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This website gets skeptical about global warming “skepticism”.

How ‘balcony solar’ could help fight rising utility costs

17 June 2026 @ 8:07 pm

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Ben Tracy, Climate Central If you feel like your electricity bill just keeps climbing, you aren’t imagining it. Since 2020, U.S. residential energy prices have surged by about 30%, making power the largest household energy expense behind gasoline, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But for residents like Alex Curtis, the days of feeling powerless against rising costs are coming to an end. Curtis is waging a war on his electric bill, and his new weapon of choice is a lightweight, thin-film solar panel. “Oh, it’s super light too,” Curtis remarked as he unboxed the kit on the balcony of his condo in Sunnyvale, California. It weighs just about 1

Fact brief - Does solar energy need subsidies to compete with fossil fuels?

16 June 2026 @ 3:41 pm

FactBriefSkeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Does solar energy need subsidies to compete with fossil fuels? NoUnsubsidized utility-scale solar is now generally cheaper than building fossil fuel power plants. Costs are often compared using “levelized cost of energy,” the average lifetime cost to build and run a power plant divided by the electricity it produces. A 2025 analysis estimates the mean

Plateauing CO2 emissions have slowed atmospheric growth

15 June 2026 @ 8:38 pm

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink I’ve often come across graphs on social media showing atmospheric CO2 concentrations over time, with various dates of climate agreements highlighted. Shared by doomers and skeptics alike, they are used to argue that the rise of CO2 concentrations is inexorable and has not (or perhaps cannot) be slowed by actions we take.

2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #24

14 June 2026 @ 3:50 pm

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, June 7, 2026 thru Sat, June 13, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category: Climate Change Impacts (7 articles) What happens when the world`s breadbaskets start failing simultaneously? The Conversation, Ekamjot Dhillon, Jun 07, 2026. This 1,000-year-old pine tree`s protector fears changing weather patterns Mayors from around the world gathered last week in Huangshan

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #24 2026

11 June 2026 @ 3:17 pm

Open access notables A desk piled high with research reports Emergence of Uncompensable Heat Stress During Monsoon Season in India, Chuphal et al., AGU Advances Uncompensable heat stress (UHS), characterized by the loss of homeostasis due to excessive environmental thermal loading, causes substantial heat-related health risks in India. However, the spatial and seasonal heterogeneity, as well as temporal changes of UHS in India remain poorly understood. Using observations, reanalysis data, and climate model projections, we highlight the surge of UHS during the monsoon season (July–October) as the climate warms. In the observed period (1979–2021), the frequency and area affected by UHS ha

How many people does heat actually kill?

9 June 2026 @ 8:53 pm

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler You have likely seen a headline like this: 62,000 people died from record-breaking heat in Europe: link It’s a striking number. It’s also not clear what it means. Is this the number of people killed by extreme heat? Or climate change’s contributions to the ex

Check out the brand-new hurricane ‘cone of uncertainty’ graphics arriving this season

8 June 2026 @ 8:28 pm

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bob Henson It might have seemed exotic when it first appeared, but the forecast “cone of uncertainty” used by the NOAA/NWS National Hurricane Center (NHC) is now a familiar part of tropical cyclone readiness in U.S. states and territories. For 2026, NHC has made a couple of key tweaks to its standard cone product. It’s also testing an expanded version of the cone – one made feasible by a new way of understanding how and where forecast errors arise. Since its debut in 2002, the cone has become what a University of Miami writer called “arguably [the cen

2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #23

7 June 2026 @ 3:17 pm

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, May 31, 2026 thru Sat, June 6, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category: Climate Policy and Politics (8 articles) Scilencing The Trump Administration would just as soon we didn't know stuff, especially about our planet The Crucial Years, Bill McKibben, May 31, 2026. Companies No Longer Report Greenhouse Gas Emissions And Climate Risk Progressive lawmakers and environmental groups strongly condemned the decision, ar

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #23 2026

4 June 2026 @ 1:06 pm

Open access notables A desk piled high with research reports Historical Volcanic Eruptions Mitigated the Expected Rapid Arctic Sea Ice Decline Prior to 2000, Wang et al., Geophysical Research Letters Arctic sea ice has declined at sharply contrasting rates over the past four decades—modest before 2000 and rapid thereafter. Using observational and model evidence, we show that large tropical volcanic eruptions can trigger decade-long Arctic sea ice recoveries, and that without the 1982 El Chichón and 1991 Pinatubo eruptions, Arctic sea ice would have declined approximately 1.5 times faster before 2000. We further show a model's sensitivity to volcanic aerosol forcing scales with its sens

Nobody knows the future of energy

3 June 2026 @ 7:57 pm

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler I’ve long been struck by how hard it is to predict the evolution of our energy system, even a few years in advance, never mind 25 or 30 years. I still remember the “peak oil” craze in the mid 2000s, when people were telling me the end of oil was nigh. It sounded convincing right up until it turned out to be wrong. In this post, let me show you how bad previous predictions have been for the electricity sector. evolution of our energy system in 6 charts Each plot below shows annual predictions of how a particular source of electricity will evolve as well as what actually happened. The data come from the Energ