The whole “net-zero by 2050” narrative that cranked up in earnest in early 2021 has now become a public relations problem for the climate-alarm movement, according to a senior official at the United Nations.
Chris Stark, the outgoing chief executive of the UN’s Climate Change Committee (CCC), said as reported by the Guardian: “Net zero has definitely become a slogan that I feel occasionally is now unhelpful, because it’s so associated with the campaigns against it. That wasn’t something I expected.”
As seems to always be the case among the globalist sponsors of this government-subsidized rush to saddle the world with unreliable power grids and short-range electric cars, the conversation among the leaders of the movement immediately moves not to perhaps reconsidering the approach to address public concerns, but to rejiggering the narrative. Stark recommends shifting the label and the narrative to more of a focus on investment and how renewables and EVs somehow improve energy security.
“We are talking about cleaning up the economy and making it more productive – you can call that anything you like,” he said.
That would be a neat trick, inventing a narrative about benefits that don’t really exist. But it wouldn’t be the first time it’s been tried.
At last November’s COP 28 conference, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres floated the term “climate collapse” as a new name for what the climate alarmists have successively called “global warming,” “climate change,” “climate crisis,” and “climate emergency.” Each successive label has been replaced as its cache’ with the public has faded; and apparently the whole “climate emergency” has lost its punch, so another fright narrative must be concocted.
The trouble there, of course, is that the climate is not collapsing. But then again, it isn’t in any sort of an emergency, either, or a crisis.
The climate is always changing, though, so at least the long-abandoned “climate change” label had the ring of truth to it. Maybe let’s go back to that and try to deal with something that is at least a real thing? But, no, that would cut down on the alarm and make it harder for political leaders to enact bad “solutions” and subsidize them with debt combined with skyrocketing utility bills for average citizens.
So, as Stark says, call it anything you want, just so long as it is alarming. Stark’s boss at the UN, Guterres, used the term “global boiling” to describe the current climate situation. So, maybe we change “net-zero by 2050” to “no bubbles by 2050.” That would at least have the advantage of some semblance of consistent thought.
A colleague suggested that we simply change the problematic label to “Stone Age,” since that is where we are heading if the alarmists continue to get their way. She has a point.
The most amazing thing about Stark’s concerns is that anyone is really surprised that “net-zero by 2050” has become a problematic term. How else would officials at the UN and other governments expect the public to react to what has become the umbrella label for a set of authoritarian government actions that have destabilized power grids, caused the cost of living to rise rapidly, reduced consumer choice, and begun to rob citizens in nominally “free” countries of their individual rights?
The central problem today with this climate change narrative is that it has gone on for so long that is has become a bit of a joke with an increasingly aware and skeptical public. And the reason they’re skeptical is not due to any disbelief in science, as the alarmists invariably claim, but because they have seen nothing but bad outcomes and personal deprivations from the alleged solutions being subsidized into existence.
Stark assures us that, “the lifestyle change that goes with this is not enormous at all,” but painful results to date tell another story.
If Stark were truly thoughtful and serious about wanting to deal with the increasing unpopularity of the “net-zero by 2050” construct, he would suggest that everyone take a step back and re-evaluate the nature and effectiveness of the solutions being pushed.
By merely advocating for the concoction of yet another shift in the narrative, a troublesome lack of sincerity is laid bare.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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“They say they will not be blowing up ships anymore, and that’s the purpose of what we were doing”
During a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and reporters Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. is ending its bombing campaign against the U.S.-designated Yemeni foreign terrorist organization, the Houthis.
“We had some very good news last night. The Houthis have announced… that they don’t want to fight anymore. They just don’t want to fight. And we will honor that and we still the bombings,” Trump said.
The Houthis began launching coordinated attacks on U.S. ships in the Red Sea in 2023. The Houthis have repeatedly conducted missile and drone strikes on American merchant and war ships since then, aligning themselves with Iranian terrorist groups and citing America’s support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a reason for the attacks.
Through an executive order signed on his second day in office, Trump re-designated the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization and began an aggressive campaign against them. Former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally included Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a Signal messaging thread containing details of U.S. strikes against the Houthis in March. The administration recently moved Waltz to its United Nations ambassador role and put Secretary of State Marco Rubio in charge of the National Security Council. Rubio will hold both positions.
Trump’s administration has repeatedly touted its victories against the Houthis as a sign of its strength, but Trump exhibited a slightly gentler attitude toward the group Tuesday.
“They have capitulated, but more importantly, we will take their word. They say they will not be blowing up ships anymore, and that’s the purpose of what we were doing,” Trump said.
Earlier this week the New York Post asked me to help its readers make sense of some surprising new research on ice dynamics at both poles. The new research appears in a new peer-reviewed paper and a preprint that was just posted.
At the South Pole, Wang et al. 2025 find a record accumulation of ice on the Antarctic ice sheet over the period 2021 to 2023, following a steady decrease from 2002 to 2021. The data comes from NASA’s GRACE series of satellites, which have the ability to precisely measure ice mass.
The figure below shows that the recent accumulation is small in the context of the multi-decadal decline, but is still characterized by the paper’s authors as a “significant reversal.” The paper makes no predictions of whether or how long the accumulation might continue.
At the other end of the planet, at the North Pole, a new preprint by England et al. identifies a “surprising, but not unexpected multi-decadal pause in Arctic sea ice loss.”¹ Their data can be seen below.
From the caption to the figure: “(a,b )Observed sea ice area [106 km2] 1979-2024, (c,d) 20 year-trends of September sea ice area [106 km2/decade] with varying end year from 1998 to 2024, in which the red shaded envelope shows the bounds inside which a linear trend is not statistically significant according to a t-test at 95% confidence.” Source: England et al.
Disucssing these new papers and their significance, my op-ed for the NY Post starts as follows:
When it comes to climate change, to invoke one of Al Gore’s favorite sayings, the biggest challenge is not what we don’t know, but what we know for sure but just isn’t so.
Two new studies show that the Earth’s climate is far more complex than often acknowledged, reminding us of the importance of pragmatic energy and climate policies.
One of them, led by researchers at China’s Tongji University, finds that after years of ice sheet decline, Antarctica has seen a “surprising shift”: a record-breaking accumulation of ice.
The paper takes advantage of very precise measurements of Antarctic ice mass from a series of NASA satellites called GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment).
Since the first GRACE satellite was launched in 2002, Antarctica has seen a steady decline in the total mass of its glaciers. Yet the new study found the decline reversed from 2021 to 2023.
Melting Antarctic ice contributes to global sea-level rise, so a reversal of melting will slow that down. Understanding the dynamics of ice mass on Antarctica is thus essential.
The recent Antarctica shift makes only a small dent in the overall ice loss from 2022, but comes as a surprise nonetheless.
A second new paper, a preprint now going through peer review, finds a similar change at the opposite end of the planet.
Antarctic ice has made a turnaround, scientists say, with an increase in ice mass after years of depletion.
Antarctic ice has made a surprising rebound in mass, scientists say
“The loss of Arctic sea ice cover has undergone a pronounced slowdown over the past two decades, across all months of the year,” the paper’s US and UK authors write.
They suggest that the “pause” in Arctic sea ice decline could persist for several more decades.
Together, the two studies remind us that the global climate system remains unpredictable, defying simplistic expectations that change moves only in one direction.
In 2009, then-Sen. John Kerry warned that the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free by 2013: “Scientists tell us we have a 10-year window — if even that — before catastrophic climate change becomes inevitable and irreversible,” he said.
Today, six years after that 10-year window closed, catastrophic climate change has not occurred, even as the planet has indeed continued to warm due primarily to the combustion of fossil fuels.
Partisans in the climate debate should learn from Kerry’s crying wolf.
On one side, catastrophizing climate change based on the most extreme claims leads to skepticism when the promised apocalypse fails to occur on schedule.
On the other side, studies like the two surprising polar-ice papers reveal climate complexities, but don’t prove climate change isn’t real and serious. . .
This last point is important — climate research is not a scoreboard in a Manichean debate, but instead offers certainties, uncertainties, and even areas of total ignorance that establish a nuanced context for developing robust mitigation and adaptation policies.
The rest of my piece discusses this context. Please head over to the NY Post to read the whole thing and then come back to THB and tell me what you think.
One bit of my original draft was cut for space reasons. Here is that part:
Core understandings of climate science have remained remarkably constant over many decades – Humans affect the climate system in many ways, including greenhouse gas emissions, but also through land management, air pollution, and vegetation dynamics. At a planetary scale the net effect of these changes – driven by carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, natural gas, and oil – is a warming of the planetary system. Anticipating regional and local consequences is far more challenging.
Irreducible uncertainties mean that climate variability and change are about risk management. As the late climate scientist Steve Schneider lamented in 2002, “I readily confess a lingering frustration: uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes, let alone provide confident probabilities for all the claims and counterclaims made about environmental problems.”
Risk management means that as we balance competing objectives in energy policy we should look for opportunities to reduce costs, increase access, ensure security and reduce the human influences on the environment.
The published version ends with may call for policy makers to keep their eyes on the ball:
The surprises revealed by the two new papers about polar ice also remind us that we need to be prepared for unexpected behavior of the climate system, regardless of the underlying causes of change.
History tells us that climate can shift abruptly, with profound consequences for society.
For instance, the 1870s saw a wide range of climate extremes across the planet, by some estimates contributing to the deaths of 4% of global population.
More recently, the climate extremes of the 1970s led to many new US government programs focused on monitoring and researching climate, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Such efforts are crucially important because we can’t always anticipate the results of research. If we could, we wouldn’t need data and science.
Perhaps the most important lesson to take from the new polar-ice findings is that ongoing efforts in Washington, DC to gut climate data and research are deeply misguided.
The global climate system has more surprises in store for us — and we ignore them at our peril.
Next week here at THB and elsewhere, I’ll have much more on NOAA and current efforts to gut climate data and research.
Before letting you go today — last week I sat down with John Hook from Fox 10 in Phoenix and engaged in a deep discission of climate science and energy policy. You can see the full interview below. Thanks to John for the opportunity and the informed questions — I enjoyed the interview and the chance to explore nuances of climate and energy.
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