Facts about Climate

New film presents the latest evidence.

Move over Oppenheimer. Irrespective of the movie Oppenheimer’s sweep of the Oscars, a new film deserves an academy award for best documentary feature film. This remarkable film, Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth), written and directed by Martin Durkin, is a must-see for all Americans.

The movie stars a cast of characters that include scientists and climate experts. Among them are: Physicist Steven Koonin, the best-selling author of Unsettled, and former climate advisor to Barack Obama. John Clauser, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. Dick Lindzen, professor of meteorology at Harvard University and MIT, and scientist who has served on the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Will Happer, who has been science advisor to three U.S. presidents and is a professor of physics at Columbia University and Princeton University. Roy Spencer, senior scientist for climate at NASA’s Marshall space flight center who developed global temperature monitoring with satellites, receiving NASA’s medal for exceptional scientific achievement.

A few climate facts

Here’s a sample of some of the facts in the film:

• We are still in an ice age—the Late Cenozoic Ice Age.

  We’re at the tail end of a 50-million year cooling period. The slightly less cold [periods] are called glacial minima, when there’s just ice at the poles. For the past 10,000 years, we’ve been in a slightly less cold glacial minimum known as the holocene.

• The global temperature has risen gently since 1650 by one degree centigrade. Instead of a long term systematic warming trend, global temperatures vary up and down every 50 to 60 years. Temperatures today are barely higher than they were in the 1940s.

• Global temperature readings have been inflated by urban thermometers. As towns have grown, thermometers that were once outside towns are now in the middle of cities. Concrete and asphalt retain heat. The urban heat island effect causes cities to be 4 or 5 degrees centigrade warmer than rural areas.

  Since 1880, most the warming, it looks like, is due to the urban heat island effect.

• Temperatures taken in rural areas, the ocean and via weather balloons and satellites as well as those measured with tree ring data are not corrupted by the urban heat island effect. These readings all agree that temperatures today are barely higher than the 1940s.

• The level of carbon dioxide on Earth today is close to the lowest it has ever been in the last 550 million years.

  We are in a CO2 famine if we look over the last 550 million years.

• CO2 and temperature are correlated. But if CO2 is the driver, it has to change first, and the temperature has to change second. In real life, the exact opposite always occurs.

• All of the climate models are notoriously inaccurate. They are not able to accurately model the past, the present, or the future. The climate models don’t agree with what scientists observe.

In conclusion

There is no truth to the idea that the Earth is warmer now than it has been in the past. There is no truth that CO2 is higher than it should be.

The real causes of climate change include changes in the sun’s activity and the changing position of our solar system in the Milky Way galaxy. These changes, not carbon dioxide, are driving the global temperature on Earth.

Climate: The Movie—length 1 hour, 19 minutes—is available on YouTube. You can watch it for free below. Please click the bubble icon at the top or bottom of this newsletter to make any comments about this groundbreaking film. And be sure to share this issue of 2026 with your family and friends.