“Professor McKitrick’s work has laid a major blow against global climate change fearmongering by exposing how it is next to impossible to blame humans for the recent rise in global temperatures, which have oscillated wildly since the beginning of time,” said Adam Creighton, Chief Economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.
Adam Creighton recently sat down with Professor Ross McKitrick, a key architect of the Trump administration’s controversial 131-page academic take-down of climate change catastrophism. In their discussion, McKitrick said Canadian and Australian plans to phase out fossil fuels were “bizarre”, highly damaging, and would not be fulfilled for economic and scientific reasons.
McKitrick said the conventional wisdom about climate change had become distorted and biased because of vested interests. “Climate change is a kind of industry, it’s a huge one and if you produce research that says it’s not important then you’re putting yourself out of a job,” he added.
Professor McKitrick identifies the major problem in the renewables debate: the use of a “phony cost number” — the levelised cost of power — that ignores intermittency and conceals how solar with battery backup was “by far the most expensive power system out there”.
“Because you need power 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but you don’t have wind all the time, you need to have a second power system running in the background that they leave out of the costs,” McKitrick explained.
During the discussion, amid ever more strident fearmongering about future weather, McKitrick declared global warming could “certainly” even be a net benefit to the planet overall given the positive impact of greater carbon dioxide concentration on agricultural yields and reforestation.
Professor Ross McKitirck is a renowned Canadian economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario. He has written extensively on the economic folly of pursuing ‘net zero’, blasted the unreliability of climate models which disagreed with each other significantly about the temperature in 2100 and could not even forecast the actual temperatures in recent history.
In 2025, Professor McKitrick was a co-author of a report for the Trump Administration titled, A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate. The report was co-authored alongside other scientists including John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven E. Koonin, and Roy Spencer, all similarly highly credentialed and respected in their fields.
The report challenges mainstream scientific understanding by arguing that the economic and environmental harms of greenhouse gas emissions are smaller and less certain than what is generally accepted and suggests that aggressive mitigation policies could have costs outweighing benefits.
“For their report the authors were crucified by a mainstream media which has uncritically swallowed a catastrophic narrative that might attract eyeballs but leads to terrible decision making, not to mention undermining the psychological wellbeing of large swathes of the population, particularly children,” Mr Creighton said.
“McKitrick reminded me how hysterical and baseless so much reporting on climate change in the media has become; it’s so much harder to undermine the government’s disastrous energy policies when it can point to hysterical climate change narratives that provide moral cover for madness.”
To watch Adam Creighton’s discussion with Professor McKitrick click here.
