Peter Clack

The Little Ice Age was a period of regional cooling (spanning roughly 1300 to 1850) driven by a combination of natural factors. The primary underlying causes were explosive volcanic eruptions and reduced solar activity, which were then sustained for centuries by self-reinforcing changes in ocean and sea ice circulation. The main drivers and perpetrators of this cooling included heightened volcanic activity, frequent, and massive volcanic eruptions (like the 1257 Samalas eruption in Indonesia), which injected massive amounts of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere. These particles reflected incoming sunlight back into space. The period coincided with several Grand Solar Minima—most notably the Maunder Minimum (1645–1715)—when sunspot activity dropped to near zero, resulting in lower amounts of available solar radiation reaching Earth. According to climate models, the initial cooling from volcanoes caused Arctic sea ice to expand. Because bright ice reflects more sunlight than dark ocean water (the albedo effect), this further cooled the region. The influx of melted Arctic ice altered ocean salinity and density, which in turn weakened the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (often known as the Gulf Stream), keeping heat from traveling northward. Some researchers speculate that vast human depopulation events (such as the Black Death and the devastating epidemics in the Americas after European contact) allowed large areas of farmland to undergo reforestation. This regrowth absorbed significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, slightly reducing greenhouse gases.

Comment prétendre avec une certitude absolue que le CO2 est la cause du réchauffement récent quand on n'a que de vagues hypothèses pour expliquer l'épisode climatique juste avant l'actuel: le Petit Âge Glaciaire? Moi je prétends qu'on en sait moins qu'on pense.

@jacksonto888 @AlexTaylorNews These are the real life problems many people struggle with, aren't they. Another that I often think of is the rise of urban emptiness, social breakdown via anomie, and the dismantling of family as the one-time cornerstone of human society.

@PeterDClack @AlexTaylorNews Cities now more populated with tall buildings cramped together which will make heat retained. Trees are being removed as well which makes less shaded areas in cities.

If you don't think we're burning up our planet, you're an idiot ... and that goes for US Presidents and other populists telling people to "drill baby, drill"

None of that is true McDonkey, I'm afraid. Reality will tell you that a temperature change of 1.4 degrees over 175 years will not make a breath of difference to anything on planet Earth. There are no overheating problems for wildlife (your side abandoned the wildlife decades ago), and no glaciers are making storms more destructive (where did you find that one?)

@PeterDClack It seems more like a miscalculation than a stroke of luck, but it actually confirms the change. It could be a lifeline, but rising temperatures are also affecting wildlife, and melting glaciers are making storms more destructive. Can't you see it on satellites?

Harsh climate scenarios have spent decades painting Earth's likely future landscape as dystopian, dark, barren and forbidding. Yet, recent physical data argues exactly the opposite. Instead of plunging the planet into chaos, it's becoming eye-catchingly greener - and CO₂ is the key. The formal models predicted a scorched planet, but NASA satellites unleashed a world that is biologically thriving. This silent miracle of global greening isn't some theory, it's the physical reality captured by the orbiting space platforms; MODIS instruments on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. This is how these jarring narratives have been unfolding: * Official Climate Narrative: Rapid, systemic desertification and global canopy loss due to rising temperatures. * Hard Reality: Persistent structural greening across more than 30% of the global vegetated area over the last two decades. * Official Climate Narrative: CO₂ acts strictly as a destructive atmospheric pollutant driving extreme weather. * Hard Reality: CO₂ is plant food, driving down stomatal conductance, making plants use water more efficiently and expanding the leaf area index. * Official Climate Narrative: Global food supply chains are on the verge of climate-driven collapse. * Hard Reality: Agricultural yields bolstered by CO₂ fertilisation are expanding green cover in semi-arid zones like the African Sahel and Western Australia. Plants are not passive victims of these often fudged climate waystations. Increased atmospheric carbon should be a blast of rich green reality. Higher, more robust CO₂ is not a death sentence - which is what they argued. It allows vegetation to open their pores (stomata) less, yet absorb the same amount of carbon. This drastically reduces water loss through transpiration. It's why the world's arid desert regions are blooming and the fragile living desert is raging into life - plants are also becoming more drought-resistant. This oft-neglected climate resurgence reveals that the biosphere is its own self-regulating flywheel. A massive global expansion of leaf cover is already visible from space. Official computer models consistently fail to mention it. Nevertheless, a vividly coloured renaissance is dutifully taking place, sweeping away all doubts.

@Signof4 @Isaiah20221176 Carefully researched answer Steve...

@PeterDClack @Isaiah20221176 Do you remember when it was claimed DDT was good for you, smoking didn't cause lung cancer and drinking alcohol could make you a better driver? I'd put your sermon on the benefits of excessive CO2 caused by dirty fossil fuels in that category.

@Raymond26773481 This is very broad ranging and interesting Raymond.

Liberals excel at cycling through doomsday narratives, quickly pivoting when one scare fades or gets inconvenient—abandoning yesterday’s urgent crusade for today’s shinier threat. Remember the 1970s–80s “save the whales” hysteria? Whales were supposedly doomed by evil industry, with celebrities and activists demanding total bans. Protections worked in many places, populations recovered in key species (like humpbacks), yet the apocalyptic rhetoric moved on without much self-reflection. Similarly, “tree huggers” warned of imminent deforestation Armageddon and the total loss of rainforests by the year 2000—yet global forest cover has stabilized or grown in many regions thanks to technology, markets, and better management, while the panic shifted to “climate emergency” as the new existential threat. This pattern repeats: global cooling in the 70s → acid rain → ozone hole → mass starvation → global warming → climate catastrophe. Each time, the solution is more government control, wealth redistribution, and lifestyle restrictions—rarely acknowledging human ingenuity, adaptation, or when predictions failed. It’s less about consistent evidence-based stewardship and more about perpetual crisis as a political tool. Yesterday’s sacred cause becomes today’s afterthought once the funding, attention, or narrative utility dries up.

We are told that hydrocarbons are a stain on history. But before fossil fuels, humanity was entirely at the mercy of a harsh world. Life before modern energy was exactly as Thomas Hobbes described it: 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'. Coal and oil are the core reasons modern civilisation exists at all. They ended the backbreaking human servitude and primitive toil, provided reliable warmth and built the physical infrastructure that protects humanity from the elements today. When you see maps of Europe painted in apocalyptic blood-red, accompanied by insults for anyone who asks questions, you are looking at pure marketing - this is not science. Behind the panic dialogue lies a profound ignorance of deep geological time and human history. The transition to modern energy didn't corrupt a pristine world; it lifted human hope out of subsistence poverty. It built modern medicine, sanitation and transport, and paradoxically made us vastly more resilient to a harsh world. The irony runs deep. Carbon dioxide, now labeled a pollutant, was the foundation for the rise of life, the catalyst for oxygen production and blind architect of the miracle of photosynthesis. Without it, multicellular life would not exist. Look at the actual data. For the vast majority of the Phanerozoic Eon (over the past 541 million years), Earth's average temperature sat between 18°C and 26°C. Today's global average is around 15°C. Geologically speaking, we live in a remarkably 'cool' era. We are also still living in the Quaternary Ice Age, enjoying a brief, 11,700-year warm holiday climate known as an interglacial period. The roughly 1.4°C rise seen since 1850 was a natural recovery from the brutal icy depths of the Little Ice Age - not the ignition of a planet. Yet, the institutional campaign of absolute climate panic—now roughly 38 years old—has successfully morphed a complex scientific inquiry into a massive, centralised economic torrent. The futility of fighting these natural cycles comes at an astronomical economic cost. According to global consulting firms like McKinsey, the forced top-down transition to Net Zero is projected to cost $9.2 trillion every single year through to 2050. That is a staggering global total of $275 trillion. This isn't about saving the planet. It's a massive, top-down redistribution of wealth away from sovereign nations and into an opaque, tangled bureaucratic web of managed funds. It is being driven by a self-serving activist hardcore within the UN. Fear has been hijacked to replace physics, fracturing global stability for an outrageous multi-trillion-dollar quest for power.

@PassagePress @TJ_Harker Mass hysteria, now fuelled by the internet and multiple levels of an information deluge.

Today we are proud to announce the release of American Scapegoat: How a Corrupt Justice System Sacrificed Derek Chauvin to the Mob by former federal prosecutor T.J. Harker (@TJ_Harker). Six years ago today, George Floyd died while in custody of Minneapolis beat cop Derek Chauvin, sparking the most destructive riots in our nation's history and becoming the pretext for an era of mass political hysteria that threatened to rip apart the very fabric of American life. Cities burned. Floyd's body was paraded around in a gold casket. Every institution was made to bend the knee to BLM. Ordinary white Americans, represented by the person of Derek Chauvin, were called to account for three centuries of racial grievance. All most Americans saw of that day was the grainy cellphone footage of Officer Chauvin's knee restraining the back of George Floyd's neck. Few bothered to learn any other details about the case, and by the time the trial rolled around, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. An innocent black man had been killed by a racist white cop, they were told. And for America to atone for its original sins, that racist white cop had to pay the price. What they didn't know was that Chauvin's knee did not prevent Floyd from breathing. They didn't know Chauvin was following procedure by the book. They didn't know Floyd had taken lethal amounts of fentanyl minutes before being restrained. They didn't know Floyd had a pre-existing heart condition. They didn't know the autopsy report had been revised under threat of professional harm. They didn't know the original prosecutor removed herself from the case after seeing all of the evidence. They didn't know the subsequent prosecutors had to abandon their theory of the case just days into the trial. They didn't know the prosecution never established a cause of death, let alone that Derek Chauvin was responsible. In American Scapegoat, author T.J. Harker breaks down what happened on that fateful day six years ago, analyzes the thousands of court documents manipulated and recontextualized to achieve the trial result Minnesota politicians demanded, and relives the trial itself in thorough, painstaking detail to definitively show that Derek Chauvin did not kill George Floyd. Never in modern American history has our justice system been so corrupted by public mass hysteria than in the case of Derek Chauvin. This is the story of that trial. This is the story of how a man was sacrificed to the mob. American Scapegoat is available for pre-order now. Coming Fall '26.

@porti35451 Made possible by fossil fuels....

@PeterDClack Discrepo amablemente. Si el petróleo por si mismo fuera fuente de riqueza Venezuela sería una potencia mundial ya que tiene la mayor reserva de petróleo. Lo que dio un impulso a la humanidad fue la llegada del capitalismo pasamos de la carreta al avión en el término de 40 años

@MareIntern 475 million is correct... A conservative figure....

@PeterDClack (…) of 475 million wild animals yearly? Show a reliable source or correct it. The fight against climate agenda that cripples my country is serious and pulling numbers and narrative out of a hat, does not help.

They bulldozed vast stretches of the living Amazon basin for a crude highway to help shuttle 50,000 delegates to COP30. This was November 2025 - and modern civilisation was crashing the party of an ancient rainforest in order to save the planet. It was a profound environmental insult already shrouded in the past. Instead of global outrage, its an enduring scar. The road access debacle carved a 13km wound directly into the bloodstream of the protected Belém Environmental Protection Area. A causeway of lifeless red dirt was driven through dense green jungle, as mud-caked excavators sputtered under the banner of summit preparation. This was progress on the march. But this isn’t just 'any' jungle - and it was a real highway only for a moment. Now the 'Avenue of Liberty' is a tawdry access road for the drug cartels, illegal loggers, and opportunistic cattle ranchers. Cash crops like soybean and oil palms are also eating the jungle alive. The legacy of this crime are the fragmented habitats and a massive localised spike in fresh roadkill (in a country losing 475 million wild animals yearly to roads). The global elite descended on Belém, lectured the world on the environment for a few days, then flew away. The bureaucratic class got their photo-ops, but the ecosystem was left permanently changed, and powerless local indigenous peoples were left to rue their shrinking homelands. Now, no one even bothers to remember. It's just another example of the biodiversity nuisance getting in the way of progress.

@Stillwa32737642 Thanks...

@PeterDClack I always enjoy your posts, Peter - beautifully written!

@Preporhtnasim The climate scheme has nothing to do with science. It's sheer propaganda by the socialists running the UN, and the greedy asset managers, investment schemers and the utterly brainless leaders in the dying light of western life.

@PeterDClack The vast majority of scientists, using the scientific method, say differently. If 95 scientists said ice was unsafe to walk on & 5 said it was..I might risk walking on the ice..but not with my kids..You?

@RichardPaving The 'unborn people'? What are you on?

@PeterDClack This greening is unfortunately the proverbial canary in the CO2 coal mine. It is on its back with its legs in the air. But it's okay to enjoy it if that's what you like to do. The unborn people of the future may not exist if we carry on with our selfishness though.

@chuzbucket You are well judged in your choice of a fictional name. The dying of the light won't affect you.

@PeterDClack Last I checked, climate change has produced many examples of dry, barren, brown landscapes. AND nice green tropical ones. As predicted decades ago, CC increases precipitation AND evaporation. No surprise that CC deniers cherrypick the pretty examples.

@x22Report110 It means the people behind this entire charade have no clue about climate on our blue green world. They are obsessed with their own agenda of one world government.

@PeterDClack In short, parts of the planet are becoming greener in some ways, but that doesn’t contradict climate risk models or mean the system is uniformly “thriving.”

@salingergregor Pathetic ... Inaccurate... Unchecked... Misleading...

one reason why climate change denial isn't a thing really in Europe (some right wingers deny its human cause tho) is because Europe is the place which has heated up the most and will further have about 2x as much temperature rise as the global average unless the AMOC slows down

@ralph_jreinhard That is not what i said. Take your lies elsewhere...

You are right: “Human energy systems changed faster than the old models thought possible.” Who would have forecast the tremendous cost declines in solar, wind and battery technologies, or the rapid rise of EV cars and trucks? Who would have predicted that China would become the global leader of the transformation… Time to adjust the basic assumptions of the scenarios, right?

The IPCC has now explicitly acknowledged that their own forecast of a 5°C future driven by human emissions is no longer credible. It is the baseline trajectory of our world 'no longer'. This dire forecast was quietly dropped because human energy systems changed faster than the old models thought possible. Over the last two decades, trillions of dollars in capital allocation, global treaties, national regulatory frameworks, and corporate ESG metrics have been anchored to a one-dimensional climate model. That model says bluntly: we are headed down a species-ending climate black hole. But as technical experts increasingly point out, the extreme catastrophe scenarios used to justify these sweeping economic changes are actually highly implausible. They create a massive belief gap and an erosion of authority. Why should anyone believe the sweeping mandates just because 'they say so?' The picture remains muddy because the IPCC writes by massive consensus, which blurs their language. It is indecipherable to almost everyone. They won't use a blunt word like 'implausible' in their public summaries because they want to guard against unexpected Earth-system feedbacks—meaning us. To maintain political and financial momentum, it is much easier for the IPCC to quietly reclassify its worst-case scenario as a low-likelihood 'stress test' in the fine print. Yet it's keeping the public-facing rhetoric largely unchanged. They stopped short of calling these futures completely impossible. Instead, they changed how those scenarios are meant to be used, moving them from 'business-as-usual' to extreme high-risk outliers. The scientific community is moving to confirm this lack of clarity. Climate scientists designing the next generation of models for the upcoming IPCC Seventh Assessment Report have openly discussed dropping the old extreme scenarios because real-world trends have made them indefensible. Instead, the technical focus is shifting to a new baseline that peaks much lower, around 3°C to 3.5°C, even under a hypothetical rollback of clean energy policies. The public narrative still lags behind this technical realisation—the institutional river keeps coasting on the momentum of the older, hotter models. In other words, they refuse to openly admit it. When a policy goal transforms from a flexible, data-driven scientific inquiry into a rigid moral directive, it stops reacting to new evidence. If the 1.5°C or 2°C targets are treated as absolute baselines, then admitting they were calculated using flawed or overly pessimistic assumptions threatens the entire administrative structure built to police them. It creates a strange paradox: the data says the extreme 5°C future is off the table because global energy dynamics changed. Yet the bureaucracy insists the crisis is more urgent than ever, and the mechanisms must remain in place. Nothing is clearly stated anymore. When the language of science is adopted by a centralised bureaucracy, clarity is the first casualty. It was replaced by consensus-driven wording designed to protect the institution's mandate rather than reflect shifting real-world data. The original assumptions diverged significantly from reality. Specifically, those old 5°C models wrongly assumed there would be a five-fold expansion of coal use through 2100, effectively replacing other forms of energy with coal. Real-world exponential growth in solar, wind and electric vehicle adoption, alongside tightening global policies, made that massive pivot back to coal an impossibility. The bureaucracy simply exploits fear of natural feedbacks to justify keeping a human-emission model they already know is broken.

@SS9weatherman I prefer not to be your old chap. My text is fully correct. If you say there is an error, what is it?

@PeterDClack Read the full report old chap?

This is absolute truth. What's your problem? The IPCC has now explicitly acknowledged that their own forecast of a 5°C future driven by human emissions is no longer credible. It is the baseline trajectory of our world 'no longer'. This dire forecast was quietly dropped because human energy systems changed faster than the old models thought possible. Over the last two decades, trillions of dollars in capital allocation, global treaties, national regulatory frameworks, and corporate ESG metrics have been anchored to a one-dimensional climate model.

@PeterDClack Fear mongering