Worst Climate Stories of the Week—Funeral for a Narrative Edition

The stories this week strike a plaintive tone, like a balladeer pouring out his soul on stage while playing a sad tune on piano. The laments come one after the other, as tragic stories of loss and heartbreak emerge from those pushing the climate agenda. The classic Elton John song, Love Lies Bleeding, could easily have been about the tragic death of not just a relationship, but an entire movement:

The roses in the window box have tilted to one side

Everything about this house was born to grow and die

The narrative lies bleeding in their hands.

And really, we've seen this coming for a long time, those of us who consider ourselves rationalists who reject hysteria. Everything about this house was born to grow and die, indeed. None of it ever held together with rational explanations, or science for that matter, which explains the need propagandize and mandate. We clearly never had any intention of voting for this stuff, after all.

And for good reason. This week's stories center around the theme of truths ever so inconvenient for the climate cult. We also have several stories that are downright weird, and a new scientific study that continues to erode the arguments in favor of the theory of manmade global warming.

In our Good News segment, we have more EV implosions, and NOAA retires its "billion-dollar disaster" boondoggle.

Let's get to it.

(DON'T MISS LAST WEEK'S CLIMATE CULTISTS COLUMN: Geoengineering Madness and the Iberian Nightmare)

Death of a Narrative: Antarctic Sea Ice Edition

The Narrative states definitively that anthropogenic global warming has caused climate change that drives more weather extremes, causing more catastrophic storms, floods, fires, sea level rise, and melting polar ice caps and glaciers. Therefore, we need to extract trillions of dollars from capitalist countries and impose global communism.

The Narrative's baseline assumptions are dying, as the dogs of society howl. Take, for instance, Antarctica. The sea ice continues to refuse to shrink there. Four "key glacier basins" in East Antarctica showed ice growth from 2021 to 2023, according to a new study.

Death of a Narrative: Volcano Edition

The sudden spike in global temperatures in 2023 was nothing but a candle in the wind, it seems.

Welcome climate update: Global temperatures have returned to early 2023 levels. pic.twitter.com/1NwZIRNtSW

— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) May 4, 2025

A massive underwater volcano in the South Pacific, Hunga-Tonga, erupted in 2022. It spewed massive amounts of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Many climate "skeptics"—or, rationalists, rather—have attributed the spike in global temperatures to that event. The satellite temperature record sure does seem to have validated that view. This is important because most climate zealots dismiss out of hand any natural causes of atmospheric carbon dioxide increase. Seems they haven't given this one enough thought—or they've dismissed any inconvenient factors that invalidate their claims.

Death of a Narrative: Bees Edition

Enviros have tried to gin up panic about declining bee populations for decades now, with the catastrophic claims that no pollinators would lead to no food, causing mass starvation. Thanks a lot, climate change! When that turns out not to be true, so much, sorry seems to be the hardest word.

Somebody decided to count worldwide bee colonies. Turns out they've increased significantly since 1990. So you can stop worrying that global warming is going to cause mass starvation.

Resistance to Offshore Wind Goes International

It's not just New Jersey and New York resisting the offshore wind movement. In Japan, residents of Hokkaido have pushed back hard on wind turbines that pose serious risks to threatened white-tailed eagles.

New Study Demonstrates Urban Heat Island Effect

Global warming acolytes flatly reject the notion that an "urban heat island" effect exists, or that it skews global temperature records. A new scientific study puts the lie to those claims, showing a strong correlation between population growth and warming trends at individual weather stations. The authors state definitively that about 22 percent of observed warming can be explained by the urban heat island effect, not any sort of global phenomenon. This is yet another variable for which climate scientists have failed to account when creating predictions of doom.

This Week In Weird Norwegian Ferry News

Hopefully this doesn't become a weekly installment in this column. Apparently, Norway is doing weird things to its ferry system in the name of the climate.

The passenger ferry operator Norled announced the world's first passenger ship powered by liquefied hydrogen in 2023, the MF Hydra. Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to use as a fuel for transportation, despite its great potential. The source of the liquefied gas has caused some controversy in the environmental press in Europe, leading to more questions than answers. A German chemical plant is trucking the hydrogen gas to Norway, but its hydrogen plant is not the source. Journalists believe it comes from a fossil fuel production source. A long report contains a lot of background information on the drive to produce hydrogen fuel in Europe, with many questions still unanswered.

The second Norwegian ferry story concerns the electric ferry Medstraum—the first of its kind in the world. Apparently it had so many mechanical issues and insufficient battery life it had to switch back to diesel for normal operations.

US Power Goes Non-Fossil, but There's a Big BUT

"For the first time, fossil fuels provided less than half of U.S. electricity generation in a month (March 2025)." So goes the headline announcing a seemingly massive milestone proving that green energy has taken root in America.

BUT.

This info came from a leftist think tank called Ember, which included nuclear in their calculations. In addition, according to oilprice.com, "this is an estimate of total generation, including small scale systems that are not connected to the grid."

Yeah, if you squint real hard and look at it cock-eyed and include every off-grid homestead's solar panels and wind mills, sure, you come up with something that looks like a trend.

Coincidentally, energy expert David Blackmon reported this week on a study showing that large-scale wind and solar production farms face greatly extended interconnection delays getting them connected to the grid, so that doesn't exactly look like progress for green energy.

Getting Astrological to Treat Climate Anxiety

Feeling anxious about the impending end of the world due to global warming? Try tarot:

A growing movement of artists is creating spaces for people to sit down and unpack their climate feelings. And no, it’s not talk therapy; it’s climate tarot reading. 

When the deck's stacked against you, and the living gets hard, oh it's four walls of madness in this house of cards.

And now for this week's Good News segment.

Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting EVs

The numbers are in, and the Trump agenda is in full effect. In April, sales of electric vehicles fell five percent. That contrasts with the auto market as a whole, which saw robust sales increases. April marks the third monthly decline of EV sales since 2021. And it wasn't just Tesla due to the backlash against Elon Musk—the entire EV sector was down. Both manufacturers, due to the end of government subsidies, and consumers, sensitive to pricey options, have signaled broad declines in the industry that could extend into the future. Gas-powered vehicle sales increased 10 percent in the same month.

NOAA Retires Billion Dollar Disaster Boondoggle

Roger Pielke, Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former climate professor, has a Substack called The Honest Broker. There, Pielke writes about the absurdities of the climate hysteria movement. He published a peer-reviewed study in 2024 that demonstrated the lack of scientific integrity in NOAA's "Billion Dollar Disaster" database. This database follows a climate hysteric invention of the increase in the number of natural disasters that caused over a billion dollars in damages. From the abstract of Pielke's paper:

For more than two decades, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has published a count of weather-related disasters in the United States that it estimates have exceeded one billion dollars (inflation adjusted) in each calendar year starting in 1980. The dataset is widely cited and applied in research, assessment and invoked to justify policy in federal agencies, Congress and by the U.S. President. This paper performs an evaluation of the dataset under criteria of procedure and substance defined under NOAA’s Information Quality and Scientific Integrity policies. The evaluation finds that the “billion dollar disaster” dataset falls short of meeting these criteria. Thus, public claims promoted by NOAA associated with the dataset and its significance are flawed and at times misleading. Specifically, NOAA incorrectly claims that for some types of extreme weather, the dataset demonstrates detection and attribution of changes on climate timescales. Similarly flawed are NOAA’s claims that increasing annual counts of billion dollar disasters are in part a consequence of human caused climate change. NOAA’s claims to have achieved detection and attribution are not supported by any scientific analysis that it has performed. Given the importance and influence of the dataset in science and policy, NOAA should act quickly to address this scientific integrity shortfall. 

This week at The Honest Broker, Pielke reports, "NOAA announced that the BDD tabulation would no longer be updated by the agency, explaining that it has been 'retired.'"

Good riddance to bad assumptions.

And now that it's all over

The birds can nest again

I'll only snow when the sun comes out

I'll shine only when it starts to rain

(READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: NOAA Caught Manipulating Temperature Data to Advance the Global Warming Narrative)