Examining ESG

Imagine you are a leader for a company that manages investments or insurance products, and you have spent a bunch of money adding ESG/sustainable/responsible and the like capabilities to your stable of money managers. You also added ESG overlays to all your other management teams, paid consultants to design and implement all this and put ESG prominently in your marketing. Then, the investing public, financial advisors, and regulators started to recognize the deep errors and biases in the whole ESG movement, and found that much of the terminology you used, the claims you made, the marketing materials you created and the products you offered were firmly based on false scientific claims, false economic benefits, false social values and in fact were terribly harmful to humanity. Might some reputational, regulatory, and even legal damages follow? This blog is an effort to persuade Canadian and international investment managers to tread much more carefully before adopting ESG and similar ide...

  Apples, Oranges, and Normalized Hurricane Damage - An incredible data error in a paper celebrated by the IPCC offers a science integrity test for climate science. When the IPCC AR6 and the Sixth US National Climate Assessment (USNCA) chose to highlight just one 2018 study of normalized hurricane damage from among more than 70 similar studies, one of the authors of many of those studies, who is also co-author of the very methodology for doing such studies, dug into the highlighted study to understand how it reached conclusions so different from every other study in the literature.  What he found was that the 2018 researchers had attached a recent data series, that had not been through peer review, to a long-term data series that had been thoroughly peer-reviewed, and that the recent data series had already been identified as having severe flaws. The researcher has written to the journal that published the paper to ask for a retraction and also to the lead author of the...

This week in Science we have a few angles on temperature records, starting with the long term where it is shown that solar system changes dominate, the short term of the last eight years are spot on the 30-year mean, another example of how measurement data has been "adjusted" to change a cooling trend into a warming trend, and a de-bunking of the idea that 2023 was the hottest year ever. In the Investment/Economics category we have a philosophical look at DEI/ESG interactions, ESG in decline, a look at hydrogen, and climate death manipulated data. In Absurdities, we have climate change being racist, and all the safety rails on roads would need to be replaced due to the heavy weight of EVs, just another massive un-considered cost. SCIENCE  The Phanerozoic climate  "We review the long-term climate variations during the last 540 million years (Phanerozoic Eon). We begin with a short summary of the relevant geological and geochemical datasets available for the reconstruction...

This week we have a batch of science, including a dive into the greenhouse effect and how CO2 change has not affected it, a low CO2 climate sensitivity, CO2 fertilizing and greening the Earth, and recent low cyclone activity.  In the investment/economics category we have the high cost of climate alarmism, ESG manager exodus, the failure of plastic bags, ESG bait-and-switch, the woke investing disaster, net-zero modelling errors, stealing with solar, and DEI captures scientists.  And finally, in the theatre of the absurd, $4M cost per green job, the giant footprint of urban agriculture, and the fantasy of battery locomotives. SCIENCE Revisiting the greenhouse effect – a hydrological perspective and commentary at New Study Finds The Post-1900 CO2 Rise Has Not Discernibly Altered The Greenhouse Effect  "Variations in the greenhouse effect are predominantly modulated by water vapor and cloud cover. CO2’s role in the greenhouse effect is so minor it cannot be discerned." The a...

This week in the Science category I bring you the tantalizing possibility that hydrocarbons may have not only a biogenic origin, but an abiogenic one, where hydrocarbons are created at high temperature and pressure deep in the Earth, followed by a review of research purporting that the vast majority of scientific papers support the man-made global warming hypothesis, then data on cyclone and burned area trends. Under Investment/Economics we have articles on climate safety denial, alternative energy reality checks, ESG fund trends, wind and solar sick days and opposition to a battery plant. For Absurdities this week I bring you the Extinction clock, rapid-wearing EV tires and boiling testicles.  Check it out. SCIENCE Abiogenic Deep Origin of Hydrocarbons and Oil and Gas Deposits Formation This chapter from the peer-reviewed book "Hydrocarbon" examines the rationale for the creation of hydrocarbons deep in the earth by a combination of high temperatures and pressures. This is ...

The Guardian newspaper is well known to be one of the most climate-alarmist papers. On the occasion of the 28th Conference Of The Parties (COP28), they published an article titled " The Climate Crisis Explained in 10 Charts " that provides an excellent series of examples of how to misuse statistics, omit full context, and demonstrate biases. Let's have a look at some of them. This post will look at some of the problems with just the first graph referenced by the Guardian, and their short text attached to it. Let's list the errors, omissions, and biases in this very small dose of Guardian information, and perhaps I'll show the extent of errors in other Guardian graphs in future posts. I do think examining just the first one tells you all you need to know about the likely quality of the rest, since it reveals a deeply untrustworthy source of information. Figure 1 - from the Guardian. Note that I take no exception to the data presented since it is an objective measu...

I have assembled some quotes from the intellectual leaders of the global warming alarmist movement and links to some recent articles. it is amazing how completely wrong they have been, and always in the same direction. While they forecast things getting much worse, they actually got much better. To preface all this, here is a quote from Alex Epstein, author, energy expert and philosopher, who studies how supposed experts lead us astray.   “Imagine if we had followed the advice of some of our leading advisors then, many of whom are some of our leading advisors now, to severely restrict the energy source that billions of people used to lift themselves out of poverty in the last thirty years? We would have caused billions of premature deaths  - deaths that were prevented by our increasing use of fossil fuels. What happens if today’s predictions are just as wrong?” “Today, proposals to restrict fossil fuels are more popular than ever.” Alex Epstein , The Moral Case for Fossil...

Two political documents were just published at essentially the same time, but with opposite intentions. One is all about liberating the human mind in pursuit of life-promoting energy. The other is about using government force to stop citizens, energy producers, and energy sellers from speaking freely the truth about fossil fuels. First, the good stuff. Not being American but Canadian, and being in favour of any politician or political party that has pro-reason, pro-human, pro-rights policies, it is wonderful to see the Republican National Committee come out with an energy policy resolution that is likely the best one ever crafted. You can download it using this link , but the full text is below. How inspiring to see such a statement published in a world that has such irrational ideas about energy and prosperity!  RESOLUTION SUPPORTING A TRANSFORMATIVE ENERGY FREEDOM POLICY FOR AMERICA WHEREAS, Affordable, reliable energy is essential to American and human prosperity because it giv...

This week in Science I bring you a fascinating application of stochastics to the question of cause and effect in the temperature-CO2 relationship, and the data shows that only a temperature-caused change in CO2 is supported, not the other way around as alarmists claim, meaning the entire climate brouhaha is again proven false, along with everything and all the insane policies that have sprung from it. As I constantly demonstrate, there is ample evidence from the scientific disciplines of physics, chemistry, astrophysics, mathematics, biology and other areas that there is no dangerous man-made global warming, no climate emergency or crisis, and that natural cycles dominate the climate. Anyone who cares to learn can easily find all this. Another article explains how official record-keepers constantly adjust past temperatures downwards to make it seem like greater warming has occurred – a most suspicious bias. In the Investment/Economics category, I have an explanation of how Biden’s LNG ...