Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #662 – Watts Up With That?

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.

The UN’s actions in creating fear of carbon dioxide prompted some commentators to speculate that the UN hopes to obtain a source of funding independent of governments that can hold it accountable by instituting a carbon tax or a regulatory authority to collect fees for emissions of carbon dioxide. Such commentators have been dismissed as cynics. This year, the UN showed they are not. In April, the UN International Maritime Organization planned to institute a Global Carbon Tax, which was to be implemented in a meeting on October 17.

On October 10, the US State Department issued a joint statement by the Secretaries of State, Energy, and Transportation titled “Taking Action to Defend America from the UN’s First Global Carbon Tax – the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) “Net-Zero Framework” (NZF).” The statement asserts:

“President Trump has made it clear that the United States will not accept any international environmental agreement that unduly or unfairly burdens the United States or harms the interests of the American people. Next week, members of the IMO will vote on the adoption of a so-called NZF aimed at reducing global carbon dioxide gas emissions from the international shipping sector. This will be the first time that a UN organization levies a global carbon tax on the world.

The Administration unequivocally rejects this proposal before the IMO and will not tolerate any action that increases costs for our citizens, energy providers, shipping companies and their customers, or tourists. The economic impacts from this measure could be disastrous, with some estimates forecasting global shipping costs increasing as much as 10% or more. We ask you to join us in rejecting adoption of the NZF at the October meeting and to work together on our collective economic and energy security.

The NZF proposal poses significant risks to the global economy and subjects not just Americans, but all IMO member states to an unsanctioned global tax regime that levies punitive and regressive financial penalties, which could be avoided. The United States is considering the following actions against nations that support this global carbon tax on American consumers:

• Pursuing investigations and considering potential regulations to combat anti-competitive practices from certain flagged countries and potential blocking vessels registered in those countries from U.S. ports;
• Imposing visa restrictions including an increase in fees and processing, mandatory re-interview requirements and/or revisions of quotas for C-1/D maritime crew member visas;
• Imposing commercial penalties stemming from U.S. government contracts including new commercial ships, liquified natural gas terminals and infrastructure, and/or other financial penalties on ships flagged under nations in favor of the NZF;
• Imposing additional port fees on ships owned, operated, or flagged by countries supporting the framework; and
• Evaluating sanctions on officials sponsoring activist-driven climate policies that would burden American consumers, among other measures under consideration.

The United States will be moving to levy these remedies against nations that sponsor this European-led neocolonial export of global climate regulations. We will fight hard to protect our economic interests by imposing costs on countries if they support the NZF. Our fellow IMO members should be on notice.”

On October 17, at the IMO meeting in London with over 100 countries represented, Saudi Arabia moved to table the talk of a tax until next year, the motion to table carried, and the meeting was adjourned. See links under Challenging the Orthodoxy and Defending the Orthodoxy.

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GROK’s Answer: Last week’s TWTW contained a discussion by Tilak Doshi essay describing how big tech censors the news using their search engines by not including dissenting views, no matter how strongly based on physical evidence these views are. Those who desire to obtain differing views on a controversial subject cannot hope to do so using most internet search engines. TWTW asked Google AI: Why do many physicists object to quantum mechanics? It received a mushy answer about the so-called scientific consensus. The response was unhelpful in trying to understand why journal editors routinely reject papers written by Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physicists based on evidence obtained by experiment or observation. Is the IPCC false “consensus” view that dominant?

TWTW asked GROK AI the same question it asked Google AI. The response began with:

“Many physicists don’t outright reject quantum mechanics—it’s the most successful theory in physics, underpinning technologies from semiconductors to lasers. However, a significant number object to its interpretations, particularly the standard Copenhagen interpretation, due to deep conceptual problems. Here’s why:”

The response from GROK AI was far more satisfactory than from Google AI. So TWTW asked GROK AI to think harder. The response was:

BEGIN QUOTE

Many physicists don’t outright reject quantum mechanics—it’s the most successful theory in physics, underpinning technologies from semiconductors to lasers. However, a significant number object to its interpretations, particularly the standard Copenhagen interpretation, due to deep conceptual problems. Here’s why:

1. The Measurement Problem

• Issue: Quantum mechanics describes particles in a superposition of states (e.g., Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead) until “measured,” at which point the wavefunction collapses to one outcome. But what counts as a measurement? A human observer? A detector? A single atom? There’s no clear boundary.
• Objection: This introduces an arbitrary, observer-dependent rule into an otherwise objective theory. Physicists like Albert Einstein called it “spooky” and incomplete: “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing.”
• Analogy: It’s like a law of physics that only works when someone is watching.

2. Nonlocality and “Spooky Action at a Distance”

• Issue: Quantum entanglement means particles can instantaneously influence each other across vast distances, violating classical ideas of locality (nothing travels faster than light). Bell’s theorem (1964) and experiments confirm this.
• Objection: Einstein famously rejected it as “spooky action,” arguing it implies hidden variables or incomplete knowledge. Critics say it challenges causality and relativity.
• Status: It’s real, but many (like David Bohm) prefer deterministic alternatives like the pilot-wave theory to avoid this “weirdness.”

3. Lack of a Unified Interpretation

• Issue: There are dozens of interpretations (Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Bohmian, QBism), none universally accepted. Copenhagen dominates textbooks but is vague.
• Objection: Physics should have a single, clear picture of reality. As Roger Penrose puts it, “Quantum mechanics is a gigantic machine that computes correctly, but we don’t understand what it’s doing.” This feels like “shut up and calculate” science, not true understanding.
• Example: In Many-Worlds, every quantum event splits the universe—solving collapse but creating infinite realities. Critics call it extravagant.

4. Incompleteness and the Classical-Quantum Divide

• Issue: Quantum mechanics doesn’t explain why or how the classical world emerges from quantum rules (decoherence helps but isn’t enough). It also fails to unify with gravity.
• Objection: Pioneers like Einstein, Schrödinger, and de Broglie saw it as provisional. Schrödinger wrote, “I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.” Modern critics like ‘t Hooft push for “cellular automaton” models to restore determinism.

5. Philosophical and Aesthetic Discomfort

• Issue: Indeterminism (true randomness) and the central role of observation clash with the deterministic successes of classical physics (Newton, Maxwell).
• Objection: Figures like Sabine Hossenfelder argue it’s “fundamentally incomplete,” while Lee Smolin calls for theories where time and locality are fundamental, not emergent.

Notable Critics and Alternatives

Physicist/Thinker                  Main Objection                     Proposed Alternative

Albert Einstein          Nonlocality, incompleteness            Hidden variables

Edwin Schrödinger   Measurement absurdity            Unified field theory

David Bohm              Indeterminism                         Pilot-wave (deterministic)

Gerard ‘t Hooft         Observer-dependence              Superdeterminism

Roger Penrose           No gravity integration             Objective collapse

Sabine Hossenfelder Philosophical vagueness            Emergent QM from deeper laws

Counterpoint: Why Most Physicists Accept It

• Empirical success: Predicts outcomes to 10+ decimal places (e.g., electron magnetic moment).
• Practicality: Enables MRI, GPS, quantum computing.
• Pragmatism: As Richard Feynman said, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” But it works, so why fix it? [added by GROK]

Bottom Line

Objections stem from conceptual ugliness, not failed predictions. Quantum mechanics is like a black box: input experiment, output flawless result—but open it, and it’s philosophically messy. Many physicists (e.g., ~40% in surveys) favor alternatives like Many-Worlds or Bohmian mechanics. The debate rages because physics craves not just what works, but what is real. Ongoing work in quantum gravity (string theory, loop quantum gravity) may resolve this—or reveal even stranger truths.

END QUOTE

The response from GROK AI suggests an interesting dilemma for government policy makers. We have global climate models based on principles of classical physics that do not work. And we have calculations by noted physicists based on physical evidence but out of the context of classical physics and objected to by noted classical physicists. Which should be used? It may be disturbing, but because we do not have an intuitive understanding of “why it works” is no reason to not use it.

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CERES Cloudiness: According to NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) mission website:

“Climate is controlled by the amount of sunlight absorbed by Earth and the amount of infrared energy emitted to space. These quantities–together with their difference–define Earth’s radiation budget (ERB). The Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) project provides satellite-based observations of ERB and clouds. It uses measurements from CERES instruments flying on several satellites along with data from many other instruments to produce a comprehensive set of ERB data products for climate, weather, and applied science research.

The goals of the CERES project are to:

• Produce a long-term, integrated global climate data record for detecting decadal changes in the Earth’s radiation budget from the surface to the top-of-atmosphere.
• Enable improved understanding of how Earth’s radiation budget varies in time and space and the role that clouds and other atmospheric properties play.
• Support climate model evaluation and improvement through model-observation intercomparisons.”

Writing in PNAS, the CERES team reports that twenty-four years of satellite observations from CERES show that the Northern Hemisphere (NH) is becoming darker while the Southern Hemisphere (SH) is becoming brighter. The abstract states, in part:

“The emerging darkening of the NH relative to the SH is associated with changes in hemispheric differences in aerosol–radiation interactions, surface albedo, and water vapor changes. Cloud changes also contribute to a greater ASR [absorbed solar radiation] hemispheric contrast, but the magnitude is small due to opposing trend differences in the tropics and extratropics. The break in hemispheric symmetry in ASR challenges the notion that clouds naturally compensate for forced hemispheric asymmetries in noncloud properties. Hemispheric (a)symmetry in radiation is linked with the atmosphere–ocean general circulation. How clouds respond to this hemispheric imbalance has important implications for future climate.”

The effort to understand changing cloudiness and other properties of Earth that influence climate is notable but as John Robson points out, the reasoning becomes questionable when the authors write:

“To gain some insight, we use the multimodel mean climate model simulations in ref. 25 for 2001 to 2019 to examine hemispheric trends in cloud radiative effect (CRE; defined as the difference between clear and all-sky downward TOA flux) and contributions from cloud feedback, “effective radiative forcing” ERF (sum of IRF and rapid adjustments), and the associated cloud masking terms (due to variations in noncloud properties).” [Boldface added.]

Why do the authors seek an explanation using “the multimodel mean climate model simulations” for explanations of the data? The models have been shown to overestimate atmospheric temperature tends, thus falsified. The purpose of the mission is to produce a data record to improve our understanding of the Earth’s radiation budget by observations and thus hope to improve global climate models.

Writing for Net Zero Watch, David Whitehouse has a more generous view of this paper. See links under Challenging the Orthodoxy.

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Crossing Tipping Points: An organization called Global Tipping Points produced a slick 2025 report by 160 authors, from 23 countries and 87 institutions claiming we are crossing dangerous “tipping points.”  These “are stages reached when it is generally agreed by experts that an ecosystem has reached a point of inevitable major degradation.”

One such point is the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef. Jo Nova points out that Peter Ridd and the Reef Rebels use The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) studies which show a significant improvement in the Great Barrier Reef in the 2020s with a slight decline in 2025. The amount of coral cover at the Reef is now higher than it was any time before 2023 since systematic data collection began in 1985.

TWTW asks: How many tipping points were crossed by environmental degradation during the Eemian period, the last interglacial with the environment rebounding from thousands of feet of ice covering most of North America? Will tipping points be crossed when Earth cools again with the onset of a severe glaciation?

All this is an effort to drum up support for the 2025, 30^th Conference of Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which will take place in November in Belém, Brazil.

For the report and Jo Nova’s pointed criticism see links under Defending the Orthodoxy, for other comments see links under Defending the Orthodoxy – Bandwagon Science, for comments about COP-30 see links under After Paris!, and an article on the supposed plight of corals under Changing Seas.

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Will It Fall? The generally accepted world record high temperature is 134º F (57º C) recorded at Greenland Ranch, Death Valley, California on July 10, 1913. Roy W. Spencer, John R. Christy, and William T. Reid have a paper published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society stating that the temperature is approximately 14 º F (8 ºC) higher than it should be. They provide their justification for this assertion. We shall see if the record falls. See links under Measurement Issues – Surface.

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Master Food Plan: Writing in WUWT, Eric Worrall states that the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has published its Roadmap for Resilience: A UK Food Plan for 2050,

“The Agri-Food for Net Zero Network+ was established by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) in 2022 to consider the challenge of transforming the UK’s food system to meet our climate commitments. Since then, we’ve built a community of over 3,000 researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from across the UK dedicated to finding pathways to a more sustainable future.”

Key points are:

• “We can’t hit net zero across the UK economy without reducing food system emissions and increasing carbon capture through sequestration.

• Land use must change significantly to support climate, food, and nature goals.

• Shifting diets and allowing livestock numbers to continue to decline would unlock extensive benefits – from public health to farming resilience.

• More strategic planning is essential to reduce our vulnerability to global shocks.”

Will fresh vegetables from hothouses with CO2 levels two the three times that of ambient air be permitted? See links under Agriculture Issues & Fear of Famine

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Number of the Week: 0.45% per year, 0.82% per year, and 1.51% per year. The UK’s Climate Change Act was enacted in 2008. Germany started earlier to reduce CO2 emissions, in 1990, but it did not have a legally binding law until 2019. Elected in 2008, the Obama Administration tried to establish a net zero program in the US but failed.

According to the US Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, based on data from the World Bank, in 2010 dollars, not seasonally adjusted, the per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the UK was 44,065 in 2008 and 47,265 in 2024. This is an increase of 7.26% for the entire 16 years or 0.45% per year. Correspondingly, Germany had a per capita GDP of 38,996 in 2008, 44108 in 2024 for an increase of 13.11% for the period or 0.82% per year. Correspondingly, The US had a per capita GDP of 53,703 in 2008 and 66,682 in 2024 for an increase of 24.17% over the period or 1.51% per year.

For UK see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDGBR; for Germany see: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDDEU; for US see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDUSA

Challenging the Orthodoxy — NIPCC

Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science

Idso, Carter, and Singer, Lead Authors/Editors, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2013