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“Unlike some, I trust the mainstream science on climate change and support emissions reductions.” — Claire Lehmann, Quillette editor-in-chief in The Australian

Ms Lehmann is smart and normally well-informed, but her trust in what she calls “the mainstream science on climate change” shows that on this topic  she is clueless. She also believes in what she calls “climate action”, but needs to take her own advice that “real climate leadership isn’t about chanting catchy phrases.”

Meanwhile, Liberal leader Sussan Ley is expected to wrap up the party policy on Net Zero after consulting MPs on Wednesday (12/11/25) and liaising with the Nationals. Her problem is that she and many colleagues, like Lehmann, also “trust the mainstream science”. [Update: the Liberals have joined their coalition partners the Nationals to ditch net zero targets, though retaining an aspiration, and prioritising affordable energy. We Ozzies are still with Paris 2015]

What actually is it? And what has it confirmed to justify up-ending Western civilisation, other than there’s been 1degC of warming and humankind has caused some of it? Beyond that non-existential finding, should we trust the 35 or so giant computer models cranking out global heat estimates supposedly to arrive in the year 2100?

The modellers’ outputs “run hot”, with forecasts well exceeding actual warming for the past two decades. And the long-term scenarios to which models’ forecasts are tailored are also fanciful, though that doesn’t stop them being extolled by tens of thousands of academic researchers. Drill down into other key elements of “the mainstream science” and what you find are inadequate data, guesswork, politicisation, and disputes that will take decades to resolve.

For example, we are “tackling” global warming by planting trees – the industry for CO2-offsets makes billions from plant-outs. But “the science” doesn’t actually know whether adding trees will reduce or increase the warming. Don’t take my word for it about this astounding admission: it’s from committed warmist Dr Andy Pitman, the doyen of Australia’s climate scientists.

Maybe the global warming is actually beneficial? There’s plenty of climate-science papers on the global greening caused by extra CO2 and its boost to agriculture. Whether warming is net good or net bad has become a respectable debate among the scientists, economists, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who has just decided that despite global warming, “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”[1]

Media pundits applaud our country’s 28% cut in carbon emissions since 2005, as if we’ve won gold in the emissions Olympics. In reality, as the estimable climate blogger JoNovapoints out,  this 28% cut comprises 24% through forestry and reduced land clearing, and a mere 4% from all the billions spent on renewables and other cure-alls like brown-paper bags and bike lanes.

The Liberals and Nationals are now trying to sort out Net Zero 2050 while voter support for the Coalition has tanked 4 points to a record low of 24%. Much of the muddle is because the two parties are afraid to dispute this “consensus science”, specifically “human-caused catastrophic global warming”, or CAGW for short.

The Coalition opposes Labor Climate Minister Chris Bowen’s trillion-dollar ambitions to cover the landscape with windmills and solar farms, producing dear and unreliable electricity and with no reduction detectable in global warming. But the LNP seems to believe we only need maybe half as many windmills and solar farms. Let’s waste billions, but not trillions, they suggest boldly.

Instead, they should take a hard look at the “consensus” science itself. Andy Pitman says Australian climate science is building “on crumbling foundations”. And last July, five eminent scientists authored a report for the US Department of Energy concluding from peer-reviewed studies that the climate scare is vastly overblown.

Each of this five-person “Red Team” brings to the debate science clout far superior to that of any Australian climate scientist. Two of them even created the satellite-based global temperature series on which climate orthodoxy relies.

The alarmists know and admit their “science” is a mess. It’s not “settled”, as they solemnly claimed for 25 years, because

♦ Climate is too complex and chaotic, and the data is too recent and crude

♦ They don’t know if key variables like cloudiness, volcanos and El Nino/La Ninas are increasing the modest warming trend since 1850 or damping it down.

♦ They disagree on whether warming is increasing extreme weather: the IPCC body-copy says it doesn’t and decades more data are needed to see what’s really going on.

♦ Meanwhile the CO2/heat models on which the whole predictive schemes of the IPCC are based, are diverging ever wider from the less-warm realities.Why aren’t these facts better known? Partly because of media censorship (the ABC policy book for example doesn’t want its journos platforming so-called “deniers”, whom the ABC views as flat-earthers).[2]

The BBC is not just in crisis over its fraudulent editing of Trump’s Jan 6 speech: the UK Telegraph reported last night (Nov 9) that the Beeb will also conduct a “thematic review” of verified bias complaints about its climate reporting, including misinforming readers about dying polar bears, climate-caused extreme weather, manipulative editing, and ‘demonising’ farmers. The ABC could run a similar bias inquiry just on its countless false claims about Tuvalu “drowning”.

The problem is also due in part to the “argument from authority” fallacy – studies that claim a “consensus” of 97% are shoddy and politicised (also, every advance in science refutes a consensus). In any event, few voters invest the energy needed to explore the fundamentals.

I’ll start with the admissions just one year ago by Dr Pitman[3]. He’s chair of the National Committee for Earth System Science of the Australian Academy of Science, and director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes. Then I’ll give the gist of the “Red Team’s” findings for the US Department of Energy.

Pitman is reluctantly famous for rubbishing the “consensus” by Australian alarmist scientists and their media shills that global warming increases droughts. He told his audience in 2019 the truth was the opposite, because warm air holds more water.

Pitman has made some huge climate admissions on behalf of the woke and Labor-captured Science Academy. Apart from the “crumbling foundations” , there’s “critical gaps in our understanding” and “our knowledge is incomplete”. And even this:

We risk investments that lead to maladaptation, incorrect disclosure of financial risk by business, and erroneous assessments of national and regional risks associated with climate change.

By “investments” he’s talking about trillions that politicians want to transfer from taxpayers to grifters’ turbine and solar-farm projects.

Pitman now acknowledges that his crowd still has no idea if Australia will see more or fewer weather-shaping El Ninos, or more extreme weather, or even whether more vegetation will reduce or increase greenhouse emissions.[4]. “These are not easily solvable but offer profoundly different futures for Australia,” he admits. Odd that we are to invest trillions in Net Zero on a punt.

Interviewed by the Australian, Pitman even confessed

Climate models are very valuable tools for many applications but they are not something I want used to decide investment strategies for my superannuation.

 Voters out in Nationals-land would agree.

He admits that “Earth system models omit crucial components, not by choice but due to lack of investment coupled with weak national coordination.” Global climate models with their low resolution aren’t fit for purpose and can’t catch key processes in all spheres of the climate system. They can’t represent, for example, “critical weather systems” in the Southern Ocean.

Overseas climate models “don’t work great” here anyway, he says.

You can’t do it [modelling] by importing 1.5 million lines of code from somewhere else and assume it’s OK, it really doesn’t work that way…

…using current CMIP [global] models, or indeed the regional models that rely on them, therefore risks fundamentally wrong projections of future climate and its variability.

Regional models can’t predict weather-disaster processes, including the lead-up to the Lismore 2022 floods, he says. But I notice that whole Australian university departments use and abuse these dud models, as do renewables lobbies like Tim Flannery’s Climate Council which touts every storm as “climate-fuelled”. Pitman continues,

Climate predictions are built on very old science. The quality of the science is as good as we can do with the systems in place, but are nowhere near as good as if we genuinely address the Australian organisational environment for earth system science.

Alarmingly, he concedes that Australia has no funding even to audit climate models’ flaws and veracity. He also bemoans the scarcity of Australia’s earth sciences researchers. To train one earth scientist takes ten years, he says, and that person disappears to the first business recruiter. I’d say on this manpower basis alone, Australian climate science is circling the drain, while politicians like Malcolm Turnbull have poured  billions on nonsense like his Snowy 2.0 battery, what he called the “game changer”.  Well one thing has certainly changed — the cost, from $2 billion to $10 billion and then $12 billion and even that’s not enough.

In coded language Pitman also concedes no amount of battery and hydro backup can offset the certain failure of renewables during sustained wind droughts and cloudiness –Germans call it Dunkelflaute or “dark doldrums”. Demonstrating a gift for understatement, Pitman writes:

High impact events also include long periods of low solar radiation coinciding with low winds … these impact national strategies to achieve net zero emissions.

He offers no solution since there is none.

He’s thrown his bucket of cold water on climate orthodoxy because climate science in Australia involves every boffin and social-science hanger-on doing his/her own thing and no-one is coordinating any key issues. Hence he wants his  super-agency to get the government money, keep core funding and feed the rest out only to its approved projects.[5] To make this power-grab plausible, he has to convince peers that today’s climate science needs rescuing from its ignominy.

He admits that his crowd has no idea

♦ When and where so-called “tipping points” might arise

♦ Whether climate change will increase or decrease the Murray Darling water flows

♦ Whether an increase in CO2 will cause more or less rain for a given location

♦ How climate change will impact cities and urban landscapes [heatwaves in capitals haven’t increased, according to BoM data (downloadable here to Excel, courtesy scientist Geoff Sherrington, even with the urban-heat-island effect].

His further profound unknowns are sea-ice extent, ice-sheet dynamics affecting sea levels, and urban and agricultural landscape impacts.Let’s turn now to the US Department of Energy report. Energy Secretary Chris Wright says, later echoed by Bill Gates, that climate change is not the greatest threat facing humanity: “That distinction belongs to global energy poverty … Climate change is a challenge—not a catastrophe. But misguided policies based on fear rather than facts could truly endanger human well-being.”

I’ll set out the credentials of the report’s five authors below lest someone call them flat-earthers or fossil fools. A search of the ABC yields not one word for Australians about this report: so much for impartiality.

Dr Steven Koonin is the Edward Teller Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.[6] He’s been Undersecretary for Science at the Department of Energy (2009-2011), Chief Scientist for British Petroleum (2004-2009), and vice-president and provost at Caltech. He was Governor of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and has authored 200 papers in physics and astrophysics, scientific computation, energy technology and policy, and climate science.

Dr John Christy is a Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric and Earth Sciences at Alabama University, Huntsville, and the State Climatologist. He’s recipient of the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement for co-constructing the first global atmospheric temperature dataset from polar orbiting satellites. He’s been an IPCC lead author and coauthored the National Academy of Science expert report on Surface Temperature Reconstructions (2006).

Dr Roy Spencer is a Principal Research Scientist at Alabama University. With Christy he won the NASA Medal, and also won the American Meteorological Society’s Special Award. He was Team Leader for NASA’s Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on the Aqua satellite, measuring sea surface temperatures and sea ice.

Dr Judith Curry is Professor Emerita at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she served as Chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences for 13 years. She has 192 papers in atmospheric and climate sciences, plus two textbooks, and served on several Science Steering Committees of the World Climate Research Program.

Statistician Dr Ross McKitrick is a Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Guelph, Ontario. He authored the book Economic Analysis ofEnvironmental Policy ( University of Toronto Press, 2010). His applied statistics generated papers in paleoclimate reconstruction, malaria transmission, surface temperature measurement, climate attribution methodology and climate model evaluation. He’s been an expert reviewer for the last three IPCC Assessment Reports.

The report’s Executive Summary complains that the mainstream climate models offer little guidance on warming effects of CO2 doubling, with predictions ranging over a factor of three, from 1.8degC to 5.7degC,[7] and there’s been no lessening of such disagreement in decades.

The combination of models running hot plus implausible scenarios about future emissions, exaggerate the likely warming  to 2100. The uncertainty of the most basic data – global average surface temperature– varies among models by  3 to 4degC, whereas warming of the whole 20^th century was only 1degC.

The most striking change in the Earth’s climate system during the 21st century is an unexplained reduction in planetary albedo (reflectivity) since 2015, coupled with two years of record warmth. The authors suggest the main cause could be less cloudiness (itself unexplained) – the measured 1 or 2 per cent reduction could be equivalent to doubling CO2.  Modelling can’t even agree on whether the southern or northern hemispheres are more reflective.

Another grave uncertainty is the cycling of natural and human-caused CO2 through the surface and atmosphere. On the CO2 take-up by vegetation, the models vary by a factor of nearly seven. This  uncertainty cascades all the way to dubious warming predictions.

Warming feedback from clouds is also unknown but often assumed to be high, with models then “tuned” to reflect that assumption and generate the theorised warming of 3degC. In fact, models can’t say if clouds produce net warming or net cooling. Moreover, clouds have an unknown influence on other key climate variables such as water vapour and albedo.

The authors warn that much climate alarm in recent years stems from the most extreme and implausible scenario of the IPCC, called RCP 8.5, suggesting 5degC of warming by 2100. Academic researchers by the thousand have been mis-using RCP8.5 as their “business as usual” scenario, i.e. what happens without policy correctives. An audit by Pielke and Ritchie (2020) found mis-use of RCP8.5 in 16,800 science papers between 2010 and 2020, as well as by government agencies like the IPCC and USNCA. The hyped-up studies appeared at the rate of 20 per day!

Pielke and Ritchie said the research community spent a decade “committing scientific resources to science fiction” and that “The scientific literature has become imbalanced in an apocalyptic direction.”

For its fifth report the IPCC switched to different, ‘SSP’ scenarios (‘Shared Socioeconomic Pathways’) The spread of heat outcomes, instead of narrowing, widened from well below 2degC to nearly 5degC. That outcome was not merely ‘worst case’, it was genuinely implausible. As of 2023, actual CO2 emissions have been tracking well below even the low scenarios.

The models’ over-prediction of tropical tropospheric [surface to about 12km high] warming, which flows on to surface temperatures, has been increasing since 2006 “and the bias is now global”. The IPCC acknowledges the failure.

Modelling has fared even worse on predicting how warming varies with altitude. The actual lower tropospheric warming [to about 12km high]  has been so small as to suggest no human-emission effect at all. For the middle troposphere, the models’ results varied by 40% each way around the median. The results are not merely uncertain but show a common warming bias, which the IPCC’s sixth report fails to explore.

On costs and benefits, the report says CO2-enhanced warming could well be less economically damaging than commonly believed. Rising CO2 has greened the planet by 8% with no sign of slowing and creating big benefits for crop yields. The IPCC has played down these benefits.

Aggressive spending purporting to reduce the warming could be worse than the original problem, and in any event would create undetectably-small reductions in temperature.

On extreme weather like hurricanes, floods and droughts, the authors found little to no worsening. Even US hot days since the 1950s remain low compared to the 1920s and 1930s. Wildfires have increased since the 1960s but are worsened by poor forest management and remain low against earlier baselines.

The authors deplore the constant assertions by government, media and academics about worsening extremes, despite IPCC findings that show no worsening. Case in point is the World Weather Attribution lobby, much relied on by Australian alarmists. It uses home-grown models to bring out rapid unreviewed claims for the media and for green lawsuits about climate causing extreme weather events.

In reality trends are hard to detect and even harder to pin to human causation, the authors say. They disparage the drumbeat that particular fires, droughts, storms and floods are “climate caused”. The IPCC itself doesn’t attribute extreme events to climate.

The report says sea level rise to 2100 is deeply uncertain because we don’t know much about ice sheet instability. The IPCC forecasts 7.9 to 39.4 inches under medium emissions scenarios. Forecasts (obviously ridiculous) by the US government’s NOAA include a foot-high rise at Manhattan’s Battery in the next 30 years, which the authors say would have to involve a dramatic acceleration.

In regard to farming the report says that with CO2 fertilisation “on balance climate change has been and will continue to be neutral or beneficial for most U.S. agriculture.” Every part-per-million increase in CO2 concentration boosts corn yields by 0.5 percent, soybeans by 0.6 percent, and wheat by 0.8 percent, also boosting resilience against dryness.

Rather than harming the third world, CO2 warming under IPCC scenarios would double global per capita income by 2100 (low emission growth) or by nearly 16 times (high emissions):

 In that scenario even the poorest regions (Africa and the Middle East) end up with a per capita income of about US$126,000, 70 percent higher than current U.S. per capita income (about US$75,000). Consequently the same scenarios in which CO2 levels increase the most are also those in which global poverty is largely eliminated.

The report is highly critical of “climate action” supposedly to cut warming. Many emissions regulations fail any cost-benefit test, including electric vehicle and renewable energy mandates, energy efficiency regulations and bans on various home appliances (Victoria’s Labor government has banned gas stoves in new housing from 2027).

U.S. cars and light trucks account for only 3.0 percent of global energy-related CO2 emissions. Even eliminating all U.S. vehicle-based emissions would retard the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere by only a year or two over a century.

Total US car and truck bans would reduce the overall warming trend by at most 3 percent, far below the level of measurability where the margin of error is 15%. Impacts on weather extremes would be even more miniscule.

They quote Bjorn Lomborg (2016) estimating that full compliance with the Paris Accord would not stop warming, it would only prevent an unnoticeable 0.1C warming and push back the year-2100 temperature rise by about a decade.

As for all the popular angst about the supposedly vanishing ice caps, the decline in Arctic sea ice which had been observed since 1980, stopped in 2007. And around the South Pole, the IPCC concedes, “there has been no significant trend in Antarctic Sea ice areas from 1979 to 2020”. I might add that a 2020 paper by Singh and Polvani in Nature found there had been no Antarctic warming for 70 years.

The alarmist establishment naturally piled-on against the report. They found some errors, such as under-stating Arctic sea-ice loss, and misinterpretations of a few studies, particularly work by Dr Richard Tol finding that warming harms poorer countries more than rich ones.

Glitches are not surprising given the authors’ four months deadline, and don’t affect their broad conclusions. Other criticism is largely subjective, such as beefs about cherry-picking data and running material ‘out of context’. Another criticism was that co-author Dr Roy Spencer had included material about ‘faulty’ climate models from a blog post of his own, republished by the conservative Heritage Foundation and not peer-reviewed. This is a bit rich given the alarmists’ historical reliance on countless non-peer-reviewed documents.

The late IPCC chair (2002-15) Dr Rajendra Pachauri announced to legislators in 2008 that all references in the fourth report were peer reviewed. But a crowd-sourced audit by Canadian blogger Donna Laframboise found that of the 18,531 references, 5,587 or 30% were non-peer-reviewed – even including press clippings and Greenpeace propaganda. The many hundreds of climate scientists involved with the fourth report knew Pachauri was lying but not one called him out on it. Pachauri resigned abruptly mid-term in February 2015 when caught out sexually molesting his young female subordinates. He was also a court-verified perjurer, author of porn fiction and financially corrupt.

A prestigious attempted rebuttal came from the US National Academies of Sciences last September, in “Effects of Human-Caused Greenhouse Gas Emissions on U.S. Climate, Health, and Welfare” (120pp). The Academies’ main issue is the Trump government’s overturning the EPA finding of 2009 that CO2 is a hazardous gas that needs to be controlled. This EPA finding became the legal basis for multitudes of anti-CO2 regulations in the US, and is undermined by the new DoE report.

The National Academies cover science, engineering and medicine. Its chair for the dissenting report is Princeton’s Shirley M. Tilghman, a Canadian professor specialising in regulation of genes during development, particularly genomic imprinting. Her climate science nous seems doubtful, though perhaps outclassing retired Rear Admiral David W. Titley on her 16-person team. Tilghman’s first words commit a howler:

As the committee undertook this project, it was hard not to think about recent climate-related disasters.

 Out of her depth, the geneticist went on to blame “climate” for Hurricane Helene, the Los Angeles wildfires, and the Guadalupe River flash flooding in Texas that killed 35 girl campers and 100 others in July. The report is full of PR guff like, “The United States faces a future in which climate-induced harm continues to worsen and today’s extremes become tomorrow’s norms.”Many voters are coming round to the view that the “climate science” alarmism is a hoax. I think it’s more a case of religiosity and confirmation bias, with a dash of “let’s stick it to capitalism”. There is no doubt that the scare is subsiding worldwide, but not as fast as the Dutch tulip bulb collapse of 1637 or the Year 2000 computer panic. Could Sussan Ley’s Liberal politicians please check out the two authoritative reports I’ve cited?

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 here

[1] If given a choice between eradicating malaria and a tenth of a degree increase in warming, Gates told reporters, “I’ll let the temperature go up 0.1 degree to get rid of malaria. People don’t understand the suffering that exists today.” –– AP News

[2] The ABC policy is built on a straw-man argument that ‘deniers’ deny warming harm and human causation. The dispute is actually about the amount of both, which involve conjectures via modelling. See its policy with para 1 correct and para 2 slipping to the straw man argument (my emphases):

For some time, there was genuine dispute about both the extent of global warming and the role of human-produced greenhouse gases.

By the early 2000s the weight of scientific evidence concerning human-induced warming was overwhelming. At that point asserting the existence of anthropogenic warming ceased to be contentious, despite ongoing scepticism among some in the community. 

[3] Augmented by my transcription of the Academy’s webinar on their paper’s release.

[4] The problem with trees is that also produce planetary albedo (reflectiveness) and admit more solar heat

[5] Pitman : “Current organisational and funding structures impede rather than enable our ability to answer critical questions. We therefore need to build and implement a strategically well-aligned and integrated national Earth System Science plan. Without such a plan and clear direction, our current strategies for observations, process-based understanding and the building of modelling systems will fail to answer the key questions that confront Australia and impede efforts to combat and respond to the risks of climate change”

[6] Edward Teller is known from the Cold War era as ‘father of the H-bomb’. As a junior journo on The West Australian in the 1960s I interviewed Teller when he visited Perth, but am unable to resurrect the article from archives

[7]  The sixth IPCC report used research by Sherwood et al to suggest warming of 3.1degC (range 2.6-3.9) but a rival study by Lewis said 2.2degC (range 1.8-2.7). The dispute continues. Sherwood is the Steve Sherwood of UNSW.