The Economic Cost of Eliminating Fossil Fuels

By Andy May

The debate on how much impact humanity has on climate change continues. As nearly everyone knows by now, there is no observational evidence that humans have a significant impact on climate, so the debate is mostly over which future climate projection is likely. It also isn’t clear that the changes we might cause are bad, most of the evidence suggests that additional CO2 and warming have been beneficial so far and will likely be beneficial in the future. But what if we do decide to eliminate fossil fuels? What is the economic impact?

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What’s below the Greenland Ice?

By Andy May

An interesting PNAS article discusses the deepest portion of the Camp Century Greenland Ice core. It is not paywalled. The researchers, led by Andrew Christ (Dept. of Geology, University of Vermont) found evidence of an ice-free vegetated environment at the base of the Camp Century ice core roughly one million years ago. This means the glaciers, which are currently 1.4 km (0.9 miles) thick, at the Camp Century location completely melted and reformed sometime between 0.7 and 1.4 million years ago. The Camp Century location, along with other deep ice core locations, are shown in Figure 1.

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Is “Climate Change” science or pseudoscience?

I have a new op-ed in the Washington Examiner today that questions whether “climate change,” as commonly defined today, is a scientific concept. The op-ed is a very brief summary of a longer post on the topic here. The longer post contains all the references and links to supporting material, including a link to Karl Popper‘s famous book on the definitions of science and pseudoscience, called Conjectures and Refutations.

From the op-ed:

“Tornados, nor’easters, hurricanes, mid-winter thaws, 100-degree days, cold snaps, droughts, and flooding creeks all are presented as evidence of human-caused climate change, “proof” that human emissions of carbon dioxide are leading to an overheated planet.


However, Karl Popper, the famous philosopher, would say that these meteorological events do not support human-caused climate change because none of them can falsify the idea. If every event supports an idea, and no event can falsify it, the idea is not a scientific hypothesis.


Popper’s examples of pseudoscience included Marx’s theory of history. He observed on page 35 of his famous book, that “A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page, confirming evidence” for the theory. Freud’s theories were the same; every clinical case confirmed his ideas. A hypothesis that is not refutable by any conceivable event is not scientific.”

Washington Examiner.

Climate Feedback Fact Checks CO2 Coalition

By Andy May

The Climate Feedback website critiques my CO2Coalition article “Attributing global warming to humans.” Their factcheck is here. Like most “fact checks” these days it is a thinly disguised opinion piece. The statement that they claim is incorrect is:

“There is no evidence, other than models, that human CO2 emissions drive climate change and abundant evidence that the Sun, coupled with natural climate cycles, drives most, if not all, of recent climate changes, as described in Connolly, et al., 2021.” [emphasis added]

They cleverly leave out the last phrase: “as described in Connolly, et al., 2021,” and then immediately assert “Solar irradiance has had a negligible impact on Earth’s climate since the industrial era.” This is followed by no evidence other than an appeal to the mythical “consensus.”

Later in the article, they say Connolly, et al. uses simple linear regression to establish a link between solar irradiance and surface temperature. Connolly, et al. does not state that the Sun controls the climate or that humans do, it simply shows that, using available evidence, solar variability (actually TSI, or Total Solar Irradiance variability) could account for anywhere from 0 to 100% of the warming since the Little Ice Age (the so-called “pre-industrial” era). One of the main points of Connolly, et al. is that the IPCC and the so-called “consensus” are ignoring two critical areas of current research. First, they ignore the uncertainty in our estimate of surface warming since the Little Ice Age, and second, they ignore the considerable uncertainty in solar-variability-long-term trends, both recently and since the Little Ice Age. As they state in the paper, the amount of 20th century warming that can be simulated as due to solar variability, depends upon the surface temperature dataset and the solar TSI model used. There are many versions of both. Suffice it to say, while the exact influence of human activities and solar variability on climate change are both unknown, no one can claim solar influence is negligible. The correct answer is we don’t know.

In the Climate Feedback fact check, their Figure 1 shows the TSI reconstruction preferred by the IPCC, the empirical PMOD reconstruction. The PMOD reconstruction was created by Judith Lean and the late Claus Fröhlich by adjusting the data to match their solar model, it was not from the best satellite data, like the more accurate ACRIM model, which shows a long-term change in solar irradiance that may explain some of the 20th century surface warming.

Read the rest at the CO2Coalition website here.

America’s Huge Natural Gas Reserves

By Andy May

Greg Wrightstone, the Managing Director of the CO2 Coalition, has a new blog post describing the sadly underdeveloped super-giant natural gas fields along the U.S. East Coast. The combination of the Marcellus and Utica Shale reservoirs have more recoverable gas than any other gas field in the world, except for South Pars/North Dome in Qatar and Iran. With government restrictions removed we could easily replace all the gas currently purchased from Russia by the rest of the world and have plenty more for our own consumption.

Mr. Wrightstone has years of experience studying the Marcellus and Utica shales, he knows what he is talking about. He is also the author of the best-selling book, Inconvenient Facts: The Science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know.

The SEC climate change proposal is not grounded in science, Author’s Cut

By Andy May

This is the full uncut version of the op-ed I wrote for the Washington Examiner, here.

On March 22, 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released a new rule for public comment (File Number S7-10-22) that would require public companies to report the climate-related impact of their businesses. Since it has been well established in multiple IPCC reports that the human impact on climate has never been observed, only modeled, this seems unnecessary. The climate models, used by the IPCC and NOAA to “compute” the human impact on climate have already been invalidated by Dr. Ross McKitrick and Dr. John Christy in their well-known Earth and Space Science peer-reviewed paper. McKitrick and Christy’s previous 2018 paper is cited numerous times in the latest IPCC report (AR6), and the report acknowledges that their paper is correct on page 3-24, where they also admit that one likely reason is the models are overestimating the sensitivity of the climate to CO2. They also admit on the same page that the models are overestimating warming relative to observations in both the atmosphere and the oceans. Page 10 of the SEC proposed rule states:

“In particular, the impact of climate-related risks on both individual businesses and the financial system as a whole are well documented.10”

SEC: File Number S7-10-22

Footnote 10: “In 2020 alone, a record 22 separate climate-related disasters with at least $1 billion in damages struck across the United States, surpassing the previous annual highs of 16 such events set in 2011 and 2017. See NOAA, National Center for Environmental Information, Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Summary Stats (3rd Quarter release 2021), available at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/summary-stats/US/2020. In 2021, the United States experienced 20 separate billion-dollar climate-related disasters. See NOAA, U.S. saw its 4th warmest year on record, fueled by a record-warm December (Jan. 10, 2022), available at https://www.noaa.gov/news/us-saw-its-4th-warmest-year-on-record-fueled-by-record-warm-december.”

SEC: File Number S7-10-22

Continue reading “The SEC climate change proposal is not grounded in science, Author’s Cut”

The New SEC Climate Change Rule

By Andy May

On March 22, 2022 the SEC released a new rule for public comment that would require public companies to report the climate-related impact of their businesses. Since it has been well established in multiple IPCC reports that the human impact on climate has never been observed, only modeled, this seems unnecessary. The climate models, used by the IPCC and NOAA to “compute” the human impact on climate have already been invalidated by Dr. Ross McKitrick and Dr. John Christy in their well-known 2020 Earth and Space Science peer-reviewed paper.

As you might imagine I had quite a lot more to say about this foolish rule that forces companies to make up costs that have an imaginary effect on an imaginary modeled climate future. You can find it in my Washington Examiner op-ed, here.

To read the full uncut Author’s version of the op-ed, see here.

Why I left Linkedin.com

Like many of my friends, I’ve decided to leave linkedin.com. They removed two recent posts of mine, one of them was an announcement of this post. Their stated excuse was:

“your content goes against our Professional Community Policies”

I studied their “Professional Community Policies” and did not see how I had violated any of them. Both posts were well researched, well supported with references and links, respectful, accurate, professional, and truthful.

They own the linkedin platform and are entitled to set their own policies, I have no problem with that. But if they have determined that I violated them, which one? How did I violate the policy? They refused to explain, so it is reasonable to conclude that they did not agree with what I wrote and decided to censor it arbitrarily. The fact that they did not explain their decision, is really what bothers me. If they censor a post, I deserve to know why.

If you read the post and can see anything that violated linkedin’s policies, let me know in the comments, I’m all ears.

I plan to continue writing and you will be able to read my posts and comment on them here. I will also continue placing the posts on Wattsupwiththat.com, many other sites also pick up my posts, including clintel.org, EIKE (in German), and elonionbloggle. I also encourage you to subscribe to my blog so you will be notified when I post something. The subscribe button is at the bottom of each page, if you have any trouble with it let me know. Subscribing is free and I do not share email addresses with anyone. Feel free to post this anywhere, including on linkedin.

I should add that I have an Op-ed that the Washington Examiner has scheduled for April 10, 2022. Watch for it.

An Alternative view of the 2020 Election

By Andy May

In my last post I discussed a peer-reviewed study of the 2020 election by Dr. John L. Lott. It examined the vote totals in six critical states that were accused of voter fraud due primarily to illegally changing voter procedures and inadequately verifying the authenticity of the votes cast. Texas filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court to challenge the vote tallies in critical states that violated their own laws and the Constitution (Article 1, Section 4), but the Supreme Court would not hear the case, claiming that Texas did not have standing to sue. This was correct, Texas cannot control the vote tallies in another state, but the Supreme Court ruling does not address the clear violations of law by judges, bureaucrats and Secretaries of State in the critical states.

Continue reading “An Alternative view of the 2020 Election”
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