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March 27, 2025
Global Energy Demand Set to Accelerate
The International Energy Agency has just published its Global Energy Review 2025. In this post I share the five most important take-aways I see in the report. I encourage you to have a look at the full report for IEA’s interpretation of its top conclusions. Let’s jump right in . . . Have a look at the figure…
March 20, 2025
Is Single Extreme Event Attribution Even Possible?
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) currently has a study committee on Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and their Impacts. In this series — Weather Attribution Alchemy — I have previously discussed the committee’s many conflicts of interest. Today I discuss a crucial scientific question at the center of the committee’s work,…
March 12, 2025
“In Bad Faith”
The DC Court that heard the defaation case brought by climate scientist Michael Mann against two bloggers has ruled today that Mann and his lawyers acted in “bad faith” during the case, by presenting false claims on multiple occasions related to Mann’s grant funding: Here, the Court finds, by clear and convincing evidence, that Dr. Mann, through…
March 12, 2025
How To Get Rid of a Tenured Professor
I was a tenured full professor at the University of Colorado Boulder for almost 24 years. At the end of 2024, I left. Officially, it was a voluntary departure. But I sure felt like I’d been pushed out. My story started in 2015, when Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D–Ariz.) asked the university to investigate me. He alleged that…
March 11, 2025
Welcome to the Era of Energy Realism
Every year for the past 15 years, JP Morgan publishes an outstanding annual energy report by Michael Cembalest. Last week JP Morgan published its 2025 edition and today I share five important figures from the many in the report, which I highly recommend. Cembalest’s top line: [A]fter $9 trillion globally over the last decade spent on wind, solar,…
March 5, 2025
Climate Misinformation from the United Nations
I was speaking to a non-US non-climate beat reporter yesterday about undeniable issues of scientific integrity in climate science and he asked a question about the climate science community that got my attention: “And no one cares? Aren’t scientists supposed to care about such things?” Lapses of scientific integrity in climate science have become normalized….
March 3, 2025
Thinking About Tanks
Speaking yesterday on Fox News, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick indicated that official data for U.S. GDP would now separate out government spending from the rest of the nation’s overall economic tally. “You know that governments historically have messed with GDP. They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two…
February 27, 2025
Is the EPA “Endangerment Finding” Endangered?
Earlier today, The Washington Post reported that head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin, has urged the Trump administration to rescind the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases. The Post reports: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has privately urged the White House to strike down a scientific finding underpinning much of the federal government’s push to combat…
February 24, 2025
Why We Do the Research
One of the wonderful things about science is that research results cannot be consistently anticipated. That’s why we do the research. That research doesn’t always come out how we expect is particularly problematic for partisans who expect research to provide results in alignment with their political commitments. So you think hurricane landfalls have become more…
February 18, 2025
The Dilemmas of Democracy
In his classic 1960 book, The Semisovereign People, political scientist E.E. Schattschneider identified a dilemma of democracy: All of us are ignorant about most things, making each of us unsuitable to govern — yet we also have a belief that everyone should be allowed to participate in governance, with our political leaders chosen from among the…