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December 4, 2025
A Huge Retraction, the Usual Playbook, and Reason for Optimism
Some huge news dropped today that will reverberate through climate science and policy. Nature has finally retracted “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change,” by Kotz et al. (KLW24), more than 18 months after first learning that the paper was fatally flawed, with the authors acknowledging that its errors are “too substantial” for a correction. It is not just the retraction…
December 1, 2025
THB Insider #28 – Thanksgiving Reading
It is Thanksgiving Day here in the US — My favorite holiday. Chez les Pielke we are getting ready to put the turkey in as the sun rises. We will have a big table of family and are looking forward to a fun day with family, football, food, and joy! Last year, on this day…
December 1, 2025
US Hurricanes 2025 in Review
For the first time in a decade, the continental United States experienced no hurricane landfalls.1 Islands in the Caribbean saw multiple landfalls [1], notably Hurricane Melissa’s landfall as a Category 5 storm in western Jamaica, which resulted in more than 100 deaths in the region and about $10 billion in losses. The usual media script was played —…
November 24, 2025
The Battle for Climate Science and Policy Past—And Why It Matters
Last week in Belém, Brazil the 30th Conference of Parties to the U.N Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) concluded with little accomplished, according to most observers. Perhaps the most significant accomplishment was formalizing a fully Orwellian characterization of the recent history of climate policy — See my post last week for why the UNFCCC characterization of moderating…
November 20, 2025
Reassessing the World’s Climate Victories: The Paris Delusion
In 2015 in Paris, countries from around the world agreed to accelerate the decarbonization of their economies in response to climate change. According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), implementation of the Paris Agreement over the past decade has been a runaway success story, moving the world away from what would…
October 21, 2025
We Already Have a Social Contract for Universities
The bad news for U.S. universities keeps on coming. Last week, Pew Research released the results of a September 2025 poll showing that increasingly large majorities of Republicans and Democrats believe that the country’s higher education system is moving in the wrong direction. In this broader context of public dissatisfaction with universities, the Trump Administration has offered…
September 24, 2025
More Problems with Australia’s National Climate Risk Assessment
When Australia’s National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA) was released last week, headlines such as the above announced that “climate change could cost Australians $40 billion per year by 2050.” It turns out that claim is demonstrably false. Let’s take a close look. The NCRA asserts the $40 billion cost on p. 102: The Colvin Review (2024) projected disaster costs…
August 12, 2025
The Climate Beat Goes On
Last week I was contacted by two reporters at the Associated Press with a request to comment on the Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group (DOE CWG) report and the proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to rescind the 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding: We’re Seth Borenstein and Michael Phillis, reporters on the climate and environment team at…
August 12, 2025
The Climate Conversation is Changing
Later this week here at THB I’ll be publishing two important pieces — one a guest post from a climate scientist on how his work was cited in the DOE CWG report and the other exposing a major scandal in climate research. Today, I share a big pile of recommended readings. We are all lucky to have…
August 5, 2025
Well Cited
Last week, a colleague of mine sent me a copy of an email that they had received from ClimateBrief, a UK-based advocacy journalism group. The email asked for examples of how their published research had been “falsely or misleadingly characterised” in the Department of Energy (DOE) Climate Working Group (CWG) report. That email began as follows:…