The Worst Climate Stories of the Week (Killing Owls to Save Mother Earth)

The climate stories we have this week are equal parts infuriating and ridiculous. So, really, just another normal week in climate news—only moreso.

Forgive the shocking and provocative claim, but our mainstream media has not accurately reported the news about the climate. As the corporate media focused on Hurricane Beryl’s intensity, they failed to note the relative inactivity of tropical storms around the globe. But hey, we got more cow fart news, so at least the media got some sensational climate news out to the masses.

In our weekly EV implosion segment, the Department of Energy has decided to prop up a nearly bankrupt manufacturer with half a billion in subsidies. On top of that, America still doesn’t have enough electricity infrastructure to build enough EV charging stations. A congressional hearing revealed the reason 25% of western forests have burned down. And federal wildlife officials have decided to kill owls to save owls in a demonstration of just how ridiculous federal interventions have gotten.

(Don’t miss last week’s column: Cleanup on Aisle B)

In our good news segment, we get to talk about how increased carbon has led to massive coral growth on the Great Barrier Reef, shutting down the climate hysterics on that argument. Also, temperatures in Antarctica have gone down while glaciers have grown—again.

Let’s defy the mainstream media by pointing out their foibles, and celebrating the good climate news.

Media Refuses to Notice the Missing Hurricanes

This week, Hurricane Beryl made news for its unusual characteristics—it briefly got up to Category 5 over the open ocean, the earliest Cat-5 hurricane in the Atlantic on record. Climate hysterics, naturally, blamed global warming. The press failed, however, to counterbalance that sensational news with another inconvenient fact about named storms across the globe. For the first time in the satellite era, not a single storm worthy of a name developed across the entire Pacific Ocean for the month of June.

Burning Down the Forests to Prove Climate Change

A congressional hearing this week featured the head of the U.S. Forest Service confirming that 25% of America’s forests have burned up completely, as logging has plummeted. As federal agencies have enacted more environmental regulations, and slashed the amount of logging allowed, fires have gotten out of control over the period of a couple of decades. Don’t worry, though, that’s not the Forest Service’s fault, it’s climate change.

Shooting Owls to Save Owls

The saga of the Northern Spotted Owl took another ridiculous and nonsensical turn this week. Since the 1980s, the controversy has dominated public policy surrounding management of the forests in the Pacific Northwest. A federal court ruling, using erroneous and since-debunked scientific claims, put old-growth forests off-limits to logging to save the Spotted Owl. When that didn’t work, biologists came to realize the decline had more to do with Barred Owls out-competing them in their own territory. So now, instead of reversing any of the previous bad forest policy, the feds have decided to shoot all the Barred Owls. That’s right, the Fish and Wildlife Service will start culling upwards of half a million Barred Owls, in a doomed attempt to boost Spotted Owl numbers.

Where do Spotted Owls stand, you ask? Great question! There are approximately 15,000 of them. Nowhere near the population of Barred Owls, but importantly, Spotted Owls carry a designation of “near-threatened.” Not endangered, not even threatened, but a category even below that. And it strains credulity to think the USFWS has the right idea when it proposes to interrupt an otherwise natural occurrence. One species out-competing another in a given territory has happened countless times throughout Earth’s history. It’s perfectly natural. It’s how evolution proceeds. Why are we interrupting natural processes to favor one species over another? Who do we think we are?

Denmark Taxes Livestock Flatulence For the Climate

Starting in 2030, the Danish government will tax farmers approximately $43 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted by cows, pigs, and sheep. All in an effort to get Denmark to “carbon neutrality.” The Taxation Minister, Jeppe Bruus, boasted that it makes Denmark the first nation in the world to tax agricultural CO2. No indication yet how they intend to measure the cow farts. Seriously—they haven’t announced a mechanism by which they can measure emissions.

The climate hysterics’ obsession with livestock farts has really gotten disturbing.

This Week in Imploding EVs

Our friend Kevin Killough reported over at Just The News that 75 percent of businesses that build EV charging stations say the electrical grid doesn’t have enough capacity to support them. A majority also said the total costs were also problematic, along with permitting and licensing delays. This has caused many of them to install gas or diesel generators at the charging stations.

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy (DOE) will give a $400 million “loan” to battery manufacturer Eos Energy, despite their recent $1 million penalty for defrauding the federal government. Eos paid the fine for evading tariffs on Chinese battery components. A report in 2023 revealed Eos had inflated its reported “backlog” of customer orders by $500 million, which triggered a class-action lawsuit by shareholders.

Turns out, a member of the Board of Directors for Eos counts DOE “loan czar” Jigar Shah as a personal friend.

Just a coincidence, certainly.

And now for some good news.

Coral Deaths Called Off Due to Lack of Participation

Despite the doomsaying about coral die-offs, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia keeps setting coral growth records. This despite the increase in atmospheric CO2 levels. Why, it’s almost as if CO2 might actually be good for coral:

Sixty percent of all human CO2 emissions have been emitted since 1985 but today the corals are healthier than ever

In 1985 humans were emitting only 19.6 billion tons of CO2 each year, and now we emit 37 billion tons. In the meantime AIMS have been dragging divers thousands of kilometers over the reefs to inspect the coral cover. These are the most detailed underwater surveys on the largest reef system in the world, and they show that far from being bleached to hell, the corals are more abundant than we have ever seen them.

Newsflash: Antarctica Is Still Cold

Despite all that global warming all over the globe, the southern part of the globe remains cold. Shockingly cold. Record-breakingly cold. As Tom Nelson noted on X, as climate hysterics continue to go on about the “hottest year on record,” Antarctica refuses to participate:

Australia has seen record cold snaps this winter:

This follows last month’s revelation of Chile, and other parts of South America, experiencing the coldest autumns in decades.

Weird how the globe refuses to get hot with all this global warming going on.

Learn more: How the Left’s Global Warming Ideology Wrecked Science—And How to Stop It