Examining ESG

This week I published a special focus piece The problems with "These haunting underwater photos portray climate change in a new way"  to illustrate the gullibility of some artists and how no due diligence is done on apocalyptic climate claims. Significant West Antarctic Cooling in the Past Two Decades Driven by Tropical Pacific Forcing . Most Of Antarctica Has Cooled By Over 1°C Since 1999, W. Antarctica Cooled 1.8°C. Of 28 CMIP6 models, none captured a cooling trend – especially of this amplitude – for this region. This modeling failure “implies substantial uncertainties in future temperature projections of CMIP6 models.” The 1999-2018 mean annual surface temperature cooling of the Antarctic continent and nearly half of the Southern Hemisphere’s SSTs do not support the claims that surface warming is driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). An Assessment of ERA5 Reanalysis for Antarctic Near-Surface Air Temperature   Scientists Find ‘Statistically S...

 Some people can be gullible. All artists are people. Some artists can be gullible.  A tidy little syllogism, but real-world examples abound. Consider the recent article  These haunting underwater photos portray climate change in a new way  Photographer Nick Brandt did a series of photos underwater to draw attention to the supposed dangers of climate change, one photo essay in a series he is doing. Here is a sample photo. From the article (bold is added): The stunning portrait is one in a series of images in “SINK / RISE,” the latest project from fine art photographer Nick Brandt. The photos feature South Pacific islanders representing people who are on the brink of losing their homes, lands and livelihoods due to climate change. And despite the difficulty of photographing them on the ocean floor, Brandt knew that’s what he had to do. The dramatic and devastating impact sea level rise will have on the lives of millions of people can be difficult to see and grasp in...

 This week in science we have the contrast between the infamous island of Tuvalu which is supposedly at risk of being flooded by rising seas, yet is actually growing in size (as are most similar islands), an article examining the enormous bias that comes when you only examine one side of a story, and a fascinating study finding that ocean microplastics are created around volcanic ocean vents. In the category of Investment/Economics we have articles discussing the need to choose between costly and ineffective climate policies and helping actual people suffering from poverty, then news of ESG-linked debt coming under pressure. In Absurdities, read about how if you want a study to show how EVs are cleaner than previous research, you simply make unjustified assumptions about carbon intensity. Climate Change: A Curious Crisis    The fundamental problem with the climate crisis narrative is that it is simplistic and gives us only one side of the story. It largely expunges all th...

This week in science we do a fairly deep dive into recent studies of the known problems of land surface measurements and their bias and unreliability over time. Such measurements are often used to support the claim for dangerous man-made global warming, yet every time you carefully dig deep into the numbers you find an abundance of scientists who express caution about such interpretations.  In the investment/economics category, we have a substantial collection of recent articles focused on greenwashing, portfolio manipulation for ESG reasons, and even research showing that companies with higher CO2 emissions have higher returns.  Finally, in the theatre of the absurd, we have a look at the irrational ideas of multiple climate-related tipping points. Happy reading! Although urban areas occupy only about 4% of the land surface, most weather monitoring stations are located in urban regions. Those same regions have an abundance of concrete and asphalt, which have remarkable heat-a...

We sometimes see news articles proclaiming the virtues of wind and solar-generated electricity in a specific region. The example is chosen to highlight how good wind and solar are at providing electricity that is claimed to be "renewable" in some way. Not only does the idea of renewable ignore that it is an industrial process requiring immense mining projects and is very capital intensive, even the energy claims are usually false when examined in their full context. Consider this article:  Portugal powered solely by renewables last weekend  from November 1, 2023. The article was short but included this text, and I have made a few words bold to highlight what is misleading: Portugal relied solely on renewable energy last weekend, particularly wind and hydroelectric power, to meet electricity demand. It generated 172.5 GWh of renewable electricity and consumed 131.1 GWh between Friday night and Monday morning. Wind contributed 97.6 GWh, hydroelectric 68.3 GWh, and photovolta...

This week in the science category we have social science research about attitudes towards climate change and the remarkable thing is that religiosity is the dominant determinant of attitude. Hmm, it sounds like people who believe in things science can never support often apply the same to their attitude about climate change. Go figure.  In the Investment/Economics category, we have a focus on the misuse of Levelized Cost Of Electricity (LCOE) to represent the cost of adding wind and solar electrical generation to the electrical grid. Such misuse is widespread, yet investment managers are fiduciaries and expected to do proper due diligence in their security analysis. If they can so often be ignorant of a concept like LCOE, you wonder what other errors they have accepted in their thinking. In the Absurdity category we have the novel idea of "green coal" and a Canadian political leader backing down on carbon taxes after insisting they were necessary to save the world. The ‘Holy ...