Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #662
3 hours ago Guest Blogger
The Week That Was: 2025-10-18 (October 18, 2025)
Brought to You by SEPP (
www.SEPP.org)
The Science and Environmental Policy Project
Quote of the Week: “For my many mentors, who taught me the importance of scientific integrity.”— Steven E. Koonin, dedication in Unsettled? (2021)
Number of the Week: 0.45% per year, 0.82% per year, and 1.51% per year
THIS WEEK:
By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Scope: This TWTW begins with a discussion of an effort by the UN to establish a global carbon tax. TWTW presents some responses from GROK AI to questions like why do many physicists object to quantum mechanics? TWTW discusses some weaknesses in a new paper from members of the CERES project and it discusses a report on crossing tipping points. TWTW concludes with a discussion of a paper on the world record surface temperature and a UK master food plan.
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Global Carbon Tax: For years, some commentators have speculated why the UN was so emphatic in creating fear of carbon dioxide, which is essential for life on Earth. In the 1850s Earth was coming out of the Little Ice Age when famine was a widespread problem in temperate regions when crops did not ripen. A bit of warming was a blessing that permitted crops to ripen. The UN ignored this history.
In their efforts to create fear, the UN relied on computer models with questionable assumptions. When tested against atmospheric temperatures the models clearly fail, significantly overestimating the warming of the atmosphere, where the greenhouse effect occurs. The UN ignored this fact and many others in making questionable claims about the warming effect of carbon dioxide in today’s atmosphere. Based on decades of laboratory experiments, carbon dioxide has a slight warming effect, which is beneficial, not harmful for life on Earth.
Further, thousands of studies show that adding carbon dioxide will make most plants more robust, particularly C3 plants that include virtually all food crops except C4 grasses such as corn (maize), sugarcane, sorghum, and millets. Yet even C4 plants do better in an atmosphere richer in CO2. Greenhouses and hothouses growing plants routinely double or even triple the amount of CO2 in their atmospheres to promote growth. These yield fresh vegetables year-round, even in cold climates such as in the northern parts of Europe and North America. The UN typically dismisses or ignores such benefits.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/10/20/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-662/
