We have proposed that other planetary forces and phenomena, such as albedo, play a much larger role than CO2 in global warming or temperature variations.

The basic laws of physics and thermodynamics are not in support of efficient processing of CO2 using DAC. This is because dilute molecules of CO2 in air prefer to randomly mix and achieve maximum disorder or entropy per The Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Per Sherwood, trace amounts of CO2 molecules in an air mixture are difficult and costly to separate.

Capturing CO2 by DAC takes at least as much energy as that is contained in the fossil fuels that produced the carbon dioxide in the first place, per Keynumbers. //

Extra Thoughts: What Might Happen if CO₂ is Removed from the Air ?

1. If CO₂ is removed from the air in some significant quantity, CO₂ may outgas from the other sinks (land, oceans, lakes) to replace the removed CO₂. The reverse is true as well: when CO₂ is increased in the air, land/oceans/lakes) will uptake more CO₂ until a new quasi-equilibrium state is possibly reached over time.

2. A recent Nature Climate Change paper discusses the possible effect of CO₂ removal on the global carbon cycle. The paper notes that removing tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere might not be effective, because the shifting atmospheric chemistry could, in turn, affect how readily land and oceans release their CO₂, aka Le Chatelier’s principle. Another reference discusses the same concepts, and it is noted that both rely on synthetic models, like most climate change theory.

3. Handwaving synthetic climate models: a general rule that has been propagated is that for every tonne that ends up being emitted from fossil fuels or “land use changes”, a quarter gets absorbed by trees, another quarter by the ocean and the remaining half gets left in the atmosphere. I have not seen any hard data that backs this up. It basically says half the CO₂ emitted by man is left over and can’t be absorbed or re-equilibrated.

Photosynthesis is the process which involves a chemical reaction between water and carbon dioxide in the presence of light, to make food (sugars) for plants and as a byproduct releases oxygen in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide currently comprises .04% (400 ppm) of the atmospheric volume. //

The ambient CO2 (naturally occurring level of CO2) concentration of 400 parts per million can occur in a properly vented greenhouse. However, the concentration is much lower than ambient during the day and much higher at night in sealed greenhouses. The carbon dioxide level is higher at night because of plant respiration and microbial activities. The carbon dioxide level may drop to 150 to 200 parts per million during the day in a sealed greenhouse, because CO2 is utilized by plants for photosynthesis during daytime. Exposure of plants to lower levels of CO2 even for a short period can reduce rate of photosynthesis and plant growth. Generally, doubling ambient CO2 level (i.e. 700 to 800 parts per million) can make a significant and visible difference in plant yield. Plants with a C3 photosynthetic pathway (geranium, petunia, pansy, aster lily and most dicot species) have a 3-carbon compound as the first product in their photosynthetic pathway, thus are called C3 plants and are more responsive to higher CO2 concentration than plants having a C4 pathway (most of the grass species have a 4-carbon compound as the first product in their photosynthetic pathway, thus are called C4 plants). An increase in ambient CO2 to 800-1,000 ppm can increase yield of C3 plants up to 40%-100% percent and C4 plants by 10%-25% while keeping other inputs at an optimum level. Plants show a positive response up to 700 to need of 1,800 parts per million, but higher levels of CO2 may cause plant damage (Figure 1). //

Adding CO2 one to two hours after sunrise and stopping two to three hours before sunset is the ideal duration of supplementation. Plants are photosynthetically active one to two hours after sunrise reaching peak at 2:00 to 3:00 p.m., followed by a decrease in the rate of photosynthesis. However, leafy greens and vegetables in a hydroponic system can be supplemented with CO2 and a grow-lighting system 24 hours a day. Seedlings supplemented with CO2 in flats will be ready to transplant one or two weeks earlier. Supplementing CO2 at an early age reduces the number of days to maturity and plants can be harvested earlier. Young plants are more responsive to supplemental CO2 than more mature plants.

Yes, that's right. We're paying for a group of "consultants" whose funding depends on their spreading climate panic. I'd love for anyone to show me in the Constitution where this is an enumerated power of any portion of the federal government. Hint: It isn't, but that's never stopped the left and big-government advocates (but I repeat myself) from spending more and more of our money. //

This group, mind you, has a defined budget nearing $2 billion, and, as I wrote in March, takes money from a variety of government sources:

There are reports that funding from our federal government to ICF runs as high as $7.4 billion. //

There does not, as of this writing, appear to be any indication that the DOGE or the Trump administration has their eyes on this waste. That needs to change; after all, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking real money. //

anon-7lqi
9 hours ago
It starts as a movement, evolves into a business then degenerates into a racket. //

Froge
8 hours ago
That is the research racket for everything though. If I wanted to study the Western Sparrow, just to find out it range and nesting habits etc, and came to the conclusion, it is an interesting bird and is doing just fine - I will never receive another grant to study my bird. So even if things are going well, I will have to write pages and pages of what could go wrong, and it is easy to glom onto Global Warming as the problem. Government grants are predisposed to award people who discover problems, if it isn't a hard science. And if the problem is really big, the government loves it because they get to set up a department to help fix the problem.

So that is the racket with everything. Environmental studies, nutrition studies (though with nutrition, "we don't know but it could cause cancer heart disease and even death" is more likely than GW) medical studies, the works. And the studies don't even have to be true, as we learned with the Alzheimer's plaque studies which were bogus but led to years of fake research accusing aluminum from frying pans and other things that "cause the plaque."

According to ESA, Sentinel-6, one of the most advanced altimetry satellites, has a sea surface height measurement accuracy of <4 cm. NASA echoes similar numbers, claiming satellite altimetry achieves 2.5 to 4 cm accuracy over the global oceans.
So let’s be clear: they’re detecting micron-scale accelerations using instruments with centimeter-scale noise. That’s a factor of 1,000 between the noise and the signal. Even with years of averaging, extensive noise filtering, and meticulous data modeling, this veers between pseudoscience at best and scientific fraud at worst. //

Scott Simmons @sjsimmons
·
1h
3/ The analysis is based on thousands of measurements from satellites, and uncertainty decreases with =SQRT(N). So the measurement error is much larger than the error of the mean GMSL value. With your Ph.D. in earth science, you certainly learned this. You're being dishonest.

That, folks, is the climate panic-mongers' entire agenda in a nutshell - flawed analysis, lack of full disclosure, questionable science and mathematics, and, as noted, the models are junk. //

But the best part, of course, is that the local people, folks who live near the construction site, got involved. It may have started over concern of messing up their ocean views, but it swiftly became more than that. People looked at the math, they looked at the numbers and the analysis from Shell New Energies and EDF Renewables, who were backing the project, and they didn't like what they saw.

They organized, filed a challenge against the permit, and won. //

The climate-industrial complex is finally facing a breeze it can’t spin.

“To think that we can draw some useful analogies from history dramatically underestimates the novelty and scale of the climate challenge.”[2]

“In the contest between geopolitics and sustainable climate policies, the former takes precedence.”[3]

Starting in the early 1980s, I have spent my entire professional life studying climate change, as well as teaching, writing and speaking about it in universities, conferences, and public forums around the world—in 43 countries at the latest count. With such a professional and personal investment in the idea of climate change, it is not surprising that for a long period I uncritically absorbed the notion that climate change represented the pre-eminent challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century.

Since first immersing myself in the topic in the 1980s, and subsequently being part of the scientific and public story of climate change in the 1990s and 2000s[4], I was easily convinced that the growing human influence on the world’s climate would be a reality that all nations would increasingly need to confront, a reality to which their interests would necessarily be subservient and that would be decisive for shaping their development pathways. For more than half of these 40 or so years, it seemed to me self-evident that relations between nations would forcibly be re-shaped by the exigencies of a changing climate.

But now, in the mid-2020s, I can see that I got this the wrong way round. And I can also see why this was so. Rather than geopolitics having to bend to the realities of a changing climate, the opposite has happened. //

Now, 30 years later, it is the geopolitical truth that power and interests win out. Climate is not the only thing that is changing through our lifetimes, and perhaps not the most important thing. Technology, cultural values, the centres of political, economic and military power have all changed remarkably since I first started studying climate change 40 years ago; and the rules, cohesion and effectiveness of the international order that I assumed were eternal are being seriously called into question. I now see the need for a deeper reading of political realism and power, that goes beyond seeing science as a coercive force that trumps geopolitics, beyond appeals to a superficial cosmopolitanism. To use the language of Jason Maloy at Louisiana University, climate change is neither an emergency or a crisis; it is a political epic, “a process of collective human effort that features gradual progression through time, obscure problem origins, and anticlimactic outcomes.”[25]

The best that we can say is that the world will continue slowly to decarbonize its energy system and, at the same time, the Earth will continue slowly to warm. And societies will continue to adapt to evolving climate hazards in new ways, as they have always done, with winners and losers along the way.

© Mike Hulme, January 2025

The result is a press that cheers policies antithetical to its audience’s interests. International lenders, swayed by the climate mob, tie financing to “renewable” mandates. The World Bank, once a financier of coal plants in Africa, now balks at funding anything that emits demonized carbon dioxide, leaving countries like Mozambique struggling to exploit their gas fields.

In Ghana, where power outages still plague daily life, the government hesitates to tap coal reserves, wary of an international backlash stoked by media outrage. In Kenya, where coal in the Mui Basin could power millions, local outlets echo The Guardian’s disdain for “dirty energy,” ignoring how such resources could slash electricity costs for the rural poor.

In South America, pressure from green-leaning non-governmental organizations – amplified by outlets like O Globo – has stalled oil projects in Ecuador, even as indigenous communities plead for the jobs and infrastructure they bring. In Peru, where natural gas discoveries promise economic liftoff, El Comercio fixates on melting glaciers, marginalizing rural natives still cooking over open fires.

In many developing countries, natural gas could ease energy prices, but policymakers bowed to “green pressure” and left citizens to shoulder rising costs. The poorest suffer most from higher bills, fewer jobs, and dimmer futures.

Popular news reporting no longer empowers with facts but incestuously recounts nonsense that leaves the developing world with the burden of a climate crisis fabricated by self-dealing globalists. //

People of the developing world must demand better or have their hopes buried by false prophets. And journalists in Africa, South America, and Asia must break free from the echo chamber of the climate-industrial complex. It is time to ask tough questions – the basis of critical thinking and honest reporting.

The left loves to talk about how they are all about "trusting the science," but one of the fundamentals about science is this: When the data contradicts your hypothesis, you change your hypothesis. The Biden administration certainly didn't do this; they would rather hide inconvenient data.

Case in point: A recent Daily Caller exclusive reveals that the Biden administration buried an inconvenient liquid natural gas (LNG) export study that would have removed the primary reason for that administration's LNG export ban. //

The thumbnail? The Biden administration had a draft report in hand that contradicted their claims that halting LNG exports would result in more greenhouse gas emissions. The draft report indicated the opposite was true. So the Biden Department of Energy round-filed the report. //

The first layer of this stinker is in the deliberately deceptive practice. The administration made a claim to justify the damage the export ban was doing to domestic energy development; that claim was not only false, but the administration knew it was false, they had data in hand showing it was false, and they went ahead and implemented the ban anyway, in the name of "climate change."

The second layer of this stinker is that the Biden administration hid the results of a taxpayer-funded study and then lied to the American people about it.

And the final layer? They completely disregarded the standard Democrat shibboleth about "trusting the science," but then, Democrats have never been about the science - about the data. They are about the agenda, and this episode is just one more example of many.

Climate change alarmist Michael Mann's ill-conceived lawsuit against the online critics continued to go pear-shaped Wednesday as a federal judge sanctioned Mann and his legal counsel for acting in "bad faith." That, of course, could easily describe Mann's entire career as a climate grifter. "Here, the Court finds, by clear and convincing evidence," wrote DC Superior Court Judge Alfred Irving, Jr., (George W. Bush appointee), "That Dr. Mann, through [his lawyers] Mr. Fontaine and Mr. Williams, acted in bad faith when they presented erroneous evidence and made false representations to the jury and the Court regarding damages stemming from loss of grant funding."

The saga began in 2012 when Mann, bruised from the email leak that seemed to indicate his famous "hockey stick" graph was a deliberate fraud (remember "hide the decline?"), decided to go after a handful of particularly vocal critics who dubbed him the "Jerry Sandusky of climate change," a hat tip to Penn State's legendary football coach. They were the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a CEI blogger Rand Simberg, National Review, and NR contributor Mark Steyn. //

The fact that the jury awarded him only $2 in actual damages and $1,001,000 in punitive damages (send a message!) supports this interpretation — The defense won on merits, and Mann won on the framing and the politics.

There was celebration on the left: Michael Mann climate scientist wins defamation case: NPR.

But it didn't last long. Last Tuesday, the trial judge, citing the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, reduced the punitive damages against Steyn to $5,000. But the hammer really fell Wednesday when the judge found that Mann and his attorney had lied about Mann's financial losses to inflate the jury verdict. //

Now Mann and his lawyer will be sanctioned.

I'd like to say that Mann lost this trial, but I'm not sure that's the case. He'll find deep-pocketed friends to pay off the money he lost. He's still employed at Penn State. Simberg and Steyn lost 13 years of their lives and have been largely sidelined from climate change debates. I have no knowledge of their finances, but I'm willing to bet they suffered a lot more than Mann. And Mann's suit has served the purpose for which it was intended. I didn't write about half of the very witty things I wanted to write about Mann because I don't have the time or money to fight off even a bullsh** lawsuit by someone with Mann's backing and resources. I'm sure others have made the same calculation.

The sanctions for lying will be mildly embarrassing to Mann, but what survives are the two judgments for defamation he won, which will serve as a precedent in the future.

Pete Hegseth @PeteHegseth
·
John is, of course, correct.

The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap.

We do training and warfighting.

Haley Britzky @halbritz
In response to a list of questions from CNN about military readiness as it relates to climate programs, Pentagon Spox John Ullyot said “Climate zealotry and other woke chimeras of the Left are not part” of DOD’s mission.
8:09 PM · Mar 9, 2025 //

The Army set a deadline of 2035 for all of its administrative vehicles to be electric and 2050 for tactical vehicles. //

If climate change is real, it will be addressed at home and abroad by agencies not called the Department of Defense. When the Defense encounters it, it will come in the form of weather and terrain; how we got there will be an academic exercise. Secretary Hegseth is right; his focus has to be on training troops, structuring forces, modernizing equipment, and building warrior spirit to win wars, something Defense has gotten out of the habit of doing over the last 41 years. //

anon-ymous99
9 hours ago
Y’know what’s bad for the environment? Destructive wars, that wouldn’t have started if a strong President and militarily focused US Armed Forces were in place.
Prevent those and the environment will benefit.

The findings from UC Riverside and Caltech were derived by using a widely used modeling tool from the US Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA model translates the estimated air quality and human health impacts into a monetary value.

https://dailysceptic.org/2025/02/22/sensational-findings-published-in-nature-blow-politicised-wildfire-climate-scam-out-of-the-water/

Sensational new findings published in Nature Communications effectively blow the politicised wildfire climate change scam out of the water. Far from human-caused climate change making wildfires worse across the United States and Canada, it was found that recent fires occurred at a rate of only 23% of that expected from a review of the previous historical record going back to the 17th century. The researchers note that a current “widespread fire deficit” persists across a range of forest types and the areas burned in the recent past “are not unprecedented” when considering the multi-century perspective. //

These are facts. Fire scars are actual, physical evidence of a historic event, one that, due to stacking historic tree-ring data, can be very accurately dated. The records go back to the mid-1700s, conveniently when European explorers and settlers first came into the various landscapes and started cutting trees for building houses and other buildings - and some of these trees bore fire scars, and some of those structures are still standing.

It's an interesting technique.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56333-8

Quizzical
3 hours ago
You say that this is journalistic malpractice. But many journalists have no other type of practice besides malpractice.

The head of the criminal division of the US Attorney's office in DC has resigned rather than investigate a Biden-sponsored New Green Deal grant network for possible criminal behavior. Denise Cheung announced her departure to staff with an email saying, “This office is a special place. I took an oath of office to support and defend the Constitution, and I have executed this duty faithfully.” //

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was to funnel about $26 billion to the United Climate Fund and Climate Justice Alliance. This grant was funded in August 2024 to the tune of $20.3 billion, again in October for $4.3 billion, with the final tranche of $2 billion landing in December 2024/January 2025; see the details here. These were all part of the Biden "throwing gold bars off the Titanic" (see EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin Finds the $20 Billion 'Gold Bars' the Biden Administration Tried to Jettison – RedState) plan where immense amounts of grant funding would be "parked" in leftist 501(c)3 corporations that were supposed to continue to run beneath the radar even after Trump had taken office.

The Biden-Harris administration paid POLITICO for subscriptions, and the outlet performed their propaganda PR work well, proudly announcing this $20 billion Biden-Harris EPA partnership in April 2024.

The Biden administration announced recipients of the climate law’s biggest grant program Thursday, kicking off a $20 billion effort to transform community lending and green the U.S. economy.

EPA will award eight initial grants under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, ranging in size from $400 million to almost $7 billion. The largest award will go to Climate United, a partnership that includes a nonprofit impact investment firm and two affordable housing lenders.

Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health Concentrations (IDLH)
CAS number: 124–38–9

NIOSH REL: 5,000 ppm (9,000 mg/m3) TWA,

30,000 ppm (54,000 mg/m3) STEL

Current OSHA PEL: 5,000 ppm (9,000 mg/m3) TWA

1989 OSHA PEL: 10,000 ppm (18,000 mg/m3) TWA,

30,000 ppm (54,000 mg/m3) STEL

Basis for original (SCP) IDLH: The chosen IDLH is based on the statements by ACGIH [1971] that a 30-minute exposure at 50,000 ppm produces signs of intoxication, and a few minutes of exposure at 70,000 ppm and 100,000 ppm produces unconsciousness [Flury and Zernik 1931]. AIHA [1971] reported that 100,000 ppm is the atmospheric concentration immediately dangerous to life. In addition, Hunter [1975] noted that exposure to 100,000 ppm for only a few minutes can cause loss of consciousness.

OSHA PEL
8-hour TWA
(ST) STEL
(C) Ceiling
Peak
NIOSH REL
Up to 10-hour TWA
(ST) STEL
(C) Ceiling
ACGIH TLV©
8-hour TWA
(ST) STEL
(C) Ceiling
CAL/OSHA PEL
8-hour TWA
(ST) STEL
(C) Ceiling
Peak
PEL-TWA
5000 ppm (9000 mg/m³)

A team of scientists at Harvard University and a company called Carbon Engineering announced this week that they’ve figured out a low-cost, industrial-scale method of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Needless to say, it sounds like an exciting technology, which would, as The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer notes, “transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change.” //

The paper claims that companies will be able to remove a metric ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for as little as $94. The cost of averting less than one degree of warming by 2100, according to some, would have cost around $2 trillion every year for a century — which doesn’t include the economic toll it would extract from the world’s economy. //

For many environmentalists, all this will be welcome news. I doubt it will be for the politically motivated climate warriors, whose aim has always been social engineering in the cause of curbing capitalistic excesses. Even if decarbonization is successful, they will demand we continue to mandate inefficient renewable energies. They will demand tax dollars be used to prop up the clean-energy industry. They will continue to demand we ban fracking. They will continue to propose creating fabricated markets that artificially spike the cost of fossil fuels to pay for supposed negative externalities.

But, as a political matter, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to sell those policies when they can no longer claim the apocalypse is nigh.

The Simon–Ehrlich wager was a 1980 scientific wager between business professor Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. The widely followed contest originated in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000", Simon offered to take that bet, or, more realistically, "to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run".

Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period.

The more President Donald Trump does, the more the left flies into stammering, impotent rage, and the more the rest of us have to point and laugh at. And the president is doing a lot, including removing us from impractical and even wasteful international deals that hurt American prosperity - like the Paris climate accords, which the president yanked us out of right away.

That made the climate scolds angry, of course. But now it's getting even better; as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is finding more and more wasteful expenditures, the more all the president's men are cutting out of the executive branch's budgets - and a lot of those cuts are emptying the coffers of some notorious climate scolds.

That's right, the federal government was paying these people to advocate for the destruction of our modern, high-technology lifestyles. At the great climate website Watts Up With That, author Charles Rotter has brought receipts.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/02/05/schadenfreude-at-its-finest-climate-grifters-cry-over-trumps-grant-freeze/

Mr. Eschenbach writes:

Encouraged by the reception of my previous post “Eight Ten-Thousandths Of A Degree Per Gigaton“, which ranged from warm acceptance through amused contempt to outright hostility, I’ve expanded my research to analyze the CO2 emissions of the late great State of California.

In my post linked above, I found that IF the IPCC is correct (which is a big “IF”), for each gigaton (Gt) of avoided CO2 emissions, there is an avoided global warming of 0.0008°C. Please read that post for the detailed calculations. //

That’s a total of about $1.5 TRILLION dollars, and it doesn’t count the cost of other California CO2-related laws and regulations. The increase in electricity demand from electric houses and electric cars alone will be another huge cost. A trillion and a half hard-earned taxpayer dollars … and all of that to MAYBE reduce the temperature in 2045 by six-thousandths of one degree C.

Seriously. 0.006°C.

Meaningless. Unmeasurably small. Lost in the noise. And please, don’t say that if only everyone did it, everything would be wonderful. At a cost of $1.5 terabucks for a reduction of 0.006°C, it would cost us OVER $250 TRILLION DOLLARS to perhaps maybe possibly reduce the 2045 temperature by one degree … madness.