© Clintel Foundation/Monday 17 February 2025

The Paris Agreement is now a house of cards 

Illustration: cartoonsbyjosh.com

The ‘Trump effect’ is already derailing the prospects of future UN negotiations over the Paris climate agreement, says economist Tilak Doshi. Indonesia, one of the world’s largest greenhouse gases emitters, cast doubt on the Paris agreement after President Donald Trump announced the US would withdraw from the global climate accord. Hashim Djojohadikusumo, the Indonesian climate and energy envoy, said at a conference: “If the US, which is currently the second-biggest polluter after China, refuses to comply with the international agreement, why should countries like Indonesia comply?” Indonesia, he said, is evaluating the role of energy transition projects in the light of the US withdrawal.

President Javier Milei recently revealed in an interview that he is “analysing whether to withdraw Argentina from the Paris Climate Agreement.” He denounced the Paris climate agreement as a “fraud of cultural Marxism”. Mr. Milei’s outspoken views on climate change were already well expressed before he had assumed presidency. He called the expressed concerns of politicians regarding climate catastrophe as “another socialist lie” and avowedly rejected the Paris climate agreement.

And in an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal in November, author Paul Tice argues that President Trump “can topple the climate change house of cards” by putting the nation’s energy policies on a sound and rational footing. Indeed, any nation that puts its energy policies on a sound and rational footing would reject the hobgoblin of climate change that the Paris agreement signifies.

Read the full article by Tilak Doshi: here

New paper shows clouds are more important than CO2

Photo: Shutterstock

Clouds simultaneously reflect incoming sunlight back to space (cooling the Earth) and trap outgoing heat (warming the Earth). This dual nature makes clouds both powerful and perplexing players in our climate system. The net effect of clouds on climate is a balance between these opposing influences, and thus a central component of the Earth’s energy budget.

A recent study by Van Wijngaarden and Happer, titled Radiation Transport in Clouds, delves into this complexity. The 2025 paper says the radiation effects of clouds can easily negate or amplify the impact of CO2. The researchers highlight that clouds have a more pronounced effect on Earth’s radiation budget than greenhouse gases like CO₂.

For instance, their research reveals that a modest decrease in low cloud cover could significantly increase solar heating of the Earth’s surface. In comparison, a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations reduces radiation to space by a mere 1%: “Instantaneously doubling CO₂ concentrations, a 100% increase, only decreases radiation to space by about 1%. To increase solar heating of the Earth by a few percent, low cloud cover only needs to decrease by a few percent.”

This stark contrast highlights the disproportionate influence of cloud dynamics compared to CO2 fluctuations. Most state-of-art climate models are still in their infancy. We need more accurate measurements of clouds’ properties and their influence on the electromagnetic components of solar radiation if they are to be useful inputs for climate models.

Read the full article by Vijay Jayaray of the CO2 Coalition: here

Willie Soon goes back to the Age of the Vikings

Photo: Willie Soon

Dr. Willie Soon has started up his coal fired time machine again to travel back to the Age of the Vikings. Let’s see what we can learn about the climate there. It’s another brilliant and very entertaining 5 minute video  by Soon and the team of Gorilla Science (Martin Durkin and Tom Nelson, who also produced Climate: The Movie last year). Just watch it and send it to your kids and grand kids!

Earlier the same team produced this video about the Age of the Dinosaurs.

Obsessed anesthesiologists fret over climate change

Believe it or not, the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) is concerned about the warming effect of anesthetic gases (sevoflurane, nitrous oxide, isoflurane and desflurane). The ASA references these gases as being many more times as potent as carbon dioxide.

Now, a CO2 Coalition paper says such comparisons fail to quantify the actual atmospheric warming potential of anesthetic gases. To do that, Coalition scientists studied the concentration of the gases in the atmosphere and how much they absorb solar heat and delay its return to outer space, where all solar radiation reaching Earth eventually ends up.

It turns out that the concentrations of anesthetic gases in the atmosphere are exceedingly small. Because of this and other factors the warming potential caused by anesthetic gases is also quite small. Based on the scientists’ calculations, continued emissions of anesthetic gases would cause a temperature increase of about 0.032 °C in 50 years and about 0.064 °C in 100 years.

Read the full article: here

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There are many signs that the climate debate is entering its end game. Many countries ignore climate targets all together including the US now under Trump. However, the battle is not yet over. The EU especially is on the brink of economic collapse due to its extreme energy prices and the growing amount of ‘climate’ regulations. The media, many politicians, academia continue to promote the climate agenda, as that is their bread and butter.

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Clintel is an Amsterdam (The Netherlands) based thinktank founded in 2019 by Dutch emeritus professor Guus Berkhout and science writer Marcel Crok.

Clintel operates as a climate science and climate policy watchdog. In its first year it launched the World Climate Declaration, stating “there is no climate emergency”. That declaration is now signed by more than 1950 scientists and experts.
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