The Right Way: Climate Unscience

- Guest Blogger Nitzakhon

I made reference in my essay The Leftist Sense of Self to two instances, among many in my life, where I heard something that didn’t match my current set of beliefs. Uttering those two magic words That’s weird... I investigated and often found myself changing my mind upon the discovery of new information. So in full disclosure, I used to be a Warmist, strongly believing that CO₂ emissions were a dire threat to the biosphere on earth from a runaway greenhouse effect.

No longer.

PEGGING OUT THE BULLSH*T METER

I was educated in, and still work in, a STEM-related field. I am driven by data, by logic, and make a good-faith effort to work from facts to come to a conclusion – not jump to a conclusion and then collect facts to justify that conclusion. While I have enough education and experience to be able to have flashes of insight based on a few facts – with an occasionally-annoying-to-others propensity to be right almost all the time – I wait until the facts are in, or at least in strong preponderance, before recommending a course of action. And on occasion I have found that my pet theory on something was, in fact, wrong as shown by the evidence. So I changed my mind.

Regarding the topic at hand: as I started to pay attention, drawn to the topic by multiple factors, I found my bullsh*t meter pegging out so hard the needle got bent.

This, of course, begs the question WHY did I change my mind?

LACK OF OPENNESS

Back in the late 1990s there was a study by economist John Lott on the effects of concealed carry and what happens when states pass Shall Issue laws. The effect he found was stark and clear: concealed carry reduces crime. See his book More Guns, Less Crime. Of course this is no surprise to people on the Right. But naturally this was a political hot potato; he was viciously attacked by claims his research was flawed, biased, etc. So – and I hold this to be the very zenith of openness – he offered his data set, copies of his notes in developing his analytical technique, and copies of the analysis model itself to anyone who asked, including his critics.

And that’s the critical point. He shared his data, even with critics, because he was interested in the truth. Consider another example: the German scientist who researched NASA’s data and found systematic adjustments of the data to create warming trends artificially. Relevant to this section is this quote from the article (I’ll refer back to his analysis later):

All datasets are available to the public at any time. The studies by Prof. Ewert may be requested by e-mail: ewert.fk (at) t-online.de.

Compare and contrast the openness, above, to this instance of concealment of data, one of many I’ve read over the years where Warmists actively fought sharing their data and methods with people who aren’t dedicated to The Cause (a term actually used in the infamous Climategate emails). Don’t forget Phil Jones preferring to delete data files rather than let climate change skeptics see them. And recently Michael Mann, of the infamous “Hockey Stick Graph” fame, refused to provide his data in a trial to bolster his own case in suing someone who he claimed had defamed him (bolding added):

[Mann] has bought himself time till 2019 and his lawyers can continue to deny jurors (and Joe Public) access to his disputed data in this protracted legal battle that has already eaten up six years and millions in legal fees.

Michael Mann’s “work” is the subject of the great book, A Disgrace to the Profession, by Mark Steyn; Dr. Ball, the target of the lawsuit, has his own book out, The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science.

So pause and think. This guy – whose work is foundational to virtually the entire Warmist argument – claims Dr. Ball is defaming him by saying his research is a fraud… but he refuses to release for outside examination the data and analytical techniques being criticized, preferring to risk losing the lawsuit rather than reveal to the world evidence that could vindicate his claim of defamation.

For me, this is the fundamental issue driving my changed view; the other ones I present are merely gravy: Any researcher who refuses to have their results questioned, their data and data collection methods reviewed, and their analytical models examined for robustness and trialed for replication is de facto a fraud and their results cannot be trusted.

(For a broader look at fraud in science in general, try this book: The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science.)

BURN THE HERETICS

(Shameless capitalism time: Link attached to the image above goes to a coffee mug; also available in T-shirts. Yes, I own the cartoon. Another mug is below – let me know if you want T-shirts and I can put them up.)

When skeptics are put under house arrest to avoid them raising uncomfortable questions, it’s not a science. And when people scream that skeptics need to be arrested and tried, even executed, it’s not a science. Consider these multiple links within this quote):

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for punishing and imprisoning dissenters. Bill Nye endorsed such a call just last week. And while it’s easy to dismiss Kennedy and Nye as famous crackpots, Attorney General Loretta Lynch admitted that there had been discussions about prosecuting climate dissenters. And that materials had been passed along to the FBI.

Meanwhile, many notable scientists in the field have changed their minds away from the alarmism:

[T]here are many outstanding scientists who have bothered to actually examine this issue, and have come to the obvious conclusion that there is much less to the story of gloom and doom than is popularly asserted. Many started as supporters of alarm but came to change their minds.

FRAUD

Back in high school Physics I first became familiar with the phrase “First draw your curve, then plot your reading.” With high school and even college science classes being, essentially, deterministic and the foundational implanting of basics, we pretty much knew what to expect. Thus, a little fudging-in of errors, and Voila! we had our lab report with a cursory actual set of experiments. But we were amateurs. For masters of that technique, we need to look at NASA and NOAA among others. In Global Warming Hoax: German Scientist Finds Evidence That NASA Manipulated Climate Data (which I referenced above), we see one of the huge problems here (bolding added):

When the publicly available data that was archived in 2010 is compared with the data supplied by NASA in 2012, there is a clear difference between the two. The GISS has been retroactively changing past data to make it appear that the planet is warming, especially after the year 1950. In reality, the original data shows that the planet has actually been getting colder throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Overall, 10 different statistical methods have been used to change the climate’s trajectory from cooling to warming.

It’s easy to find a trend when you torture the data to put one in. Quoting the source paper this article is based upon (bolding added):

In this research report, the most important surface data adjustment issues are identified and past changes in the previously reported historical data are quantified. It was found that each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history. And, it was nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.

As a result, this research sought to validate the current estimates of GAST using the best available relevant data. This included the best documented and understood data sets from the U.S. and elsewhere as well as global data from satellites that provide far more extensive global coverage and are not contaminated by bad siting and urbanization impacts. Satellite data integrity also benefits from having cross checks with Balloon data.

The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming.

Real Climate Science has an ongoing series of posts showing dramatic instances where temperature records are being altered, with 100% of the alterations amplifying – or outright creating – warming trends. Here’s a specific article from that site, and more on altered data. NOAA has also been caught outright tweaking data. And they’re not even hiding it. (And now we’re starting to learn that older data isn’t trustworthy.)

Now let me be calm; data sometimes does need to be “cleaned up”. In the course of my own career I’ve needed to do that on occasion – sometimes data does need adjustment. But in this case, I find three things being outright suspicious:

That, according to my recollection of reading articles about these adjustments, the original data sets are being over-written in some cases. This is a fundamental no-no. That it is done once could be accidental; that it is, apparently, being done multiple times has to be intentional.
All of the adjustments go only one way. That defies even a basic knowledge of how things work on a statistical level – by just randomness, some adjustments should go the other way.
To my knowledge there has been no rigorous, let alone replicated, accounting for how the data was adjusted and why it was necessary to do so.

I do know this: If I had ever overwritten the original data, or had adjustments or clean-ups I could not explain to people wanting to confirm my results based on my notes, or tried to use data that was questionable in accuracy, my work would have immediately been deemed worthless by my colleagues. For “climate science”, however, what would be unacceptable anywhere else is standard practice.

FALSIFIABILITY

A theory needs to be testable, and failing the test, is falsified. One of the most famous examples of this was Einstein’s General Relativity which predicts that a gravity field can bend light. Known as gravitational lensing, the theory was tested in a famous experiment. Had the test failed, General Relativity would have had to – at best – undergone significant revision… if not been outright proven wrong. In other words, a theory must say “If this theory is true, these predictions must be testable” – whether true or false. So consider a prediction by one of the leaders of the Warmist movement, Dr. James Hansen:

Since then we’ve had a continued expansion of fossil fuel use, as in his most alarmist scenario. Given that amount of CO2 emissions, his prediction was that by now, temperatures would have gone up by five degrees Fahrenheit, or about 3°C.

Obviously, nothing like that has happened. Despite the fact that millions of folks believed his prediction in 1988 and continue to listen to him today, the UAH MSU satellite data says that since 1988 it’s warmed by … well … about a third of a degree. Not three degrees. A third of a degree. He was wrong by an order of magnitude. So obviously, he desperately needs an excuse for this colossal failure.

When you’re off by a factor of ten it’s time for a person interested in the truth to step back and say “You know, maybe I’m wrong.”

Predictions are for worse hurricanes. Wrong. Worse tornadoes. Wrong. The Arizona and California droughts that are the “new normal”? Wrong and wrong. Melting ice caps? Wrong. Polar bears going extinct? Wrong. Hot spot in the upper atmosphere (a critical element central to all models)? Wrong. Glaciers retreating everywhere? Wrong.

So, basically, “climate change” predicts that it will be – simultaneously – warmer, colder, wetter, drier, stormier, and calmer. How can it be falsified? And speaking of falsification, take a look at this graph:

The models, considered the unquestionable Holy Writ, differ from actual temperatures by a confidence interval of more than 95%, which is a standard scientific term for “We’re pretty sure they’re different”. This brings to mind a quote by Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist:

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

The theory (models) do not agree with the experiments (real-world measurements). They’re wrong. Now, of course, comes the shift to say that falsifiability – a fundamental aspect of the scientific method – doesn’t need to be applied here. WHAM! BS meter pegs out again.

And one more thing about falsifiability is the name changing. It was “global warming”, but then it became “climate change” when it became clear there was a years-long hiatus in warming. Now it’s shifting to “climate instability” or “climate extremes”. If you need to keep changing the name of what you’re screaming about, well… that’s marketing, not science.

CONTEXT AND SCALE

Just look at this ice core data showing temperatures were warmer than today:

So it was warmer during the Roman period; was it the SUVs “Roman” around the world? Before that, during the Minoan civilization, it was warmer still – it must have been the Atlantean coal plants. When the changes claimed match, or are exceeded by, natural variations in the past in both range and rate, any changes being seen now cannot be differentiated from nature.

CO₂ levels in earth’s past were far, far higher than they are now – and life thrived. If CO₂ is going to be the “End of life on earth!!!!!!!!” how did plants get exposed to that higher level to handle it in the first place?

(More shameless capitalism: Image links to a mug!)

Two videos, one by Greenpeace’s founder Patrick Moore and one by Bill Whittle, bring up difficult questions that Warmists simply cannot answer without pretzel logic (though they try). And here’s a BBC video, The Great Global Warming Swindle. From that video, pay particular attention to the Danish examination of temperatures vs. sunspots (discussion starting at 30:39; amazing graph at 33:37); Professor Ian Clark, Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottowa, said – upon seeing this correlation between cosmic rays hitting the earth and temperature records:

“I’ve never seen such vastly different records coming together to show, really, what was happening over that long period of time”.

For me it’s stark: two completely disparate data sets matching up so well, over 500 million years… not a coincidence.

Incidentally, it was the Warmists’ outright dismissal that variations in the sun’s output could affect climate that first set off my That’s weird… response and attention-paying to the topic. Given that the radiative conduction of heat is a function of temperature to the fourth power - i.e., T⁴, I could not believe the glib dismissal, or assurances of “that’s been taken into account”. (For example, the sun’s surface temperature is roughly 5500 Kelvin. A hike of just 50 degrees C could result in a 3.7% increase in temperature transfer to the earth. A 100 degree change in the sun’s temperature… and remember, the sun is a seething, dynamic tempest… leads to a potential 7.5% change in radiation heat transfer.)

97%

The original “97% of climate scientists agree… blah blah blah” sound bite was – aside, do you also find it funny how Leftists always argue on the basis of sound bites – boiled down, based on 77 of 79 papers deemed worthy by the author of the paper making the claim:

In fact, the “97 percent” statistic was drawn from an even smaller subset: the 79 respondents who were both self-reported climate scientists and had “published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change.” These 77 scientists agreed that global temperatures had generally risen since 1800, and that human activity is a “significant contributing factor.”

A later paper by John Cook down in Australia revealed other flaws in this statistic (bolding added):

In an analysis of 12,000 abstracts, he found “a 97% consensus among papers taking a position on the cause of global warming in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are responsible.” “Among papers taking a position” is a significant qualifier: Only 34 percent of the papers Cook examined expressed any opinion about anthropogenic climate change at all. Since 33 percent appeared to endorse anthropogenic climate change, he divided 33 by 34 and — voilà — 97 percent!

Additionally, several scientists whose work Cook cited stated that their results had been misrepresented. His paper was accused of being fraudulent… and he took no action (bolding added, link in original):

Jose Duarte, expert in Social Psychology, Scientific Validity, and Research Methods, has actually called the Cook paper “multiply fraudulent”, and, as far as I know, Cook has taken no action to challenge the claim. This, as much as anything else, shows just what a con trick the whole business was. How many scientists, after all, would accept being called fraudulent without taking action?

Like the Michael Mann case, above… someone calls you a fraud, and you don’t do everything to counter that attack on your integrity? BS meter peg-out. Another great takedown of Cook’s paper is here: The 97% Cook Consensus – when will Environ Res Letters retract it?.

There is no such thing as consensus in science. Things get overturned all the time, for example the consensus on salt and fat in our diets; in the latter case, the push to demonize fat was bought and paid for. (And if we can’t understand the human body, we definitely can’t understand the entire planet.) Remember continental drift, and how the originator of that was derided:

“Utter, damned rot!” said the president of the prestigious American Philosophical Society.

“If we are to believe [this] hypothesis, we must forget everything we have learned in the last 70 years and start all over again,” said another American scientist.

Anyone who “valued his reputation for scientific sanity” would never dare support such a theory, said a British geologist.

It is the pride, the hubris, that things are known to within a gnat’s ass without a scintilla of doubt or wondering “Have I missed something?” that… WHAM! pegged out my BS meter again.

IN-YOUR-FACE CRISIS (NO, FOR REALS!)

Consider the comedy of shoreline-resort-developing, yacht-renting Warmist Leonardo DiCaprio flying commercial – likely because he couldn’t find a private jet as they’d already been booked. Look at Warmists selecting luxurious locations for conferences, with people flying in on private jets – lots of private jets. Now, of course, we find out that Al Gore, who can be accused of fabricating the crisis for personal profit, has a home that uses electricity by the metric f*ckton. They even admit their hypocrisy.

I’ll quote (from memory) the Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds:

“I’ll believe it’s a crisis when those who claim it’s a crisis act like it’s a crisis.”

It’s about virtue signaling, nothing more.

OTHER FACTORS

A recent paper points to temperature being a function of atmospheric temperature and solar irradiance. Another paper suggests changes and shifts in earth’s orbit affect the climate, as does cosmic radiation as modulated by the sun’s activity as noted above. And there are surely other things I’ve missed.

With all these peer-reviewed papers highlighting other potential factors to why earth’s climate shifts, the obsession with man-produced CO₂ to the exclusion of everything else on this cycles-within-cycles-within-cycles planet and solar system is very suspicious. Why? The above are independent of humanity, leading to...

THE BIG REVEAL

So what’s it really about? What are most things about on this scale? Money:

Climate change alarmism has become a $1.5-trillion-a-year industry – which guarantees it is far safer and more fashionable to pretend a 97% consensus exists, than to embrace honesty and have one’s global warming or renewable energy funding go dry.

Entire academic departments, whole think tanks and research organizations, not to mention “carbon sequestration/offset” industries have been formed based on this. That’s a lot of lobbying pull to continue the flow of money – and all gone if CO₂ is not the controlling knob. There’s an axiom in research:

Results of research will be biased towards those that continue the flow of grant money.

After all, how does marketing for any product or service work? Create a demand, very often through the creation of a perceived crisis, and then fill it. What you think was really behind Al Gore’s book and movie… we’re talking multi-millions.

It’s also about ideology: Socialism. To save the planet we’ll need to give up private property. We’ll need to redistribute wealth. It would require a categorical reduction in human civilization and lifestyle. And they openly state they want to leverage the crisis to shift to Marxism:

"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said in anticipation of last year's Paris climate summit.

"This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history."

There’s a reason today’s environmentalist whackos are nicknamed “watermelons” – green outside, red inside. H.L. Mencken said it very well:

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

And they do intend to rule; and while we eke out a living on sustainable algae cakes, they will sup on dainties and live in luxury. All to save the planet from the crisis they fabricated.