Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #655
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The Week That Was: 2025-08-23 (August 23, 2025)
Brought to You by SEPP (
www.SEPP.org)
The Science and Environmental Policy Project
Quote of the Week: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.” — John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859) [H/t John Robson]
Number of the Week: About 7,000 ppmv
THIS WEEK:
By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Scope: TWTW begins with a second discussion of key issues in the report by the Climate Working Group to the Secretary of Energy. Then, it presents a request for information from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. TWTW concludes with a discussion of the reasons why grid level storage batteries are impractical for a modern grid.
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Review of the Climate Working Group Report (Part 2): Last week, TWTW began discussing the main body of a report to the Secretary of Energy from five independent scientists (John Christy, Ph.D. Judith Curry, Ph.D. Steven Koonin, Ph.D. Ross McKitrick, Ph.D., and Roy Spencer, Ph.D.) “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” The report is well written in clear English with no specialized jargon or mathematics. It is not a report typical of Washington bureaucracies. This week, TWTW will cover key sections of Part II: Climate Response to CO2 Emissions including Discrepancies Between Models and Instrumental Observations.
Part II Climate Response to CO2 Emissions begins with Chapter 4, Climate Sensitivity to CO2 Forcing. The Chapter Summary States:
“There is growing recognition that climate models are not fit for the purpose of determining the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) of the climate to increasing CO2. The IPCC has turned to data driven approaches including historical data and paleoclimate reconstructions, but their reliability is diminished by data inadequacies.
Data-driven ECS estimates tend to be lower than climate model-generated values. The IPCC AR6 upper bound for the likely range of ECS is 4.0°C, lower than the AR5 value of 4.5°C. This lowering of the upper bound seems well justified by paleoclimatic data. The AR6 lower bound for the likely range of ECS is 2.5°C, substantially higher than the AR5 value of 1.5°C. This raising of the lower bound is less justified; evidence since AR6 finds the lower bound of the likely range to be around 1.8°C.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/08/25/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-655/
