The science of science is to robustly challenge the science, and not to just blindly accept it. Climate and energy news from Germany - by Pierre L. Gosselin
The Pacific Ocean covers about one-third of the Earth’s surface. Much of it has been cooling in this era of “global” warming.
New research indicates there has been “cooling of the Pacific sector on decadal timescales during 1940-2020,” including robust cooling reaching -0.4°C per decade from 2005-2019 (even “exceeding -0.9°C per decade during 2005-2010”).
“…observations find a significant cooling of the South Pacific Ocean during 1979-2013”
“…cooling of the Pacific sector on decadal timescales during 1940-2020 in the reanalysis data”
“Sea surface temperature has been decreasing in the southwest Pacific Ocean since 1979, where the cooling has reached -0.9°C per decade during 2005-2010.”
“The warming trend in the Indian sector reaches 0.2°C per decade, and the cooling trend in the Pacific sector reaches -0.4°C per decade during 2005-2019.”
Pacific Ocean cooling is not just confined to the near surface, but also to the deep ocean.
“We further suggest that the Pacific cooling is robust from the surface to the deep, and can even reach the intermediate ocean up to 1500 m rather than being limited to the mixed layer.”
“The cooling trend is also significant in the deep 1000 m, reaching -0.2°C per decade.”
Another heavy blow has hit Germany’s traditional industrial sector.
According to a report by Blackout News, the renowned porcelain manufacturer Kahla in Thuringia is shutting down its operations for good on December 31, 2026.
Despite months of rescue efforts and political backing, the combination of soaring energy bills and a sluggish market has brought a 182-year legacy to a close.
Energy unaffordable
Porcelain manufacturing relies on massive amounts of energy to run kilns at temperatures exceeding 1,000 degrees Celsius. In recent months, Kahla faced monthly gas bills ranging between €150,000 and €180,000, totaling up to €2.16 million annually. Unable to fully pass these costs on to consumers facing their own economic pressures, the business model collapsed.
Following an insolvency filing earlier in the year, insolvency administrator Rolf Rombach spent months negotiating with potential investors—including parties from Turkey. Even with intervention and support from the Thuringian state government and Minister President Mario Voigt, no investor could present a financially viable plan to keep the plant alive.
96 Jobs Lost
The closure leaves the remaining 96 employees without jobs. Management began winding down production in late September and is processing remaining orders gradually, leading to staggered layoffs rather than an overnight cutoff.
News of the final shutdown sparked a wave of solidarity and nostalgia among consumers. The company’s online store was temporarily overwhelmed by a massive rush of last-minute orders as people scrambled to buy pieces of the iconic brand before it disappears forever.
Founded in 1844, Kahla grew into a powerhouse during the Communist East Germany era before restructuring in 1994 following German reunification. After surviving a previous insolvency in 2020, this second major financial crisis has proven insurmountable.
The closure of Kahla Porzellan highlights the severe challenges energy-intensive manufacturers face in maintaining domestic production amid sustained high operating costs.
Reducing human emissions has almost no effect on global temperatures.
An inconvenient new study published in Nature Communications highlights the double-bind consequences of maintaining the view that humans fundamentally control the global climate. This paradigm incentivizes scientists to publish studies that insist humans simultaneously cause both warming and cooling, flooding and drought, glacier retreat and advance, etc., with our everyday activities.
The inevitable and consistent conclusion inherent in most of these studies is that governmental policymaking is the key variable determining climate outcomes.
It is now commonly believed that humans fundamentally control the temperature of the air and ocean primarily by (1) increasing or reducing the atmospheric CO2 concentration, or by (2) increasing or reducing the air pollution (aerosols, particulates) associated with industrialization and energy consumption.
The authors of this study assert that the net climate sensitivity to a 24 ppm decrease in atmospheric CO2 by 2070 – achieved via China’s transition to “net zero” emissions alone – is just -0.03°C ±0.09°C.
This figure is derived by assuming that the global cooling alleged to be produced by a 24 ppm CO2 reduction over the next 50 years, -0.16°C, is almost completely offset by the global warming, +0.12°C, derived from China’s ongoing (successful) air pollution reduction policies during this same time period.
“The global warming from air pollutant reductions can largely offset the climate cooling benefit of CO2 reduction even by around 2060, when net-zero CO2 emissions are reached. The combined global effect is an insignificant cooling of -0.03K ±0.09K.”
Succinctly, the authors assert reducing anthropogenic emissions (both CO2 and aerosols, particulates) causes both cooling and warming simultaneously, and thus they effectively offset or cancel each other out. Ambitious CO2 reduction policies, such as the pursuit of “net zero” CO2 emissions in the coming decades, have almost no effect on climate “for half a century”.
“Even aggressive climate policies like carbon neutrality are not sufficient to cool the planet by ~2070 due to the competing effect of air pollutant reduction.”
So what is achieved by pursuing wildly expensive government-sponsored decarbonization policies? If these calculations are to be believed, a three-one-hundredths of a degree change in global temperature. So, zero.
Germany’s online Report24 discusses the insolvency of Solara4 (at Alcoutim in the Algarve), which was once celebrated as Portugal’s largest flagship solar park (~219 MW) built without traditional state-backed feed-in tariffs.
Europe’s green energies refuse to perform. Image by NoTricksZone using Grok AI.
A major problem was the high solar expansion across the Iberian Peninsula, which today means thousands of megawatts of solar power hit the grid simultaneously during peak sunny hours. This oversupply causes wholesale electricity prices to drop to zero or into negative territory precisely when the plant’s production is highest, drastically reducing expected revenue.
Moreover, the solar park consistently produced less electricity than originally calculated in initial forecasts, which undermined the project’s financial projections despite having a long-term Power Purchase Agreement (PPA).
The huge solar park also suffered several technical failures, including inverter fires within the 12 months leading up to insolvency. A major fire in late May 2026 knocked out roughly 10% of the facility, taking an estimated 8 to 14 weeks to repair and leading to costly downtime and maintenance fees.
As a capital-intensive project, the solar park carried significant remaining debt (tens of millions of euros) owed to primary lenders like Investec and Kommunalkredit Austria. Ongoing fixed costs (maintenance, insurance, interest) became unmanageable as refinancing deadlines approached.
Another factor is that the operating company faces an ongoing arbitration dispute with Chinese contractor CTIEC (China Triumph International Engineering), which claims approximately €143 million from a cancelled construction contract.
The holding company, WElink Energy Portugal 2 (UK) Limited, entered insolvency administration on June 11, 2026, though the solar plant itself continues to generate electricity.
To survive the price collapses, WElink planned to transform the site into a hybrid facility with wind power and a 100 MW battery storage system. Ironically, while the original solar park was touted as subsidy-free, the new battery system is backed by €16.45 million in public funding from Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR).
Report24 argues that “free solar energy” does not equal economically viable power. Capital costs, timing of generation, grid stability, and price cannibalization pose severe financial risks for massive, un-subsidized solar installations.
In summary, Europe’s green energy revolution is going the way of communism: lots of rosy promises turning into an economic debacle. Collapse is inevitable.
In an interview published by Apollo News titled “Energiekrise: Wir werden es schon in diesem Winter spüren”, German chemist, manager, and energy expert Prof. Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt presents a critical assessment of Germany’s energy policy…
Vahrenholt warns of deindustrialization and a potential destabilizing loss of competitiveness. High energy costs and policy-driven phase-outs of reliable baseload power (such as nuclear and coal) are pricing German industry out of global markets.
Key industrial sectors (chemicals, manufacturing, steel) are relocating capital and production abroad, leading to structural economic decline.
Vahrenholt points out that energy supply risks, particularly gas storage levels and grid stability, remain precarious entering the upcoming winter period. “We will soon feel it this winter,” Vahrenholt warns.
Relying heavily on volatile renewable sources (wind and solar) without sufficient backup storage or baseload generation creates grid vulnerability and potential supply bottlenecks.
Global divergence in energy strategy
While Germany has phased out nuclear energy, major industrial powers like China, the United States, and several European neighbors are expanding nuclear energy and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) to power future technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and heavy manufacturing.
Germany’s unilateral approach places it at a competitive and technological disadvantage relative to global rivals. “The energy transition is not a transition, but a retreat. Anyone who shuts down progress shuts down the future,” Vahrenholt told Apollo News.
Advocactes nuclear energy re-entry
Vahrenholt argues that returning to nuclear energy is essential for securing cheap, low-emission, and continuous energy supplies necessary to preserve prosperity and tech leadership. “Germany has not only shut down reactors, but destroyed the promise of the future for coming generations—while China and America compete over AI leadership and industrial power.”
According to new research, marine organisms embedded in coastal rocks dating to ~6500 years ago indicate Northern Ireland’s sea levels were 7.8 m higher than today at that time.
As recently as 3400 years ago sea levels were still no lower than 5.6 m higher than today.
Approximately 7000 to 6000 years ago biomarker evidence embedded in rock suggests Brazilian sea level was >2 m (3-3.5 m) higher than today (Anduro et al., 2026).
This equatorial region was minimally affected by post-glacial uplift. Thus, the 2 to 3.5 m higher relative sea level during this period likely represents the Holocene eustatic (water volume in ocean basins attributed to a less-glaciated Earth) sea level.
Newly published research identifies convective heat transfer and the consequent lapse rate, and not radiation, CO2 concentration, or the so-called greenhouse effect, as the predominant mechanisms warming Earth from its effective radiating temperature, ~255 K, to ~288 K.
Proponents of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) narrative necessarily believe (1) CO2 is the Earth’s temperature “control knob,” (2) longwave (LW) radiation from greenhouse gases like CO2 and water vapor is what keeps the Earth’s surface ~33 K warmer than it would otherwise be in an imaginary world with no CO2 or water vapor.
This thought-experiment-based position relies on the presumption that LW radiation is the main heat transfer mechanism in the Earth’s lower atmosphere, or troposphere. It is not.
Convection, not radiation, dominates heat transfer near the surface. And convection sets the lapse rate, which means that as the density of the atmosphere falls the temperature drops 6.5°C for every km of altitude above the surface. This is why the snow-covered summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro is, for example, about -29°C colder than its base.
“The warming (from ~255 K to ~288 K) is a necessary consequence of the lapse rate, which in turn appears because of convection. Indeed, there would not be a lapse rate without convection.”
“Because the dominant mechanisms operating in the atmosphere are in several respects opposite to that of a greenhouse, the traditional label ‘greenhouse effect’ is arguably inaccurate. … [T]he expression ‘anti-greenhouse effect’ would be more accurate in describing the behavior of the atmosphere, namely the fact that the convection establishes a lapse rate and thereby a surface temperature above the column-mean temperature, while a greenhouse warms mainly by suppressing convection.”
Not only that, but the variations in LW radiation (attributed to variations in CO2 and water vapor) cannot explain either the lapse rate nor the temperature. Instead, it is the temperature variation that determines the variation in LW radiation, and not the other way around.
“The temperature variation full explains and predicts the variation in the LW radiation.”
“The small changes in the lapse rate cannot be attributed to changes in any component related to radiation. … [T]he lapse rate is invariant with respect to changes in LW radiation.”
Over the tallest mountain range on Venus, Maxwell Montes, the atmospheric pressure drops from around 92 bars to roughly 45 bars, and the temperature consequently drops about 82°C compared to the average Venus surface temperature. So convection and lapse rate, not CO2 or radiation, dominate heat transfer in the Venus atmosphere too.
“The proposed explanation of surface warming due to convection and the implied lapse rate extends beyond Earth, most notably to Venus. … The very high temperature of Venus’s surface, of more than 700 K, is usually attributed to the abundance of CO2. … [T]he actual lapse rate in the entire troposphere [60 km altitude] is very close the dry adiabatic, which suggests an isotropic profile…convection with cellular structures dominates in the atmosphere [of Venus].”
The ScienceFiles article reports that the study was heavily flawed, citing errors in calculations, miscoded data, misaligned comparison periods, and flawed weightings.
The now retracted paper claimed that drought severity had increased significantly since 1981, that “atmospheric evaporative demand” (PET/AED) had worsened droughts by 40% from 2018–2022 compared to previous decades, and that 30% of global land area had suffered moderate-to-extreme drought since 2022. It now appears all these findings were incorrect and based on shoddy methodology.
Reality: no detectable global drought acceleration
The ScienceFiles article highlights a follow-up study by Xu et al. (2026, published in Communications Earth & Environment), which challenged the original study. The main issue revolves around how Potential Evapotranspiration (PET) was calculated: In the retracted paper, soil dryness was overstated by assuming uniform moisture dynamics based on air dryness. When re-calculated by Xu et al., the drought severity ended up being less than one sixth of that reported in the retracted paper, and found no detectable recent acceleration in global drought.
The ScienceFiles author accuses major mainstream media outlets (such as Die Zeit and The New York Times) of uncritically spreading alarmist “climate apocalypse” headlines based on flawed science without issuing corrections after retractions.
ScienceFiles criticizes the journal Nature and peer reviewers for allowing low-quality science to be published in the first place.
Another climate-related “crisis” narrative is sapped by observational evidence.
A new study published in a Nature journal finds no acceleration (even a slightly negative acceleration, -0.0003 to -0.00005 yr⁻²) in global-scale drought trends in the modern era of “global warming”.
The zero-acceleration (or slightly declining) trend in global drought appears in Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) observations across 125-year (1900-2024), 75-year (1950-2024), and even the most recent 43-year (1981-2024) records.
Scientists who prefer to advance the narrative that human activity is driving warming, and climate warming accelerates global drought, have historically used negligent statistical methods to “artificially inflate” drying trends six-fold.
A 2022 study that analyzed global annual precipitation trends from 1900 to 2020 also found “no evidence…to show that there has been any increase in precipitation deficits in recent decades that might be attributable to global warming.”
German socialists keep thinking up creative ways to drive companies out and run the economy into the ground.
Online German BlackoutNews here reports on details of a proposal by the SPD Socialists Party parliamentary group (SPD-Bundestagsfraktion) to tax productivity gains resulting from the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to fund bleeding social programs.
Image by NTZ using Grok AI
The extreme left SPD socialists aim to secure new revenue streams (such as a potential “AI dividend”) for the welfare state to offset anticipated losses in payroll taxes and social security contributions if AI replaces human labor.
Although no specific tax rate has been set yet, the plan targets the extra revenue generated through automation, digitalization, and increased process efficiency.
How incompetent can policymaking get?
The initiative creates a conflict with Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s economic strategy, which claims to prioritize boosting competitiveness, encouraging investments, and accelerating productivity before discussing redistribution (“growth first, then redistribution”).
German corporate tax rates remain high internationally (at around 30.13% for corporations in 2025). While the federal government aims to reduce corporate burdens to attract investment, the proposed tax works in the opposite direction.
5 reasons it’s a bad idea
Opponents and economic critics argue that taxing AI-driven productivity gains presents several major drawbacks:
1. Implementing a tax specifically on productivity gains penalizes companies for improving efficiency. Businesses bear all upfront financial risks—purchasing AI infrastructure, data pipelines, computing power, and retraining staff—with no government support if the initiative fails. Taxing the returns when projects succeed distorts the risk-to-reward ratio.
2. Capital and tech investments are highly mobile. In a globalized market, companies choose locations based on energy costs, tax burdens, and overall return on investment. Given Germany’s existing high tax environment, introducing an extra levy on technological adoption could push domestic companies to relocate AI R&D or deter foreign investment altogether.
3. Taxing productivity gains before they materialize prioritizes revenue distribution over economic growth. By dampening the incentive to automate, the policy risks slowing total output—which ultimately limits the future tax base for standard corporate profits, wages, and consumption.
4. From a practical standpoint, defining and measuring “productivity gains purely derived from AI” is extremely difficult, How do we know if the productivity gains arise from AI or from better management, standard software updates, market shifts, or hardware upgrades creates immense administrative complexity?
Moreover, compliance costs for tracking AI-specific gains could burden small and medium enterprises (SMEs) far more than large corporations.
5. Many developed economies facing demographic shifts rely on AI and automation to maintain economic output despite a shrinking labor force. Taxing AI adoption disincentivizes technology that resolves labor shortages, risking structural stagnation.
According to a new study, coral proxy sea surface temperature (SST) evidence suggests the northern South China Sea (nSCS) naturally warmed and cooled at rates of 1 to 1.5°C per decade from about ~5300-5100 years ago.
A 2021 coral proxy study indicates from ~6000 to 2000 years ago nSCS annual SSTs were 3-4°C warmer than they were from 1994 to 2004, with the modern SSTs the coldest of the last ~6000 years.
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