It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

The above principle, stated by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, is one of the foundations of science, yet this seems to have eluded many in the world of climate science.

If rising atmospheric carbon dioxide is the primary driver of recent warming, we should expect relatively uniform warming across the months of the year. Carbon dioxide is a well-mixed gas; its radiative effect does not change strongly from one month to the next. The world’s longest continuous instrumental temperature record tells a different story.

The data and the method

The Central England Temperature (CET) series, maintained by the UK Met Office, runs from 1659 to the present and is the longest continuous instrumental temperature record available. For each calendar month I calculated the linear trend over two periods — 1659-2025 and 1850-2025 — and expressed the result as degrees Celsius per century. This produces 12 independent rates of change that can be compared directly. Because the same month is compared with itself across centuries, many of the practical difficulties that affect long temperature series (instrument changes, site moves, time-of-observation bias) are held constant.

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Full record: 1659-2025

When the monthly rates of change are plotted for the entire 365-year period, a clear pattern appears. March is one of the strongest warming, roughly 0.45-0.5 °C per century. June shows the weakest, around 0.05°C per century — more than eight times slower. Winter months (December-February) and October also warm relatively quickly; late spring and early summer warm far more slowly.

The industrial period: 1850-2025

Restricting the analysis to the modern industrial era produces higher overall rates, as expected. Yet the seasonal contrast remains. March still warms roughly three times faster than June. October and November now show the highest rates, both exceeding 1°C per century, while June remains the slowest of the 12 months.

What the pattern implies

The data confirm that central England has warmed. They also show a persistent, large difference between the warming rates of individual months. A forcing that is essentially constant through the year does not, by itself, predict that March should warm three to nine times faster than June. Seasonal differences can of course arise from other processes — changes in snow cover, cloud, atmospheric circulation or land-surface feedbacks. The magnitude and longevity of the March-June contrast therefore raise a legitimate question: is carbon dioxide the dominant control, or are other factors playing a larger role than the prevailing narrative assumes?

Limitations

CET is a regional series, not a global one. Linear trends calculated over centuries can still be influenced by earlier natural variability. Nevertheless, it remains the longest continuous instrumental record we possess, and the monthly pattern is robust across both the full series and the industrial subset.

The observations do not ‘disprove’ a role for carbon dioxide. They do show that the simple hypothesis — CO₂ as the primary driver producing broadly uniform warming — fails a straightforward test against the longest temperature series available. Something else is clearly at work.

For a longer discussion of possible physical explanations, see my previous article for the Daily Sceptic and my conversation with Tom Nelson:

First published on Stephen Andrews’s Substack page. Subscribe here.

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• “EU cost of living crisis: ‘the EU… deosn’t have a magic wand to make the price increases go away’” – The EU may not have a “magic wand” to make price increases go away, but abolishing 30% of household energy bills by cancelling the green energy transition might help, suggests Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That?

• “Poster child for green energy becomes emergency power buyer” – The Indian state of Tamil Nadu spent decades boasting about its wind power. Now, with turbines barely turning, it’s paying six times the usual rate for gas to keep the lights on, notes Vijay Jayaraj in the Washington Times.

• “Ten fastest depreciating new cars revealed – and nine are electric” – Nine of the 10 fastest depreciating new cars are electric, with one luxury model retaining just 27% of its value after three years, according to the Mail.

• “Destroying green in the name of green” – The radical green movement has hijacked the language of conservation and turned it into a sales pitch for the renewables industry, argues Vijay Jayaraj in the Patriot Post.

• “Kellogg’s removes rice from Rice Krispies” – Kellogg’s has taken the rice out of Rice Krispies and Coco Pops, blaming “changing weather conditions” for affecting the quality and supply of the grain, reports ITV News.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“LSE climate course recommends book promoting eco-terrorism” – A climate course on the compulsory list for first years at LSE recommends a book promoting eco-terrorism edited by an author who calls bombing oil pipelines an “act of love”, says Chris Morrison.

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First year students at the London School of Economics (LSE) are required to pick a compulsory course from three subjects of which the most popular is likely to be a waffle fest around transforming climate futures. The reading list for our weather-bothering future leaders looks rather exciting with a book edited by Jessie Kindig. This features essays on direct climate action including sabotage and eco-terrorism. The ground – and oil rig – breaking collection includes an introduction by Andreas Malm, whose 2022 book on how to blow up an oil pipeline discussed destroying industrial infrastructure rather than relying on peaceful lobbying and protest. Kindig also edited this odious if fantastical book and at the time said that “it’s immediately clear that destruction, sabotage and occupation are acts of love”.

This beauty went on to state that Malm’s writing “is always infused with a kind of hope, and that he shows us how militant action is, in fact, hope in its purest form”.

‘Hope not Hate’, to coin a hard Left mantra – one to go alongside ‘peaceful protest’ as nearby buildings are ablaze and ‘defund the police’ as looters run riot through the streets. For the Left, violence – except when committed by their opponents, naturally – is just an act of exquisite love.

Today’s students have been indoctrinated and brainwashed almost from birth with junk climate science and messaging that the world is on an unstoppable handcart to Hell. Why not feed them obscene texts that flirt with violence, destruction and terrorism. After all, why should they care about the rule of law when they have been told that they have no future anyway.

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• “NESO winter outlook” – In Not A Lot Of People Know That, Paul Homewood examines NESO’s Winter Outlook, which assures us that Britain won’t run out of electricity this winter.

• “Gone with the wind. German power goes from €13 to €315 a megawatt-hour in four days” – German power averaged €13 a megawatt-hour on Sunday, October 25th, when renewables briefly supplied more than the country used, but four days later the wind was gone, lignite and gas were carrying the load and the price averaged €315, reports Charles Rotter in Watts Up With That?.

• “Trump was right: study finds paper straws more harmful to the environment than plastic, contain carcinogens” – A South Korean study has found that paper straws may be more harmful to the environment than plastic ones across their full life cycle from manufacturing to landfill, with more than six times the carcinogenic impact, says Breitbart.

• “Bombshell: new climate study shows zero carbon impact on warming” – A new peer-reviewed paper using 500 years of data finds that the contribution of ‘fossil fuel’ carbon to rising atmospheric CO₂ is effectively zero, reveals John O’Sullivan at Principia Scientific.

• “Foxes, hedgehogs and climate change” – Nate Silver may be a forecasting genius, but, according to John Ridgway in Cliscep, his methods are built on shaky foundations – much like the climate models he’s so happy to defend.

• “It’s been 20 years since Inconvenient Truth and climate change is still questioned” – It’s not the fossil fuel industry that needs to be investigated – it’s lazy journalists who regurgitate the talking points spoon fed to them by the climate lobby, says Russell Cook at GelbspanFiles.com.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“How the climate-obsessed Lancet tortures data to push alarmist propaganda” – The Lancet’s 10th annual ‘Climate Countdown’ report claims 500,000 deaths each year due to climate change. But the underlying data show deaths to be falling, says Ben Pile. Enough with the modelled alarmist propaganda!

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For a decade, the formerly respectable and prestigious journal of medical science the Lancet has been producing an annual report of climate-related health metrics. The 10th Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change was published this week, and it again produces a number of headline statistics that drive the broader ‘climate crisis’ narrative. Such stats are invariably wielded by green commentators, not just to illustrate the urgent necessity of Making Energy Expensive Again but to show what hateful, morally grotesque, deplorable fiends we climate sceptics – without any medical and climate science qualifications between us – are. But how robust are the Lancet’s statistics?

The Lancet’s press release makes it plain that the work it does is intended to drive political action:

The 10th indicator report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change suggests that some of the health harms of climate change grew faster in the decade since the Paris Agreement entered into force (2016-2025) than in the previous decade (2006-2015) as climate action fails to keep pace.

“Fails to keep pace,” it claims. The Lancet’s Editor, Richard Horton, has in the past made no secret of his attempts to weaponise both health statistics and the cultural authority of medical science and doctors. After all, whom do you trust more: policymakers or paediatric oncologists? And so, if such selfless, disinterested people as those who cure cancer are telling you that the planet is boiling, then you better believe it. “The climate emergency is a more far-reaching public health emergency of international concern than COVID-19. It’s time to accelerate our actions towards decarbonisation, renewable energy, and a green recovery,” said Horton to an Extinction Rebellion protest in 2021.

So now we evil deniers are up against not only the seemingly overwhelming weight of evidence produced by climate science, we’re also pitched against the world’s top physicians. The intervention of doctors links the seemingly abstract and remote issue of climate change with concrete ‘climate impacts’: people are literally dying, according to this ‘science’.

“Annual average heat-related deaths rose by nearly 36% globally after the Paris Agreement was introduced,” says the report. “In 2023 alone, heat was linked to a record 710,000 deaths with more than 70% of that toll attributable to human-caused climate change.”

But how were these data produced, and what do they really say? The report states that “estimates [of heat-related mortality] for all countries” were “obtained by combining state-of-the-art meta-prediction models with yearly mortality estimates from the Global Burden of Disease study”. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study is an impressively extensive searchable database relating to health data of all kinds compiled by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. So we can obtain the raw data for ourselves.

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• “Amazon knows what really powers the AI boom – and it isn’t wind and solar” – Amazon is turning to natural gas to keep its servers running, notes David Blackmon for the Daily Caller.

• “Healey kills Miliband’s green power pledge” – John Healey has torpedoed Ed Miliband’s promise to deliver green energy by 2030 to bring down bills, reports the Telegraph.

• “NESO is playing with fire” – Disconnected leadership and statistical sophistry at NESO are putting energy security at risk, warns David Turver on his Eigen Values Substack.

• “On with the show at UN COP31” – UN climate conferences may be pointless, but they remain spectacles worth watching, says David Wojick at CFACT.

• “Net Zero climate policies carry a high price tag” – At the Heartland Institute, H. Sterling Burnett looks at a new study exposing the costs and damage caused by forcing drivers into EVs and pushing the electricity grid towards Net Zero.

• “Globalists’ climate grift returns in full force” – America has walked out of the UN climate racket, but the rest of the world hasn’t got the message, says Craig Rucker at CFACT.

• “Wool should be banished from Traitors’ wardrobes, activists say” – Animal rights activists are urging Claudia Winkleman to “be the shield animals deserve” by swapping sheep’s wool for “environmentally friendly plant-wool knits” on the Traitors, reports the Mail.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Skeptic on climate, conventional on Russia” – Rupert Darwall’s new book brilliantly dissects the climate juggernaut and its enablers – yet on Russia and NATO expansion, he swallows the Western consensus almost whole. Dr Tilak Doshi finds a glaring blind spot.

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The Age of Error and The West’s Undoing by Rupert Darwall (Encounter Books, 2026)

Rupert Darwall, previously special adviser to the UK’s then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont and currently Senior Fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics (NCEA), has spent the better part of two decades doing what few writers on climate policy dare to do: following the money, the meetings and the memoranda behind the West’s great green crusade. The Age of Error, newly published, is his most ambitious book (out of three) yet. It attempts nothing less than an explanation of why the West – with the significant exception of Trump’s America – chose to disarm itself economically, energetically and militarily at the very moment big-power geopolitics returned with a vengeance. The book is sweeping in its coverage of world events, learned in its focus on key issues, often brilliant in untangling the machinations that occur in the corridors of power. Yet, in one crucial respect, it is curiously conventional.

From Lehman to L’Aquila

Darwall’s age of error begins with the 2008 financial crisis. Elected politicians lost the authority to govern on their own account. Drawing on Bertrand de Jouvenel, Darwall argues that they recovered it by borrowing the prestige of experts: central bankers, climate scientists and public health officials. The result was what he calls “the co-dependency of politicians and experts with its command to ‘follow the science’”. Decisions migrated from parliaments to unelected committees (quangos in British parlance), and dissent became heresy.

The central bankers went first. Deficit financing and near-zero interest rates were supposed to restore growth; the Bank of England alone bought close to £900 billion of assets. Growth never properly resumed. What came instead were zombie firms, inflated asset prices, stalled productivity and, eventually, the inflation of 2021–22 that the monetary mandarins failed to see coming. Darwall reads this as a Keynesian conceit, the opposite of Schumpeter’s creative destruction of a vibrant capitalism. The real supply-side miracle of the period came not from Threadneedle Street or the Federal Reserve but from the shale fields of Texas and North Dakota, despite the Obama administration’s hostility to fracking.

Easy money had a further consequence. “Easy money begat ESG,” Darwall writes. Cheap capital disguised the true cost of capital-intensive wind and solar, while Wall Street embraced environmental, social and governance investing to buy itself a social licence after the crash. Mark Carney’s campaign to turn central banks into climate regulators, which I criticised at the time, and the fatal combination of central banking and ESG that followed, belong to the same story. Markets killed ESG in 2022, as Darwall wryly observes, although the regulators in the EU have not got the message, as I noted recently.

The intellectual spine of the book is the West’s abandonment of energy realism. Darwall contrasts the St Petersburg G8 of 2006 with the L’Aquila G8 summit of 2009. The 2006 G8 was the last occasion on which Western leaders spoke collectively as members of a fossil-fuelled civilisation focused on energy security. In 2009, the G8 inaugurated “an era of green Keynesianism”, promising emissions cuts of 80% or more by 2050 while claiming that green stimulus would deliver “sustainable growth”. “It was a jumble of policy incoherence,” Darwall writes. It was also a programme to replace efficient energy with inefficient energy, reversing the trajectory of progress since the industrial revolution.

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• “The ‘clean power for 2030’ pledge is vanishing before our eyes” – The goal of 95% clean electricity by the end of the decade has given way to a ‘we’ll-get-there-in-the-end’ sort of approach, says the Times.

• “Many happy returns: the Stern Review turns 20 and weather losses come in $2.8 trillion under its forecast” – Weather losses came in at 0.18% of world GDP in 2025 against the Stern Review’s projected 0.41%, leaving them $2.8 trillion short over 20 years, writes Charles Rotter in Watts Up With That.

• “America closes refineries while the rest of the world races to build them” – California’s policies did not reduce the state’s demand for refined products but simply moved the source of those products across the Pacific and into the path of a crisis on the other side of the world, say Ronald Stein and Yoshihiro Muronaka in Watts Up With That.

• “Germany’s green energy transition becoming increasingly expensive… another six trillion euros!” – In the No Tricks Zone, Professor Fritz Vahrenholt says that Germany’s green energy transition is becoming increasingly expensive, with another six trillion euros down the drain.

• “Brussels wants Europe ready for four degrees of warming” – The EU executive has declared that Europe must prepare for a rapidly warming continent, with Brussels now planning for four degrees of warming, says Paul Homewood in Not a Lot of People Know That.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Madame Otto and Her Computer Crystal Balls” – Fresh from a summer in Mystic Meg’s fairground tent, Imperial’s Friederike Otto has returned with her computer crystal balls to bring news that climate change killed exactly 32,619 people this summer, says Chris Morrison.

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Fresh from a summer season in Mystic Meg’s fairground tent, the weather attribution queen Friederike Otto has returned to Imperial College to bring news that 50,391 heat-related deaths occurred in 854 European cities in June, July and August, while 32,619 fatalities were attributed to human-caused climate change.

Such precision! A feature of all good clairvoyants, and a skill we might conclude is honed in the company of more commercially-minded soothsayers. Who needs doctors to tell us if we are dead and provide a certificated cause when Madame Otto is consulting in front of her computer crystal ball. Of course, the precise figures are not based on actual fatality data but are modelled estimates using population numbers and previous historical stats on temperature and summer mortality. In fact, data on historical mortality and temperature were only sought from 232 cities but, details, details! when a computer model can fill in any gaps.

The almost instant pseudoscience paper was written by, among others, several activists associated with Imperial including Otto and is titled ‘Heat-related urban mortality attributable to human-induced climate change in Europe in summer 2026’. As might be expected from a college with a world-class reputation for worrying everyone witless with computer modelled junk, its tone is highly political. At one point the authors claim that the world is “nearly” 1.5°C warmer without giving a checkable timeline, while “around” 1.4°C is attributable to human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels. There is not a scintilla of convincing scientific proof to back up this latter claim. In the opening abstract, the authors state that their results highlight the threat from human-caused warming “and the need for rapid emissions reductions”.

In other words, the need for the Marxist-inspired Net Zero fantasy. While this evil, little understood project was all the rage a few years ago, these days it comes with a much wider understanding that a world without hydrocarbons is a world facing starvation and mass death, along with societal and economic collapse. Don’t be poor in this brave new world.

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• “Senior Greens warn party being taken over by pro-Palestinian activists” – Senior Greens are warning that their party is being taken over by pro-Palestinian activists amid public criticism and internal division following the vote on Zionism, notes the Times.

• “Germany, France pushing to abandon climate neutrality goals for cars” – Germany and France are pushing to abandon climate neutrality goals for cars, according to the Detroit News.

• “Net Zero cable approved by Labour despite threat to wildlife” – Labour has approved a Net Zero cable linking Kent and Suffolk despite fierce opposition from locals and warnings it will destroy wildlife areas, reveals the Telegraph.

• “Will we always have Paris?” – In the Spectator, Douglas Murray writes that Art Basel’s shipment of some of the world’s most valuable art arrived just in time for Paris to go up in flames.

• “Stackers, make room: the Telegraph diaspora is coming” – On Substack, Laura Dodsworth says stackers must make room because the Telegraph diaspora is coming.

• “Clean energy projects face veto if they raise bills via wasted wind” – Ministers will veto new clean energy projects that add to Britain’s multibillion-pound wasted wind bill and push up electricity costs, reports the Times.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“The Climate Skeptic Podcast | Episode 68” – On this week’s episode, Laurie sits down with Marcel Crok, the veteran Dutch science journalist and co-founder of Clintel, to discuss his life and times exposing decades of shoddy climate science – from Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ graph to Climategate and the IPCC’s implausible doomsday scenarios.

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Implausible, by Chris Morrison (Free Speech Press, 2026)

Movements obsessed with the imminent end of the world have recurred throughout history. They all share the conviction that Armageddon will be caused by the sins of humanity, and that only self-flagellation will propitiate the angry gods. They’re usually fixated with coercing others into the same mindset.

In the past these movements were religious in nature. God, or any god, they claimed was enraged by evil human beings who therefore needed punishing. We, however, live in a secular age. The present orthodoxy has been recast in a bizarre contemporary conflation of pseudoscience and religious fervour to create a unique variant on ancient and medieval mentalities. “Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” (George Orwell, 1984.)

Chris Morrison’s Implausible is a short book (100 pages) which these days, when a gnat’s attention span is about the most any author gets, is a good idea. The cover has some wonderful headlines from recent years. My favourite is the Guardian’s ‘Joanna Lumley says wartime-rationing could help solve climate crisis’ (October 26th 2021). What’s next? Climate Crisis Precautions wardens berating residents with a revived “Put That Light Out!” and “Turn That Boiler Off!”?

Apart from the prelims and end matter, Implausible has five chapters on “Hydrocarbons”, “Climate Science”, “UK Met Office”, “Net Zero” and “Climate Clots and Comedians” (the latter including such luminaries as George Monbiot and his litany of date-locked apocalyptic predictions that have never come to pass). The book is, if you will, an exposé of a phenomenon Charles Mackay described in 1841:

Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) (Chapter on Crusades)

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In the Foreword, Toby Young says: “Reading it will make you angry — and you should be angry, very angry. But you’ll also be very entertained.” His take on Chris Morrison’s theme is that “the climate agenda is a thinly disguised power grab by the lanyard classes, determined to assert control over the unruly masses who are proving stubbornly reluctant to give up their sentimental attachment to freedom”.

The whole ‘climate crisis’ all made sense to me when I realised it’s about a very small number of people making a vast amount of money out of, and controlling, everyone else.

Toby’s words could easily be applied to how medieval aristocracies sought to control the peasantry, or how the Victorian landed, political and commercial elite kept the working classes on a tight leash. Plus ça change.

One of the problems with a book like this is that it’s difficult to imagine a screeching eco-protester or a self-righteous Green MP or councillor buying a copy, let alone reading it or being converted. In our polarised era it’s increasingly difficult to have a reasoned debate about anything.

Morrison kicks off with the bombshell that on April 7th 2026 the “United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted that a set of computer model assumptions commonly known as RCP8.5 were ‘implausible’”. It thereby fired a missile right through the Armageddon stories fuelled by its “high emissions worst-case scenario” that we have been bombarded with by armies of credulous journalists and the Met Office among others for the last few decades. This is important because the whole ‘climate crisis’ cult was only ever going to falter if its own proponents start giving up on it.

Morrison bears down on the meretricious consequences of the RCP8.5 assumptions. “Easily convinced politicians have been taken in by invented claims, and Net Zero rules and regulations have flowed through the economy and society.” Result? Among other outrages, British consumers are now stumping up an extra £200 billion on their electricity bills.

Sir David Attenborough does not escape Morrison’s attention. In 2022 the national hero and holy relic warned that the Arctic was on course to be summer ice free by 2035. But it’s been stable for 20 years now, says Morrison, who points out that polar bears are currently on a roll and mysteriously not teetering into extinction.

To that we can add the mysterious failure of Antarctica to be ice-free by 2023 as well as the apparent downright ignorance of past fluctuations like the high of 1964 not matched again until 2014, or the low of 1966 matching a recent dip. This seems to be a common feature of today’s pseudoscience: an inclination to regard any recent deviation from the mean as unprecedented and of weapons-grade significance.

Like so many people of my age I can vividly recall the insistent predictions (including from my teachers) in the early 1970s that the oil was about to run out, the atmosphere was about to be unbreathable and overpopulation would all conspire to bring about a collapse of civilisation.

The funny thing is that pseudoscience is most likely to be peddled by people who claim to be scientists. Morrison homes in on the problem:

Over the last few years, the implausible pseudoscience of individual weather attribution has taken hold, driven in part by the need of lawfare activists to pin bad weather on industrial operations. This involves comparing two imaginary atmospheres with different levels of CO₂ and producing a computer model finding that an individual weather event is X times more likely to be caused by humans.

Next a fusillade of press releases is sent out to credulous, copy-hungry journalists desperate to fill their bulletins. I can bear witness to that because a long time ago in another galaxy far, far away, I used to work for BBC radio news. Slow news days are always the most dangerous. The hacks reach out for the pile of press releases sent in by charities, political spin-doctors, publicity-hunting commercial concerns, and – of course – ‘scientists’ of every conceivable hue desperate for prominence in their fields.

The next thing you know is that something which might never have been a story has been propelled into people’s homes, often terrorising children, and taken on a life of its own. The whole edifice of scientific publication has been consumed by a movement to suppress anything which diverges from the Holy Writ of the impending end of the world. Citing several chilling examples, Morrison observes:

There is certainly a ‘consensus’ in much mainstream climate science publishing – a consensus of fear that unless the agreed narrative is followed, the chances of publication tend towards zero.

The message might be shifting, something that Morrison mentions. On Friday October 23rd 2026, Radio 4’s Six O’Clock News covered Storm Austen and the damage it had wrought, as well as the prospect of two more storms to come in the following days. I listened with interest, waiting for the Usual Suspects, the BBC’s climate and environment correspondents Justin Rowlatt and Matt McGrath (the latter the recipient of a €100,000 award from the pro-green technology Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria apparently) to be wheeled out.

After all, these days there isn’t a rain shower or breeze we aren’t told was wildly worse than it would have been in the Good Old Days thanks to human-induced climate change. However, climate change went without mention in the bulletin and human responsibility for all our weather woes was ignored too. It was almost like listening to a programme from over 20 years ago.

Nonetheless, my hopes were dashed when a BBC Radio 4 Today presenter announced on October 26th 2026, “we do know however that the weather is getting more extreme”, continuing to peddle the eternal fiction that once upon a time the weather was stable, benign and predictable and only now has it taken a turn for the worse. Morrison cites the 17th-century weather observer Richard Shann and his enthusiasm for climate alarmism (I covered other examples from this period in Daily Sceptic in 2023). Fings ain’t what they used to be, goes the refrain. They never are, are they?

“Climate stability has never existed,” says CM, but “climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs”:

Political correctness is destroying many academic institutions which are turning into junk echo chambers peddling whatever crazy nostrums bring in the cash and garner mainstream attention.

This has coincided with a proliferation of academic institutions populated by intellectual 12 year-olds each desperate to blaze their way across the firmament.

Then there’s the Met Office, with its “bizarre methodologies and unchallenged hysterical weather claims” used to spread “the necessary climate alarm to promote Net Zero”.

Perhaps one of Morrison’s most convincing points also ought to be obvious:

Science is never ‘settled’ – what was occurring was a deliberate trashing of the scientific process for obvious command-and-control political motives. A vast amount of dark money was helping to gaslight entire populations to the extent that individuals were triggered into climate hysteria if anyone dared to dispute the settled doomsday narrative.

This is all fascinating stuff, and it’s delivered in a fast-paced and highly readable text. But is Implausible going to change anything? I’m no scientist, though I’ve long been concerned by the extent to which what I thought was the true scientific method has been submerged under a tidal wave of fake science and scientists who tell you things they ‘believe’, which instantaneously disqualifies them from being scientists.

My understanding was that in science you produce a hypothesis and then do everything possible to demolish it – as Mr Spock said (borrowing from Sherlock Holmes), “Once you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Instead, much climate science has been turned into a religion, characterised by dogmatic pronouncements that are declared to be infallible and unchallengeable truths rather than being tested to destruction (as Morrison points out, reminding us that these days dissenters are more likely to be criminalised).

There is nothing more divorced from true science. It’s been compounded by the BBC’s decision that “any dissent from [official climate orthodoxy] could be dismissed as too insignificant to be worthy of notice” (Morrison quoting the climate sceptic Christopher Booker). Morrison rightly equates that with the world of dictators.

No surprise then that Morrison likens climate catastrophism to other falsehoods that have proliferated across the contemporary Western world. Not least is the hypocrisy of those so keen to indulge the fancy that hydrocarbons must be done away with, unaware of what that would mean for their self-indulgent lives. Richard Hammond put this very well in an interview with the Telegraph recently:

How many people do you see sellotaping themselves to bridges to complain about cars, when they’re wearing clothes made from oil-based products? We need to be better informed.

To this one can add, among others, Morrison’s “the scandal that dares not risk being mentioned in the mainstream media” which is the destruction of balsa wood reserves in the Amazon rainforest. Why? Wind turbines need balsa wood cores because of its lightness, strength and load distribution in sandwich composites. I explored this further. There’s a move to substitute PET and PVC foams, but these are made with plastics manufactured from oil and require fossil fuels to provide the extreme heat needed for manufacturing.

That’s the paradox and it’s a central plank of Implausible. While a wind turbine generates electricity throughout its operational lifespan, creating its ultra-strong, lightweight blade structure demands vast quantities of oil-derived materials. And then there are the benefits of elevated CO₂ levels (which varied between two and five times more than today when vast numbers of dinosaurs ate forests for lunch), such as more and larger trees.

Even if Morrison is wrong and the climate-panickers are right, it’s beyond belief that billions of people could be sentenced for generations to doing without, all for the sake of trying to crank down average temperatures a degree or two by slapping concrete/balsa/PVC wind farms all over the place and manufacturing vast quantities of non-recyclable solar panels and batteries.

Do they really think the people of the 22nd century will thank the 21st for leaving them lumbered with all that debris? Especially if the desired effect never happens because even if it does (and it’s a big if) all the so-called planet-saving eco ‘stuff’ churned out from wind-turbine columns to EV batteries will by then have been slung into landfill sites which will probably have to spread to the Moon.

But that does epitomise the challenge for Implausible, despite the vast amount of detail Morrison has harnessed (only a micro fraction of which I have referred to here). So many people have absorbed the fanciful apocalyptic narrative and the need to adopt the modern equivalent of rain dances and self-flagellation that it peppers their everyday speech and behaviour.

Climate catastrophism has become a trope, a posture, the ‘right’ thing to talk about at parties, the excuse for everything. Now millions of people take it as a given that any deviation from the weather mean is invariably the fault of humans and that by quoting from climate catastrophism liturgy and indulging in futile gestures like buying heat pumps (‘we felt it was the right thing to do’ they trill as they hand over four time the cost of a boiler and replumb the house) the impending end of the world will be extinguished by a gale of virtue-signalling.

Changing minds, even getting people to question anything, is a tall order. Implausible is a necessary book, if only because as a polemic it’s a suitable counterfoil to the polemics produced in yet another an age of insanity, so I wish it well, but it’s an uphill task.

Morrison leaves the reader with two explanations:

Rank stupidity bred of decades of dumbed-down and politically biased education, or another concerted attempt by international hard-Left forces determined to destroy and remake society according to their own perverted ideological whims?

With predictions that AI will wipe out humanity within 10 years, and now Wes Streeting telling Britain to be ready for war in 1,000 days, thereby creating a nationwide shortage of tinned ravioli and wind-up radios, perhaps even the most fanatical proponents of climate catastrophism will find something else to fret themselves into a meltdown over and forget the weather. Maybe it’s all only ever been about terrifying everyone out of their wits to keep them under control.

Then, dreadful trumpet, sound the general doom!

Romeo and Juliet

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with numerous books to his credit, most concerned with the ancient world though his latest is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys (Abacus 2025).

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• “Re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic” – The Budget does little to tackle soaring energy costs, though hints of a retreat from Net Zero suggest the penny may finally be dropping, writes Mark Hodgson in Climate Scepticism.

• “England records its wettest week for two years after Austen and Boelo” – This week has been the wettest in England for two years after Storms Austen and Boelo battered the country – but parts of the South have remained in a drought, according to the Mail.

• “Wrong, AP and NPR: Europe’s 50,000 heat deaths are a computer-model estimate, not a real body count” – NPR claims that more than 50,000 Europeans died from heat this year, yet the figure is a statistical estimate from computer models and not a real body count, writes Anthony Watts in the ClimateRealism.

• “Same hospital, new label. Our World in Data finds a third of bilateral project aid is now ‘climate-related’” – A third of bilateral project aid is now labelled “climate-related”, which raises the question of how much pledged climate finance is simply the old aid budget with a green sticker on it, says Charles Rotter in Watts Up With That?

• “Wildfire trends: are fires becoming more frequent?” – At Clintel, Ralph B. Alexander looks at historical wildfire trends and questions whether fires are becoming more frequent or intense.

• “Whisper words of wisdom. Climate ASMR experiment finds no effect on anything, sees potential anyway” – A study has found that autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) made no difference to people’s attitudes or behaviour, yet researchers still claim the technique could help persuade people to go green, reports Charles Rotter in Watts Up With That?

• “Ideologues try their hand at ordering up an electrical grid powered only by ‘renewables’” – El Hierro’s much-vaunted 100% renewable grid has never managed more than 56% wind power in a year. So why are Britain and others repeating the same expensive experiment? wonders Francis Menton in the Manhatten Contrarian.

• “Colder and snowier than normal in the Northwest: this is not the El Nino pattern” – The US Northwest is running colder and snowier than normal in a pattern that is emphatically not the typical El Nino one, notes Cliff Mass on his weather blog.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“London is letting its bridges fall down to ‘save the climate’” – London’s bridges are falling down, and some are now closed indefinitely. Yet councils can find money for endless climate-saving schemes despite supposedly having none for bridges. This is no accident, says Ben Pile.

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Something of a row has broken out about charitable organisations deviating from their nominal purpose. According to a Times report by Juliet Samuel, charities that were seemingly founded to maintain London’s deteriorating bridges have instead been making substantial grants to Left-wing causes. Barrister Barbara Rich, however, has answered this criticism, pointing out that the law does not constrain charities in the way that critics imagine it should, and that the consequences of making it so might not be desirable. But pulling back from the detail of this debate reveals a much more intriguing picture about the state of Britain’s infrastructure and politics.

The controversy begins with the fact that some of London’s oldest crossings are decrepit. Hammersmith Bridge has been closed to vehicles since 2019 after defects were found in its structure. Albert Bridge has been closed since February this year for the same reason. London Bridge is closed to traffic for 12 hours a day for opaque reasons, seemingly related to Covid and climate change. These closures have caused traffic chaos in neighbouring areas in a very large city divided by a wide river, both north and south sides of which are very badly served by way of crossings. And things are even worse to the east. Critics ask why it is so difficult to maintain infrastructure, and even more difficult to build new capacity.

As a former East Londoner, and then as an economic refugee (priced out of London and moved to Kent), I have sympathies for these criticisms. Getting from East London to the south by car was very often a chore that would take the better part of the day, as if a cross-country journey, not a trip of less than 10 miles. Coming back from Kent to East London, or to the east of England, I’d find that occasional restrictions or closures of the Dartford tunnel or adjacent Queen Elizabeth II M25 crossings would send traffic between Essex and Kent into East London. These problems, in the most densely-populated parts of the country, force reflection on the question of whether Britain is in any sense ‘developed’ at all.

One of the fetters on the provision of adequate roads is of course the green agenda. Although the Silvertown Tunnel in East London was built in relatively short order and completed in 2025, plans for a Lower Thames Crossing to link Tilbury in Essex with Gravesend in Kent faced legal challenges from Green Blob funded climate and transport campaigners. These legal challenges used the government’s commitments to the Paris Agreement and emissions reduction policies to prove that plans were unlawful. Meanwhile, further inland, the new East London crossing imposed on East Londoners (who are already subject to charges for congestion and pollution) tolls of up to £4.20 each way for a car, which the Mayor believed would “control the numbers using the tunnel and stop an increase in congestion and pollution”, according to the BBC.

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• “Petrol drivers face threat of stealth tax raid to boost EVs” – Petrol drivers could be hit with a stealth tax to subsidise electric vehicles, with an official review proposing that fuel suppliers be forced to fund renewable energy, reports the Telegraph.

• “What emission reduction advocating economists get wrong about the real world” – Putting a price on carbon only works if there are emissions reductions which can be made, says Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That?

• “He who pays the piper calls the tune” – How ‘independent’ can a report commissioned by the renewables industry really be? asks Mark Hodgson at Climate Scepticism.

• “Germany’s green energy transition becoming increasingly expensive” – Germany’s green energy transition is becoming ever more expensive, with another six trillion euros now added to the bill, notes Prof Fritz Vahrenholt in No Tricks Zone.

• “EPA’s carbon repeal saves billions, protects energy supplies” – The US Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon repeal spares Americans a $160 billion charge for a temperature effect no one can measure, writes Vijay Jayaraj in Watts Up With That?

• “The core issues with ‘renewables’” – On his Substack, Stephen Andrews outlines some of the issues with the current renewable strategy.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Net Zero costs continue to climb in Labour’s budget” – Net Zero costs have continued to climb in Labour’s Budget, with tens of billions in subsidies being poured into renewables and other green boondoggles. We simply can’t afford it, says Paul Homewood.

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This article will look at what the new Budget has to say about projected Net Zero-related costs.

But first, a quick look at the fundamental numbers. You rarely see these spelt out in black and white by the media. They seem to be more interested in the minutiae of tax changes and political point scoring, consequently missing the bigger picture. This is, of course, exactly the sort of deflection the Chancellor wants.

You will hear a lot about ‘fiscal headroom’. I hate that term. It means that the Government can afford to spend and borrow more money. It is a dangerous fallacy. The UK is effectively broke and should be cutting spending, not increasing it.

I have prepared this very simple graph, comparing Public Borrowing forecasts at each of the last three budgets, using the data from the OBR:

Two things stand out like a sore thumb:

1. At each Budget, public sector borrowing was projected to steadily decline, year by year.

2. Each Budget consistently projected higher borrowing than the one before, certainly in cumulative terms.

Somehow, it was always jam tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes. The pot of gold is always just over the rainbow.

I recall George Osborne pulling the same tricks years ago. Don’t worry about the next year or two – everything would miraculously come right in the end – just don’t ask me how!

Just let these two numbers sink in. Two years ago in her first Budget, Rachel Reeves forecast borrowing of £336 billion between 2025-26 and 2028-29.

That figure has now risen to £478 billion – 42% more.

Does anybody still believe in jam tomorrow? If so, I have a bridge to sell them.

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• “John Healey to cut energy bills by scrapping green levies” – John Healey is expected to announce long-term plans to strip more green levies from energy bills and move them onto general taxation, according to the Times.

• “Get drilling! Tony Blair urges PM to give Rosebank green light” – Sir Tony Blair is piling pressure on Andy Burnham to back new North Sea drilling, reports the Mail.

• “Government’s own statistics show rising majority of public opposes Labour energy policy” – Sixty-one percent of the public oppose Britain producing less of its own oil and gas if it means importing more, reveals Guido Fawkes.

• “Villagers block wind farm from ‘ruining’ Hockney landscape” – Villagers have blocked plans for six wind turbines in the Yorkshire Wolds, according to the Scarborough News.

• “Marine fuels – the bill hiding in your next pair of shoes” – Your next pair of shoes may come with a climate policy surcharge that appears nowhere on the receipt but is buried in the cost of transportation and production, warns Dr. Lars Schernikau in Watts Up With That?

• “Why the prevailing climate change narrative is wrong” – On Substack, Stephen Andrews explains why the prevailing climate change orthodoxy is utter nonsense.

• “CBC’s ‘climate change’ false spook story about Canadian pumpkin harvests is all trick and no treat” – CBC News is blaming climate change for damaged pumpkin harvests in Canada, but the evidence doesn’t stack up, says Linnea Lueken in ClimateRealism.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Phase out fossil fuels, says BMJ” – Why is the Editor-in-Chief of the BMJ calling for the phase-out of fossil fuels and cuts in defence spending? When did this once prestigious medical journal become a Left-wing propaganda rag, asks Paul Homewood.

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Since it was first published in 1840, the British Medical Journal, now simply known as “The BMJ“, has been among the most influential and widely-read peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, famous for its publication of high-quality original research.

So it claims anyway.

It is a reputation that is quickly being trashed if the latest article by its Editor-in-Chief is anything to go by. Its title, ‘For the sake of both health and security: phase out fossil fuels‘, rather gives the game away that it is just yet another propaganda piece designed to scare us into giving up fossil fuels.

According to the article:

Summer is coming. While superpowers engage in forever wars; while nation states, rogue states and failed states flex their weaponry; while old alliances are abandoned and new ones forged; while our thoughts are consumed by security threats and our leaders dream of building military might; while the elite pray to new gods and dream of new worlds; while the growing ranks of undeserved and underserved poor people are too distracted, disempowered or disinformed to contemplate a better future; while the people tasked with securing our existence are conflicted by personal, corporate and national interests; and while we banish our greatest threat, the threat we must unite against, from our collective conscience, the forces of summer are breaching our planetary walls — and they bring annihilation.

Annihilation is a pretty strong word! The article then proceeds to back up these extraordinary claims with a handful of examples of ‘climate doom’, based on the flimsiest of evidence at best, cherry-picked and totally devoid of any context.

Indeed, it could have been written by the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt!

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• “Net Zero added £140.3 billion to our electricity bills. Nobody official counts it” – On Substack, Richard Lyon puts Net Zero’s price tag at £140 billion on Britain’s electricity bills and asks why nobody official is keeping track of what climate policies are costing us.

• “Britain will pay a high price for its doomed EV transition” – Investors have poured huge sums into the assumption that we would all have to plug in our cars and now stand to lose a lot of money, notes Matthew Lynn in the Spectator.

• “Sudden stratospheric warming, powerful El Niño combination may lead to extreme Europe cold, energy crisis!” – Sudden stratospheric warming combined with a powerful El Niño may bring extreme cold and an energy crisis to Europe, warns P. Gosselin at NoTricksZone.

• “UN climate panic rests on false scenario and buried past” – In Townhall, Vijay Jayaraj claims that UN climate alarm relies on outdated scenarios and ignores historical warm periods and the benefits of CO₂.

• “The climate blame game: when correlation becomes causation” – In America Out Loud, Mary-Jean Harris takes aim at a report claiming the “climate crisis” fuels sexual violence, child marriage and unintended pregnancy.

• “The new Alaska gold rush” – Alaska’s UKMP project is a potential new US source of copper, zinc and other metals vital to domestic supply chains, reports Duggan Flanakin at CFACT.

• “Indian collegian challenges EV ‘sustainability’ claims” – A CFACT collegian takes on the claim that electric vehicles are more sustainable than petrol-powered vehicles.

• “I have trust issues with Big Nature” – Too many nature charities are putting Left-wing activism before serving the causes for which they were founded, says Charles Moore in the Telegraph.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“How Green billionaires convinced the world to build thousands of useless windmills” – In the Daily Sceptic’s final exclusive extract from Chris Morrison’s new book on the ‘climate crisis’: trying to run a modern economy on windmills is insane, but eye-watering sums from green billionaires say it isn’t.

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Today we publish a final exclusive extract from Chris Morrison’s explosive new book that is shooting up the bestseller charts and sending shockwaves through both the ‘settled’ climate science community and the hard-Left promoters of the wicked Net Zero lunacy.

However many lies are told, the fact remains that running an electricity grid on intermittent wind and solar is for the surviving birds. Nothing beats hydrocarbons for providing almost instant power, a fact that is constantly glossed over by windy fanatics. Taking away hydrocarbon power and expecting a much larger grid, as yet unbuilt, to cope with all our energy requirements is a recipe for economic and societal collapse. Windmills have had a good run since they were first seen in the reign of Henry II (1154-1189), but in a modern industrial society they should be regarded as little more than a curiosity piece.

Without enormous cash subsidies, few if any practical entrepreneurs would invest in wind energy. According to Professor Gordon Hughes, a former political economist at the University of Edinburgh and senior energy adviser to the World Bank, green subsidies now account for three quarters of the price of electricity in the UK, while “the cost of Net Zero to the public is much higher than politicians are willing to admit“.

In a recent paper co-authored with Dr Lee Moroney, Associate Director of the Renewable Energy Foundation, it is noted that the British consumer has been forced over the last two decades to pay a staggering £274 billion (at 2025 prices) to support electricity generated from renewable sources. The numerous direct and indirect annual subsidies for the unreliable breezes and beams have risen from £0.2 billion in 2005 to £22.6 billion last year. That sum, suggest the authors, is expected to grow rapidly under current Government plans and could exceed UK defence spending by 2030.

Who will stop this out-of-control spending on a system that also requires the further massive expense of a full stand-by gas station network for what the Germans call dunkelflaute (rough translation: no frigging wind) and 18 hours of sunless winter nights. All subsidies and other distorting charges on gas considered, Hughes and Moroney state that for every £1 that electricity users would have paid in 2025, they ended up paying £3.90.

The next time someone lies to you that the price of electricity is set by gas, renewables are getting cheaper while energy security is just around the corner, it will be time to not only count the spoons but to audit the full cutlery canteen.

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