Crisis Looms in Alarmist Climate Science

By David Wojick – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Climate science is dominated by alarmists addicted to the idea that increasing carbon dioxide will cause dangerous global warming. How much warming is thus the central scientific question.

This question has been surprisingly difficult to answer despite 40 years of research, costing tens of billions of dollars. Now the issue is exploding because two different answers are emerging, one harmlessly low and the other dangerously high. This divergence is a crisis for the alarmist community. How they handle it remains to be seen.

Weekly Energy and Climate News Roundup #426

The Week That Was: October 10, 2020

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

Quote of the Week: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”— Richard Feynman, Theoretical physicist, co-recipient Nobel Prize in Physics.

Number of the Week: US$3,660 billion [$3.66 Trillion]

Guess and Test – and Re-Test: Writing in the Wall Street Journal, journalist Matt Ridley, author of books such as How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (2020) and The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010), had an outstanding, long essay titled:

“What the Pandemic Has Taught Us About Science

‘The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War’

By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Joe Bastardi, whom I consider a friend and a brilliant weather forecaster with a photographic-like memory for weather events through history, has written a book on the “climate war”, which is a rebuttal to Michael Mann’s use of the same phrase in his gloom and doom book.

The Washington Times had this to say about it:

Restoring Scientific Debate on Climate

By Jim Steele – Re-Bloggede From WUWT

The political genius of Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to unify the country during America’s most divisive time has been attributed to assembling a “team of rivals”. Likewise, scientific research is published so rivals and supporters of a hypothesis can independently and critically examine it. The great benefits of a team of rivals is also the basis for convening red team/blue team debates.

In 2017, Dr Steve Koonin, a physicist who served as Obama’s Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy, urged convening red-team blue-team debates for climate science in his article A ‘Red Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science.  “The national-security community pioneered the “Red Team” methodology to test assumptions and analyses, identify risks, and reduce—or at least understand—uncertainties. The process is now considered a best practice in high-consequence situations”.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #421

The Week That Was: August 29, 2020, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.” – Karl Popper

Number of the Week: 50%

Popular Delusions: Last week, TWTW discussed the problem of the California Blackouts (also called greenouts) and the failure of California politicians to properly prepare for the simple fact that as the sun goes down Photoelectric Power declines and other means of electric power generation must be increased significantly (ramped-up). The state constitution places the ultimate responsibility on the legislature.

Cascading Fallacies in Climate Risk Assessment

By David Wojick, CFACT – Re-Blogged From WUWT

As a logician, I am always on the lookout for fallacies and there is no lack of them in climate change alarmist policies. New Zealand’s newly released climate risk assessment not only has multiple fallacies, they build on one another in a cascade.

This is not about New Zealand. The authors of the assessment make clear that theirs is a new approach which they hope will be used globally. So this is about the world, including America.

North Island Brown Kiwi, Apteryx mantelli

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup # 417

The Week That Was: July 25, 2020

By Ken Haapala, President, SEPP

Quote of the Week: “When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.” —Thomas Paine (1776)

Number of the Week: 12 datasets of evidence

July Summary Part III; Models and Observations: Two weeks ago TWTW reviewed Richard Lindzen’s new paper summarizing what we know with reasonable certainty, what we suspect, and what we know is incorrect about climate change, the greenhouse effect, temperature trends, climate modeling, ocean chemistry, and sea level rise. Key parts included:

1) The climate system is never in equilibrium.

Message to the President of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences

By David Wojick – Re-Blogged From WUWT

In the ongoing effort to clearly summarize their position, CLINTEL has published a Scientific Manifesto in the form of ten propositions. These specifically address, among other things, the role of National Academies in protecting the integrity of science, in the face of alarmist dogma.

Since the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has evolved from guardians of science to an alarmist fortress, I thought it interesting to contrast the basic CLINTEL Manifesto with the statements of NAS President Marcia McNutt.

First, here are the ten basic CLINTEL propositions. (In the Manifesto document each is elaborated with regard to the sorry state of climate science today. All-caps are in the original.)

Faulty Forecasts and False Climate Narrative Hold Nations Hostage

By Vijay Jayaraj – Re4-Blogged From WUWT

The United States is the only major Western country that is not part of the Paris climate agreement, which seeks to restrict and reduce fossil fuel consumption across the world. But the country is not immune from the impacts of the restrictive energy policies the agreement imposes on its trade partners. One of those is my own country, India.

India imports large amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas from the U.S., mostly to generate affordable power for its electric grid. That grid must grow rapidly to meet the needs of over 1.3 billion people. Over 300 million of them—comparable to the whole U.S. population—currently have no electricity. But they need it desperately for their health and their escape from severe poverty.

BBC Asks Dr. Willie Soon to Respond to Climate Conspiracy Claims

By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

The BBC has belatedly decided they need at least a little input from one of the targets of their latest big oil climate conspiracy propaganda piece. Dr. Willie Soon does not hold back in his response.

Note some of the links take you to a “You are leaving the mail.com service” page. This is a harmless artefact caused by copying Dr. Soon’s email, click continue to see the referenced document.

---

Dear Ms. Keane,

I am wary of responding to your false allegations, since your questions seem somewhat loaded. Disappointingly, they appear to repeat the dishonest and misleading claims of the former Greenpeace USA research director, Kert Davies (now running the so-called “Climate Investigations Center”), whose research we have shown to be disingenuous in Section 2 of our attached 2018 report on Greenpeace (Attachment 1). Unfortunately, the premise of your series seems to be the dangerous conspiracy theories promoted by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change and their 2014 film of the same name. I’ve attached a short 3-page .pdf (Attachment 2) summarizing just a few examples of the poor scholarship and bizarre hypocrisies in Oreskes & Conway’s conspiracy theories.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #416

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Re-Blogged From WUWT

Quote of the Week: ““No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” – Albert Einstein [H/t H. Sterling Burnett]

Number of the Week: From 55% to 34% with no change in gross amount.

July Summary: Discussed in the previous three TWTWs, Richard Lindzen’s paper, “An oversimplified picture of the climate behavior based on a single process can lead to distorted conclusions,” contained nothing new, but provided an excellent basis for understanding what we know with reasonable certainty, what we suspect, and what we know is incorrect about climate change, the greenhouse effect, temperature trends, climate modeling, ocean chemistry, and sea level rise. Describing this knowledge, or lack thereof, will probably take two or three installments to complete in TWTW, but it may be a valuable reference in the future that can be modified as needed.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #415

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Re-Blogged From WUWT

Quote of the Week: “The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” ― Thomas Sowell [H/t Jim Buell]

Number of the Week: 0.086ºC/decade (0.155ºF/decade)

Oversimplified-Part II: Last week, TWTW focused on part of a new paper by MIT Professor emeritus in Atmospheric Physics Richard Lindzen titled: “An oversimplified picture of the climate behavior based on a single process can lead to distorted conclusions.” It presented the generally accepted physical characteristics of the climate system, which is extraordinarily complex and ever changing. As Lindzen asserts, even if the solar forcing were constant, which it is not, the climate would vary. With the massive size of the oceans, and their ability to absorb heat, such variations can involve timescales of a thousand years or more.

New Climate Models Exaggerate Midwest Warming by 6X

By Roy W. Spencer, PhD – Re-Blogged From WUWT

For the last 10 years I have consulted for grain growing interests, providing information about past and potential future trends in growing season weather that might impact crop yields. Their primary interest is the U.S. corn belt, particularly the 12 Midwest states (Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Michigan) which produce most of the U.S. corn and soybean crop.

Contrary to popular perception, the U.S. Midwest has seen little long-term summer warming. For precipitation, the slight drying predicted by climate models in response to human greenhouse gas emissions has not occurred; if anything, precipitation has increased. Corn yield trends continue on a technologically-driven upward trajectory, totally obscuring any potential negative impact of “climate change”.

The Climate Model Muddle

By Ed Zuiderwijk – Re-Blogged From WUWT

This is a posting about the epistemology of climate models, about what we can learn from them about the future. The answer will disappoint: not much. In order to convince you of the veracity of that proposition I will first tell you a little story, an allegory if you want, regarding a thought experiment, a completely fictitious account of what a research project might look like, and then apply whatever insight we gained (if any) to the climate modelling scene.

A thought experiment

Here’s the thought experiment: We want to make a compound that produces colour somehow (the mechanism how it does that is not really relevant). However, we specifically want a well-defined colour, prescribed by whatever application it is going to be used for. Say a shade of turquoise.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #414

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Re-Blogged From WUWT

Quote of the Week: “Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.” – Richard Feynman

Number of the Week: 2%

Oversimplified: Last week, TWTW presented a new paper from MIT Professor emeritus in Atmospheric Physics Richard Lindzen titled: “An oversimplified picture of the climate behavior based on a single process can lead to distorted conclusions.” The discussion was limited to what was presented in the No Tricks Zone blog. Further, TWTW did not draw a clear distinction between what the blog presented and what Lindzen actually wrote.

Starting with the UN and continuing through virtually all industrialized countries in the West, there is enormous political pressure to replace reliable fossil fuels with unreliable wind and solar power, particularly for electricity generation. Yet, no successful demonstration project exists showing this can be done at reasonable costs. Even the largest “battery” in the world, the Bath County Pumped [Hydro] Storage Station in Virginia, must be recharged, refilled, nightly by electricity from reliable nuclear and coal-fired power plants.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #412

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Re-Blogged From WUWT

Quote of the Week: “Aqueous vapor [water vapor] is a blanket, more necessary to the vegetable life of England than clothing is to man. Remove for a single summer-night the aqueous vapor from the air which overspreads this country, and you would assuredly destroy every plant capable of being destroyed by a freezing temperature. The warmth of our fields and gardens would pour itself unrequited into space, and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost.” – John Tyndall (“Heat: A Mode of Motion”, 1861) [H/t William Happer]

Number of the Week: Daily change of 100⁰C (or daily change of 180⁰F)

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #412

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Re-Blogged From WUWT

Quote of the Week: “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.” – Richard Feynman

Number of the Week: 11,000 & 1,600

Dynamics in the Tropics: In 2017, Judith Curry retired from her tenured position as a professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she had been Chair of the department, to focus on her private firm, Climate Forecasts Applications, citing the “craziness” of the field of climate science and the great politization of research funding. She has long recognized that there are major problems in the field, particularly in the dynamics of the atmosphere and the oceans in the tropics. As a climate modeler, she has first-hand knowledge of these problems, yet to be solved.

Models Can’t Accurately Predict Next Week’s Weather, So Why Should We Trust Them To Predict Climate Change?

By Daniel Turner, The Daily Caller – Re-Blogged From WUWT

It’s curious … SpaceX has all the money in the world, and they didn’t hire someone who could have accurately predicted the afternoon weather in Florida on May 27, 2020.  Seems like a huge oversight, doesn’t it?  And to think there are scores of nonprofit leaders and academics in Washington, DC who can accurately predict global temperatures 10, 15, even 50 years into the future.

Oh, stop it with the “climate isn’t weather” rebuttal. It’s trite and silly. The guys who says “food isn’t cuisine” is a food critic, and by default, haughty and obnoxious.

How about this one: science isn’t semantics.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #411

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Re-Blogged From WUWT

Quote of the Week: “’It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of the castle and to see the battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth (a hill not to be commanded and where the air is always clear and serene), and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.’ so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or pride.” – Of Truth, Francis Bacon (1625)

Number of the Week: 140% more than [of] a very small number is still a very small number

Political Rhetoric: Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Todd Myer, the author of “Eco-Fads: How the Rise of Trendy Environmentalism Is Harming the Environment” discusses how certain politicians use the term science without any special meaning. Myer states:

“The word ‘science’ has been hollowed out by politicians, who have stripped it of its substance and power and replaced them with emotional pabulum. These politicians discard the scientific method and deploy the term merely as a weapon against their opponents.”

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #410

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Re-Blogged From WUWT

Quote of the Week: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” – Voltaire

Number of the Week: 25 to 100 times greater

Disruptive Wind: The electrical grid operators provide reliable electricity with narrow tolerances. Generally, grid operators plan that power sources can be shut down for maintenance, usually in the spring and the fall. To keep costs down, grid operators desire to have maximum operating capacity in the summer (cooling) and in the winter (heating). According to the EIA’s description of electricity generating capacity:

To ensure a steady supply of electricity to consumers, operators of the electric power system, or grid, call on electric power plants to produce and place the right amount of electricity on the grid at every moment to instantaneously meet and balance electricity demand.

CMIP6 Cranks Up the Climate Sensitivity Estimate for COP26

By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Even worse than we thought ™ – global warming estimates have been raised, just in time for next year’s COP26 conference. But one of high end CMIP6 models, CESM2 (highlighted above), has already been invalidated by a paleo study.

Just how hot will it get this century? Latest climate models suggest it could be worse than we thought

Michael Grose Climate Projections Scientist, CSIRO
Julie Arblaster Associate Professor, Monash University
May 18, 2020 5.58am AEST

Climate scientists use mathematical models to project the Earth’s future under a warming world, but a group of the latest modelshave included unexpectedly high values for a measure called “climate sensitivity”.

CMIP6 Climate Sensitivities, with CESM2 highlighted (see the explanation at the bottom of this post). Source Carbon Brief

The Scientific Case for Vacating the EPA’s Carbon Dioxide Endangerment Finding

From The Competitive Enterprise Institute

Patrick J. Michaels – Re-Blogged From WUWT

View Full Document as PDF

Executive Summary

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2009 “Endangerment Finding” from carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases grants the agency a legal mandate that can have profound and far-reaching effects. The Finding is based largely on a Technical Support Document that relies heavily upon other mandated reports, the so-called National Assessments of global climate change impacts on the United States.

The extant Assessments at the time of the Endangerment Finding suffered from serious flaws. We document that using the climate models for the first Assessment, from 2000, provided less quantitative guidance than tables of random numbers—and that the chief scientist for that work knew of this problem.

Some Dilemmas of Climate Simulations

By Wallace Manheimer – Re-Blogged From WUWT

A great deal of the recommendation that the world should modify its energy infrastructure to combat climate change, costing tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars, is based on computer simulations. While this author is not what is called a ‘climate scientist’, a great deal of science is interdenominational, and experience from one field often can fertilize another.  That is the spirit in which this opinion is offered.  The author has spent a good part of his more than 50-year scientific career developing and using computer simulations to model complex physical processes.   Accordingly, based on this experience, he now gives his own brief explanation of his opinion, on what computer simulations can and cannot do, along with some examples. He sees 3 categories of difficulty in computer simulations, where the simulations go from mostly accurate to mostly speculative.  He makes the case that the climate simulations are the most speculative.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #406

The Week That Was: April 18, 2020, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics [H/t Demetris Koutsoyiannis]

Number of the Week: 2 cents

Limits of Models: In the midst of the lock-down of much of the U.S. public and the collapsing economy; some Americans are learning a few important lessons. One, the country is a republic with a written Constitution. As President Trump realized this week, that Constitution grants the Federal government limited powers, even during a health emergency. And two, numerical models are not infallible. Indeed, almost daily, Drs. Birx and Fauci repeat on television that: “this model is only as good as the data we put into it.” Speculation, scenarios or projections, may be interesting but must be supported by evidence fitting the issue. Unfortunately, all too frequently government policy has been based on models using inappropriate data.

Climate Change – Ebb and Flow of the Tide –Part 2 of 3

By Dr Kelvin Kemm – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Continued from Part 1

Emotional, agenda-driven politics confronts sound, evidence-based science

The topic of global warming and climate change is far more scientifically complex than the public is led to believe.

Myriads of newspaper, magazine and TV items over decades have tended to simplify the science to the point at which the general public believes that it is all so simple that any fool can see what is happening. Public groups often accuse world leaders and scientists of being fools, if they do not instantly act on simple messages projected by individuals or public groups.

One often hears phrases like: ‘The science is settled.’ It is not. Even more worrying is that the reality of the correct science is actually very different to much of the simple public perception.

Fauci-Birx Climate Models?

By Paul Driessen and David R. Legates – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Honest, evidence-based climate models could avoid trillions of dollars in policy blunders

President Trump and his Coronavirus Task Force presented some frightening numbers during their March 31 White House briefing. Based on now 2-week-old data and models, as many as 100,000 Americans at the models’ low end, to 2.2 million at their high end, could die from the fast-spreading virus, they said.

However, the President, Vice President Pence, and Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx hastened to add, those high-end numbers are based on computer models. And they are “unlikely” if Americans keep doing what they are doing now to contain, mitigate and treat the virus. Although that worst-case scenario “is possible,” it is “unlikely if we do the kinds of things that we’re essentially outlining right now.”

Climate Change – Ebb and Flow of the Tide Part 1 of 3

By Dr Kelvin Kemm – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Emotional, agenda-driven politics confronts sound, evidence-based science

The topic of global warming and climate change is far more scientifically complex than the public is led to believe.

Myriads of newspaper, magazine and TV items over decades have tended to simplify the science to the point at which the general public believes that it is all so simple that any fool can see what is happening. Public groups often accuse world leaders and scientists of being fools, if they do not instantly act on simple messages projected by individuals or public groups.

One often hears phrases like: ‘The science is settled.’ It is not. Even more worrying is that the reality of the correct science is actually very different to much of the simple public perception.-

How Much Human-Caused Global Warming Should We Expect?

By Andy May – Re-Blogged From WUWT

OMG! The world is going to end, and we caused it. This story, in one form or another, goes back to biblical times. According to Genesis (6:9 to 9:17) God decided that humans had sinned too much and must be punished, so he called up a great flood to destroy the world. A similar story also appears in the earlier Epic of Gilgamesh. End of the world predictions are very popular and recur regularly in human history.

More recently, prognosticators have predicted climate change disasters that are due to human actions (sins?). During the Little Ice Age (see Figure 3 in the link), the European public blamed the cold weather on witches and Jews, over 50,000 “witches” and tens of thousands of Jews were killed because they supposedly caused the cold weather and glacial advances. Thus, the idea that humans somehow control climate change is very old. We have no more proof that this is the case today than people had in 800AD, which is about when Archbishop Agobard of Lyons, France said:

On UK Climate Policies

By Neil Lock – Re-Blogged From WUWT

“I’d expect that some probing by independent experts into the economic calculations, and the assumptions on which they are built, might bear fruit.” But where are these calculations, and who are the unbiased experts who have quality controlled them? I couldn’t find any such calculations, or the names of any such experts. Perhaps, I thought, I’d better take a look at this myself.

So, I set out to learn as much as I could about the economic calculations which – so we’re supposed to believe – justify the extreme measures proposed, all the way up to total de-carbonization of the UK economy, to avoid alleged catastrophic damage from global warming. This essay is the result of that exercise. If it reads like a cross between a layman’s guide to the economics of global warming and a political rant, that’s because it’s both!

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #411

The Week That Was: February 29, 2020, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.” – Benjamin Franklin

Number of the Week: $61,937

Green Dreams: Many political leaders and political factions have little or no understanding of the importance of reliable, predictable electricity to modern civilization and economic wellbeing. Without thoroughly demonstrated examples of success, a number of local and national governments have passed laws phasing out electricity generated by fossil fuels based on the belief that wind and solar can replace fossil fuels. This “green dream” may become a nightmare.

In the UK, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has produced a set of studies estimating that removing fossil fuels from:

Iowa Agriculture in Consideration of Climate Change

By Kevin Kilty – Re-Blogged From WUWT

A recent article in Physics Today[1] presents use of regional climate modeling in forecasting how climate change might impact agriculture in the U.S. Midwest. This guest blog offers a summary of this effort, and makes additional observations.

Introduction

The introduction makes a case that Iowa is a proxy for the Midwest itself, and that agricultural productivity in the Midwest is very important to the national and global food supply. It is clear that climate conditions in Iowa have improved markedly for selected crops since the 1980’s. One may find supporting evidence in the changing agricultural practices of farmers. However, the authors argue that this present “Goldilocks” period cannot last, and that by mid-21st century climate change could decrease Midwest agricultural productivity back to 1980s levels. This dire warning comes by way of the Fourth National Climate Assessment made in 2018. David Middleton has poked fun at this assessment.

Average annual precipitation in Iowa 1981-2010. Note the 50% gradient northwest to southeast across the state. Figure from reference [3].

Climate Science Dials Back the ‘Worst Case Scenario’

By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From WUWT

A surprising comment published January 29th in the leading scientific journal Nature said; “Emissions – the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading – Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome — more-realistic baselines make for better policy.” This has thrown a monkey wrench in hundreds of studies and media stories that previously predicted dire climate consequences in the future due to increased carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere.

The consequences were predicted by a computer model called Representative Carbon Pathways (RCP) and the worst case scenario model, RCP8.5 had been cited over 2500 times in scientific journals and in hundreds of media stories as the primary need for “urgent action” on climate. Predictions from RCP8.5 model suggested maximum global temperature increases of nearly 6°C (10.8°F) by the year 2100, shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Image Credit: Neil Craik, University of Waterloo

Cooling the Past

By Jennifer Marohasy – Re-Blogged From WUWT

It is not disputed that Blair Trewin under the supervision of David Jones (both working at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology) remodel all the historical temperature data generating trends and statistics that look quite different from the actual measurements.

The remodelled series are then passed on to university and CSIRO climate scientists who base much of their climate research on these ‘second-hand’ statistics.

So, when Michael Mann and David Karoly tell you it’s getting hotter and hotter, this is their interpretation of Blair Trewin’s statistics, not their interpretation of the actual data.

Nature Has Been Removing Excess CO2 4X Faster than IPCC Models

By Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Note: What I present below is scarcely believable to me. I have looked for an error in my analysis, but cannot find one. Nevertheless, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so let the following be an introduction to a potential issue with current carbon cycle models that might well be easily resolved by others with more experience and insight than I possess.

Summary

Sixty years of Mauna Loa CO2 data compared to yearly estimates of anthropogenic CO2 emissions shows that Mother Nature has been removing 2.3%/year of the “anthropogenic excess” of atmospheric CO2 above a baseline of 295 ppm. When similar calculations are done for the RCP (Representative Concentration Pathway) projections of anthropogenic emissons and CO2 concentrations it is found that the carbon cycle models those projections are based upon remove excess CO2 at only 1/4th the observed rate. If these results are anywhere near accurate, the future RCP projections of CO2, as well as the resulting climate model projection of resulting warming, are probably biased high.

Weekly Energy and Climate News Roundup

The Week That Was: February 8, 2020, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “Judges ought to be more leaned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.” – Francis Bacon

Number of the Week: Exceeds in Six of Seven Categories.

Expanding the Orthodoxy: Writing a post on Project Syndicate, Johan Rockström, Lars Heikensten, and Marcia McNutt announced:

“…the Nobel Foundation is hosting its first-ever Nobel Prize Summit, with the theme ‘Our Planet, Our Future,’ in Washington, DC, from April 29 to May 1. The summit – supported by the US National Academy of Sciences, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and the Stockholm Resilience Centre/Beijer Institute – will bring together more than 20 Nobel laureates and other experts from around the world to explore the question: What can be achieved in this decade to put the world on a path to a more sustainable, more prosperous future for all of humanity?”

Explaining the Discrepancies Between Hausfather et al. (2019) and Lewis&Curry (2018)

[This is a technical analysis of climate models vs observations by an econometrician who helped show that Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick” was false.  –Bob]

By Ross McKitrick – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Challenging the claim that a large set of climate model runs published since 1970’s are consistent with observations for the right reasons.

Introduction

Zeke Hausfather et al. (2019) (herein ZH19) examined a large set of climate model runs published since the 1970s and claimed they were consistent with observations, once errors in the emission projections are considered. It is an interesting and valuable paper and has received a lot of press attention. In this post, I will explain what the authors did and then discuss a couple of issues arising, beginning with IPCC over-estimation of CO2 emissions, a literature to which Hausfather et al. make a striking contribution. I will then present a critique of some aspects of their regression analyses. I find that they have not specified their main regression correctly, and this undermines some of their conclusions. Using a more valid regression model helps explain why their findings aren’t inconsistent with Lewis and Curry (2018) which did show models to be inconsistent with observations.

Outline of the ZH19 Analysis:

A climate model projection can be factored into two parts: the implied (transient) climate sensitivity (to increased forcing) over the projection period and the projected increase in forcing. The first derives from the model’s Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) and the ocean heat uptake rate. It will be approximately equal to the model’s transient climate response (TCR), although the discussion in ZH19 is for a shorter period than the 70 years used for TCR computation. The second comes from a submodel that takes annual GHG emissions and other anthropogenic factors as inputs, generates implied CO2 and other GHG concentrations, then converts them into forcings, expressed in Watts per square meter. The emission forecasts are based on socioeconomic projections and are therefore external to the climate model.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #396

The Week That Was: January 25, 2020, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” – George Orwell

Number of the Week: 50 Million Gallons of drinking water per day at a cost of 0.5 cents per gallon.

The Gathering – Davos: Generally, TWTW ignores political speeches because, regardless of political faction, today, they are usually a collection of sound bites having little meaning. They lack the careful logical reasoning of the speeches by Abraham Lincoln. This week, an exception occurred at the meeting of World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Perhaps Walter Russell Mead writing in the Wall Street Journal summarized the Davos meeting best:

“There is something inescapably ridiculous about a gathering this self-important; certainly Marie Antoinette and her friends dressing up as shepherdesses to celebrate the simple life has nothing on the more than 100 billionaires descending, often by private jet, on an exclusive Swiss ski resort for four days of ostentatious hand-wringing about the problems of the poor and the dangers of climate change.”

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #395

The Week That Was: January 18, 2020, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “The day we see the truth and cease to speak is the day we begin to die.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

Number of the Week: +/- 0.003⁰C

The Greenhouse Effect – Different Results: It appears that no one involved in climate change issues disagrees with the concept that the greenhouse effect occurs in the atmosphere. A major issue is how to best calculate it. The key component is estimating: How much humans are changing the greenhouse effect by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere?

As readers realize, TWTW considers the finest comprehensive temperature dataset is that from the Earth System Science Center of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). The world-wide temperature average, after all, requires data from the entire earth, not just samples scattered around from place to place on land, and even more sparsely in the oceans. Moreover, after issues with orbits were discovered, UAH now has one satellite that is rigorously kept at constant altitude to serve as a standard for the others.

Bush Bull

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley – Re-Blogged From WUWT

This will be a long posting, because it is necessary to nail the childish myth that global warming caused the bushfires in Australia. The long, severe drought in Australia, culminating in the most extensive bushfires in recent history, ought to have aroused sympathy for the cattle-ranchers who have lost their livestock and the citizens who have lost their homes. But no. Instead, those who profiteer by asserting that global warming is the cause of every extreme-weather event have rushed to state – falsely – that an “overwhelming scientific consensus” (to cite the Greens’ website) blames the incidence, extent, duration and severity of the drought and bushfires on the somewhat warmer weather caused by our having increased the atmospheric CO₂ concentration by about 1 part in 10,000 from 0.03% to 0.04% by volume.

Oreskes Vs. Oreskes

By Rud Istvan – Re-Blogged From WUWT

WUWT reader Max alerted us to a 1994 Naomi Oreskes et. al. paper published in the prestigious journal Science. Her paper was a critical analysis of Earth Science numerical models.

I asked Rud to take a look, since he had previously written on climate models both here and in the ebook Blowing Smoke. What follows is an edited version of what Rud sent us, approved for publication by him.

After a quick read of Oreskes’s paper, I felt a double whammy was in order:

1. Explain Oreskes ‘science’ per se.

2. And then explain her later duplicitous conversion to rabid climate alarmist.

What I Wasn’t Told About Climate Change

By Luca Rossi – Re-Blogged From WUWT

CONTINUE READING –>

Failed Serial Doomcasting

By Willis Eschenbach – Re-Blogged From WUWT

People sometimes ask me why I don’t believe the endless climate/energy use predictions of impending doom and gloom for the year 2050 or 2100. The reason is, neither the climate models nor the energy use models are worth a bucket of warm spit for such predictions. Folks concentrate a lot on the obvious problems with the climate models. But the energy models are just as bad, and the climate models totally depend on the energy models for estimating future emissions. However, consider the following US Energy Information Agency (EIA) predictions of energy use from 2010, quoted from here (emphasis mine):

In 2010, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected that in 2019, the U.S. would be producing about 6 million barrels of oil a day. The reality? We’re now producing 12 million barrels of oil a day.

Meanwhile, EIA projected oil prices would be more than $100 a barrel. They’re currently hovering around $60 a barrel.

EIA had projected in 2010 that the U.S. would be importing a net eight million barrels of petroleum by now, which includes crude oil and petroleum products like gasoline. In September, the U.S. actually exported a net 89 thousand barrels of petroleum.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #390

The Week That Was:, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

Quote of the Week: “In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it (audience laughter), no, don’t laugh, that’s really true. Then we compute the consequences of the guess, to see what, if this is right, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature, or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works. [Boldface added.]

“If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.” Richard Feynman on the Scientific Method

Number of the Week: 20 to 30º C (35 to 55º F) warmer

After 30 Years of Failed Climate Politics, Let’s Try Science!

By Larry Kummer, From The Fabius Maximus – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Summary: The climate policy debate has raged for 30 years, consisting mostly of propaganda and political games, with few results. Let’s try science, instead. Here is a first step to transforming the debate.

“Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.”
– The basic text of Narcotics Anonymous. They know all about dysfunctionality.

ID 50990297 © Kiosea39 | Dreamstime.

Naomi Seibt – Former Climate Alarmist Turned Climate Skeptic

By Naomi Seibt – Re-Blogged From WUWT

CONTINUE READING –>

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #389

The Week That Was: December 7, 2019, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

Quote of the Week: “The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person. It is only necessary to be precise when there is some doubt as to the meaning of a phrase, and then the precision should be put in the place where the doubt exists. It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing.” – Richard Feynman (New Textbooks for the “New” Mathematics)

Number of the Week: Minus 89,000. Down from plus 13,442,000 b/d

How Much Sun Could A Sunshine Shine?

By Willis Eschenbach – Re-Blogged From WUWT

It has been pointed out that while many of the global climate models (GCMs) are not all that good at forecasting future climate, they all do quite well at hindcasting the 20th-century global temperature anomaly [edited for clarity – w.]. Curious, that.

So I was interested in a paper from August of this year entitled The energy balance over land and oceans: An assessment based on direct observations and CMIP5 climate models. You’ll have to use SciHub using the DOI to get the full paper.

What they did in the paper is to compare some actual measurements of the energy balance, over both the land and the ocean, with the results of 43 climate models for the same locations. They used the models from the Fifth Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5).

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #386

The Week That Was: Nov 16, 2019, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, The Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “’Theories, ideas are wonderful, but to me, they become established when passing tests,’ he continued.

“’Theories of course, any bright physicist can make up theories. They could have nothing to do with reality.

“’You discover which theories are close to reality by comparing to experiments…’” – Jim Peebles, 2019 Nobel co-Laureate in physics.

Number of the Week: $143 billion over 10 years

After Climategate: Ten years ago, a scandal in climate science broke. Hackers took over a thousand emails from Britain’s University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and revealed them in a series of releases. These provided the first solid evidence that the climate establishment was trying to suppress physical evidence that nature was not responding to increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claimed and the climate modelers predicted / projected. Many of the lead authors of the IPCC Assessment Reports were involved in this suppression of physical evidence, which is contrary to the principles of the scientific method.

1 Meter of Sea Level Rise Now “Inevitable”… Eventually

By David Middleton – Re-Blogged From WUWT

When I first read this, I was all set to ridicule it mercilessly… until I noticed the timeline…

INHERIT THE WATER —
It keeps going: 1 meter sea-level rise by 2300 is now inevitable
Analyzing a longer timeline, even if we ceased emissions in 2030.

SCOTT K. JOHNSON – 11/7/2019

Climate change is often discussed in reference to where things will be in 2100, but the story obviously doesn’t end that year. Sea-level rise in particular has an impressive amount of inertia, and a very long time will pass before it has played out fully. What will our emissions have set in motion on longer time scales?

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #385

The Week That Was: November 9, 2019, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, The Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “It’s a kind of scientific integrity, principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards.”

“You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.”

“In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.” – Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science

Number of the Week: Down 66%. From 1.9 billion to 650 million.

The Buck Stops Here: President Harry Truman (1945 to 1953) was not well liked by the eastern political establishment, either Republican or Democrat. He was considered ill-educated, crude, and ill-suited for the job. Yet he was well read in history. He was ill-prepared for assuming office on April 12, 1945 because President Roosevelt hid his illness and did not include Truman in important discussions.