Climate Narrative Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

In 1971, David Bowie told us to, "Turn and face the strange." I've seen a lot of strange people, mostly on the left, in my 30 years of working in media. But among the strangest have been what the Late Rush Limbaugh used to call environmental whackos. 

Also in that same year, Stephen Schneider, working in Maryland at the Goddard Space Flight Center for NASA, wrote a paper that largely steered the debate on human impact on Earth's climate and what we might have to do about it. His thesis? Because of all the dirty air caused by pollution, it would outweigh the effects of carbon dioxide and throw us into a mini ice age. 

The average global temperatures had steadily decreased from the 40's to that point, and since he was science, to quote a line by Dr. Anthony Fauci, that became the narrative...until it didn't work anymore. 

Schneider reviewed a book six years later called The Weather Conspiracy, and admitted he overestimated his earlier research, and that, "We just don’t know…at this stage whether we are in for warming or cooling – or when."

In the 80's, the global temperatures began to increase again, and by 1981 in the House of Representatives, a young Tennessee Congressman named Al Gore began holding hearings on what he called global warming. Seven years later, then-Senator Al Gore of the Volunteer State started organizing events to raise public awareness on the subject. He knew then how to use the issue for political advantage. And in 2006, six years after losing to George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign, Gore's infamous An Inconvenient Truth came out, predicting the melting of the global ice caps by the summer of 2013 if we didn't stop burning fossil fuel. Gore, now an elder statesman of the climate change movement at 77, is still a weirdo, and he's still wrong.

By the mid-teens of the new century, due to the fact that the Earth wasn't boiling over fast or severe enough to keep up with the prophets of doom predicting global apocalypse, the narrative had to shift again. It wasn't cooling, and it wasn't really warming up all that much, so the term 'climate change' evolved as the preferred term of art. And for the left, it was perfect. It was all-encompassing, and gave them a 'heads, I win...tails, you lose' scenario. No matter what the climate did, whether it was a busier-than-normal hurricane season, or a drought in the American Southwest, flooding, or any inclement weather, it was blamed on climate change, and we had to reduce the use of fossil fuels as a result before it killed us all. 

Human-caused climate change was so insidiously evil, we were told, that it would get warmer in some places, cooler in others, drier over here, wetter over there, the seas would rise, land mass would disappear below the surface, and whatever weather anomaly occurred was branded as severe, extreme and/or unprecedented. 

That nonsense got us through the John Kerry years, first as Barack Obama's Secretary of State, and then the climate czar during the Biden regency. Lurch is about the biggest oddball out there, and the Trump team has been wise to undo much of the economic damage caused by that Massachusetts buffoon. 

Yesterday, The Guardian came out with this news - the climate isn't really changing much at all. 

The melting of sea ice in the Arctic has slowed dramatically in the past 20 years, scientists have reported, with no statistically significant decline in its extent since 2005. 

The finding is surprising, the researchers say, given that carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning have continued to rise and trap ever more heat over that time. 

They said natural variations in ocean currents that limit ice melting had probably balanced out the continuing rise in global temperatures. However, they said this was only a temporary reprieve and melting was highly likely to start again at about double the long-term rate at some point in the next five to 10 years.

I could have told you this, and I'm not even a scientist. In 2013, Ed and the First Mate joined a few Hugh Hewitt Show listeners and I for a cruise up to Alaska. Included that week was a day inside Glacier Bay to view the calving of the Margerie Glacier, which is a tidewater wall of ice about a mile wide and 76 feet tall. It's not advancing or receding. It's just there doing its thing. A dozen years later, my wife and I were back in Glacier Bay on another cruise, and Margerie hadn't changed a bit. Yes, chunks of the glacier kept falling off into the Pacific, but that's only because there's a river of ice from the top of a mountain behind it, and funnily enough, snow keeps falling on that mountain year-round. It's not climate change, it's gravity that's causing the calving. 

Hurricane Katrina was the third named major storm of the 2005 season, and it beat the holy hell out of New Orleans. That was August 29th after forming on the 23rd. Since that time, yes, we've had hurricanes, but if you track them over the course of the nation's history, they're actually fewer in frequency now than in the early 1900's. And yet, that's despite us using plenty of coal, oil, and gas. More, in fact, than we've ever used. Al Gore and John Kerry proclaimed that hurricanes would increase in number and severity because of this. It just isn't so. 

This year, Erin is the first hurricane of the season, and it's already turning north and will die in the Atlantic. There are four other systems being tracked out there that could turn into major storms, but because of upper atmospheric wind conditions, none of them pose a threat to the coastline of the Southeast or the Gulf of Mexico. Why? The high level wind shears off the rotation of the system, stunting its growth, and it blows the storm into open water instead of continuing west to the U.S. 

I'm not tempting fate here. Hurricanes can form in a hurry and strike even faster, leaving death, destruction, and chaos in their wake. Throw in Democratic governance at the state or federal level, as was the case in Western North Carolina when Helene came a-callin', you get politicized rescue and relief operations at best, or victims being ignored entirely because of how they voted. What I'm saying is what I've said for a very long time. What we're witnessing with the climate's changing isn't necessarily dire, because the climate has been changing ever since there was a climate. But those changes are cyclic in nature and generally tend to self-correct over time. 

I love this Guardian story so much, I want to take it home, put a collar on it, and give it treats if it does its business outside and not on the rug. Confounding scientists, the lack of climate change, being attributed to 'natural variations', is slowing the decline of ice. Actually, if you look at other studies analyzing the same data, ice at both poles is expanding, at least for now. 

“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.

Almost 50 years after Stephen Schneider admitted, "We just don't know," we still don't know. In the media, typically what happens when a politician makes a statement that turns out not to be true, especially if that politician is a Republican, not only are there cameras and microphones in that person's face trying to capture the gotcha question for viewers, virtually every other Republican politician is also hunted down and put on the spot to answer for the false prophecy. So in the case of the climate apocalypse acolytes - Al Gore and John Kerry, where's the media herd asking for an explanation for the fraud committed by both of them for half a century? I could have easily included Greta Thunberg in that mix, but she's given up on climate change. It bores her. Nothing seems to excite her more these days than hating Jews. 

But why wasn't this story covered by traditional Resistance media? It's a rhetorical question. You know the reason why. It's because most of them are practicing believers in the same climate religion peddling the hysteria. 

Bill Weir of CNN is one of the worst offenders. As the cable network's environmental reporter, there is only one side of the issue. He'll wrap himself up in science in his Faucian best, but his bias on the issue is so over the top as to be laughable. His latest special, produced in July, featured the positive impacts on the climate by artists like Billie Eilish. 

My latest is a deep dive into the handful of artists forcing significant change in their industry while trying to make the clean energy revolution irresistible for fans.

Saturday at 8 ET on @CNN https://t.co/XSccYD1oJX via @billboard

— Bill Weir (@BillWeirCNN) July 15, 2025

Also, L.A. Magazine heaped praise on Eilish for how much she seems to be reviving the vinyl record business.  

It’s no surprise that Billie Eilish’s second album, Happier Than Ever, debuted atop the Billboard 200 albums chart. But what is astonishing is how extraordinary her physical sales were—particularly vinyl records. 

The seven-time Grammy winner’s sophomore album sold 73,000 vinyl LPs, making it the second-highest weekly vinyl haul since at least 1991, the New York Times reports. (SoundScan—the predecessor to MRC Data, which is Billboard’s tracking arm—first began keeping track of data on music sales in '91.) Only Taylor Swift, who sold 102,000 vinyl copies of her LP release Evermore after months of preorders, had more.

I asked Co-Pilot AI how much fossil fuel goes into the production of a vinyl record. This is what it gave me. 

⚙️ Materials & Energy Use

• Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC): The main ingredient in vinyl records is derived from petroleum and salt. PVC is a plastic made using fossil fuels, and it's not biodegradable.
• Carbon Footprint: A single vinyl record can emit up to 0.5 kg of CO₂ during production, depending on the supply chain and energy sources used.
• Pressing Process: Traditional steam-driven presses consume a lot of energy, often sourced from fossil fuels.
• Packaging: Sleeves, jackets, and shrink wrap add to the footprint, especially if made from virgin materials.

🧪 Toxic Additives

• Vinyl records often contain heavy metals, carbon black, and even lead as stabilizers—materials that are environmentally hazardous and fossil-fuel derived.

🌍 Environmental Impact

• Vinyl records can take centuries to decompose, and if they end up in landfills, they may leach harmful chemicals into the soil.
• Unlike other plastics, PVC is difficult to recycle, making sustainable disposal a challenge.

I just returned to my home in Southern California last night after a few days in the nation's capital. All week, I've been getting severe weather alerts on my phone for a severe heat warning, listing resources such as cooling centers and the like. Never mind the part about what has to be burned in order to generate the electricity to cool those centers, or what compound is used as a cooling agent in an air conditioner and its impact on the ozone layer. I think the high here has been near 90, in August, which if I recall, is still summer. 

In 1984, when we still were trying to decide whether we were cooling or warming, the first month of high school my senior year was north of 100 degrees. There was no severe alert. It was the normal weather pattern for this part of the country. The dirty secret? It's not as hot here in SoCal as it used to be. Sure, we'll get a day here and a day there a few times a year when we cross the century mark, but it used to be like that for weeks on end. 

We just don't know. That was science in 1977, and that's the long and the short of it today. Perhaps the more prudent course of action is to go ahead and live our lives without worrying about climate hysteria. Human interaction with the climate didn't cool it down, it hasn't seemed to accelerate it warming up, and it certainly has had no impact on the Sun's radiation output, which goes through its own cycles, too. And yet somehow, this magical blue ball keeps spinning and adjusting in spite of us.

Thank God for that.