustainable-finance experts to bolster companies’ energy-transition plans as a way to win access to more global capital.
The idea behind the effort, called Business Future Pathways, is to give corporations guidance on international standards for developing business strategies that deal with climate risks and the shift to a low-carbon economy. The big investors will endorse the advice.
Benchmarking studies have shown Canadian companies were already lagging their global peers – including many in the United States – in developing decarbonization plans and putting them into operation, said Barbara Zvan, chief executive officer of University Pension Plan Ontario and a driving force behind Business Future Pathways.
She said in an interview that the effort aims to move beyond the concept of regulatory compliance to turn climate strategy into a competitive advantage.
The group is launching at a time when sustainable finance progress has slowed to a crawl. In April, many large investors expressed disappointment when Canadian Securities Administrators suspended its work aimed at making climate-related disclosure mandatory for public companies.
The CSA, which comprises the provincial and territorial securities commissions, cited the changing “global economic and geopolitical landscape” for the move.
Our take: Basing corporate and financial action plans on flawed premises of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is a recipe for capital misallocation and economic self-harm. The transition finance agenda assumes an imminent climate crisis and prescribes radical decarbonization as the only solution, without proper due diligence on the underlying science. Yet a brief review of empirical evidence and alternative research (e.g., Lindzen, Happer, Pielke Jr., Humlum) reveals critical weaknesses: overstated model projections, natural variability drivers, and implausible net-zero feasibility. Companies and regulators have a fiduciary duty to question these assumptions. Blind adherence to ESG frameworks steers capital away from productive uses toward unproven, subsidy-dependent ventures, undermining both returns and resilience, harming humanity.
Our take: Coca-Cola’s sustainability narrative reflects the typical ESG playbook - climate urgency, social equity, and stakeholder capitalism. It highlights Net Zero ambitions and recycled packaging targets, but often lacks detail on feasibility, cost, or unintended trade-offs. The company endorses DEI initiatives that sometimes veer into racially divisive territory, including controversial employee training content. Its stakeholder-centric model may dilute shareholder accountability, prioritizing brand optics over business fundamentals. It’s one thing to look for ways to reduce packaging, make more efficient use of natural resources like water, or have strong relationships with suppliers, but another thing to dive into political idologies like ESG, DEI, and stakeholderism. Like so many other companies, despite polished reports, Coca-Cola’s approach appears more aligned with ESG orthodoxy than with rigorous, balanced due diligence.
Despite its popularity, LCOE has significant limitations that make it insuffcient and unsuitable as the sole metric for policymaking, decision making, and comparing the value of different electricity generation technologies.
The use of LCOE is especially fraught in the context of long-term system and deep decarbonization planning, clean energy technology value assessment, and supplying the recent surge in load growth forecasts.
LCOE does not consider a project’s value to the system because of key shortfalls:
■ LCOE does not consider a system’s needs,
■ LCOE does not consider the technology’s generation profile,
■ LCOE does not consider the technology’s generation
profile or generation characteristics such as dispatchability and inertia,
■ LCOE often does not account for the full electricity system cost necessary to deploy a generator at a large scale, such as the transmission and distribution infrastructure necessary to deliver power to consumers.
In addition, the use of LCOE suffers from other shortfalls prevalent in analysis methods that are purely based oncost analysis:
■ LCOE does not consider non-electricity infrastructure tradeoffs (e.g. land use, health effects, local economic benefits, and etc.),
■ LCOE is highly sensitive to financial assumptions that differ between investors and technologies, and
■ LCOE often does not consider impacts of uncertainty or volatility of input costs that may arise from supply chain strains or other world events (e.g. critical mineral prices or conflict related commodity price increases).
Customer electricity costs are not merely summations of individual project LCOEs across the system, but are more complex determinations based on total system costs to ensure a reliable and resilient power system.
Therefore, it is critical to understand these limitations and their implications in policy conversations around consumer electricity costs. Total electricity system costs include costs related to generation and storage, transmission, and distribution infrastructure and administrative and policy related costs.
Our take: The study offers a comprehensive critique of relying on Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) as a sole metric for evaluating energy technologies. It underscores that LCOE, though simple and standardized, ignores crucial system-level needs like dispatchability, reliability, and the infrastructure costs associated with large-scale deployment of intermittent sources like wind and solar. LCOE may look appealing on a PowerPoint slide, especially for wind and solar advocates keen to advertise falling costs. But as the CATF report reveals, it’s a superficial metric that ignores whether a technology actually meets system needs like peak demand, grid stability, or affordable reliability. Real energy planning demands real due diligence, accounting for backup costs, transmission upgrades, and integration complexity. Otherwise, "cheap renewables" quickly become a costly illusion when the bill for full-system functionality arrives. Just as investment managers need to conduct a full-context due diligence into claims of a climate crisis, so do they need to investigate claims of low-cost wind and solar.
Our take: The McKinsey Sustainability report does not present a human-centric, full-context, or empirically rigorous evaluation of the foundational premise of a climate crisis. Instead, the document operates from a position that assumes the validity and urgency of Net Zero goals without engaging in a substantive, critical analysis of climate science or the trade-offs involved. Specifically:
The report refers to Net Zero, decarbonization, and "climate risk" as settled imperatives, not hypotheses to be tested or challenges to be weighed against other human development goals.
No empirical examination of alternative scientific perspectives or cost-benefit analyses of climate mitigation versus adaptation is offered.
The social framing focuses on inclusion and equity in implementing green policies, not on whether the underlying premise of those policies withstands objective scrutiny.
There is no mention or engagement with empirical counterpoints like historical disaster trends (e.g., Pielke Jr.), energy poverty trade-offs (Lomborg), or critiques of emissions attribution methods (e.g., Lindzen, Happer, or the Dagsvik studies).
McKinsey has adopted a climate ideology as a given, embedding it within their economic and investment frameworks. The report reflects a technocratic consensus that aligns with prevailing ESG narratives but fails to demonstrate the critical thinking, full-context reasoning, or empirical rigor necessary to justify transformational policies like Net Zero on moral, scientific, or economic grounds.
Five novels have been shortlisted for the 2025 Climate Fiction Prize. Our academics review the finalists ahead of the announcement of the winner on May 14.
Our take: None of the shortlisted novels strive for empirical rigor in climate science. Most use climate collapse as narrative or emotional scaffolding, creating speculative or allegorical worlds rather than constructing them from climate data, models, or geoengineering frameworks. Their tone tends toward alarmism or mood-setting rather than balanced, science-based exploration. If you're looking for climate fiction grounded in hard science, even offering proposals or plausible projections, these books aren't it. They're more about lived experience, moral questions, and metaphor, rather than empirical validation or technical plausibility. For a fiction book about what may be possible in the near future, one based in real science and expressing optimism about human capabilities, we recommend “The Martian.”
Claims of cheap renewables are industrial-scale gas-lighting of the public and Parliament.
As we discussed last week, I made a submission to the ESNZ Cost of Energy Inquiry that laid out the cost of renewables and ideas on how to reduce our energy bills. Quite remarkably, many of the submissions to the same inquiry, from organisations that really should know better, tried to maintain the fiction that renewables are cheap. Figure 1 below (note the figures may not add exactly to the totals because of rounding) shows a summary table of the current cost of gas-fired electricity and various renewables according to the different subsidy regimes.
Figure 1 - Summary Cost of Electricity by Technology and Subsidy Scheme (£ per MWh)
'Nobody thought this through': How wind and solar waste are contaminating your local garbage dump.
While green advocates commonly use the terms renewable, sustainable, and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills.
The current amounts of fiberglass, resins, aluminum and other chemicals — not to mention propeller blades from giant wind turbines — currently pose no threat to local town dumps, but this largely ignored problem will become more of a challenge in the years ahead as the 500 million solar panels and the 73,000 wind turbines now operating in the U.S. are decommissioned and replaced.
Greens insist that reductions in carbon emissions will more than compensate for increased levels of potentially toxic garbage; others fret that renewable energy advocates have not been forthright about their lack of eco-friendly plans and the technology to handle the waste.
“Nobody planned on this, nobody had a plan to get rid of them, nobody planned for closure,” said Dwight Clark, whose company, Solar eWaste Solutions, recycles solar panels. “Nobody thought this through.”
Interestingly, in Spain specifically, there is little trend in precipitation since 1871. However, if one begins the analysis in 1951, there is a statistically significant decrease (P-value <0.05) in annual precipitation, while if one starts in 1981, there is a statistically significant increase (P <0.05) in precipitation.
This study highlights the importance of how one can manufacture a desired trend if you manipulate the starting date of an analysis.
It also showcases that the news media thrives on sensationalistic headlines as they are clickbait.
Heavily researched does not guarantee correct. Even one erroneous assumption in common renders pages of references, papers and citations useless. CAGW’s GHE contains three such assumptions.
GHE claims without it Earth becomes 33 C cooler, a 255 K, -18 C, ball of ice.
Wrong.
Naked Earth would be much like the Moon, barren, 400 K lit side, 100 K dark.
TFK_bams09 heat balance graphic uses the same 63 twice violating GAAP and calculating out of thin air a 396 BB/333 “back”/63 net GHE radiative forcing loop violating LoT 1 & 2.
Wrong.
Likewise, the ubiquitous plethora of clones.
GHE requires Earth to radiate “extra” energy as a BB.
Wrong.
A BB requires all energy leaving the system to do so by radiation. Per TFK_bams09 60% leaves by kinetic modes, i.e. conduction, convection, advection and latent rendering BB impossible.
GHE is bogus and CAGW a scam so alarmists must resort to fear mongering, lies, lawsuits, censorship and violence.
Heavily researched does not guarantee correct. Even one erroneous assumption in common renders pages of references, papers and citations useless. CAGW’s GHE contains three such assumptions.
GHE claims without it Earth becomes 33 C cooler, a 255 K, -18 C, ball of ice.
Wrong.
Naked Earth would be much like the Moon, barren, 400 K lit side, 100 K dark.
TFK_bams09 heat balance graphic uses the same 63 twice violating GAAP and calculating out of thin air a 396 BB/333 “back”/63 net GHE radiative forcing loop violating LoT 1 & 2.
Wrong.
Likewise, the ubiquitous plethora of clones.
GHE requires Earth to radiate “extra” energy as a BB.
Wrong.
A BB requires all energy leaving the system to do so by radiation. Per TFK_bams09 60% leaves by kinetic modes, i.e. conduction, convection, advection and latent rendering BB impossible.
GHE is bogus and CAGW a scam so alarmists must resort to fear mongering, lies, lawsuits, censorship and violence.