Mike's Minute: We aren't prepared to pay the climate price

Almost on cue, the Climate Commission has entered this week's climate debate and told us we are at risk of missing our targets.

This isn't to do with Golden Bay Cement specifically. It's generally about the fact that we have mucked about with rules and promises and things slowed down to a point they have decided we need to "crack on".

Philip Leith: Climate Scientists Clearly Don’t Believe Their Own Tales of Doom

To be referred to as a scientist suggests that someone has studied science, passed exams relevant to their subject and continued to work, exploring that particular field. Most people would consider a scientist as an intelligent human being.

Climate scientists are constantly warning us that if the global level of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions is not cut the world will suffer badly.

Net Zero Watch Samizdat: Dark Green Money

UK

Ed Miliband’s Dark Green Money Network

An investigation by The Spectator has exposed the Dark Green Money networks behind the ideological capture of Westminster.

This week’s cover piece reveals the monied interests behind a dense ecosystem of funders, think tanks, campaign groups and policy organisations that have helped shape Britain’s net zero debate. Also read this article in the Telegraph on the European Climate Foundation. 

Net Zero Watch Samizdat: Campaign against Red Ed gathers pace

UK

Banks and unions unite to keep Miliband away from the Treasury

Ed Miliband has done the unthinkable by bringing trade union bosses and bankers together in an unlikely alliance - to stop him becoming Chancellor. They say he would put a ‘noose’ around job creation with a senior government figure saying “It takes something to unite Goldman Sachs bankers and the unions.”

Francis Menton: Can You See The Climate Scare Slowly Fading Away?

I have often noted that the climate scam and the associated forced energy transition would of necessity go away at some point because the proposals being advocated to “save the planet” could never possibly work. But the open question has always been, when that happens, what will it look like? Would all the big enviro groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club all go on national TV one night and admit that the whole thing was a fake scare from the beginning? In the real world, that’s not how these things happen. People who have staked out absurd positions somehow need to save face. So there would have to be some sort of gradual process of backing down.

Ian Bradford: More Arguments Against the Climate Alarmists

Flawed IPCC assessment reports

The first IPCC Assessment Report in 1990 found that the climate record of the past century was “broadly consistent” with changes in the Earth’s surface temperature, as calculated by climate models that incorporated the observed increase in greenhouse gases. So what they were saying is that as the amount of greenhouse gases increased in the atmosphere the temperature of the Earth also increased. But the trouble with that was from about 1940 to 1975 the climate actually cooled. And to make matters worse for this IPCC claim, industrial activity grew rapidly after WW2. So how would one reconcile this cooling with the increase in greenhouse gases, notably of course, carbon dioxide.

Peter Bassett: From Impartiality to Instruction - How Journalism Rewrote Its Own Rules

For most of the 20th century, journalism operated on a simple but demanding premise: tell the public what is known, what is disputed, and who is arguing what — then step back. Readers were treated as adults, capable of weighing evidence and reaching their own conclusions.

That settlement has quietly collapsed.

Andrew Moran: 2025 Was the Worst Year for Climate Alarmism

Even Bill Gates abandoned the charade this year.

Since former Vice President Al Gore fooled the world with An Inconvenient Truth two decades ago, climate alarmism has kicked into overdrive. Over the years, politicians and bureaucrats around the globe have committed to spending trillions of taxpayer dollars and making your life as miserable as possible to prevent the Arctic ice caps from melting. Some of the younger generations aren’t even having children because the planet is dying or something. But it turns out that conditions are not as dire as the doomers said.

Dr Kevin Donnelly: How the Frankfurt School Captured the Culture – and How to Fight Back

Conservatives have too often failed to realise that “politics is downstream from culture”. So argued Douglas Murray in a recent obituary of the late Peter Whittle, founder of the New Culture Forum (NCF), following the adage popularised by the late American journalist Andrew Breitbart, himself the founder of Breitbart News. “Too many conservatives for far too long felt the crucial battles were about economics”, Murray writes. “The NCF founder helped to correct that error.”

Ian Bradford: Some Arguments Against Climate Alarmists

Skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin - Thomas Huxley, 19 C Biologist

Sea Level Rise

Alarmists continue to push sea level rise, plus the rise is accelerating as yet more propaganda. Let’s go back in time.

Chris Morrison: The False Temperature Claims That Underpin the COP30 Alarmist Agenda

The next two weeks of COP30 will see three favourite climate scares relentlessly broadcast to promote the fast-fading hard-Left Net Zero fantasy. They are: breaching a 1.5°C global ‘threshold’ leading to runaway temperatures; human-caused tipping points producing unimaginable natural disasters; and attribution of single-event bad weather to the use of natural hydrocarbons.

Chris Morrison: Met Office Deletes Huge Chunks of Historic Temperature Data After Fabrication Claims

Last August, the Daily Sceptic drew attention to the UK Met Office inventing temperature data at its fictitious ‘open’ weather station at Lowestoft. Figures were said to be compiled from “well-correlated neighbouring stations”, but research by citizen sleuth Ray Sanders found there were no such operations within a 40-mile radius.

Judy Gill: Teaching Children to Think — or Teaching Them What to Think?

New Zealand: Indoctrination in the Classroom

From early childhood onwards, New Zealand children are not being taught to question. They are being taught to accept.

Three powerful narratives dominate their schooling:

Net Zero Watch Samizdat: UK public opinion turns against costly Net Zero policies

UK

Public opinion turns against Net Zero policies

New polling and focus groups for The Times show a surge in climate scepticism. One in four Britons now say global warming is exaggerated, while support for net zero measures — petrol car bans, heat pumps, higher gas bills — has collapsed. Voters increasingly see climate as a low priority beside crime, the NHS and the cost of living, as the political consensus on net zero frays.

Ian Bradford: CO2 – the gas of life

Carbon dioxide is our second most important gas. Yet some want to eliminate emissions of it almost entirely.

Carbon dioxide occurs naturally in the atmosphere and plays a crucial role in the life processes of the planet. This gas is fundamental to the life cycles of plants and it is absorbed during photosynthesis, and converted into carbon in the plant’s growth structures through a photochemical process. This process releases oxygen into the atmosphere, the gas essential for the respiration of living organisms.

Chris Morrison: Trees Get Bigger Around the World Thanks to Higher CO2 Levels

Recent scientific investigation, curiously missing from constant mainstream media reports of ecological Armageddon, confirms that trees are getting larger around the world due to higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide fertilisation. A little extra of the gas of life, nature’s bountiful plant food, has led to bigger trees and more leaf growth over the last few decades.

Ian Bradford: The Anthropogenic Climate Fraud

There are probably a large number of people who wonder why we are going through this climate fiasco. The climate alarmists are still doing their best to scare the population into believing that carbon dioxide only from human activities and methane from cows and other ruminants are causing global warming and the consequences will be dire for humanity.

Chris Morrison: Now Scientists Claim Near 20-Year Stable Arctic Sea Ice is “Unsurprising” and Predicted by Models

Dramatic confirmation that the sea ice in the Arctic has been stable for nearly two decades is contained in a recently published science paper from a team led by Dr Mark England from the University of Exeter. The finding is of course obvious to anyone who studies the data but it will inconvenience the activist cranks who continue to promote supposed reductions in Arctic sea ice as an important sign of their imaginary ‘tipping points’ and their fake climate crisis. Despite the data showing the ice has been stable over every month in the year since around 2007, Sir David Attenborough told BBC viewers in 2022 that the region could be summer ice-free by 2035. The climate hysteric Al Gore never quite recovered his authority when he said all the ice could be gone by 2014.

Hannes Sarv: Global Warming is Mostly Caused By the Sun, Not Humans, Says Astrophysics Professor

“There’s no such thing as a scientific consensus,” Nir Shaviv, a Professor at the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem says in response to a question about what he thinks of the widespread claim that there is a scientific consensus on the anthropogenic nature of climate change. “In science, we deal with open questions and I think that the question of climate change is an open question. There are a lot of things which many scientists are still arguing about,” he explains.

Ian Bradford: Can we really believe anything the climate alarmists tell us?

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the UN climate arm whose aim is to provide information to the public about climate, particularly changes to climate and the causes of those changes.