Tag Archives: XTwitter

The Sixth US National Climate Assessment

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The Fifth US National Climate Assessment was published in November 2023 during the Biden/Harris administration. Here’s the announcement by Zeke Hausfather on X/Twitter:

The “NCA5” report begins as follows:

The Global Change Research Act of 1990 mandates that the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) deliver a report to Congress and the President not less frequently than every four years that “integrates, evaluates, and interprets the findings of the Program and discusses the scientific uncertainties associated with such findings; analyzes the effects of global change on the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, human social systems, and biological diversity; and analyzes current trends in global change, both human-induced and natural, and projects major trends for the subsequent 25 to 100 years.”

You may well have noticed that Kamala Harris lost the subsequent election? Hence the Sixth US National Climate Assessment will be prepared during the term of the current Trump/Vance administration.

The first move by Trump et al. was for the US Department of Energy to commission a “Climate Working Group” to produce a report catchily entitled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate“, which was published in July 2025. The authors of the report were listed alphabetically as John Christy Ph.D., Judith Curry Ph.D., Steven Koonin Ph.D., Ross McKitrick Ph.D. and Roy Spencer Ph.D.

Regular readers will recognise some or all of those names, and it will not surprise you to learn that there was plenty of pushback from a wide range of climate scientists. In particular, the “Climate Experts’ Review of the DOE Climate Working Group Report“, led by Andrew Dessler and Robert Kopp was published at the end of September 2025. This report begins as follows:

Continue reading The Sixth US National Climate Assessment →

Grok Confirms Michael Shellenberger Talks Abject Nonsense

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Thanks to Going South for the heads up:

By way of additional background information, Wikipedia asserts that:

Grok is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI. It was launched in November 2023 by Elon Musk as an initiative based on the large language model (LLM) of the same name. Grok has apps for iOS and Android and is integrated with the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), Tesla vehicles, and Tesla’s Optimus robot. The chatbot is named after the verb grok, coined by American author Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land to describe a deeper than human form of understanding.

The bot has generated various controversial responses, including conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and praise of Adolf Hitler, as well as referring to Musk’s views when asked about controversial topics or difficult decisions. Updates since 2023 have shifted the bot politically rightward to provide conservative responses to user queries.

and that:

Michael D. Shellenberger is an American author and journalist. He is the first endowed professor at the University of Austin, serving as CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech.

Shellenberger is a prominent heterodox thinker on topics including climate change and homelessness…

University of Austin is not a school recognized by the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics.

In other news, is Grok schizophrenic?

[Update – November 3rd]

Grok seem to having a lot of trouble answering this simple question:

He/she/it/they has been pondering the problem for over an hour now.

[Update – 15:00 UTC November 3rd]

I got bored waiting for Grok to get back to me, so I asked ChatGPT much the same question. I was informed:

Suggested links

The Naval History & Heritage Command (NHHC) entry: “Skate II (SSN-578)” on history.navy.mil — gives the official history and mentions the March 17, 1959 surfacing. history.navy.mil

An archived photograph in the NHHC image collection: “USN 1040961 USS SKATE (SSN–578)” which shows the submarine moored to the ice pack. flickr.com

A blog article “USS Skate at the North Pole – Truth and Fantasy Fiction” that collects several of the historic photographs and discusses their context. greatwhitecon.info

I asked ChatGPT to check out the final link in more detail. I was informed:

What GreatWhiteCon does well:

It collects and reproduces the historic images and contemporary captions, and discusses how those images have been interpreted (or misinterpreted) over time. That makes it a handy one-stop place to see the pictures and some commentary.

What GreatWhiteCon is not:

It is a blog/analysis piece (2018) rather than an official or archival source. That means its interpretation is useful, but any factual claim that matters (dates, official captions, archival catalog numbers) is best checked against the primary records (Naval History & Heritage Command, National Archives, contemporary magazines, USNI Proceedings).

Grok has a rather different interpretation of what Great White Con does well. Allegedly “Snow White”:

Counters alarmist views… promoting nuanced data interpretation over binary claims.

[Update – November 4th]

Today my discussion with Grok on XTwitter turned (amongst other things) to the recent United States Department of Energy “Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate” report.

My conversation with Grok is remarkably reminiscent of mud wrestling with “skeptical” Twitter trolls:

Watch this space!

Tony Heller Confirms Global Warming!

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As the New Year rapidly approaches Tony Heller is up to his old Arctic tricks yet again. No doubt we’ll get on to many of his hoary old chestnuts in due course, but although I may easily have blinked and missed it he appears to have a new trick up his voluminous sleeve. Providing empirical evidence that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s global warming “predictions” are correct!

Here is a recent extract from “Snow White’s” XTwitter feed:

By way of further elucidation, here is an extract from the IPCC’s Technical Summary of their AR6 Working Group 1 report:

Continue reading Tony Heller Confirms Global Warming! →

The Information War with the Fossil Fuel Industry

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Here’s a few minutes old Xweet from my now ex Member of the European Parliament, Molly Scott Cato:

Here’s a template for Arctic sea ice trolls, helpfully provided by my very good friend “Snow White”:

Look dumbass. Al Gore says the Arctic is warming at 4 times the speed of the rest of planet, but the data says it’s GETTING COLDER!

[Edit – August 3rd]

By way of a change, which is of course as good as a rest, today let’s take a look at some academic psychology. According to the recently published “The illusory truth effect leads to the spread of misinformation” in the journal “Cognition”:

Continue reading The Information War with the Fossil Fuel Industry →