The report is well done, and each of the six risk areas are worth their own focused post here at THB.3 In the remainder of this post, I highlight what the report says about climate change — which the report does not identify as an existential risk.

The assessment recognizes that changes in climate have many significant consequences for people and ecosystems, but the corresponding risks are local and regional, not global: //

The report acknowledges diplomatically that activists often characterize climate change as an existential risk, which reflects “subjective values and worldviews” rather than scientific judgments of real-world risks: //

However, the assessment largely rejects these outliers and is very clear in its conclusion that climate change does not present a catastrophic health risk — even over the course of a century: //

The report acknowledges some of the extreme claims found in the scientific literature from those in the catastrophist planetary boundaries community as well as some of the outlier work in climate econometrics. However, the assessment largely rejects these outliers and is very clear in its conclusion that climate change does not present a catastrophic health risk — even over the course of a century:

Researchers describe global catastrophic risks from artificial intelligence, asteroid and comet impacts, climate change, nuclear war, pandemics, and supervolcanoes, including causes, likelihood, consequences, uncertainties, and possible changes. //

This report summarizes what is known about the risks associated with six threats and hazards: artificial intelligence; asteroid and comet impacts; sudden and severe changes to Earth's climate; nuclear war; severe pandemics, whether resulting from naturally occurring events or from synthetic biology; and supervolcanoes. //

Global-Health Global-Security Global-Climate-Change Space-Science-and-Technology Emergency-Preparedness Artificial-Intelligence Natural-Hazards Public-Health-Preparedness Nuclear-Weapons-and-Warfare

Now, a report required by the U.S. government per the 2022 Global Catastrophic Risk Management Act has given us an assessment of the various risks humanity faces. Climate change didn't make the cut.

• https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2981-1.html

• https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/global-existential-risks

//

Note the conclusions: There are three categories of risk. Existential risk, global catastrophic risk, and global catastrophic and existential threats - both. Artificial intelligence, asteroid and comet impacts, nuclear war, pandemics, and supervolcanoes rated a "yes" in all three risk categories.

The only one that rated a "no" was climate change.

Rusty
@Rusty_Weiss
·
Follow
LMAO - Climate scolds demanding everybody stop eating meat are lining up for the meat buffet and skipping over the vegan buffet.

Reporting from @ClimateDepot at #COP29Baku

11:02 AM · Nov 14, 2024 //

Morano wonders why they would bother to offer the meat version at all, considering it's so bad for the environment that they have to "restrict (it) for the rest of us."

He then films himself about to enjoy a hot dog with real beef at the summit, a menu item Morano says is "selling like hot cakes."

Morano tells RedState that NetZero climate initiatives are little more than a masquerade for the rich to enjoy life's pleasures while forcing others to pay.

"This is just another example of how NetZero is nothing short of the Sovietization of the once free West," he explained. "Private jets, lavish mansions, and plenty of meat for those who rule over the rest of us."

Introduction

Heat and cold are now established health risk factors, with several studies reporting important mortality effects in populations around the world.1–3 The associated health burden is expected to increase with climate change, especially under the most extreme scenarios of global warming.4,5 ///

Many more cold-related excess deaths than heat-related excess deaths. However, the chart shows a different scale for heat- vs. cold-related deaths...

China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are set to fall in 2024 and could be facing structural decline, due to record growth in the installation of new low-carbon energy sources. //

China’s CO2 emissions have seen explosive growth over recent decades, pausing only for brief periods due to cyclical shocks.

Over the past 20 years, its annual emissions from fossil fuels and cement have climbed quickly almost every year – as shown in the figure below – interrupted only by the economic slowdown of 2015-16 and the impact of zero-Covid restrictions in 2022.

While CO2 is rebounding in 2023 from zero-Covid lows (see: Why emissions grew in Q3 of 2023), there have also been record additions of low-carbon capacity, setting up a surge in electricity generation next year. (See: Solar, wind and hydropower set to surge in 2024.)

Combined with a rebound in hydro output following a series of droughts, these record additions are all but guaranteed to push fossil-fuel electricity generation and CO2 emissions into decline in 2024, as shown in the figure below.

Global efforts to tackle climate change are wildly off track, says the UN, as new data shows that warming gases are accumulating faster than at any time in human existence. //

The UN wants to see how much progress is being made in driving down emissions that are threatening to push global temperatures well above 1.5C this century, a level beyond which scientists say extremely damaging impacts will occur. //

The rise last year was higher than the previous 12 months, due to record fires in Canada, and the onset of the El Niño weather event all adding to ongoing emissions from fossil fuels. ///

"Greenhouse gases" == Carbon dioxide, which is food.

There are far more damaging greenhouse gases, but only CO2 affords gov't bureaucrats more power.

Meanwhile, several studies have found that cleaner, clearer air due to falling pollution from China and lower sulfur marine fuels made only a small contribution to last year’s temperatures. One study, submitted to Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, found that declining pollution could raise global temperatures by 0.03°C over the next 20 years, with the strongest effect not occurring until later this decade. It’s not nothing, says study co-author Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at Scripps, but far too little to explain last year. Taken together, says Mika Rantanen, a climate scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the results are “a good reminder that it was indeed El Niño that was the major player.” //

None of the data justifies making energy more expensive. None of the data justify covering thousands of square miles of open ground, including vital wildlife habitat, with windmills and solar panels.

Forget what Kamala Harris is saying. Look at who she's hiring — in this case, someone who is an unrepentant climate scold, a fanatical anti-child, anti-energy, anti-modern lifestyle (except for herself, we feel sure) lunatic. //

Key campaign workers like this frequently go on to take related positions in the staff of election winners when they assume office. There can be little doubt that a Harris administration would include Camila Thorndike, almost certainly in some position having to do with energy and climate policy. She would be pushing policies that would make energy more expensive, and in so doing make everything more expensive; she would be pushing policies that would damage, if not destroy, our modern technological lifestyle.

Hurricane Oscar developed on Saturday near Turks and Caicos, and to the northeast of Cuba, in the extreme southwestern Atlantic Ocean. As of Saturday evening, hurricane-force winds extended just 5 miles (8 km) from the center of the storm. //

Oscar was so small that its winds could not be detected by Earth-observation satellites that estimate wind speeds in tropical cyclones.

Writing in his summary of Oscar's development on Saturday afternoon, National Hurricane Center forecaster Philippe Papin noted that the hurricane was only discovered due to a last-minute flight by Air Force Hurricane Hunter aircraft.

"It is fair to say its been an unexpected day with regards to Oscar," he wrote in his 5 pm ET advisory. "After being upgraded to a tropical storm this morning, a resources-permitting Air Force Reconnaissance mission found that Oscar was much stronger than anticipated and in fact was a tiny hurricane. It is worth noting that remote sensing satellite intensity estimates are currently much lower." //

The Air Force aircraft found sustained winds, in a tiny area to be sure, of 85 mph (137 kph). Hence, Hurricane Oscar. //

Weather models struggle with the development of small hurricanes, and this is largely because the micro-physics of the smallest storms occur below the resolution of these models. Additionally, tiny hurricanes organize much more quickly and efficiently.

The questioner's attempted "gotcha" was, "When will the words 'Climate Change' come out of your mouth?"

The chance of me virtue-signalling for people in the media is zero, so do not count on that. I don't subscribe to your religion. And it's just a tired refrain and song and dance. I get you have an agenda, I understand that, I think you should be more honest about what that would mean for people, taxing them to smithereens, stopping oil and gas, making people pay dramatically more for energy, we would collapse as a country. So, this whole idea, of climate ideology driving policy, it just factually can't work. So in Florida, our energy is gonna be affordable and reliable. That's what you're gonna do, that's the only way you can adequately respond to things like we've just seen with the storms to get people hooked back up.

This is the Way.

Facts are stubborn things, and we are forced to live within a framework of facts. But all too often, dogma is pushed to take precedence over facts, and that's a recipe for bad policy.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ongoing climate change discussion. Now, a new study by German engineer and scientist Moritz Büsing has shown some serious flaws in the methods of measuring temperatures, and the release of this work will no doubt draw fire from climate scolds in Germany, the rest of Europe - and the United States.

But facts are stubborn things.

According to a new study, weather station data has been shown to non-climatically and erroneously record warmer-than-actual temperatures due to the steady and perpetual aging process almost universally observed in temperature gauges.

When a weather station temperature gauge’s white paint or white plastic ages and darkens, this allows more solar radiation to be absorbed by the gauge than when the gauge is bright white and new. Within a span of just 2 to 5 years, a gauge has been observed to record maximum temperatures 0.46°C to 0.49°C warmer than in gauges that have not undergone an aging process. This artificial warming is not corrected in modern data sets, and it builds up over time – even when the gauges are cleaned or resurfaced every few years.

If these systematic artificial warming errors were to be corrected rather than ignored, the 140-year (1880-’90 to 2010-’20) GISTEMP global warming trend plummets from the current estimate of +1.43°C down to +0.83°C, a 42% differential. The temperature reduction can be even more pronounced – from +1.43°C down to +0.41°C – if a set of conservative assumptions (described in detail in the paper) are removed.

https://scienceofclimatechange.org/wp-content/uploads/SCC-Buesing-Weather-Station-Ageing-V4.2.pdf

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC
·
The hurricane “machine” is climate change.

Cooler ocean temperatures slow hurricane development.

As temps rise, more hurricanes grow.

The Gulf of Mexico is a major location for warming water.

The people who bear responsibility are fossil fuel co’s + the politicians they buy.
4:32 PM · Oct 9, 2024

Chris Martz @ChrisMartzWX
·
Hi there, @AOC. 👋

You seem to like science. So, I figured I would give ya an education about this topic. 📚

I took the liberty to plot the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA) for June-August (JJA) for the period 1900 to 2023. The base period used for this analysis is 1991-2020 and JJA was used because that is what the SSTs are to work with in the GoM going into North Atlantic peak hurricane season (August-October) and SSTs are slow to change due to water's high heat capacity.  I'll drop the link to the KNMI Climate Explorer for you to reproduce this chart at your own will. Give that a lil' click-sy and knock yourself out.  https://climexp.knmi.nl/start.cgi (the bounding box I used was 20-30°N, 80-100°W) The diamonds overlain represent instances when a major hurricane (i.e., a tropical cyclone with maximum sustained wind speeds of ≥111 mph according to the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale) formed in the GoM. Some years have more than major hurricane in the Gulf, so they're represented by one dot.

A total of 75 hurricanes have either formed or tracked through the GoM since 1900.[1] Of those 75, 40 (53.3%) formed with SSTAs 𝒃𝒆𝒍𝒐𝒘 the 1991-2020 mean. That's more than half of the subset.

• [1] 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒, 𝐼 𝑒𝑥𝑐𝑙𝑢𝑑𝑒𝑑 𝐻𝑢𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑠 𝐴𝑢𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑦 (1957) 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐴𝑙𝑚𝑎 (1966) 𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑛 𝐽𝑢𝑛𝑒.

What we can conclude from this analysis is that the formation of major hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico is not contingent on warming SSTs. The Gulf gets warm enough every year to sustain a major hurricane, even of category four or five status. So, higher SSTs aren't going to add much additional effect, especially if you consider the fact tropical cyclone kinematics require far more environmental parameters to be favorable in order for a major hurricane to form (e.g., pre-existing disturbance, low deep-layer [200-850 hPa] vertical wind shear and no dry air / Saharan dust).

You are oversimplifying a very complex issue that you have little understanding about.

REPORTER: Is the increase in tornados [caused by] global warming?

DESANTIS: I think you can back and find tornadoes for all of human history, for sure, and especially, you know, Florida, how does this storm rate in the history of storms? I think it hit with a barometric pressure of (looks at the man behind him), what was it? About 950 millibars when it hit?

Which, I think if you go back to 1851, there's probably been 27 hurricanes that have had lower, the lower the barometric pressure, the stronger it is. I think there have been about 27 hurricanes that have had lower barometric pressure on landfall than Milton did, and of those, 17 occurred, I think, prior to 1960, and the most powerful hurricane on record since the 1850s in the State of Florida occurred in the 1930s, the Labor Day hurricane. Barometric pressure 892 millibars.

It totally wiped out the Keys. We've never seen anything like it, and that remains head and shoulders above any powerful hurricane in the State of Florida. The most deadly hurricane we've ever had was in 1928, the Okichobi hurricane. Killed over 4,000 people. Fortunately, we aren't going to have anything close to that on this hurricane, but even ones like Ian, it wasn't anything close to that. Yeah, I just think people should put this in perspective. They try to take different things that happen with tropical weather and act like it's something. There's nothing new under the sun. This is something that the state has dealt with for its entire history, and it's something that we'll continue to deal with.

REPORTER: In your history, sir, how many storms form as rapidly as they have between Helena and Milton.

DESANTIS: I think most people remember 2004 where it seemed like we had them every other week in 2004. Then there's also time period. From 2006-16, we had no hurricanes at all in Florida. There's also been times where we had a lot. In the 1940s, we were hit a lot. Now, more recently, we've had a spate for more. That's just kind of the nature of it, but this really does, it has a lot of similarities to 2004 in terms of the season.

Presenting the following question to Vance, she said that CBS polling found that “more than 60 percent of Republicans under the age of 45 favor the U.S. taking steps to try and reduce climate change,” and she asked him what the Trump administration would do to reduce the alleged impact of climate change.

I want to isolate that bit about the CBS polling for a moment. I wasn’t able to easily find the poll they were referencing, but I won’t worry over the numbers there anyway, because people can claim to be in favor of the government doing “something” all they want. Yet when real policy hits pocketbooks and people have to see what their virtue signaling actually costs, their tune changes drastically.

For example, a poll conducted by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (UC/AP) found that only 38 percent of Americans surveyed said that they would be willing to pay a $1 per month carbon fee to fight climate change. As the amount of monthly fee increased, support continued to fall. This same trend is seen in multiple polls, which means it is misleading to suggest that the “someone needs to do something” polling translates to voter support for higher energy costs and Green New Deal radicalism. //

The most astonishing part of this section of the debate, however, came at the very end of the relatively reasonable discussion about energy and foreign manufacturing and emissions, and it did not come from either of the candidates. After a short response from Walz in which he lied, saying that there had been no moratorium on natural gas and oil, moderator O’Donnell cut him off to tell him his time was up and, without even taking a breath, concluded with, “[t]he overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the earth's climate is warming at an unprecedented rate. Margaret?”

And moderator Margaret Brennan seamlessly pivoted to the next question on immigration.

She gave no time for either candidate to respond to her very random injection of the scientific establishment ad populum climate narrative argument, and it really seemed as if it was simply a line she was instructed to say at some point during the question period. //

CBS is partnered with a radical climate propagandist group called Covering Climate Now, which urges journalists to connect everything to climate change and environmental justice, and instructs them to never platform “climate denialists.” Who is a climate denialist? Anyone who balks at their definition of “rapid, forceful action” or anyone who disputes the consensus narrative. It is a nightmare of an organization, baldly propagandistic, and news organizations like CBS News take their marching orders from them. //

Musicman
4 hours ago
The response should always be, “Increased CO2 and temperatures is resulting in a greening of the planet, not its destruction. Yes, it will cause some disruption as the SW deserts become hotter and Canada milder and more fertile, but we humans are ingenious at taking advantage of nature’s bounty.”. //

Adler von Pfingsten
3 hours ago
Trump and Vance would be well advised to answer questions about climate change with a virtual challenge i.e. I followed the “science” of climate change and gender identity to its logical conclusion:

Lysenkoism: In modern usage, the term Lysenkoism has become distinct from normal pseudoscience. Where pseudoscience pretends to be science, Lysenkoism aims at attacking the legitimacy of science itself, usually for political reasons. It is the rejection of the universality of scientific truth, and the deliberate defamation of the scientific method to the level of politics.

Climate and energy policies must balance the risks and benefits of a changing climate against growing demand for reliable, affordable, and clean energy. To strike that balance, policymakers must consider society’s values and priorities, its tolerance for risk, equities among generations and geographies, and efficacies, costs, and collateral impacts. This paper reviews the scientific, technoeconomic, and societal facts that should inform policy decisions and draws some straightforward conclusions from them.

The REPOWER plan rests on four pillars:

1) Replacing all subsidies and mandates with a CO2 fee, which shall be set by Congress.

2) A grid of ratepayer owned coops which provide local power distribution and backup power.

3) Coops or consortia of coops contracting with merchant providers for the bulk of their power, or possibly building their own base load plants.

4) Unshackling nuclear from a regulatory system based on the Two Lies. Nuclear's remarkable energy density, combined with competition will drive the cost of nuclear down to its should-cost of less than 3 cents per kilowatt-hour.

The end result will be a largely nuclear grid, backed up by local fossil generation and supplemented in some areas by hydro, wind, or solar. //

The REPOWER plan has been criticized on the grounds it not only does not get rid of fossil fuel, it requires extensive expansion of fossil fuel capacity. The goal here is reducing CO2 emissions, not eliminating fossil fuel capacity. And we must reduce CO2 emissions in a way that uses the planet's resources efficiently. If we end up in a situation where we could have both less CO2 and less cost, we are being criminally stupid.

REPOWER will result in nuclear at a naive LCOE of less than 3 cents/kWh. That makes drastically reducing grid CO2 emissions so easy it's almost automatic. Figure 1 summarizes the results of a study of the German grid in which nuclear's overnight CAPEX was set at $2000/kW. (In the 1960's, we were building nuclear plants at less than $1000/kW in today's money.) //

Currently, the grid is producing about 25% of man-made CO2 emissions. If we cut that by a factor 20 with should-cost nuclear, we are down to about 1% of the total. At that point, we are far better off going after the other 99%, then expending resources on further reducing the 1%.
Takeaway

Unless we have cheap electricity, decarbonization in going nowhere. The Good News is we can have both very low grid emissions and cheap electricity. All we have to do is:

a) Put the ratepayer in charge of the grid.

b) Let the underwriters balance nuclear safety and cost.

Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today.

None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.

What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.

More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science.

While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited. //

1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life’

But no such ‘great peril to life’ has been observed as the so-called ‘ozone hole’ remains: //

2008: Al Gore warns of ice-free Arctic by 2013

But… it’s still there:

Hurricanes in the United States end up hundreds of times deadlier than the government calculates, contributing to more American deaths than car accidents or all the nation’s wars, a new study said.

The average storm hitting the U.S. contributes to the early deaths of 7,000 to 11,000 people over a 15-year period, which dwarfs the average of 24 immediate and direct deaths that the government counts in a hurricane’s aftermath, the study in Wednesday’s journal Nature concluded. Study authors said even with Hurricane Helene’s growing triple digit direct death count, many more people will die partly because of that storm in future years.

“Watching what’s happened here makes you think that this is going to be a decade of hardship on tap, not just what’s happening over the next couple of weeks,” said Stanford University climate economist Solomon Hsiang, a study co-author and a former White House science and technology official.

“After each storm there is sort of this surge of additional mortality in a state that’s been impacted that has not been previously documented or associated with hurricanes in any way,” Hsiang said.

Hsiang and University of California Berkeley researcher Rachel Young looked at hurricane deaths in a different way than previous studies, opting for a more long-term public health and economics-oriented analysis of what’s called excess mortality. They looked at states’ death rates after 501 different storms hitting the United States between 1930 and 2015. And what they found is that after each storm there’s a “bump” in death rates.

It’s a statistical signature that they see over and over, Hsiang said. Similar analyses are done for heat waves and other health threats like pollution and disease, he said. They compare to pre-storm times and adjust for other factors that could be causing changes in death rates, he said. Complicating everything is that the same places keep getting hit by multiple storms so there are death bumps upon death bumps.

Just how storms contribute to people’s deaths after the immediate impact is something that needs further study, Hsiang said. But he theorized it includes the health effects of stress, changes in the environment including toxins, people not being able to afford health care and other necessities because of storm costs, infrastructure damage and government changes in spending.

“When someone dies a few years after a hurricane hit them, the cause will be recorded as a heart attack, stroke or respiratory failure,” said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who wasn’t part of the study but has done similar studies on heat and cold deaths. “The doctor can’t possibly know that a hurricane contributed/triggered the illness. You can only see it in a statistical analysis like this.”

According to Resources for the Future, 83 percent of people believe that human actions have been partly responsible for the cause of global warming, and 81 percent believe global warming will be a serious problem for the world. Funny enough, 78 percent of Americans think the government should do something about it.

And yet, the environment is never very high on the list of concerns when elections roll around.

Why, you ask? Easy. Because it's too expensive. When green energy comes for your wallet, all that concern for the climate disappears. It's too expensive. Which means that most people actually don't think it must be all that much of a threat. In fact, they see combating climate change as a greater threat to their wallet than climate change in total.

According to the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, when Americans are given the option to pay an extra monthly fee to combat it, they shut their wallets and walk away:

While the majority of Americans support climate policies, including a carbon tax on companies, when it comes to paying for these policies in the form of a monthly fee on their energy use they are much less supportive. In fact, more than half of Americans are unwilling to pay any amount of money to combat climate change. Forty-five percent are willing to pay $1—more than last year, but down from prior years of the poll. That said, a consistent minority is willing to pay a significant amount (even $100) to combat climate change. //

Mildred's Oldest Son
3 hours ago
None of these climate-cultists have been able to express what the goal is. If we did everything that they want, what would happen to the climate? Will we never have a blizzard in winter, heat wave in the summer, will everyday around the world be a balmy 75 degrees during the day and 60 degrees at night? What's the goal? The goal is total control of the economy and the government while we proles live stone-age lives and the elites live the same lives they have always lived. That's the goal