Prefer to read first? The article follows Pielke’s account of being labelled a “climate denier”, the White House response to his work, and the congressional investigation that damaged his career. It also explains his criticism of event attribution. Using the same approach, he says he could “attribute” a flood in Japan to the growing number of patent applications. His point: a method can produce a causal claim if the relationship it is supposed to test is already built into its assumptions. His advice to the audience: don’t accept the “climate sceptic” label so easily. First, look at what the science actually says. clintel.org/roger-pielke-cli…

Remarkable: an entire month of copied temperature readings, a historical heat record deleted, and comparison measurements largely kept under wraps. @JennMarohasy examines Australia’s temperature archives: ▪️ All 31 minimum temperatures for August 1907 also appear under August 1867. The original observation books show different readings. ▪️ The 51.7°C recorded at Bourke on 3 January 1909 has been removed from the official dataset. ▪️ Other historical heat extremes were never digitised. ▪️ Parallel measurements from mercury thermometers and electronic sensors remain largely unpublished. Her blunt conclusion: management at Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology prefer the hottest years to be recent years. In her assessment, that is why the old heat record had to go. A weather bureau should preserve the measurement history. Not the history it finds most convenient.

‘Net Zero’ is running into a world that cannot do without fossil fuels. That is the argument made by Wim Röst, chairman of Clintel, in his opinion article “The Climate Narrative Is Collapsing”. Countries within the IPCC are clashing over funding and the timetable for its next assessment report. Röst sees a more fundamental conflict behind those disputes: climate ambitions are colliding with the need for affordable energy, industrial production and food security. Natural gas is also a vital feedstock for nitrogen fertiliser. Disruptions to energy supplies therefore reach far beyond electricity bills—they affect harvests, food prices and livelihoods. The poorest countries have the least capacity to absorb the consequences. His sharp conclusion: ending all fossil fuel production would lead to a ‘Zero Economy’.

One sentence for the good news. Extensive coverage of regional fire disasters and climate threats. Charles Rotter highlights the striking emphasis in the abstract of the ‘State of Wildfires’ report. Global burned area last fire season was 18% below the 2002–2024 average. Carbon emissions from fires were 20–31% below average. Nor was this an isolated result: satellite records show that global burned area has been declining for two decades. Yet that global picture gets just one sentence. Another striking point: the report presents a lower projected fire risk compared with the extreme SSP5-8.5 scenario as a benefit of climate mitigation. Yet it describes that same scenario as no longer credible. In Rotter’s view, an unrealistic worst-case scenario becomes the benchmark for policy success. Severe regional fires deserve attention. The global decline deserves more than one sentence.

Building a replacement for fossil fuels still requires fossil fuels. What if that effort consumes the very resources needed to keep civilisation running? That is the dilemma Richard Lyon explores in The Energy Trap. Wind turbines, solar panels and batteries require mining, refining, manufacturing and transport—all heavily dependent on fossil energy. Lyon argues that wind and solar cannot replace hydrocarbons at industrial scale and that building them accelerates the depletion of the fossil resources on which society still relies. With cheap conventional oil declining, he sees an “energy trap”: spending a dwindling inheritance on a replacement that cannot sustain modern industrial civilisation. His proposed escape is a major expansion of nuclear power, accompanied by a planned reduction in total energy use. Energy economist @tilakdoshi shares much of Lyon’s criticism of the renewable energy transition. But he challenges the leap from resource depletion to unavoidable economic contraction. Oil resources, Doshi argues, are not a fixed economic quantity. Technology, investment and prices change what can be recovered profitably. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing opened up resources previously considered uneconomic. Nor does a lower energy return automatically mean that an oil project cannot make money. Their disagreement matters. Both recognise the essential role of fossil fuels and the limitations of wind and solar. But Lyon sees a future that requires managing scarcity; Doshi argues that this outlook underestimates the capacity of markets, innovation and human ingenuity to overcome constraints.