Another round-up of some of the latest climate silliness – some stories that are worth commenting on but don’t really merit a full post on their own.

Mr Hulot resigns

The clueless French environment minister, appropriately named Mr Hulot, has resigned, see AFP report and Climate Home. Apparently he announced his resignation live on radio this morning, without having told President Macron first. Hulot seems to think that nuclear power stations cause global warming and is upset that they aren’t being phased out fast enough, something we’ve commented on before. In fact France has lower carbon emissions per capita or per GDP than most of the rest of Europe, largely thanks to their high level of nuclear power. So this, attributed to Hulot, makes no sense at all:

Hulot said his time in office had been “an accumulation of disappointments”, citing France’s failure to move away from nuclear power. He said he felt like he had “a bit of influence but no power”. He stressed that the transition to a carbon-free world was a “collective responsibility” and that the dominating liberalism model had to be put into question if the world was to move to a green economy.

Kaitlin’s fake news

Kaitlin Naughten is a climate scientist now at the British Antarctic Survey. Hers is a story you may have seen before. She started her climate activist blogging at the age of 16, then moved into the field (this is one of the problems climate science faces — political activists with established views and agendas are attracted into it).

Her latest post is about fake news. Now writing about fake news is always dangerous, and you have to be careful. But this point seems to have escaped Kaitlin. She starts her blog about fake news with the claim that

The UK is stockpiling food and medicine

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is, itself, fake news. The link goes to a Guardian article saying that the government is drawing up plans for stockpiling in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

I posted a comment on Kaitlin’s blog pointing out that her claim was fake news. But unsurprisingly, she didn’t post it or acknowledge or correct the error.

She ends her post with another piece of fake news,

More and more people now understand and accept the science of climate change

Here the link is to Climate change in the American mind. If she had bothered to read beyond the spin from the Yale climate propaganda team and actually look at the results of the survey, she’d have seen that, as we’ve discussed here recently, there’s been virtually no change in public opinion over the last decade.

Unbalanced alarmists

An assorted bunch of climate activists, politicians, people from UEA etc (including Caroline Lucas, George Monbiot, Rupert Read and Mark Maslin) have written a loopy letter to the Guardian. Their suffering from Climate Derangement Syndrome is so severe that they appear to be unable to distinguish between climate change being real and it being catastrophic:

We are no longer willing to lend our credibility to debates over whether or not climate change is real. It is real. We need to act now or the consequences will be catastrophic.

From this non sequitur, they proceed to an outright falsehood:

In the interests of “balance”, the media often feels the need to include those who outright deny the reality of human-triggered climate change.

I wonder who they are referring to here? They don’t say. Usually the target of such authoritarian zealots is Nigel Lawson, who appears on the radio once every year or two (“often”?) leading to shrieks of indignation. But Lawson, as anyone who has looked at his book will know, doesn’t ‘deny the reality of human-triggered climate change’.

They end their letter by declaring that they aren’t going to debate, which inspired Josh’s cartoon shown above.