I recently posted about the 100 year old record high temperatures from Australia. This led me to an old post of mine that covers the most important issues that people need to know about climate science. I'm reporting it here because it has aged particularly well and condenses a great deal of information on the subject.
Some things bear repeating.
(originally posted 2 November 2021)
Glossing the Climate Scientists
Back
in the Middle Ages, books weren't printed (the printing press hadn't
yet been invented). Instead, they were laboriously copied by hand.
Monasteries were the chief place that this took place, and you can get a
great overview of this in the very enjoyable
How The Irish Saved Civilization.
One
thing that the Monks would often do, especially on more complex books
on theology or philosophy was to add short notes in the margins
explaining the more impenetrable passages. These little blurbs were
called "glosses" and were essentially a reader's helper. If you didn't
have a teacher - if all you had was the book - then the gloss would
provide a welcome overview to guide the reader to the point of the
original book.
Reader Lou emailed:
Hi Borepatch,
I am a longtime reader, this is my first reach out.
Great blog, I learn a lot and it is on my daily read list.
Regarding
AGW, I am a definite skeptic. Though only semi-literate on the subject
matter. I try to apply my generic engineer-trained, data-driven
analytical approach to issues.
I have read your posts on it (especially the ones from 2010 and 2017) and appreciate you taking these folks on.
I recently came across this article:
My
lack of command of the subject leaves me ill-equipped to critique or
rebut. Would you be willing to look at it and unpack/rebut from your
perspective? I know you have already covered the fundamentals, it’s
just these people never quit. And they misuse data to deceive folks.
Either way, thank you for all you are doing, please keep it up you have more positive impact than you may realize!
Thanks
for the kind words, Lou. I haven't posted on Anthropogenic Global
Warming (AGW) in quite some time because I think I've written everything
I have to say on it. And so while I won't do a line-by-line fisking of
Dr. Weatherhead's article, I will gloss some of my older posts as to
how they relate to her article.
We should start with the post that has a permanent sidebar in the upper right hand side of this blog: A Layman's Guide to the Science of Global Warming.
The discussion that is most pertinent to Dr. Weatherman's article is
the bit on Carbon Dioxide and how weak a greenhouse gas it is. Dr.
Weatherman repeatedly refers to increasing carbon dioxide but completely
skates by the fact that CO2 is saturated in Earth's atmosphere, at
least as far as its heat capturing capacity. The key passage from my
old post is this:
The
scientific consensus is that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere results in warming of around 1°C. We've gone from around
280 parts per million (ppm) atmospheric CO2 to
around 400 ppm an increase of about 50% over the last 100 years or so,
so there should have been an increase of around half a degree. So why
do we hear all of this about how we are destroying the planet? I mean,
half a degree doesn't sound like much.
The next post of mine that is pertinent to Dr. Weatherman's article is How to create a consensus on Global Warming.
She points out in her article that climate data show that all
continents are warming. However, she does not address the very serious
problems with adjustments to the data that inject a warming signal where
none exists. This is quite frankly the key problem in climate science:
the raw temperature data (temperature readings as originally collected
by the scientist many years ago) do not show warming, but the adjusted
data (what is reported by scientists like Dr. Weatherman) shows
considerable warming. My post is very difficult to gloss because the
information is so, well, shocking but this is the summary:
Let
me say this explicitly: I used to believe that the planet was warming,
and that this was likely due to natural (as opposed to man made) causes.
Now I'm not sure that the planet is warming. The data do not show warming over the last 70 years, maybe longer.
If
you only read one of my posts on global warming, this is the one. It
is information-dense and has a bunch of links to scientists who dissent
from Dr. Weatherman's "consensus science" view.
A related post about non-adjusted temperature data is relevant. Understanding Climate Data Made Easy
discusses how record temperatures (you can't adjust them, amirite?) do
not jive at all with the every-year-is-hotter message from Dr.
Weatherman. Here are the key bits:
So
we see [only] 9 states (18% of the total) setting high records in the
last 50 years. 41 states (82% of the total) haven't seen record high
temperatures in the period we've been told is an accelerating and hotter
climate. You would expect to see a lot more states - another 15 or so
setting recent high temperature records. Weird, huh? It's almost like
if you remove the adjustments to the temperature data, you don't see
accelerating warming.
In
fact, we may be seeing the opposite. If you look at record low
temperatures you see a lot going on in the most recent years. 15 states
have set record low temperatures in the last 50 years (once again
ignoring dates listed with an asterisk which tells us the year that the
previous low record was tied). This is only 30% of the total, but
that's basically twice as many as set record high temperatures.
July
and August 1936 saw 14 States set record high temperatures that have
not been surpassed in the subsequent 85 years. This despite the
repeated statements that last year was the hottest ever. This post
suggests a fundamental breakdown in the "Carbon Dioxide is killing us"
throry:
Now
the establishment science story is that average TMin has been
increasing over time, while average TMax has not been increasing much
(looking at adjusted data). Left unexplained is how increasing carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere increases average low temperatures while not
increasing average high temperatures. Also left unexplained is how
increasing average low temperatures (without increasing average high
temperatures) will lead to ecological disaster. Maybe it could, but
it's not at all obvious how this would happen.
It's
also not explained why Urban Heat Island (UHI) doesn't explain the
higher average low temperatures (TMin). UHI is where a weather station
that used to be in a nice grassy field is now in the middle of an
airport, surrounded by tarmac and blasted with jetwash. It's surprising
just how many weather stations are not sited to accurate data
collection norms - only 8% of GCHN stations are accurate withing 1°C.
The data are a mess - you might even say they are a hot mess.
And now we come to the most pointed argument against Dr. Weatherman's article - Science As Practiced Today Is Very Sick.
The scientists themselves have repeatedly shown themselves to be less
than trustworthy. Dr. Weatherman really needs to deal with the
Climategate scandal but is unlikely to touch the subject. The Layman's
Guide post above gives an overview of the scandal:
In November 2009, someone posted 61 MB of emails, computer program code, and climate data from
Hadley servers to an FTP server on the Internet. One of the most
notorious of the emails in this release was from Dr. Jones, and contained the following:
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.
Let's
unpack this so you understand each piece. "Mike" refers to Dr. Michael
Mann (of the Hockey Stick graph fame). "Nature" refers to Nature
Magazine, one of (perhaps the) most prestigious scientific journals.
More specifically, it refers to an article that they published, written
by Dr. Mann in which he had a temperature reconstruction. There is a
huge amount of dispute over what "trick" means - skeptics allege sleight
of hand while Mann said it just referred to a mathematical technique.
So what was the trick?
Dr.
Mann's data sets contained many different proxy series. This is
actually a good thing, because you want confirmation of results from
different places and types of proxies (say, including ice cores, tree
rings, and corals will probably be more reliable than just using tree
rings). Mann's "trick" (call it a mathematical technique if you want)
was to remove all proxy data later than 1960 and replace it with
measured temperature data. The result was a hockey stick shaped
temperature graph. This is what Dr. Jones did in the paper referred to
in his email.
The
$100,000 question is: why go to the trouble to do this if you have
proxy data from 1960 up to the present? Why replace 50 years of
perfectly good data?
Hide the decline.
There
is an youtube lecture where Dr. Richard Mueller from Berkeley covers
what Jones did and why Mueller won't read any more of Jones' scientific
papers. Dr. Weatherman contributes to the IPCC Assessment Reports so
she almost certainly knows Jones personally. She will know Mueller at
least by reputation. But she is a beneficiary of Government funding,
running a department at the University of Colorado. Which leads us
directly to the next - and last - post of mine to gloss: "It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist."
Perhaps
the single dumbest argument presented in support of Global Warming is
that "the scientific consensus is that it's true". Translation: all the cool kids do it. Translation [2]: my scientist is red hot; your scientist ain't doodly-squat. Oooooh kaaaay.
Of course it's as untrue as
it is stupid. And so we get the "you're not qualified"/"we only look at
peer-reviewed scientists" expulsion of the Heretics, as the
Establishment desperately tries to keep control of the debate.
That's
breaking down. Hal Lewis is one of the Senior Statesmen of American
Physics. He's been a member of the American Physical Society for 67
years (!).
...
Hal Lewis thinks that Global Warming is an anti-scientific, money-grabbing scam by scientists, and says so in a brutal resignation letter sent to the president of the APS:
It
is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions
of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has
carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most
successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a
physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should
force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare.
(Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that
any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without
revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word
scientist.
Lewis' letter is utterly
damning, and cannot be dismissed as coming from a crank, or an amateur.
And in it he directly addresses the then President of the APS in a
passage that must fit Dr. Weatherman's department like a glove:
I
do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is
always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ
is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some
have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to
be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly
what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed
trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and
frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the
club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When
Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East
Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of
the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you
don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point
enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a
careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is
not an academic question.
I would be
much more impressed with climate scientists like Dr. Weatherman if they
would address the (it must be said) stink of corruption at the heart of
their field. Or clean up their data. Of course, as Lewis pointed out
there are millions of dollars at stake.
So there you have it,
Lou. There's a lot of reading, but unlike Dr. Weatherman I show my
work. And unlike Dr. Weatherman, I don't say "trust me, I'm a
scientist" when so many of her colleagues so clearly are not
trustworthy.
