Trump: Delusional and Stupid

Three things stand out about Donald Trump’s hour-long speech at the United Nations. First, he hurled a lot of insults, including insulting the United Nations, all while telling representatives of most of the world’s nations that their countries were on the road to failure. Second, he spent a lot of time (a lot!!) bragging about himself while claiming he wasn’t bragging about himself. Third, when it comes to climate change he went full denial.

He called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” and said “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons were wrong. They were made by stupid people …” But he declared his love for fossil fuels of all kinds, proudly informing us that he has “a little standing order in the White House. Never use the word coal, only use the words clean, beautiful coal.”

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Hit and Run

The “climate working group” (CWG), the gang of five which produced the climate report for the Department of Energy, has been dissolved. The report will not be changed in response to the many criticisms received, because the climate working group is no longer working.

According to a spokesperson from DoE,


“DOE determined that the draft report and the public comments it solicited achieved the purpose of the CWG, namely to catalyze broader discussion about the certainties and uncertainties of current climate science," a DOE spokesperson said. "We will continue to engage in the debate in favor of a more science-based and less ideological conversation around climate science.”

What follows is my opinion:

The statement from the DoE spokeperson is partly true and mostly a lie. Yes it achieved the purpose of the DoE. No, that purpose wasn’t to “catalyze broader discussion.” No, they are not in favor of a more science-based and less ideological conversation about climate science — just the opposite.

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How Bonferroni goes wrong

Having declared (in the last post) that in a recent study of sea level data from locations around the world the Bonferroni correction is not an acceptable procedure, I thought it might be a good idea to show how that comes to be.

First, a very simple example. We test data from location “A” for acceleration of sea level rise, and get a p-value of 0.042. That’s less than our critical test value 0.05, so we declare “acceleration is statistically significant.” Another team tests data from location “B” (a different location), getting a p-value of 0.046. This too is less than 0.05, so they too declare statistical significance. Along comes someone who says there were two tests done, so applying the Bonferroni correction requires a modified critical value of 0.05/2 = 0.025. Neither p-value is lower than that, so neither location shows statistically significant acceleration — despite the fact that as individual tests, they both do.

The Bonferroni correction can lead you astray.
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Bad Science on Sea Level

In a recent report about climate change from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), the authors state that “U.S. tide gauge measurements reveal no obvious acceleration beyond the historical average rate of sea level rise.” This is false. Judith Curry has defended this statement by pointing to Voortman & DeVos (2025), who analyze tide gauge data and state that


“Statistical tests were run on all selected datasets, taking acceleration of sea level rise as a hypothesis. In both datasets, approximately 95% of the suitable locations show no statistically significant acceleration of the rate of sea level rise.”

This too is false, and I believe I know how they came to this mistaken conclusion.

Consider the tide gauge record from Cedar Key, Florida (yearly values from PSMSL, the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level) from 1950 to the present:

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Sea Level Rise in the U.S.A.

I’ve already blogged about the lame treatment of sea level in the new DOE report. It has attracted some attention from those who want to know how the Trump administration is butchering climate science. But — unlike the authors of the DOE report — it seems my readers also want to know what’s really happening to sea level along the coasts of the USA.

If global sea level is accelerting (and it is), then it’s no surprise we see statistically significant acceleration on the east coast and Gulf coast of the U.S., by why not on the west coast?

I tested for recent acceleration at U.S. tide gauge stations by fitting a quadratic to the data since 1970. It’s not the best test, but it’s simple and I think it’s a good one. It raises the question, what is the average acceleration since 1970 of global sea level? I took the tide gauge reconstruction from Frederikse et al. and fit a quadratic to its data since 1970, which estimates the average rate of global sea level acceleration since 1970 to be 0.083 ± 0.024 mm/yr/yr (95% CI).

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U.S. Government makes old lies new again

A report from the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) (an official U.S. government report) tells us that

U.S. tide gauge measurements reveal no obvious acceleration beyond the historical average rate of sea level rise.

It’s one of the main points of chapter 7 (Changes in Sea Level). But the DOE report is not the origin of this particular falsehood. For instance …

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Sea Level Rise in NYC

In response to my last post, a reader asked


Please evaluate their Fig. 7.6 graph of the 30 year trailing rate of Battery sea level rise. The author’s comment is that "NOAA’s projection is remarkable — as shown in Figure 7.6, it would require a dramatic acceleration beyond anything observed since the early 20th century."

My evaluation: for the purpose of giving the wrong impression, it’s a very clever graph for at least two reasons.

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Sea Level Mis-information from DOE

Here in the USA, the Department of Energy (DOE) has issued a report titled “A Critical Review of the Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” It is a product of the “Climate Working Group,” five Ph.D.’s with one thing in common: a history of climate denial. They were commissioned by DOE director Chris Wright, previously chairman and CEO of the fossil fuel company Liberty Energy.

It’s a long report covering a lot of topics. They devote chapter 7 to sea level rise, and here is their “chapter summary” (I have highlighted, in bold, its final sentence):


Chapter Summary

Since 1900, global average sea level has risen by about 8 inches. Sea level change along U.S. coasts is highly variable, associated with local variations in processes that contribute to sinking and also with ocean circulation patterns. The largest sea level increases along U.S. coasts are Galveston, New Orleans, and the Chesapeake Bay regions – each of these locations is associated with substantial local land sinking (subsidence) unrelated to climate change.

Extreme projections of global sea level rise are associated with an implausible extreme emissions scenario and inclusion of poorly understood processes associated with hypothetical ice sheet instabilities. In evaluating AR6 projections to 2050 (with reference to the baseline period 1995-2014), almost half of the interval has elapsed by 2025, with sea level rising at a lower rate than predicted.

U.S. tide gauge measurements reveal no obvious acceleration beyond the historical average rate of sea level rise.

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The Air they Breathe

Dr. Debra Hendrikson, M.D., recounts the moment she decided to say it out loud while on the job. Like most good pediatricians, she avoided topics with risky political implications because she knew how valuable it is to have a good relationship with her patients’ parents. But on a day in 2018, in a room with two children on oxygen because of exposure to smoke and ash from western wildfires, after most of the month not being able to see the sun in the sky in Reno, Nevada because of it, after a steady and dramatic increase in exactly this kind of air pollution for more than a decade, when one kid’s father looked out the window and exclaimed “What is happening?” Dr. Hendrikson said the words. “It’s climate change.”

Thank God she did. Thank goodness that the father who asked, at first shocked to hear it, who didn’t want to say it out loud either, let on that he already knew. Thank goodness that the mother who overheard not only agreed, she bitterly mocked the fools and liars who deny reality.

I think of myself as well-informed on the subject of climate change, or at least I did until I read Dr. Hendrikson’s book The Air They Breathe. I had no idea how profoundly it has affected children’s health, in America and around the world. Dr. Hendrikson speaks from experience working as a pediatrician. She sees what her patients are suffering from and she sees the direct causal relationship with climate change.

She points to the dramatic increase in cases and mortality related to some very specific and very revealing conditions — exactly the kind of thing I tend to do. I can graph the number of hospital admissions, the rise in emergency room visits, the increase in mortality, I can even analyze their relationship to climatic conditions. But I have never been the one who tried to save a teenager dying from a severe asthma attack, only to fail. As Dr. Hendrikson says, “It is one thing to cite those statistics. It is another to have it happen in your hands.”

She powerfully proves her thesis, that “The climate crisis is a health crisis, and it is a health crisis, first and foremost, for children.” I strongly urge you all to buy two copies of this book: one to read and share with your friends, another to send to one of your elected representatives.

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Heat Wave Hotspots

Posted on July 6, 2025 | 3 comments

After working with my heat index for a while, I’ve concluded that values >= 20 represent severe extreme heat in a given year at a given location. It makes for very informative maps when one highlights the locations that exceed the limit, i.e. that have not just a hot year, but a severely hot year. That in turn reveals that certain regions of the Northern Hemisphere extratropics are susceptible to severely hot summer temperatures, the deadly “heat wave.”

One of those regions is near the center of North America, well illustrated by the 1934 heat wave (part of the “dust bowl” years in the American midwest); I delineate it as longitudes 80°W to 105°W, latitudes 29°N to 50°N.

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