Category: Climate Change

Robots to bury Canadian trees instead of letting them burn (massive CO2 release)?

by philg

CO2 emissions from Canada 2023 on the same order of magnitude as all North American fossil fuel CO2 emission. (Nature Magazine) The effect on U.S. air quality of recent fires was pernicious (“Air quality: 1980s Ponderosa smoking section”).

How about a solar-powered robot that can go through a Canadian forest, pick out every fourth tree, cut it down, and bury it? The idea has sort of been explored, but without the robot angle, in a different Nature Magazine article: “Optimal spatiotemporal thinning schemes combined with wood vaulting could maximize the forest biomass carbon sink in China” (2025).

ChatGPT suggests some improvements to the scheme:

It also says that simple burial isn’t sufficient. One must construct a “vault” that minimizes infiltration of oxygen and water.

Here’s a July 28 map of “out of control” fires in Canada (constantly updated source):

The idea is dumb, you say? How dumb is it compared to building millions of robots to somehow terraform Mars into a livable planet? Speaking of Mars, let’s have a look at SpaceX stock:

Who bought at $202 based on I am buying a lot of SpaceX stock; what will it be worth? and SpaceX is worth $63/share according to the most expert experts?

Finally, what about the fires in the Islamic world? The New York Times says that the burning is unprecedented. Could forests in the Dar al-Islam reasonably be thinned? My impression was that the pre-Islamic (“legacy”) Europeans already did as much cutting within what used to be their forests as was conceivably reasonable to do. It’s not a Canadian-style situation where there aren’t roads into the forests, right?

Full post, including comments

Don’t go outside, says the New York Times

by philg

You’ll die from the Canadian and Minnesotan (Somali?) smoke if you go outside in the north and from “dangerous” heat if you go outside in the south, says the NYT (front page):

The smoke is due to “climate change”, according to Canada’s Prime Minister (NYT).

How bad is it? aviationweather.gov:

METAR KORD 162051Z 05010KT 1SM R10L/P6000FT FU VV020 32/18 A3003
METAR KTOL 162052Z 00000KT 1SM R25/4500V5000FT FU BKN018 OVC024 31/1857007
SPECI KCLE 162109Z 36007KT 2SM FU SCT000 BKN026 BKN250 28/09 A3003
METAR KBUF 162054Z 23011KT 2 1/2SM FU SCT031 BKN065 OVC200 26/18 A2996 
METAR KTEB 162051Z 26008G14KT 1 1/2SM FU BKN020 OVC033 30/18 A298

Chicago is down to 1 statute mile of visibility (IMC begins at 3 SM so everyone has to be on an instrument flight plan) in smoke (“FU”, which sounds rude but is actually French (pre-Islamic)). Notice that Chicago and Teterboro, NJ are both at toasty temps of 32C and 30C, respectively.

Toledo, Ohio is also at 1 SM. Things get better moving east to Cleveland (2 miles) and Buffalo (2.5 miles), but get worse as one approaches the Mamdani Caliphate (1.5 miles visibility in smoke).

What about if Lionel Messi is home in Fort Lauderdale celebrating his recent victory over an African/Islamic nation? It’s “good”:

Same site for Chicago:

Let’s check the aviation weather for SE Florida, a hellscape of dangerous heat and unavailable abortion care, according to the NYT:

METAR KDJT 162053Z 22006KT 10SM FEW030 BKN250 33/18 A3005 RMK AO2 SLP175 T03330178 58016 $
METAR KFLL 162053Z 13007KT 10SM FEW030 SCT150 BKN190 BKN250 31/24 A3005 RMK AO2 SLP175 T03110244 56013
METAR KMIA 162053Z 12008KT 10SM SCT046 SCT055 SCT220 34/24 A3005 RMK AO2 TSE28 SLP177 CB DSNT SW T03390244 57006 $

Why only 10 miles of viz at President Donald J. Trump International Airport? (formerly PBI) That’s as high as the automated systems go. Note that Messi’s home in Fort Lauderdale is actually one degree C cooler than Chicago!

If this all clears before EAA AirVenture starts in Oshkosh, Wisconsin on Monday I will personally support Greta Thunberg for multiple Nobel Prizes (physics, chemistry, and peace?).

Full post, including comments

Does Gemini (Google AI) think that European elites are adapting to Climate Change (TM) by replacing their peasants with humans imported from hot places?

by philg

Happy World Population Day, except to Elon Musk who says that humans are going extinct and should have more children, while simultaneously Elon refuses to make a Tesla self-driving minivan. In honor of this glorious day, set up after the Earth’s population reached 5 billion in 1987 (due to population collapse, Earth now has only about 8.2 billion humans (or maybe 10 billion)) , let’s take a look at a population on the other side of an ocean from us…

Gemini says Climate Change is real. Prompt and answer:

Is Climate Change real from a European perspective? I.e., is Europe hotter than it was 50 years ago and is it almost certain to become yet hotter 50 years from now?

Yes and yes. From a data-driven, scientific perspective, the physical reality of climate change in Europe matches both of your conditions.

When I asked Gemini “Create a poster for Americans to show solidarity with European heatwave victims by turning their thermostats up from 72 to 74” (no mention of skin color), it produced the following:

Note that the U.S. is a mixture of skin tones while everyone in Europe seems to be nonwhite. Could this reflect Gemini’s belief that European leaders have chosen a Climate Change adaption strategy of replacing their heat-intolerant subjects with imports from Africa and the Middle East who are, presumably, accustomed to hot weather.

Note closely related, but I love the “feels like the inside of a McDonald’s Apple Pie” phrase:

Also, European Union regulations require that animals being transported cannot be exposed to a temperature higher than 30C, perhaps with a +5C tolerance. The European Food Safety Authority, however, says that horses cannot be exposed to temperatures higher than 25C (i.e., about 20C cooler than temps inside upper-floor Paris and Berlin apartments when it was 40C outside?).

Full post, including comments

Packing up our parkas because of Climate Change in Alaska

by philg

Our family heads to Seattle tomorrow and then gets on Norwegian Joy for a trip up to Glacier Bay National Park and back. Pre-Climate Change, the average high temp in May was 57 for Juneau (62 in June). Here we are towards the end of May and, due to Climate Change inflicted on us by the profligate CO2-emitting policies of Donald Trump, high temps are in the 40s. It will be snowing when we reach Juneau on Sunday:

Maybe this week is an outlier?

State-sponsored public media:

Statewide, Alaska saw its coldest December-through-March in a half-century. In famously cold Fairbanks, that same period was the coldest on record. Juneau had its coldest December ever recorded and — in a place known for being snowy — its snowiest winter. And, while not as extreme, Anchorage saw its coldest-ever month of March.

Maybe Climate Change has lent some cheer to those stuck in Miami traffic? Wall Street Journal:

In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” Al Gore wrote, with what would become his customary hyperbole, “the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of the glass shattering in Berlin.” The then-senator claimed that “according to some predictions”—no specifics were offered—“in the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated.”

Florida’s population in 1992 was around 13 million. Mr. Gore’s notional Flexodus would have reduced that figure below six million. Today, the state’s population has nearly doubled instead of more than halved. More than 23 million souls now call Florida home.

How about the increased hurricane risk predicted by Professor Dr. Al Gore, Ph.D.? Homeowners’ insurance rates are falling statewide. The local NBC station regarding Stuart, Florida, directly on the Atlantic Ocean:

I’d better close this post so as to avoid tempting the hurricane gods who last visited their major hurricane wrath on Palm Beach County in 1949.

Full post, including comments

The incompetence of HVAC installation and maintenance in Massachusetts

by philg

The 11-year-old high-end Carrier system at our old Harvard Square place failed in the hot summer of 2024. It was probably some sort of leak in the outdoor unit, but it was tough to say for sure. In Florida, this would have been repaired for about $6,000 via installation of a new outdoor unit and recharge. In Maskachusetts I got estimates from $24,000 to around $40,000 to replace both air handler and the outdoor unit. (This might have been a $12,000 project in Florida for top-of-the-line variable-speed gear.)

The company that quoted $24,000 was rated 4.9 stars in Google Maps. They’re an authorized Carrier dealer. They said that they needed to do $thousands in additional items in order to satisfy the building inspector. My suggestion that a building permit wasn’t needed because they were just replacing existing equipment was laughed off. They ran new coolant lines and, despite me begging them not to, decided to monkey with the hydroair system that sends hot water up from a basement gas-fired boiler into the attic where the air handler lives. Because the attic is technically unconditioned space, even though it never gets very cold (poor insulation in the old wooden house underneath allows heat to rise), the circulating water must have some antifreeze in it.

When the winter arrived, the hydroair system didn’t work. The only heating was from the heat pump, ruinously expensive at some of the nation’s highest electric rates. The company came back and said that we needed about $10,000 of work. The circulation pump was failed, which is why fluid wasn’t circulating. The boiler was from 2003 and should be trashed. At a minimum, everything attached to the boiler needed to be replaced. I called the plumber who’d installed the boiler. He came by and said “Your HVAC people are idiots. They filled the pipes with 100% glycol, which is too viscous for the pump to move. I drained it and refilled it with 50% glycol like it is supposed to be and everything works fine now. Your boiler doesn’t need any service and is working perfectly.” He sent me a $1300 bill (would have been $500 in Florida, but this guy is kind of a genius and Massachusetts is truly a paradise for anyone competent in the trades).

It’s finally time to sell the old unit. The market for short-term rentals in Cambridge never recovered to its 2019 level. I was never going there except to fix stuff. The family wasn’t interested in spending time in Maskachusetts. What did the lawyers working on the closing find? The HVAC company never closed the building permit that they pulled in 2024 and for which they said that thousands of dollars of extra work were required. (Ultimately, it did get closed, but not without multiple follow-up emails and calls from me. The HVAC company called the inspector and he actually did come by within a week, but he marked it as a “rough inspection”. The permit wasn’t closed and the HVAC company never checked to see if it was closed.)

(Note that the cost to heat and cool this 1400 sqft. condo, thanks to high utility rates in Massachusetts and low quality construction, is actually higher than the cost to heat (one week per year!) and cool (to 72 degrees; no Jimmy Carter austerity here) our 5400 sqft. house in Palm Beach County.)

Loosely related… this lamppost sticker from Harvard Square would make a good tagline for an HVAC business:

Also, a friend’s daughter got into a summer math program at Boston University. She is required to live in a BU dorm as part of this program. Faculty, staff, and students at BU are such experts on Climate Change that there are 31 pages of results from Google when searching for this string on the BU site:

How did the climate change experts prepare their own campus for the brutal heatwaves that are now hitting Boston regularly? (example) They failed to install air conditioning in their dorms.

Full post, including comments

When do rising sea levels make Florida beachfront real estate less valuable?

by philg

Ten years ago, here on this blog… Are markets so inefficient that global warming isn’t being priced properly?:

During our two weeks in Ft. Lauderdale we learned that a beachfront house costs between $3 and $8 million. Most of these are approximately the same height above sea level as a crushproof cigarette pack. If the seas are rising up to swallow Florida, as the climate change doomsayers predict is imminent, why are these houses still worth so much?

The beachfront houses of Ft. Lauderdale aren’t worth $3-8 million anymore, just as the Climate Doomers predicted. The price to live in a house that Science proves will be swept away soon is $5-40 million. Is there any new Science that could explain this meteoric rise in the nominal price? “A Global Perspective on Local Sea Level Changes” (Journal of Marine Science and Engineering 2025) looks at IPCC predictions vs. observations. The paper says that sea level worldwide is rising at about 1.5 mm per year. How does that compare with the Climate Doom narrative from the IPCC? The authors say that the observed sea level rise is somewhat lower than predicted and dramatically lower for Florida: “the overestimation along the Atlantic coast of North America is 4 mm/year to 5 mm/year; the highest overestimation found anywhere”.

The authors found little evidence of acceleration of sea level rise (Conclusions), but the same section seems to contradict the above map: “Empirically derived long-term rates of sea level rise in 2020 were in majority found to be in excess of the contemporary projected rates of rise. The current generation of projections can therefore be considered conservative”. Maybe someone here can read this more carefully and figure out how most of the rates based on local measurements are lower than the model predictions while at the same time the model predictions are “conservative” regarding doom.

The IPCC:

[Global mean sea level] GMSL from tide gauges and altimetry observations increased from 1.4 mm yr–1 over the period 1901–1990 to 2.1 mm yr–1 over the period 1970–2015 to 3.2 mm yr–1 over the period 1993–2015 to 3.6 mm yr–1 over the period 2006–2015.

GMSL will rise between 0.43 m (0.29–0.59 m, likely range; RCP2.6) and 0.84 m (0.61–1.10 m, likelyrange; RCP8.5) by 2100 (medium confidence) relative to 1986–2005.

If we take the 1.5 mm/year rate of the new paper and a 50-year time horizon for beachfront house ownership, the sea level rises 3 inches in Fort Lauderdale over the next 50 years. If we use the 3.6 mm/year rate, the sea level rises 7 inches. In other words, the acceleration prediction by the IPCC would need to materialize in order for the sea level to rise by half a meter (20 inches).

Our house is at 11′ above sea level (approximately 3 miles inland within Abacoa) so I think we need a rise of about 7′ (2 meters) before it becomes impractical to occupy (need a bit of buffer to handle storm surges). Even under the Doomiest Doomer’s prediction, that will take so long that the house will have required reconstruction, potentially elevated by a few feet, purely due to age.

From September 2024, WSJ, regarding a (present-day) sea level house too shabby to be left standing:

(Imagine the environmental impact of dumping all of those almost-new solar panels into a landfill!)

Finally, let’s look at the climate change alarmists. Here’s Democrat Senator Merkley saying “Climate chaos is the existential threat of our time. We need bold climate action now, before it’s too late” less than a year ago:

Today, however, he/she/ze/they demands that gasoline be as cheap as possible so that people will maximize consumption and CO2 emission:

(Curiously, the tweet complaining about “Trump’s illegal war” was posted a day after Trump had announced the U.S.’s surrender to Iran (“ceasefire”), i.e., when the war was already over.)

Full post, including comments

Why are Climate Change alarmists also Strait of Hormuz alarmists?

by philg

If you believe in climate change, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz is the best thing that ever happened to Mother Earth because it reduces fossil fuel supply and, thus, reduces CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuel. Bizarrely, however, people and organizations who’ve been reliable climate change alarmists describe the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, and the resultant obstruction of oil and gas exports, as a catastrophe. Example from today’s New York Times:

Here’s CNN. For a Follower of Science, the headline should be “Key method of destroying our planet shut down” and high oil prices should be welcomed as a spur to conservation. Instead, we learn that high oil prices should be “fixed” (i.e., oil should be cheap enough to burn in a profligate Earth-destroying CO2-emitting-as-fast-as-possible manner) by Trump and that the strait being closed is a bad thing.

An Obama-generation Democrat in 2022 says that he wants to make it illegal for people to purchase gasoline or, at least, the cars that burn gasoline. This will be an “important climate change policy”:

A few years later, Gavin Newsom is excoriating Trump for causing an increase in the price of the product that he thinks should be outlawed because use of that product is harmful:

Here’s a representative young Democrat saying, in July 2025, that we need to take climate change seriously:

Here is the climate change alarmist, less than a year later, saying that gas prices should be lower so that people can afford to buy and operate that 12 mpg SUV:

Full post, including comments

AI catastrophists will feel better if they become climate catastrophists?

by philg

A friend in San Francisco is an AI catastrophist, as least as far as the economy is concerned. He’s not worried about robots taking over and, after reflecting on the damage that humans say that humans have caused to Mother Earth, killing all of the humans. He’s concerned about the value of his three-unit building in San Francisco. I said, “Why don’t you become a climate change catastrophist? You won’t have to worry about the trajectory of the U.S. economy if all cities except Denver are inundated by melting in Greenland and Antarctica.”

As a starting point towards transitioning (always a beautiful process!) from AI Doomer to Climate Doomer, here’s a 2015 article on how even Orlando (100′ above sea level) is doomed once Greenland and Antarctica melt:

Full post, including comments

Climate change alarmist pays $200 million for a sea level house; time for new envy level?

by philg

May 2017, Harvard Crimson:

Mark Zuckerberg’s Commencement address at Harvard

How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels? … We get that our greatest challenges need global responses too — no country can fight climate change alone or prevent pandemics.

(The last part is my favorite. In 2017 he predicted that the lavishly funded UN and WHO would, three years later, be able to prevent a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic via muscular action, Scientific interventions such as saliva-soaked face rags, etc.)

February 2026, WSJ:

Billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are the latest California billionaires to buy a home in South Florida. … THE PRICE: While it isn’t clear exactly what Zuckerberg and Chan are paying for the nearly 2-acre property, local real-estate agents said it would likely trade for $150 million to $200 million. Last year, an undeveloped Indian Creek lot of roughly the same size sold for about $105 million.

A peasant to whom $200 million is real money might look at the contrast between the 2017 statement about climate panic (“destroy the planet”) and the 2026 sea level waterfront house purchase and shout out “Hypocrisy!”. But maybe instead it is time for a new level of envy. What if Mark Zuckerberg believes what he’s been saying about climate change and bought the house anyway? That’s the real estate equivalent of driving a $600,000 Ferrari Purosangue to an elementary school with two kids and a bag of drive-thru breakfasts in the back. The owner knows that the kids are doing $200,000 of damage to the interior and simply doesn’t care. Zuck expects the above house to be washed away in 5-10 years, in other words, and is indifferent to the consequent loss of $200 million.

Envy 101: being bitter about the people who can afford to buy beachfront mansions and pass them down to their kids and grandkids

Envy 303: being bitter about the people who can afford to buy beachfront mansions and treat them as disposable

Full post, including comments

Climate Anxiety therapy canceled due to Climate Emergency

by philg

A four-hour mental health session for climate anxiety caused by the climate emergency was scheduled for today at MIT:

The emergency.mit.edu web site, yesterday afternoon:

I.e., the folks who needed four hours of therapy because of their anxiety caused by the ongoing climate emergency suffered the cancelation of their therapy due to the climate emergency that had caused their anxiety in the first place. #irony?

I rescheduled my JetBlue flight from yesterday afternoon to Saturday night. Here’s our front yard yesterday as the snow was ramping up throughout Maskachusetts:

Full post, including comments