The Independent claims in “Vital Atlantic current likely to collapse with catastrophic consequences, scientists warn” that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is significantly more likely to shut down within decades, plunging Europe into extreme winters and triggering global disruption.

This is wrong-headed speculation.

The article relies heavily on extreme computer model simulations built on high-emissions assumptions, ignoring the observational record of the AMOC, which shows little or no evidence of an imminent collapse.

The article asserts that AMOC “could pass the shutdown tipping point within the next couple of decades,” and that a slowdown of 42 to 58 percent by 2100 is “almost certain to end in collapse.”

That strong claim is based solely on modeling exercises, not direct measurements of a system in free fall.

Even the article acknowledges that analyzing the AMOC, shown in the figure below, is “an incredibly complex process” with “widely varying results” ranging from no drop at all to a massive slowdown. That admission is key.

Published science over the past decade has pointed in three different directions: some studies projecting collapse, others indicating relative stability, and still others suggesting potential strengthening in certain regions depending on wind-driven upwelling and Southern Ocean dynamics.

In fact, the article itself references a recent Nature study showing that wind-driven upwelling in the Southern Ocean can prevent total collapse this century, even under extreme scenarios.

It also notes that 34 climate models analyzed under extreme forcing scenarios showed weakening of 20 to 81 percent over 90 years, yet none predicted a complete collapse.

That is hardly evidence of a near-term collapse being in the offing.

The core issue is model dependence. The study highlighted by The Independent blends limited real-world observations with climate models run under high-end emissions pathways and large freshwater influx scenarios.

These are stress tests. They are not forecasts. They assume strong anthropogenic (human-caused) forcing and then examine how models behave.

The high-end emission scenarios have increasingly been rejected, even by those who argue humans are causing climate change, as being unrealistic and likely impossible.

Climate models are useful tools, but they are not reality. Their reliability in simulating ocean circulation over century timescales remains limited. Small changes in parameterization, freshwater flux, wind forcing, or vertical mixing can dramatically alter projected AMOC strength.

That is why scientific literature shows divergence rather than convergence on the idea of a collapsing AMOC.

The observational record does not show a collapse. Direct measurements of AMOC strength from the RAPID array at 26.5°N, which has been operating since 2004, show variability but no clear long-term downward trend indicating imminent shutdown. Paleo proxies used in that study suggest multidecadal variability has always occurred.

The tipping-point rhetoric also deserves scrutiny. “Collapse” implies an abrupt and irreversible shutdown.

But the article itself acknowledges that even studies showing significant weakening do not necessarily predict a full switch-off. Weakening is not collapse. Variability is not collapse. Modeling a threshold is not observing one.

This is not the first time dramatic AMOC headlines have circulated.

Over the past decade alone, media coverage has oscillated between declaring imminent collapse, reporting stabilization, and highlighting studies showing wind-driven mechanisms that sustain circulation. Climate Realism has debunked over a dozen such stories in the last few years.

Ocean circulation depends on temperature gradients, salinity, wind forcing, freshwater input, and deepwater formation processes. It has fluctuated throughout the Holocene without industrial CO2 forcing. Abrupt events in the paleoclimate record occurred under vastly different boundary conditions.

What The Independent presents is a single model-derived study framed as the most “realistic outcome.” It selects the most alarming end of a wide range of outcomes and presents it as the likely future.

Based on realistic assessments of the emission scenarios driving the model and real-world data, the presentation of the scenario as realistic is false.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report states that while AMOC weakening is likely over the 21st century under high emissions scenarios, there is low confidence in a collapse before 2100. That cautious assessment stands in contrast to headlines suggesting shutdown within decades.

Extreme simulations produce extreme headlines, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and none have been presented here.

Ocean circulation science is unsettled. Models disagree. Observations show variability. Published studies over the past decade have projected collapse, steady-state behavior, and even strengthening under certain dynamics.

The Independent declaring a looming catastrophe based on one modeling study doesn’t represent balanced, informed science reporting. Rather, it is acting as a promoter for an alarming, unlikely climate narrative, which may attract readers but simultaneously does a disservice to them and sound science itself.

Read more at Climate Realism

Through yesterday, according to preliminary data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Storm Prediction Center (SPC), the U.S. has experienced 365 tornadoes, just four above the longer-term average to date. Last year, more than 1,900 tornadoes were observed, the most since 2011, and well above the longer-term average. [some emphasis, links added]

Today, I share the latest data on normalized U.S. tornado losses since 1954 and a time series of the incidence of the strongest tornadoes since 1975. I doubt you’ll come across this data anywhere else.

Comparing tornado losses across decades is not straightforward.

A tornado striking what was a rural county 70 years ago would cause far less damage than the same tornado striking that same heavily developed county today — because there is now more property and wealth exposed to loss.

To make meaningful historical comparisons of loss estimates, researchers “normalize” losses: they ask what each historical storm or event would cost if it occurred under today’s societal conditions, adjusting for factors such as inflation, wealth, building types and counts, population, and, in some cases, efforts to improve building quality.

This approach was first applied systematically to tornadoes by Simmons, Sutter & Pielke Jr. (2013), who analyzed NOAA SPC data from 1950 through 2011. Zhang et al. (2023) reproduced and extended the Simmons series through 2018, confirming the earlier results and updating the time series.

They concluded: “[O]ur results suggest a downward trend in tornado losses for the U.S. as a nation.”

The figure below shows my replication of the Zhang et al. tornado normalization from primary data and extends it through 2025. The normalized losses are expressed in 2026 dollars.

The dominant loss years are 1954 ($36 billion),1965 ($44 billion), and 1974 ($29 billion). The largest recent loss year is 2011 at $16 billion — the largest post-1980 value and the only recent year approaching the scale of the 1960s–1970s peaks. Since 2012, annual normalized losses have largely remained below $5 billion.

The time series shows a significant decrease in annual normalized losses. The 1954–1963 decade averaged $4.8 billion per year; the 2015–2025 decade averaged $1.9 billion per year.

Our 2013 paper identified this trend:

“We can definitively state that there is no evidence of increasing normalized tornado damage or incidence on climatic time scales.”

At the time, we hypothesized that the decrease may be due to an actual reduction in severe tornado incidence.

However, because economic data should not be used to infer trends in related climate variables, we suggested that any such trend in tornadoes would depend upon analyses of climate data.

More than a decade later, tornado data is strongly suggestive of an overall decline in the incidence of the strongest tornadoes.

The figure below shows the annual count of F3/EF3 and stronger tornadoes from 1975 through 2024, the period with the most consistent data quality.

The time series shows a clear decrease in major tornado incidence. The 1975–1984 decade averaged 49 F/EF3+ tornadoes per year; the 2015–2024 decade averaged 26 per year — a decline of roughly 46 percent.

Note that data available back to 1954 makes this decrease look much larger, but it is accompanied by questions of data quality.

The interpretation of this declining trend requires caution for several reasons. First, the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale, introduced in 2007, changed rating methodology, creating a potential discontinuity in the series.

Most analysts believe EF ratings are somewhat more conservative than legacy F ratings for comparable damage, which could contribute to the apparent post-2007 decline.

Second, improved public warnings and storm-resistant construction may have contributed to changing the nature of observable damage markers that drive intensity ratings, which are often established based on damage patterns rather than direct measurements of tornado intensity.

Neither of these caveats undermines the fact that there is no evidence of an increase in violent tornado incidence over the observational record.

The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report concluded with low confidence in the detection of any trend in tornado frequency or intensity at the global or regional level, and with low confidence in attribution of any observed changes to anthropogenic forcing.

The data reviewed here are consistent with that assessment.

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The Honest Broker is written by climate expert Roger Pielke Jr and is reader-supported. If you value what you have read here, please consider subscribing and supporting the work that goes into it.

Read rest at The Honest Broker

The drivers of warming and glacier retreat in Antarctic climates are not aligned with linear increases in atmospheric CO2. [some emphasis, links added]

Scientists (Park et al., 2026) have assessed that over the last four decades, the patterns of air temperature, sea surface temperature, and glacial retreat near King George Island (just north of the northernmost tip of the Antarctic Peninsula) align with the negative to positive phases of the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) and natural ocean-atmosphere interconnections.

Phases of cooling and glacial advances are mixed with phases of warming and significant glacial retreat, but neither follows a linear rise nor trend in greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientists identify an overall decline in glacial retreat rates from the mid-1990s until 2015, when “cooler phases slowed retreat.”

The study “demonstrates how coupled fjord geometry-ocean-atmosphere interactions govern retreat behavior.”

Human activity governs neither warming nor glacier retreat.

Elephant Island is situated just 130 km northeast of King George Island. It is home to a large volume of penguins and seals.

A recent study (Atkinson et al., 2022) reported significant (approximately -0.75°C) surface cooling across Elephant Island (purple) since the 1990s, aligning with cooling along South Georgia, the Scotia Sea, and the overall West Antarctic Peninsula in recent decades.

Read more at No Tricks Zone

CBS News’ “60 Minutes” targeted California’s high-speed rail project on Sunday, speaking to multiple officials about the project that has yielded little return since state residents voted in support of it in 2008. [some emphasis, links added]

CBS’ Jon Wertheim spoke to Rep. Vince Fong, R-Calif., Lou Thompson, who helped found Amtrak and served on California’s high-speed rail peer-review group until 2024, California High Speed Rail Authority board member Anthony Williams, and California Secretary of Transportation Toks Omishakin.

“We’re now in 2026. There are no trains. There’s no track laid. It was a complete bait and switch,” Fong told “60 Minutes.”

California voters approved nearly $10 billion in taxpayer funds via municipal bonds in 2008 for an 800-mile high-speed rail system connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles, which was estimated to cost roughly $33 billion.

The project, which began under former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, has been plagued by ballooning costs and delays, and Williams said the latest estimate of the cost to connect the two cities was over $125 billion, nearly quadruple the original amount.

[That’s “more funding than Amtrak has received in its history, and still leaves a shortfall of roughly $90 billion.”]

The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) said it expects trains to begin running in 2030, a decade after the Golden State’s initial goal.

CBS reported that the state was getting ready to lay down track for the project, but instead of Los Angeles to San Francisco, it will run about a third of that distance, connecting Bakersfield and Merced.

Omishakin acknowledged that mistakes were made in the project.

“There were mistakes made. Some of the criticism on this project, I think, is very fair,” he said. “I don’t think the voters fully understood — and neither did we in the public sector — what it was going to take to actually get this project delivered.”

Williams told CBS that the financing was not there to complete the rail when construction started.

“It wasn’t. Let’s be real. We had a lot to learn, we had a lot of growth to do, and, you know, it’s arguable whether we should have been clearer about that,” he said.

Thompson was asked by CBS’s Wertheim if he thought he’d see the system built in their lifetimes.

“I don’t know. I’m dubious. I’m dubious. Absent a national political will to work with the states to create some of these systems, I think it’s going to be in, of course, in my lifetime, almost certainly not. But maybe yours, I don’t know,” he said.

California’s high-speed rail project suffered a major setback after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the termination of $4 billion in unspent federal funding by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) in July 2025.

Citing 16 years of failure, no completed high-speed track, and escalating costs, Duffy declared the project at the time, dubbed the “train to nowhere,” a mismanaged and over-budget “boondoggle.”

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Top: Gavin Newsom announces the completion of the southern railhead facility for the bullet train to nowhere. Image via KBAX/YouTube screencap.

Read more at Fox News

Has there ever been an automobile feature as widely despised as the stop-start system that the Obama administration forced on the country? Unlikely. Which is why new federal action that kills the requirement is cause for celebration. [some emphasis, links added]

The “feature,” which is the wrong word for what’s truly a nuisance, automatically shuts off a car’s internal-combustion engine when it is idling at a red light or stuck in traffic. It restarts the engine when either the foot comes off the brake pedal or the accelerator is pressed.

The action is jerky — it too often feels like a minor collision — distracting and tiring, producing a driving experience that’s more wearisome than enjoyable.

It’s also likely that the system increases wear on a car’s starter and battery, forcing owners to replace them sooner than they otherwise would — though its few supporters claim this isn’t so.

The Obama administration coerced the industry into including the function in every new car to improve fuel efficiency and cut emissions.

Automakers weren’t required to make it standard, but it became a mandate of sorts in 2012 because the government gave them a credit for adding the confounded gadget to their lineups.

To the relief of many, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin eliminated the credit in February as part of the Trump administration’s unwinding of useless and counterproductive Obama-era environmental rules.

Last week, Zeldin followed up with an announcement that the Trump EPA had “removed the ridiculous climate participation trophy the Obama Admin created to get this hated feature installed. The incentives for manufacturers to make your car die at every red light and stop sign have now been ELIMINATED!”

It “is arguably one of the most annoying features of any new car,” says Motor1.com. Slashgear reports that the frustration caused by the function “is so severe that you can find ‘Autostop Eliminators’ selling online.”

“Some people (automotive PR folk and EPA representatives, mostly) will tell you that it’s a great idea, saving you hundreds in fuel expenses each year,” says CarBuzz.

“Others would like to reach through the dashboard and rip the control module out with their bare hands to keep it from ever shutting the engine down at a red light again.”

Read rest at Issues & Insights

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Chevron on Friday in a case about whether a Louisiana environmental lawsuit can go to federal court. [some emphasis, links added]

In Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish, the justices said that the case is covered by the federal officer removal statute, which lets Chevron move the lawsuit from state court to federal court.

The justices threw out a lower court’s decision that kept the case in state court and sent it back for more work. All of the justices agreed that the oil companies should be able to fight the lawsuits in federal court instead of state court.

“Congress has long authorized federal officers and their agents to remove suits brought against them in state court to federal court,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote.

The case of Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish, La., was about a very specific question: Could the oil companies move cases about environmental damage from state court to federal court?

But people who are suing over climate change damages, like climate activists and state officials, have been paying close attention to the case because state courts are thought to be more open to these types of lawsuits.

Justice Thomas said that the oil company had met the requirements to move the case to federal court because it was about oil production in Louisiana going back to World War II, when Chevron refined crude oil into aviation gasoline for the U.S. military.

He said that Chevron had shown that its wartime production of crude oil was connected to its wartime refining of aviation gasoline for the military, which was a federal priority.

Coastal erosion has taken away about 2,000 square miles of land from Louisiana since the 1930s. That’s about the same size as Delaware. …

Louisiana has a $50 billion master plan to protect its coastal land. This includes more than 100 projects to dredge sand, rebuild marshes, and add flood protection measures like levees and storm surge barriers. The plan is to make tens of thousands of acres of new land and protect what is already there.

Most of the money has come from a settlement that came after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, but that fund is running low.

Since 2013, local parishes, which are like counties in other states, have filed more than 40 lawsuits against oil companies, asking for billions of dollars in damages.

The parishes say that the oil companies have damaged the state’s coastline over decades of production.

They say that the companies have illegally drilled, dredged, and thrown away trash without the right permits.

HUGE: SCOTUS shuts down Louisiana’s effort to sue the energy industry in its corrupt state court system for its wartime production of oil. https://t.co/RS8q6RpVQ2

Republican Governor @LAGovJeffLandry and Republican AG @AGLizMurrill should run away from their failed effort to… pic.twitter.com/EBYWpLw8ti

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) April 17, 2026

Louisiana Republican leaders, even those who have supported President Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda, have backed the lawsuits. Both Republicans, Governor Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill, have backed the legal challenges.

Read rest at Conservative Brief

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has announced there were an estimated 1,504 heat-associated deaths in England last summer, apparently lower than they had forecast. [some emphasis, links added]

‘What heat-associated deaths?’ you might well ask. I doubt whether any death certificates recorded heat as the cause of death. And how can they be so certain that the number is 1,504, and not 1,503 or 1,505?

Strangely, the UKHSA has only been publishing these statistics since 2024. One might therefore reasonably presume that this is just another scare story to sell net zero.

After all, they never publish excess death statistics for spring and autumn when the death rate is much higher.

Weekly figures show a steady decline in deaths throughout the summer.

The table below is compiled from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) weekly registration of deaths data (bear in mind that registration is around a week after the date of death).

As weekly registrations are affected by bank holidays, I have calculated averages per working day, i.e., excluding bank holidays:

There is a little blip upwards in Week 18, w/e May 2, which almost certainly is a catching up of the backlog over Easter. Another blip in Week 35, which included the August bank holiday, is probably due to extra registrations crammed into the four-day week.

But the overall trend is unmistakable. From the end of winter onwards, there is a steady, uninterrupted decline in daily deaths, until they resume their upward trend in the autumn.

So, where do the UKHSA get their number from? Having identified a ‘heat episode’, they explain:

“The up-to-28-day baseline period for each heat episode is then identified, comprising the 14 non-episode days before and 14 non-episode days after, up to a maximum of 28 days away from the heat episode.

“The estimate of observed heat-associated mortality for each heat episode is calculated as the difference between average daily deaths during the heat episode and average daily deaths during the baseline period, multiplied by the number of days in the heat episode.”

The ONS has looked at this topic in great detail on more than one occasion. In their most recent study, they looked at the scorching summer of 2022. Their findings were absolutely clear:

In short, people who were already close to death died a few days earlier than expected. It was not the heat that killed them, but their underlying disease.

As the UKHSA admits, the recorded cause of death in these cases was typically circulatory disease, cancer, and dementia. The heatwave did not kill them any more than an April shower or a cold winter’s day.

To make matters worse, the UKHSA methodology doubles down on their estimating, because they are comparing against the following 14 days when death rates are lower than normal.

Far from people dying because of heat, far fewer die in summer than at any other time of the year. It is cold that kills, not heat.

Read rest at The Conservative Woman

Decades of careful grooming of incurious journalists designed to whip up a non-existent climate emergency have failed to halt a dramatic continuing collapse in mainstream media stories backing the net-zero fantasy. [some emphasis, links added]

Last year saw a 14% global slump in climate-related stories compared to 2024, which was already 38% down on peak Greta hysteria in 2021.

Perhaps there is only so much that once-trusting consumers are prepared to read, let alone pay for, identical, narrative-driven drivel that is often so one-sided that it is an insult to the intelligence.

Exhibit 1: The BBC’s October 2023 classic – Climate change could make beer taste worse.

The greatest declines over 2025 were found in Africa, the Middle East, and North America. Interestingly, the failed Amazon COP30 meeting in November 2025 was followed the month after by coverage falling off a cliff in Latin America (-61%), Oceania (-52%), and the European Union (-41%).

A period of private grief seems to have given the long-suffering public a merciful break from the relentless cacophony of climate catastrophizing.

Annual report

News of the continuing decline in climate change and global warming coverage is contained in the latest annual report from the Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

To produce its latest findings, MeCCO tracked the volume of newspaper, wire services, radio, and TV climate stories across 59 countries and seven regions. The work is said to have used a consistent methodology since 2004.

The graph below shows clearly the spikes in the Greta hysteria around the start of the current decade, and the earlier Gore grift that followed the release of his ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ film.

University journalism courses often run climate modules, but prospects for aspiring students looking to make the world safe for net-zero fanatics do not look good.

The Guardian can only do so much, but in the UK, coverage was 34% down in the 12 months to November 2025.

In the USA, the sackings have started with a vengeance.

Last year, new managers at CBS News removed most of the climate crisis team. Recent reports suggest that everyone on the climate beat has now been binned. In February 2026, the Washington Post cut 14 climate writing positions, leaving only five journalists in place.

Last year was a bad time for the climate groomers that are largely funded by Green Blob billionaires seeking societal upheaval by depriving modern (and developing) industrial countries of vital hydrocarbons.

Groomed journalists working in narrative-driven mainstream media are seen as key to driving up fear of the invented climate crisis.

One of the first lessons taught to useful idiot fearmongers is that the opinion, often incorrectly referred to as a theory, that humans cause most, if not all, recent climate change is ‘settled’.

The incurious are not encouraged to ask if this is the first scientific opinion to be declared settled, or at least the first since the Roman Popes of old adjudicated ex cathedra on these matters.

Laughable

In the UK, the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) is a respected industry-based charity that has operated since the 1950s. But its climate change training is laughable.

In what other investigative fields are journalists encouraged to rely on a claimed ‘consensus’, and encouraged not to disclose alternative views? What quicker way is there, it might be asked, to replace the writer with an AI tool?

Funded by the Google News Initiative (GNI), the NCTJ offers a free e-learning course on climate change reporting. As with all climate-science-grooming agitprop sessions, there is a warning about avoiding ‘false balance’.

In effect, this means denying publicity to sceptical scientists who investigate opinion by following the time-honoured process of scientific falsification.

Read rest at Clintel

Everybody knows fossil fuels cause climate breakdown, but until recently, mention of them was all but erased from the annual UN climate summits. Last year, two weeks of discussions ended without fossil fuels being mentioned in the final outcome.

Frustration with those talks led a small developing country with a large fossil fuel sector – Colombia, the largest coal and fourth biggest oil exporter in the Americas – to rewrite the rules. With co-convener the Netherlands, and support from more than 50 countries, Colombia will host a groundbreaking new global conference this month to begin the long-awaited “transition away from fossil fuels”.

Now, with nations embroiled in another oil-inflected war and fuel prices soaring worldwide as a consequence, the conference in Santa Marta on 28 and 29 April looks more prescient than ever.

Countries are paying the price for oil addiction, not just in their energy bills but in food prices, consumer inflation, shortages, and businesses threatened with collapse. “We, of course, didn’t know that war was going to break out, but we knew the challenges of a dependency on fossil fuels,” said Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s environment minister, who will preside over the talks. “This conference comes in the best possible moment.”

The oil crisis, sparked by the US-Israeli attack on Iran, is spotlighting the stark choice world leaders face between oil, gas and coal and the cleaner, safer renewable energy of the future. This is “the moment in which history is going to split,” said Vélez.

Spurred by soaring prices, some countries – and millions of individuals – are already making the switch. Record numbers of households in the UK are turning to solar panels, electric vehicles and heat pumps. Not counting China, global power generation from coal and gas has fallen, while renewables have surged ahead, with solar generation up 14% and wind by 8%. After the closure of the Hormuz strait, coal-fired power generation fell in the US, India, EU, Turkey and South Africa, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, despite fears that countries would return to coal.

For the first time, the countries that want to forge ahead with the energy transition cannot be held back by the naysayers, Vélez told the Guardian in an interview. With a “coalition of the willing”, Colombia and co-host the Netherlands hope to break the deadlock of the long-running UN climate talks that are frequently hijacked by the unwilling.

While 54 countries have confirmed their attendance at the conference, some of the world’s biggest economies and biggest polluters, including the US, China, India, Russia and the Gulf petro states, will be missing. “Whatever nations have not yet taken that decision, then this is not the space for them. We are not going to have boycotters or climate denialists at the table,” Vélez said.

The 54 countries confirmed represent about a fifth of global fossil fuel production and about a third of demand. They include the UK, the EU, Canada, and Australia and Turkey, which will jointly preside over the next UN climate summit, Cop31, this November. Among the dozens of developing countries confirmed are some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis, such as Pacific islands, but also major fossil fuel producers, such as Nigeria, Angola, Mexico and Brazil.

Tzeporah Berman, founder of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said the Santa Marta conference, intended to be the first of a series, would complement rather than replace the annual UN summits. “The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC] plays a vital role in climate governance, and will continue to do so,” she said. “However, it’s a consensus-based process and has become deadlocked on the core issue of fossil fuels. Year after year, we’ve seen this deadlock exploited to delay meaningful action on fossil fuel supply.”

Governments first agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels” at the Cop28 UN climate summit in Dubai in 2023, but have taken no further steps to decide what such a transition could look like or how to embark on it.

For Vélez, that failure comes down to an unwillingness to take the risk of change. But sticking with the status quo carries its own dangers, she said. “There is a lot of energy stress [owing to the Iran war], there is energy scarcity and it’s going to be very difficult for the energy market, and the oil market particularly, to recover any time soon,” she said.

Fossil fuel dependency also leads to war and global conflict, and countries must put themselves “on the right side of history” by moving to alternatives, said Vélez, a former minister of mines.

“[The Iran war] is making explicit what the difficulties of the fossil fuel model are,” she said. “There is a straight line of connection between the fossil fuel economy and armed conflicts at the global scale.”

Governments are at “un parte caminos” according to Vélez – a fork in the road.

Colombia has decided to stop licensing new coal, oil or gas exploration, and is aiming to develop other industries (including renewable energy), focus more on tourism and boost agriculture. “We want to invite people to be on the right side of history,” Vélez said. “The right side of history is to go greener, to go more sustainable, to go more interconnected. [These decisions can be] challenging in terms of energy provision, but are the best and maybe the only way for humanity to survive.”

Other countries could cooperate with and learn from Colombia, she added. “This country has made a very brave decision [to stop new licensing]. The reason is we should make economic decisions away from extractivism [reliance on the extraction of resources] into what we call economics for life.”

Yet some of the participants, including Norway, Mexico and Nigeria, are planning to expand fossil fuel production in response to the Iran war. “The risks of fossil fuel dependency have literally exploded in front of us,” said Claudio Angelo, head of international policy at the Observatório do Clima thinktank in Brazil. But he warned the climate crisis was slipping down the lists of government priorities – a tendency that the conference “has to counteract”.

Finance to help developing countries make the switch to clean energy will be key for many. “[It’s important that] this conference focuses on the tangible, designing a financial mechanism that can actually reach out to our shores, securing technology transfer that doesn’t come with debt and building economic pathways that allow nations to choose their people over oil reserves,” said Maina Talia, from the government of Tuvalu, at a press conference organised by Climate Home News.

Carola Mejia, of the climate justice network Latindadd, said the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine had led to an alarming shift in government spending priorities. “International cooperation financing decreased 21% in one year due to the military budget increases prompted by war,” she said. “Santa Marta must be a milestone for a future based on peace and solidarity.”

This month’s conference will be just the start. The main tangible outcome will be a report by scientists – “some very rock star academics,” according to Vélez – on how countries can make the transition, and one from finance experts from the Global South on how funding can be made available to countries that need it. A second conference is already planned for next year, in Tuvalu.

Colombia and the Netherlands are also convening a “people’s summit” within the conference to ensure Indigenous peoples and marginalised groups are heard. The organisers expect 2,800 representatives from Indigenous, African-descendant, youth, women and other social movements.

Oswaldo Muca Castizo, general coordinator of the National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon, said, “Indigenous communities are demanding a strong voice at Santa Marta. Many stress the energy transition must be fair to prevent their lands from being exploited for critical minerals or carbon credits. Some want territories to be declared fossil-free zones with extra protections for isolated peoples.

“The mechanisms being used in transition are often not fair. Sometimes, the opposite. Indigenous people are at ground zero. We have to be a fundamental part of the conference.”

A recent article from the climate desk at Philadelphia’s WHYY news titled “‘Fingerprint of climate change’: April heat wave could break a record in Philadelphia,” claims that warm temperatures in the Mid-Atlantic this week are evidence of long-term global warming. [some emphasis, links added]

This is false.

While it is true that average, long-term global temperatures have modestly increased since the Industrial Revolution, heatwaves like those forecast for the East Coast are not evidence of any emergency, and also are not becoming more frequent or severe.

A high-pressure ridge in the Atlantic Ocean is causing warmer air to sweep up the Southeastern United States and Mid-Atlantic states, bringing a springtime heatwave.

That’s a short-term meteorological event, which is normally referred to as weather, not a long-term change in the average temperature and prevailing conditions for a region, which is climate.

WHYY News says “climate analysts say these hot temperatures fit into a trend of warming spring weather,” quoting a researcher at the climate action advocacy group Climate Central, saying the heatwave has a “fingerprint of climate change,” as proof.

Indeed, some data indicate that spring weather conditions are arriving a few days earlier in recent years than they did a hundred-plus years ago in some locations; however, this does not mean that severe spikes in temperature are the drivers of those changes.

In fact, it is a less severe cold driving the trend, not more severe warmth.

For example, the article and Climate Central point to Philadelphia, PA, as one of the regions expected to see unseasonal warmth this spring, saying, “Since 1970, Philadelphia’s average spring temperatures have risen roughly 3 degrees, according to Climate Central.”

They say that climate change is what “makes this week’s high temperatures in Philadelphia twice as likely, according to the organization’s Climate Shift Index, which uses models to compare today’s world to a world without human-caused carbon pollution.”

There are major flaws and bad science in this reasoning.

Data show that temperatures for the entire state of Pennsylvania have only increased on average by around 2 °F since 1900, meaning that Philadelphia’s 3 ° F of warming since 1970 (if we assume Climate Central is correct) is higher over the past half-century than the average for the state as a whole over the past 125 years.

This is actually not a surprise, and it has nothing to do with “human-caused carbon pollution.”

The higher warming rate in a city like Philly, like with other highly urbanized regions around the country, has everything to do with increased population density and associated development, producing the urban heat island (UHI) effect.

This UHI effect was recently described by both an analysis of urban temperature stations in extremely hot places like Reno, Nevada, by meteorologist Anthony Watts, as well as broader, summertime satellite-based measurements of temperatures by Dr. Roy Spencer, who found between the years 1895 and 2023:

[f]or the average “suburban” (100-1,000 persons per sq. km) station, UHI is 52% of the calculated temperature trend, and 67% of the urban station trend (>1,000 persons per sq. km). This means warming has been exaggerated by at least a factor of 2 (100%).

This analysis was for summertime temperatures, but what’s true of summer is true of spring because the built-up, heat-retaining environment is the same.

Additionally, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) state climate summaries show that heat spikes are not getting more common.

Rather, the slight, long-term rise in temperatures is due to days and nights with extremely low temperatures becoming less common, and nighttime temperatures (which are particularly influenced by UHI) are modestly warmer than they were a few decades ago.

Indeed, data indicate that instances of extreme warmth are actually less prevalent today than they were in the mid-twentieth century:

Climate Central and WHYY fail to reference any real-world data, opting instead to simply assert without providing proof that it is warming in general.

Instead of data, they point people to an attribution study that compares two models of the world—both fictional, both loaded with assumptions on the part of the researchers and other climate scientists—to prove climate change is causing heatwaves.

Models are not data, and, as such, attribution studies don’t provide evidence of warming.

Climate Realism has discussed many times why it is invalid to use a model that assumes what it is setting out to prove: that climate change is responsible for any given weather event.

Base models, which these attribution studies rely on, have failed to accurately predict real-world temperature change, and the vast majority of supposed extreme weather trends they predict have failed to materialize.

Just as a single month’s unusual cold is not proof that the planet is cooling, a single month’s unusual warmth is likewise not some “fingerprint” of a climate emergency.

It is shameful that WHYY and other media outlets do not undertake some basic research before publishing alarming climate stories. Referencing long-term data would result in a fact-based and nuanced scientific view of weather.

Instead of harming their audience, they produce hyperbolic stories based on fearmongering grounded in unscientific attribution modeling done by groups like Climate Central.

A week of warm weather after months of dreary early spring cold is hardly alarming and certainly provides no evidence that catastrophic climate change caused by humans is underway.

Read more at Climate Realism