In 2013 a group of climate researchers published a study using statistics and the output of the latest crop of climate models. Their purpose was to show when surface temperatures could be expected to permanently depart from previous historical ranges. Such an event is called an expulsion. Camilo Mora et al. presented precise projections for when these unprecedented regional climates would emerge. Now a second group of researchers argue that their methodology produces artificially early dates at which specific regions will permanently experience unprecedented climates and artificially low uncertainty in those dates everywhere. This is an example of what happens when untrustworthy model outputs are combined with specious statistical methods. The resulting predictions are scary enough to be published in a major journal, but so false that even other climate scientists are moved to protest.
Hoards of non-scientists have been making a career out of pushing “settled science,” particularly when it come to climate change, the eco-socialists' favorite excuse for dismantling the world's existing economic and industrial base. Unlike the notoriously squishy science of climate change, physics is viewed as being mature and on a more solid foundation, at least by those who are physicists. Given the recent furor caused by the IPCC and NCA reports, plus the US EPA's ham handed attempt to institute CO2 Cap & Trade without the agreement of Congress, it is instructional for scientific outsiders to review recent events in both fields. Read on, believers in the myth of settled science and those who think scientific questions are resolved by consensus.
The science is settled, the President of the United States assures us. His pet scientists have produced yet another frightening climate report to prove it. Given this President's tenuous relationship with the truth on other matters, a citizen might pause to ask if the claim of settled science is, in fact, true. In the recent past scientific papers have discovered some “unexpected” phenomena that help to regulate climate. In fact, one of the climate change faithful proposed a mechanism affecting the jet stream that could be responsible for this winter's unexpected weather in the northern hemisphere. Only problem, a number of climate alarmist luminaries have dissented from her idea. Remember the consensus that was supposed to shut down all opposing opinions? Never mind. Another study shows statistically that there is no way to establish a human caused warming trend without another 100 years of observation. Of course, if you believe the climate catastrophists the world as we know it will have vanished by then. So is climate science really settled? Here are just some of the most recent indications that it is not.
As this blog has previously noted, the mainstream media are all a twitter over the IPCC's latest screed, advising, no, demanding that governments around the world take decisive action to combat that mythical bugaboo, anthropogenic global warming. Their own supporters, including President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, have been generating a lot of hot air about AGW but doing precious little, mainly because cooler heads in Congress have prevailed. What hasn't been widely presented are the counter arguments. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), has issued its own report, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts, to counter the half truths and outright lies in the IPCC propaganda piece but it seems that information about the report has been suppressed. As a public service we proudly present an op-ed by Dr. Craig Idso, lead editor and scientist for the NIPCC.
On March 31, 2014 the fifth in a series of scholarly reports produced by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts, was released to the public. While little reported in the main stream media, this new publication represents an independent, comprehensive, and authoritative report on the current state of climate science. It is an answer to the propaganda put out by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its lackeys and a direct refutation that no real climate scientists dispute the conclusions of the climate change alarmists. For those who do not accept the claims of consensus science or the fatuous assurances that global warming is an imminent threat by vacuous politicians, this report sheds light on the real science behind global warming and its possible effects.
Supporters of the CO2 driven theory of anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) are in full panic mode. The continued hiatus in global temperature increase has led to a flurry of statements denying “the pause,” as climate scientists have named it. This new denialism even extends to international organizations like the WHO, that just recently claimed that global warming had not ceased, even though numerous organizations—including Britain’s Meteorological Office, NASA, and the IPCC—have admitted that it has. Among climate change true believers there is a scramble on to “find the missing heat” that would explain the pause. Strangely, among these practitioners of group think there is no consensus about the cause of the pause. At the same time, the IPCC is about to release its latest screed regarding climate change and the leaks have been flowing fast and furious, saying there is dissent in the land of consensus. This may well be the turning of the tide on the greatest scientific hoax in history.
While the debate rages regarding global warming and mankind's role in climate change there is one area that is not in dispute: the steady rise in atmospheric CO2 over the last century. Indeed, climate change alarmists celebrated CO2 readings passing 400ppm at Mauna Loa with news releases and renewed predictions of the coming Apocalypse. But carbon dioxide has other impacts, one of which has recently been documented by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia's national science agency. According to CSIRO, increased levels of CO2 have helped boost green foliage across the world’s arid regions over the past 30 years. This is because of a process called CO2 fertilization, which unequivocally shows that carbon dioxide is plant food.
One of the scary scenarios frequently trotted out by climate change alarmists is the possible shutdown of the ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean. This would disrupt northern hemisphere climate, particularly in Europe. Indeed, one Hollywood disaster movie had frozen military helicopters falling from the skies in the UK and Manhattan buried under a tsunami of ice. We are told this could happen at any time, if the world gets too hot from all that CO2 our species is churning out. Now a shocking new paper in the journal Science implies that the standard view of a relatively stable interglacial circulation may not hold for conditions warmer/fresher than at present. Why? Because it happened before, over 100,000 years ago, without the help of man made global warming. Another catastrophic climate threat is shown to be totally natural and to have happened before our species began burning coal and driving SUVs.
A recent article in Nature has the on-line scientific community all a twitter. A news feature has declared “P values, the 'gold standard' of statistical validity, are not as reliable as many scientists assume.” This is one of science's dirty little secrets, a way of providing proof of your work using a supposedly impartial statistical measure. In truth, the P value is susceptible to a legion of poor assumptions that make it not just meaningless but often misleading. In an age when historical climate data are being aggressively subjected to reanalysis and 95 percent of climate models have been wrong it is time to stop taking scientific results at face value, because they are most probably wrong.
California, the state that raises 30% of US fresh produce, is in the grip of a severe drought. Billed as the driest period in the state's recorded rainfall history, climate change alarmists have hastened to blame the parched conditions on anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Paleoclimate history tells a different story, however, and highlights the amazingly short attention span of AGW advocates. Going beyond the 163-year historical period, science shows that there have been other, longer lasting and more severe droughts than the current dry spell. Today's drought is minor when compared with ancient Megadroughts, which occurred between 850 to 1090 and 1140 to 1320. In fact, the worst droughts suffered by the American Southwest all happened so long ago that human memory fails us.
The world is entering the 16th year of the greatest climate science embarrassment in modern history—the pause in global warming. Despite rising IPCC confidence levels and hundreds of computer model predictions, that darned old climate is just not behaving like the boffins say it should. After all, CO2 keeps rising, and we all know that CO2 drives Earth's climate like the thermostat in a house... or not. No longer able to sweep the lack of warming under the observational rug, the climate change community had started flailing about for answers: the heat must be hiding deep in the ocean, it must be soot from China, some have even begun to wonder whether there is something wrong with their models. Most are still convinced that the missing heat is hidden somewhere because they will not accept the simplest explanation—the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming is fundamentally incorrect.
You may have notice that the news media talking heads and TV weather presenters have discovered a new term recently—the Arctic Vortex. In a splendid demonstration of how the weak minded are quickly consumed by group think, and ill understood terms get repeated ad nauseum, the Arctic Vortex has dominated the news during the past week in the US. In truth, the phenomenon is not new. What is new is that its current foray south is being loudly attributed to global warming. For years the effects of a warming Arctic have been the subject of scientific speculation. Dubbed Arctic amplification, some claim it will enhanced extreme weather in the middle latitudes. The fact that such linkage is tenuous at best has not stopped ignorant politicians like the UK's David Cameron and the US's Barack Obama from blaming recent nasty weather on that old nugget, anthropogenic global warming. There is, however, some evidence to the contrary from one scientist who studies atmospheric dynamics and variability under different climates.
Nature has served up a lesson to publicity seeking, self important scientists during the past month. It seems that a clutch of global warming true believers chartered a ship to go visit Antarctica, in an effort to show that the southernmost continent is being ravaged by human caused climate change. This shipboard comedy of errors backfired on the warmists when their ship got stuck fast in the ice, kilometers from a bay they hoped to find ice free. Moreover, at least one other ship sent to rescue the hapless climatological tourists got stuck as well. All of this in the middle of the Antarctic summer. Will they never learn that making unfounded claims in an attempt to “prove” anthropogenic global warming inevitably fails? It would all be laughable if this floating farce wasn't going to cost the taxpayers of Australia, the US and other countries several million dollars to rescue the fools.
The current interglacial warm period, the Holocene, started ∼11,500 years ago. At its start, among the dramatic changes in climate was a notable increase in rainfall, triggered by summer insolation values higher than those of today. This caused what is called the African Humid Period in North Africa—a time when the Sahara was dotted with large and small lakes, savannah grasslands, and in some regions, humid tropical forests and shrubs. The African Humid Period ended abruptly ∼5000 ybp (years before present) in many locations, such as western North Africa and northern Kenya. In other places, such as the central Sahara and the southern Arabian Peninsula, change occurred more gradually, taking several millennia. Regardless of the pace of change, those areas are tracts of arid desert today, and the animals and humans who had previously thrived in those formerly verdant regions have either moved or had to adapt to much harsher conditions. This is but one example of nature at its most capricious—the tyranny of climate change.
Unless you have been living in one of the few truly remote areas of the planet, you have been exposed to them. Climate change memes that pass from person to person and are repeated without thought or critical examination. They range from the subtle—bad weather is being increased by global warming—to the banal—over 97% of scientists agree about climate change. We are bombarded with these unsubstantiated ideas over and over again, from talking heads on TV, newspaper headlines, our friends and even the president of the United States. They are blatant untruths that have become legitimized by repetition, until school children and adults alike patriot them to each other. The recent tropical cyclone, Haiyan, has triggered another round of meme infection: it was the worst storm in history, tropical storms are getting bigger every year, there are more storms every year, and, of course, they are all caused by global warming. Trouble is, these “facts” are all false.