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IPCC Likely to Start Blaming Humans For Weather as Friederike Otto Takes Key Role

The foxes are now firmly in charge of the chicken coop

By Chris Morrison | The Climate Skeptic | August 24, 2025

Last December the Daily Sceptic published an article reporting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) could be preparing to start blaming humans for individual bad weather events. Straws-in-the-wind stuff, based on an IPCC press release claiming a century of burning hydrocarbons had resulted in “more frequent and intense extreme weather events”. To date, the IPCC has failed to detect that humans using hydrocarbons have led to worse bad weather on the simple scientific ground that it is impossible, with current data sources, to remove the overwhelming role of natural variation. Our story was prescient. It’s all change at the IPCC, with the appointment of Attribution Queen Friederike Otto and a troop of fellow attributionists to take charge of writing a new chapter on extreme weather for its forthcoming seventh climate science assessment report. With the foxes now in charge of the chicken coop, political order can be restored, with the IPCC science more closely aligned with current Net Zero political requirements.

Dr Otto, who runs the Green Blob-funded World Weather Attribution (WWA) operation out of Imperial College, has been appointed the co-leader of the extreme weather chapter. “It will be a lot of work, but it also gives a lot of opportunity to shape the structure and focus of the chapter”, she notes. WWA paymasters who include the Grantham, European Climate and Bezos Earth foundations will no doubt be delighted with this news. Helping her shape the narrative going forward will be a number of writers who are all in on the single event attribution game. The science writer Roger Pielke Jr notes that the team is “stacked” with people who focus on extreme event attribution (EEA) – “far out of proportion to their presence in the field”. Few of the authors, if any, he adds, have expertise in the IPCC’s conventional framework for detection and attribution (D&A), and some have no publications on either detection or attribution. He points out that nine out of 20 of the authors focus their research on EEA, including two of the three coordinating leads.

One-off weather attribution is a pseudoscience based mostly on the flimsy findings of computer models. Two imaginary atmospheres with different levels of carbon dioxide are compared, and, hey presto, claims are made that a weather event is x times more likely to be caused by humans.

Complete with a suitable large multiple, the results are distributed to ‘join-the-dots’ merchants such as Jim Dale, as well as mainstream media climate desks. Worldwide publicity is given to ‘science’ findings that obviously fail the Popperian principle in that they cannot be tested and falsified. The non-peer-reviewed information is pushed out quickly in a press release, with the disaster fresh in the media minds. Climate fear levels in the general population are kept nicely topped up – job done. Climate ‘deniers’ can be dismissed with a head-in-the-hands sigh and a “can’t you even see the evidence outside your own window?” Of course, the entire unquestioning media meltdown is based on the false notion that computer models produce ‘evidence’, when in reality they just supply opinions.

In 2019, the former BBC Today editor Sarah Sands wrote a foreword for a WWA journalist guide to reporting extreme weather. She recalled the time when the UK politician Nigel Lawson managed to slip into a BBC broadcast that there had been no increase in extreme weather. “I wish we had this guide for journalists to help us mount a more effective challenge to his claim,” she gushed. These days, she enthused, attribution studies have given us significant insight into the horsemen of the climate apocalypse.

In the past, the IPCC has failed to detect and attribute most extreme weather to human involvement, and it did not expect to do so for the rest of the century. It is becoming increasingly obvious that computer models are poor at replicating the complex atmosphere and offer little guidance for future climate projections. Detecting changes in the climate requires many decades of observation. The idea that one event can shortcut an understanding of a long-term trend, when there is no way of knowing if it is a statistical outlier, is for the birds. Collecting one-offs from a number of different weather types and claiming that humans control the weather would just be silly if it wasn’t designed to induce mental anguish and screw oil and gas firms in court.

With many of the poster scares of climate collapse having to be retired – even melting Arctic sea ice has gone on strike for 20 years – the desperation of activists is getting noticeably worse. One of the last throws of the dice is running bad weather scares. Net Zero is dead in the United States, and a recent official government report stated that computer models offered “little guidance” on how the climate responds to higher CO₂ levels. It also noted that most extreme weather events are not increasing, while weather attribution claims are challenged by natural climate variation, along with an admission that they were originally designed with ‘lawfare’ in mind.

WWA was set up in 2014 by Otto and Dr Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, with Green Blob-funded Climate Central providing support and help with securing funding. These days, the operation notes that its methods have been developed over time and “peer reviewed in dedicated methods publications”. A link to the claimed peer review is helpfully provided on its website, and this brings up a paper titled ‘Pathways and Pitfalls in Extreme Event Attribution.’ Interestingly, the first peer reviewer is Dr Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, while the fifth is Dr Friederike Otto.

In 2022, a group of four Italian scientists led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti published a paper in Nature based on data used by the IPCC that concluded there had been little change in extreme weather events. Such findings and data are easy to find, although mainstream media is mostly absent from the search. On the basis of their factual findings, the Italians suggested there was not a climate crisis. All hell subsequently broke loose, and an alliance of activists, journalists and scientists managed to get the paper retracted a year later. One of those activists was Otto who said the authors were “of course” not writing their paper in good faith. “If the journal cares about science they should withdraw it loudly and publicly, saying that it should never have been published”, she added. At the time of the infamous affair, Pielke observed: “The abuse of the peer-reviewed process documented here is remarkable and stands as a warning that climate science is as deeply politicised as ever with scientists willing to exert influence on the publication process both out in the open and behind the scenes”.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.

August 30, 2025 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

The 2050 Net Zero Climate Scam

By William Levin | American Thinker | December 29, 2024

Twenty fifty is the official date for net zero emissions. According to the experts, it is the last chance to stop a catastrophic rise in temperature. The leading source for climate change science, the U.N. IPCC, says so. Corporations run commercials helpfully informing the public that net zero is a top priority. Few can outdo Delta Air Lines, which promises compliance using “a fully sustainable long-haul aircraft [that] has yet to be invented.”

The urgency is palpable and the science compelling. Humanity itself is at risk without net zero CO2 and non-CO2 emissions.

Politically, 2050 is the ideal climate date because it is close enough to justify immediate action, and just far enough as to be unprovable for climate disaster.

For a science so settled and a date so specific, there must exist a wealth of data scientifically supporting the hypothesis that 25 years from now marks a deadline and turning point for the Earth’s future.

An A.I. query provides the answer:

The target year 2050 for achieving carbon neutrality is primarily driven by scientific consensus and international agreements aimed at limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Paris Agreement outline that reaching net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 is crucial to avoiding catastrophic climate impacts.

A.I. is correct that the IPCC and the signatories of the Paris Agreement are the parties responsible for promoting 2050 net zero.  But who exactly are these organizations, and do they deserve our trust?

The IPCC is a political body consisting of 195 member-governments, charged with providing assessments in support of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. In theory, the IPCC mandate is to collect the best available climate science. The IPCC expressly commits that its “reports should be neutral with respect to policy.” And by its own admission, “the IPCC does not conduct its own research.” Its role is to summarize the objective science.

The signatories to the Paris Agreement are likewise 195 nations convened under the auspices of the U.N.  But unlike the IPCC, the Paris Agreement signatories make no pretense to being a scientific body, and indeed, no one is confused on this point. The signatories are a political body and the Paris Agreement a purely political document.

With an overlapping membership, it should come as no surprise that the two organizations coordinate their efforts.  In the process, the IPCC has become the loudest and most strident advocate for existential change in human activity.  In the latest IPCC report, deepening red gradient shadings convey that the Earth is a looming inferno.

According to the IPCC, the danger of imminent collapse due to rising CO2 and non-CO2 emissions, particularly methane, requires immediate action. Humanity must downsize and restructure the global economy, including, in their modest terminology, “governments, private sector, and civil society.” Everyone is responsible, and everyone must contribute.

Not only must GDP be lowered, but the world must immediately and drastically curtail fossil fuels; limit global agriculture output based on emissions, not feeding the world; spend and redistribute upwards of $125 trillion; rely on expensive, unreliable, discredited solar and wind for global power needs; and virtually ignore nuclear power, all the while “prioritizing equity, climate justice, social justice, inclusion and just transition processes.” To make the math work, governments and the private sector must implement on a global scale yet-to-exist carbon capture technologies, of unknown cost and consequence.

There is no imputation here that climate science is not real. It is the political choices of the IPCC at issue, specifically the 2023 Sixth Assessment’s Summary for Policymakers, as opposed to the physical scientists reporting as Working Group 1. As summarized by scientist Roger Pielke, “it is not within the IPCC’s mandate to call for action or to implore urgency.”

The IPCC task is to vet and summarize thousands of complex models and scientific papers produced annually. In each instance, a climate model incorporates assumptions not easily aggregated. The IPCC solution groups the models into five arbitrary scenarios based on forecasted warming in 2100. At no point does the IPCC ever declare one set of scenarios more likely than another.  Indeed, as aggregators, they have no scientific basis for making any such assertion. In these scenarios, 2050 does not exist as a scientifically significant year. It is simply a point on the curve connecting the current temperature to the 2100 end point.

To get to 2050, and urgency, the IPCC needs to import the political findings of the Paris Agreement.

In 2015, the Paris Agreement signatories reviewed the then most current IPCC report, the 5th Assessment. These 195 government actors arbitrarily concluded that “well below 2 degrees Celsius” of warming was the maximum threshold the Earth could survive. Nothing in the IPCC 5th Assessment supports the “well below 2 degree warming” as a scientific consensus. No IPCC evidence identifies a scientific threshold for global warming beyond which the Earth tips into collapse. Especially relevant, the signatories to the Paris Agreement in no manner highlighted 2050 as a year of special climate meaning, nor would it matter, scientifically speaking, if they had.  Following the 5th Assessment, the Paris Agreement target date is merely a “long-term temperature goal,” with one reference to “the second half” of the century.

The Paris Agreement signatories went farther, deciding by imperial fiat that the temperature goal needed a guardrail, the now infamous, endlessly repeated 1.5-degree-warming “limit.” In popular parlance, many, many people will swear that 1.5 degrees of warming is a scientifically valid statement of the limit to global warming, beyond which climate catastrophe ensues.

As important to note, all IPCC warming targets, including the Paris Agreement, start from the pre-industrial period 1850–1900. According to the IPCC, 1.1 degrees of warming has already occurred, meaning the Paris Agreement target at present is a mere 0.4 degrees over 75 years to the IPCC 2100 model date. This equates to an imperceptible 0.005 degrees of annual warming — hardly the stuff of headlines and catastrophic collapse.  And nothing compared to the 10 degrees of warming observed in the Earth’s last interglacial warm period in Siberia some 115,000 to 130,000 years ago.

It needs to be said as loudly as possible. The 1.5-degree climate tipping limit has no basis in any finding of the IPCC. It is the arbitrary finding of 195 political actors, in defense of the non-scientific “well below 2 degree” catastrophe, magically transported by the IPCC from 2100 to 2050.

How does the IPCC move the climate clock back 50 years, in violation of its 2100 science? By intentional sleight of hand, the IPCC provides a science answer to a policy question. How much CO2 can be emitted before the 1.5-degree target is breached? The sole source of the 1.5 degrees is the Paris Agreement.

Pro-IPCC climate scientists confirm that the global warming limit, whether it be 1.5 degrees from the Paris Agreement or some other number, is based solely on “value judgments and choice,” not “climate science.” (See page 7 chart.) The IPCC would have readers believe the exact opposite: that the global warming limit is scientifically determined, and those who disagree are “science deniers.” It is a deception of massive consequence.

Twenty fifty, as it turns out, is a long con between 195 governments and the IPCC.

As part of his Day One actions, President Trump needs to, once again, remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and disavow the overtly political IPCC Sixth Assessment Summary for Policymakers. The IPCC global prescription is not scientific, and it most certainly is not benign.

January 5, 2025 Posted by | Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

The Embarrassing Pause In Arctic Sea Ice Loss Has Lasted 17 Years, Defying IPCC, NSIDC Predictions

By Kenneth Richard | No Tricks Zone | January 8, 2024

“[S]ince the dramatical decline of the ice extent in 2007, the summer Arctic sea ice area has not declined further.” – Astrup Jensen, 2023

Scientists have been using the year 2007 as the starting point for assessing Arctic sea ice trends for nearly a decade. A 2015 study published in Nature Climate Change reported a “near-zero trend” in summer sea ice over the 7 years from 2007-2013.

Image Source: Swart et al., 2015 (full paper)

Another 10 years have now passed and there is still no evidence of a further decline in sea ice.

This is interesting because since late 2007 scientists have predicted Arctic sea ice would decline rapidly as CO2 continued rising – from 385 ppm in 2007 to 422 ppm today. There were 20 models referenced by the IPCC (AR4) projecting a 40% loss of sea ice by 2050 due to an allegedly enhance greenhouse effect associated with anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

But a new study reveals there’s been no declining trend in summer sea ice area over the last 17 years, and “no apparent correlation” between CO2 and sea ice trends.

“The Arctic Sea ice extent is measured by satellites and varies by day, month and year, and the yearly minimum ice extent will occur in a day of September month every year. The ice extent is much lower now (2023) than in 1978, when the satellite measurements began. However, it has not been a gradual decline. A major decline happened during the years 1997 – 2007. Before that the decline was minimal and after that period, there was no significant downward trend.”

“These data show that there is no apparent correlation between the variable extent of the Arctic and the Antarctic Sea ice and the gradually increasing CO2-concentrations in the atmosphere as proposed by NSIDC, IPCC and others, also for these areas of cold climate.”

Image Source: Astrup Jensen, 2023

January 10, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

The Political Agenda of the IPCC

BY ROGER PIELKE JR. | THE HONEST BROKER | MAY 15, 2023

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established as a scientific assessment process more than 35 years ago. Scientific assessments are of critical importance in many areas to help policy makers and the public to identify what is known, what is uncertain, as well as where there is contestation, uncertainties and areas of fundamental ignorance. Such assessments can also help us to understand policy options and expectations for how different choices might lead to different outcomes.

Regular readers of The Honest Broker will know that I have taken issue with the recent IPCC Sixth Assessment (AR6) based on an unacceptable number of errors and omissions in my areas of expertise, as well as its over-reliance on the most extreme climate scenarios.  Today I take a look at the IPCC’s self-described political agenda and argue that the institution finds itself at a fork in the road.

Before proceeding, I want to be clear about what I mean when I talk about “the IPCC.” In one sense there is really no such thing as “the IPCC.” The organization’s assessment process includes many hundreds of people who do their work across three Working Groups to produce many dozens of chapters covering a wide range of topics. The Working Groups are largely independent of each other and even chapters within the same Working Group can be written largely independently of other chapters.

In another sense there is indeed such a thing as the IPCC — Specifically, its leadership and most engaged participants. These core participants represent a kind of climate in-group with a shared sense of purpose and an overarching commitment to a shared political agenda. For some people, their entire career is centered on the IPCC. These core participants do have a shared political agenda which can be seen in varying degrees within the reports.

So what is the political agenda of the IPCC in-group? Transformational change

When the IPCC released its Synthesis Report in March, it announced:

Taking the right action now could result in the transformational change essential for a sustainable, equitable world

It would be easy to write this sentence off as containing consultant-like and empty buzzwords. But the notion of “transformational change” has been widely employed in the academic literature on climate and the IPCC clearly defines what it means by “transformational change.”

In its AR6 Working Group 3 report the IPCC explains that transformation involves more than simply transitioning from one type of technology to another (emphasis added):

While transitions involve ‘processes that shift development pathways and reorient energy, transport, urban and other subsystems’ (Loorbach et al. 2017) (Chapter 16), transformation is the resulting ‘fundamental reorganisation of large-scale socio-economic systems’ (Hölscher et al. 2018). Such a fundamental reorganisation often requires dynamic multi-stage transition processes that change everything from public policies and prevailing technologies to individual lifestyles, and social norms to governance arrangements and institutions of political economy

Transformational change means that everything changes.

What are examples of these sorts of changes? The IPCC identifies “the potential for virtuous cycles of individual level and wider social changes that ultimately benefit the climate.”

The IPCC continues (emphasis added):

The starting point for this virtuous circle are inner transitions. Inner transitions occur within individuals, organisations and even larger jurisdictions that alter beliefs and actions involving climate change (Woiwode et al. 2021). An inner transition within an individual (see e.g., Parodi and Tamm 2018) typically involves a person gaining a deepening sense of peace and a willingness to help others, as well as protecting the climate and the planet . . .”

What are examples of such “inner transitions”? The IPCC explains:

Examples have also been seen in relation to a similar set of inner transitions to individuals, organisations and societies, which involve embracing post-development, degrowth, or non-material values that challenge carbon-intensive lifestyles and development models . . .

The IPCC discusses the importance of “degrowth” to its vision of transformation in its AR6 Working Group 2 report:

Consumption reductions, both voluntary and policy-induced, can have positive and double-dividend effects on efficiency as well as reductions in energy and materials use . . . a low-carbon transition in conjunction with social sustainability is possible, even without economic growth (Kallis et al. 2012; Jackson and Victor 2016; Stuart et al. 2017; Chapman and Fraser 2019; D’Alessandro et al. 2019; Gabriel and Bond 2019; Huang et al. 2019; Victor 2019). Such degrowth pathways may be crucial in combining technical feasibility of mitigation with social development goals (Hickel et al. 2021; Keyßer and Lenzen 2021).

These views are no doubt legitimate and sincerely held. But I seriously doubt that a climate agenda focused on changing everything, grounded in inner transitions to support degrowth is going to get very far in Peoria, much less anywhere else. More broadly, why are they being used to frame a scientific assessment?

I’m far from the first to recognize that the IPCC has adopted a political agenda focused on transformational change. Writing in 2022, Lidskog and Sundqvist explain:

Transformation has become a buzzword within scientific and political discourses in which “transformative change” is stated to be the solution to many severe environmental challenges. Expert organizations such as the IPCC and IPBES have stressed that transformative change is necessary to meet environmental challenges (IPCC, 2018; IPBES, 2019). . . While transformative change is seen as the way forward and as an uncontroversial ambition—it is difficult to find anyone who is critical of it—its meaning is nevertheless unclear.

The adoption of transformational change as an overriding political objective in the IPCC AR6 (and in the IPCC 1.5 report before that) represents a departure from a more politically neutral use of the concept in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). In 2014, the AR5 described “transformation pathways” to refer to technological alternatives for mitigation, not to demand that everything must change across society:

Stabilizing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations at any level will require deep reductions in GHG emissions. Net global CO2 emissions, in particular, must eventually be brought to or below zero. Emissions reductions of this magnitude will require large-scale transformations in human societies, from the way that we produce and consume energy to how we use the land surface. The more ambitious the stabilization goal, the more rapid this transformation must occur. A natural question in this context is what will be the transformation pathway toward stabilization; that is, how do we get from here to there?

The IPCC AR5 acknowledged that there were many ways to address accumulating greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere:

[T]here is no single pathway to stabilization of GHG concentrations at any level. Instead, the literature elucidates a wide range of transformation pathways. Choices will govern which pathway is followed . . .

This expansive view of policy possibilities is far removed from “processes that change everything” and a “deepening sense of peace.” The IPCC AR5 and AR6 have been rightly criticized for not considering a larger set of possibilities for mitigation (notably, equity), which also reflects a political orientation.

The IPCC – or to be more precise, influential elements of the IPCC – appears to have been captured by an in-group with shared political views related to climate. These views embrace concepts like degrowth and planetary boundaries and turn climate policy on its head such that ends become means.

Transformational change views climate policy as a lever through which to “change everything.” The expressed need for such momentous changes across society are grounded in a frightening, even apocalyptic, perspective on the future. As the head of the IPCC exhorted in March, the IPCC “underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.”

The political agenda of the IPCC reads as if it was developed by wealthy American and Europeans academics. The billions of people around the world who may lack energy services or enough food probably would welcome an agenda of change. Instead, the IPCC emphasizes transformational changes in the lifestyles of ordinary people in rich countries, for instance, the recent Synthesis Report explained: “Many mitigation actions would have benefits for health through lower air pollution, active mobility (e.g., walking, cycling), and shifts to sustainable healthy diets.”

I have little doubt that many who have worked on the IPCC AR6 might read this post and say, “Hmmm, I never saw any of that,” others might say, “Yup, that’s our agenda, so what?” and still others might say, “I have a different political or professional agenda that I inserted into the report.” Further, one can surely dive into the almost 10,000 pages of the AR6 reports and selectively construct a different political narrative. However, I argue that “transformational change” is what in the jargon of symbolic politics is called the “master symbol” — the dominant political framing of the AR6.

The IPCC has clearly departed from its role as a scientific assessment and is now much more deeply engaged in political advocacy. Trying to simultaneously engage in assessment and advocacy is never a good idea. I hypothesize that the IPCC’s political agenda of transformational change plays more than a small role in its stubborn reliance on implausibly extreme scenarios and its multiple errors and omissions related to the science of extreme weather and disasters — both of which help to underscore the demand for urgent and large-scale societal change.

The IPCC finds itself at a fork in the road and should be reformed. It needs to either operate as a trustworthy scientific assessment or alternatively, to fully embrace its current role as an environmental advocacy group pushing transformational change. There is no middle ground.

May 19, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Dutch-Led Network Of International Experts Finds “Serious Errors” In Latest IPCC Report

By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | May 12, 2023

The UN Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) is misleading policy makers by focusing on an implausible worst-case emissions scenarios, concludes a new analysis report published by the Clintel Foundation: “The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC“

The IPCC is hiding the good news about disaster losses and climate-related deaths and wrongly claims the estimate of climate sensitivity is above 2.5°C. Also errors in the AR6 report are worse than those that led to the IAC Review in 2010, concludes the report by The Climate Intelligence Foundation (Clintel), which was founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok.

Opposite of IPCC claims likely true

Another result: The IPCC ignored crucial peer-reviewed literature showing that normalized disaster losses have decreased since 1990 and that human mortality due to extreme weather decreased by more than 95% since 1920.

Clintel accuses the IPCC of cherry picking from the literature to claim increases in damage and mortality due to anthropogenic climate change, when in fact the opposite is likely true.

Rewrote climate history

The Clintel report is 180 pages long and the first serious international ‘assessment of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. In 13 chapters the Clintel report shows the IPCC rewrote climate history, and emphasizes an implausible worst-case scenario, favoring bad news and ignoring good news.

“The strategy of the IPCC seems to be to hide any good news about climate change and to hype anything bad,” reported the Clintel press release.

The errors and biases that Clintel documents in the report are far worse than those that led to the investigation of the IPCC by the Interacademy Councel (IAC Review) in 2010. Clintel believes that the IPCC should reform, or be dismantled.

Clintel is a network of international scientists who analyzed several claims from the Working Group 1 (The Physical Science Basis)
and Working Group 2 (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) reports. This led to the latest report: “The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC”.

IPCC ignores 97% of all papers

Clintel explains how the IPCC ignored 52 out of 53 peer reviewed papers dealing with “normalized disaster losses” and found no increase in harms that could be attributed to climate change. Yet, the IPCC highlighted the single paper that claimed an increase in losses.

Cherrypicking, rewriting history

The IPCC also has tried to rewrite climate history by erasing the existence of the so-called Holocene Thermal Maximum (or Holocene Climate
Optimum), a warm period between 10,000 and 6000 years ago, and has introduced a new hockey stick graph, which is the result of cherry-picked proxies. The IPCC ignores temperature reconstructions that show more variability in the past, such as the well-documented Little Ice Age.

In its recent report, the IPCC also has grossly exaggerated sea level rise and CO2’s ability to warm the earth’s atmosphere and thus appears to have remained ‘addicted’ to its highest emissions scenario, so-called RCP8.5, which in recent years has been shown by several published papers to be implausible and thus should not be used for policy purposes.

Severely biased 

“We are sorry to conclude that the IPCC has done a poor job of assessing the scientific literature,” the Clintel scientists report. “In our view the IPCC should be reformed, and should include a broader range of views. Inviting scientists with different views, such as Roger Pielke Jr and Ross McKitrick, to participate more actively in the process is a necessary first step.”

If the inclusion of other views does not permitted, then the IPCC should be dismantled, the scientists say.

Reality: Future is far less bleak

“Our own conclusions about climate – based on the same underlying literature – are far less bleak. Due to increasing wealth and advancing technology, humanity is largely immune to climate change and can easily cope with it. Global warming is far less dangerous to humanity
than the IPCC tells us.”

Clintel also published the World Climate Declaration, which has now been signed by more than 1500 scientists and experts. Its central message is “there is no climate emergency”.

Clintel press release here.

May 19, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Rethinking The Greenhouse Effect

Not A Lot Of People Know That | September 16, 2022

A former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre is arguing that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has adopted an overly simplistic approach to global warming and has ended up exaggerating the human contribution to recent climate change.

William Kininmonth argues that the warming of the planet is fastest in winter and in high latitudes near the poles. He argues that this is mostly due to increased heat transport from the tropical oceans.

However, the recent warming of the tropical oceans can’t be explained by the greenhouse effect due to carbon dioxide, because that effect is small in the humid tropical atmosphere. The most probable explanation is natural changes in ocean currents.

William Kininmonth says:

“The IPCC’s radiation balance approach is very simplistic, ignoring the fact that nowhere on the Earth’s surface is in radiation balance. Mainstream climate science may have led us all up a blind alley”.

GWPF invited the Royal Society and the Met Office to review this paper, and to submit a response to be published as an appendix to it. No reply was received.

William Kininmonth: Rethinking the Greenhouse Effect (pdf)

William Kininmonth joined the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in 1960, and retired in 1998 as head of the National Climate Centre. He was a consultant to the World Meteorological Organization’s Commission for Climatology and participated in regional coordination and training programs. William Kininmonth is author of Climate Change: A Natural Hazard.

September 17, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Top climate scientists slam global warming “so-called evidence” as “misrepresentation, exaggeration & outright lying”

By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | July 11, 2022

Two top-level American atmospheric scientists have dismissed the peer review system of current climate science literature as “a joke”. According to Emeritus Professors William Happer and Richard Lindzen, “it is pal review, not peer review”. The two men have had long distinguished careers in physics and atmospheric science. “Climate science is awash with manipulated data, which provides no reliable scientific evidence,” they state.

No reliable scientific evidence can be provided either by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), they say, which is “government-controlled and only issues government dictated findings”. The two academics draw attention to an IPCC rule that states all summaries for policymakers are approved by governments. In their opinion, these summaries are “merely government opinions”. They refer to the recent comments on climate models by the atmospheric science professor John Christy from the University of Alabama, who says that, in his view, recent climate model predictions “fail miserably to predict reality”, making them “inappropriate” to use in predicting future climate changes.

The ’miserable failure’ is graphically displayed below. Since the observations cut-off, global temperatures have again paused.

Particular scorn is poured on global surface temperature datasets. Happer and Lindzen draw attention to a 2017 paper by Dr. James Wallace and others that elaborated on how over the last several decades, “NASA and NOAA have been fabricating temperature data to argue that rising CO2 levels have led to the hottest year on record”. The false and manipulated data are said to be an “egregious violation of scientific method”. The Wallace authors also looked at the Met Office HadCRUT database and found all three surface datasets made large historical adjustments and removed cyclical temperature patterns. This was “totally inconsistent” with other temperature data, including satellites and meteorological balloons, they said. Readers will recall that the Daily Sceptic has reported extensively on these issues of late and has attracted a number of somewhat footling ‘fact checks’.

Happer and Lindzen summarise: “Misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry picking or outright lying pretty much covers all the so-called evidence marshalled in support of the theory of imminent catastrophic global warming caused by fossil fuels and CO2.”

Professors Happer and Lindzen’s comments are included in a submission to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which is seeking to impose massive and onerous ‘climate change’ reporting requirements on public companies. But they form part of a wider scientific revolt by many scientists alarmed at the corruption of science to promote the command-and-control Net Zero agenda. Needless to say, these debates are largely ignored by mainstream media. Opponents of Net Zero politicised science are denounced as ‘cranks’ and ‘deniers’, labels at odds with their distinguished scientific achievements. Between them, Happer from Princeton and Lindzen from MIT have around 100 years of involvement in atmospheric science. Richard Lindzen was an early lead author for the IPCC, while William Happer was responsible for a groundbreaking invention that corrected the degrading effects of atmospheric turbulence on imaging resolution.

In their submission, Happer and Lindzen supply a basic lesson in science: “Reliable scientific theories come from validating theoretical predictions with observations, not consensus, peer review, government opinions or manipulated data”.

In the U.K., it will be interesting to see if Net Zero will feature as a major issue in the battle to find a new Prime Minister. At the moment, candidates seem to be steering a widish berth – something that can happen with virtuous green policies when actual votes are at stake. Happer and Lindzen state firmly that “science demonstrates there is no climate-related risk caused by fossil fuels and CO2, and therefore no reliable scientific evidence supporting the proposed rule”. The rule in this case refers to the SEC climate requirement, but it could equally apply to Net Zero. Many people now accept that a rigid Net Zero policy will lead to massive falls in living standards that will disproportionately affect the poorer in society, both in the U.K. and particularly in the developing world. Contrary to the incessant attack on fossil fuels, write Happer and Lindzen, “affordable, abundant fossil fuels have given ordinary people the sort of freedom, prosperity and health that were reserved for kings in ages past”.

Such prosperity, of course, has left the building in the case of Sri Lanka, where the prospect of famine and civil breakdown face 22 million people following (among other things) the decision of the Government to ban fertiliser in the interests of climate change and saving the planet. Such a collapse, with the President hastily fleeing the country, is likely to face any modern Net Zero society that seeks to tamper with reliable and affordable energy supply, restrict diet and try to grow enough food using ‘organic’ methods. Happer and Lindzen state that reducing CO2 and the use of fossil fuels would have “disastrous consequences” for the poor, people worldwide and future generations.

Both Happer and Lindzen have long held out against the current demonisation of atmospheric CO2, pointing out that the current 415 parts per million (ppm) is near a record low and not dangerously high. They note that 600 million years of CO2 and temperature data “contradict the theory that high levels of CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming”. Omitting unfavourable data is an egregious violation of scientific method. Facts omitted by those who argue there is a climate emergency include that CO2 levels were over 1,000 ppm for hundreds of millions of years and have been as high as over 7,000 ppm; CO2  has been declining for 180 million years from about 2,800 ppm to today’s low; and today’s low is not far above the minimum level when plants die of CO2 starvation, leading to all other life forms perishing for lack of food.

Finally, the authors note that the logarithmic influence of CO2 means its contribution to global warming is “heavily saturated”. The scientists calculate that a doubling of current CO2 levels would only reduce the heat escaping to space by about 1.1%. This suggests warming of around 1°C or less. The saturation hypothesis explains, they say, the disconnect between CO2  and temperature observed over 600 million years.

July 11, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 1 Comment

How Many Actual Scientists Were Involved With the Latest Apocalyptic IPCC Climate Report?

By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | March 5, 2022

IPCC scientists outline a harrowing summary of climate impacts already hurting people and species. The Guardian says it is clear that not enough is being done to head off a climate disaster. Up to 14% of species on land face extinction if the temperature rises another 0.3°C. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres describes the abdication of leadership by world powers as “criminal”.

Welcome to the latest IPCC report, painting its usual grim picture of future ecological and societal disaster, and claiming to provide “scientific evidence” for all its key findings. In its summary for policymakers, it notes that “human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events, has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people, beyond natural climate variability”. Furthermore, the report says with “high confidence” that if the temperature rises more than 0.35°C, it would cause “unavoidable increases in multiple climate hazards and present multiple risks to ecosystems and humans”. In fact, since about 1800 the global temperature has risen about 1.1°C, seemingly without catastrophic consequences.

So back in the real world, it is ‘Spot the Scientist’ among the 330 listed authors of the latest IPCC report. The Daily Sceptic took a sample consisting of all the British authors listed down to number 120. This is what we found.

The first to appear is Mike Morecroft who runs ‘climate change’ at the Government body, Natural England. Professor Camille Parmesan holds the National Aquarium Chair in Understanding Oceans and Human Health at Plymouth University. Jeff Price works at the University of East Anglia, and holds a PhD in animal psychology. Marie-Fanny Racault has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of East Anglia. According to her web page, she is a Biological Oceanographer whose PhD was in Environmental Science. She returned to UEA in November last year, “to take the lead on the next stage of developments on the ecosystem component of the PlankTOM model series”.

The Head of Climate Impacts Research at the Met Office, Professor Richard Betts, does actually have a degree in physics. Nevertheless, in January his organisation promoted a climate impacts report that warned of future societal collapse and armed gangs roaming a U.K. ravaged by climate change. Philip Thornton works for CGIAR, a non-profit food researcher and has a BA in agriculture. James Morison is described as a “senior climate change scientist” at the Forestry Commission. Mark Pelling is a Geography Professor at King’s College, while Richard Dawson is a Professor of Earth Systems Engineering at Newcastle University. Vanessa Castan Broto is a Professor of Climate Urbanism, having joined Sheffield University in 2017 following her appointment as a Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Dr. Helen Adams is a senior lecturer at King’s College in Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation. Her PhD concentrated on the “role of the environment in migration decision-making in rural Peru”. It was the BBC that said the IPCC scientists had outlined a “harrowing” summary of climate impact. It quoted Dr. Adams saying it was “really, really clear” that things are bad, “but actually the future depends on us, not the climate”.

The final two scientists/authors are Emily Boyd, a Professor of Sustainability at Lund University in Sweden, where she is also described as a “leading social scientist”, and Lindsay Stringer, another Geography Professor, this time at York.

The definition of science is obviously somewhat elastic these days and geography departments have been successful in reinventing themselves under names such as Earth Sciences. Nevertheless, the lack of involvement from ‘pure’ scientists – people who study chemistry and physics – is noteworthy. Ultimately all the speculative disaster prose arises from the hypothesis that humans are causing the climate to change by burning fossil fuel and creating extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The effect of CO2 is hotly disputed in atmospheric science circles, although much of the debate is ignored under the ‘settled’ science agenda. In fact, there is not yet one single, peer-reviewed science paper that proves conclusively that humans cause all or most global warming. Nobody knows how much the atmosphere warms if CO2 levels are doubled. Climate model guesses range from 1-6°C.

Meanwhile, much of the disaster prose that is endlessly recycled has been debunked. Coral reefs are not doomed – it seems the Great Barrier Reef has rarely been in better health; Pacific islands are increasing in size; the oceans are not turning into an acid bath. Declaring a climate emergency and basing all the warnings on something called global warming is starting to wear thin. Global temperature rises started running out of steam two decades ago. In fact, according to accurate satellite data, they haven’t budged for the last 88 months. No plausible link between temperature and CO2 has been established in the current, historical or geological record.

Professor Roger Pielke from the University of Colorado has been a long time critic of the politicisation of science. His initial view is that the latest UN report “is more heavily weighted to implausible scenarios than any previous IPCC assessment”. In particular, he notes that RCP8.5 accounts for 57% of scenario mentions. According to Pielke, this alone accounts for the apocalyptic tone and conclusions throughout the report.

RCP stands for Representative Concentration Pathways. There are four pathways and the worst case RCP8.5 assumes an improbable rise in global temperature of 5°C in less than 80 years. “Remarkably, RCP8.5 is characterised  in the report as a ‘business as usual future’,” said Pielke. “In reality, RCP4.5 [quoted in only 17.5% of scenario mentions] is currently thought of as an upper bound trajectory under current or stated policies, and RCP8.5 is implausible,” he added.

The climate writer Paul Homewood has spent years debunking many of the disaster tall tales. In characteristic blunt fashion, he notes that the IPCC, “relies heavily on studies written by grant-funded activist scientists. Many of these are easily debunked and they are usually based on very dodgy computer models”.

Finally comes news of a possible climate research strike. According to a recent paper from Bruce Glavovic: “Given the urgency and criticality of climate change, we argue the time has come for scientists to agree to a moratorium on climate change research as a means to first expose, then renegotiate, the broken science-society contract.” Glavovic is a Professor at the School of People, Environment and Planning at Massey University in New Zealand. Sometimes, a job title does not require any further comment.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.

March 8, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

The Misrepresentation Of The Scientific Consensus On Climate Change

By Iain Aitken | Watts Up With That? | February 10, 2022

[Note: This essay is abstracted from my eBook Myths: Widely Held But False Beliefs In The Climate Change Crisis, available on Amazon]

In their Fifth Assessment Report the IPCC, the ‘internationally accepted scientific authority on climate change’, gave their opinion of how much of the recent global warming was caused by human activity: ‘It is extremely likely [95-100 percent confidence] more than half of the observed increase in global mean surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic [i.e. man-made] increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together’. Reflecting that opinion Wikipedia states that the ‘Scientific consensus on climate change’ is that ‘the Earth is warming and… this warming is mainly caused by human activities’. It claims that 97-100% of actively publishing climate scientists endorse this opinion. Similarly, NASA claim that, ‘A consensus on climate change and its human cause exists… human activities are the primary cause of the observed climate-warming trend over the past century.’ And in an October 2020 interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes climatologist Dr Michael Mann said, ‘There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity.’ So is it actually true that 97-100% of climate scientists explicitly or implicitly endorse this key IPCC opinion?

Although science is not remotely democratic (it only needs one scientist to prove that the ‘consensus view’ is wrong and it is wrong) the fact remains that if this 97-100% consensus assertion is true then it is indeed very powerful. If the ‘internationally accepted scientific authority on climate change’ says something is almost certainly true and almost all climate scientists in the world agree then it almost certainly must be true – mustn’t it? Whilst there is undoubtedly almost total scientific consensus amongst the scientific authorities (literally dozens of scientific academies from around the world explicitly or implicitly endorse the IPCC’s opinions) that does not necessarily reflect the consensus view amongst climate scientists themselves. So what exactly is it that climate scientists agree on?

The consensus argument is epitomized by Barack Obama’s 2013 tweet that, ‘Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous’. He tweeted this immediately after the publication of the most famous climate change consensus survey, Quantifying the consensus on man-made global warming in the scientific literature (John Cook et al, 2013) conducted by Skeptical Science, a small group of climate change activists, who, despite their name, are precisely the opposite of climate change skeptics (their strapline is ‘Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism’). This study examined the Abstracts from 11,944 climate science papers published over the twenty-year period from 1991 to 2011. It concluded that 97.1% of the Abstracts (that actually expressed an opinion on the causes of global warming) endorsed the view that man-made greenhouse gas emissions (or, at least, greenhouse gases) cause global warming. Although this was 97% of Abstracts, not 97% of climate scientists, it is not unreasonable to suppose that, based on this survey, about 97% of climate scientists endorse the view that man-made greenhouse gas emissions (or, at least, greenhouse gases) cause global warming. It said nothing whatsoever about how much warming those emissions were causing and whether or not such warming was ‘dangerous’. It is probably the case that at least 99.9% of people who might describe themselves as climate scientists (including those most skeptical about the climate change crisis idea) endorse the view that man-made greenhouse gas emissions (or, at least, greenhouse gases) cause global warming, i.e. some global warming. That is not in any serious dispute. The dispute is about how much global warming human activity is causing and whether or not it is ‘dangerous’. So the study revealed nothing that was not already well known and uncontroversial.

Skeptical Science summarized their findings with the statement, ‘97% of climate papers expressing a position on human-caused global warming agree: global warming is happening and we are the cause’ – where ‘we are the cause’ clearly implied ‘we are the sole cause’ instead of what it actually found, viz. that we are the cause of some of the global warming. If the study had been able to show convincingly that 97% of climate scientists endorsed the IPCC’s opinion that human activity was the predominant cause of global warming between 1951 and 2010 then that would certainly have strongly supported the view that there was almost total scientific consensus that the IPCC was right. But of all the Abstracts reviewed in this study only 0.3% explicitly endorsed that central IPCC opinion1. Even (ex-IPCC) Mike Hulme has noted that, ‘The Cook et al study is hopelessly confused… in one place the paper claims to be exploring “the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW [Global Warming]” and yet the headline conclusion is based on rating abstracts according to whether “humans are causing global warming”. These are two entirely different judgements.’ The recently published paper Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature (Lynas et al, 2021) claims that the consensus is actually 2% higher – but once again only actually finds a 99% consensus that human activity contributes to climate change to some extent2; in fact about 99% of the papers reviewed in this study failed to explicitly quantify the extent. A survey3 of more than 1,800 climate scientists conducted in 2015 concluded that just 43% of them would endorse the IPCC opinion about our recent predominant role in global warming (and how many of them were agreeing based primarily on their faith in the IPCC and/or their self-interest in staying ‘on message’ to the climate change crisis narrative?)

Mike Hulme has stated that, ‘Claims such as “2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate” are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts.’ Supporting that view, an independent study4 found that the views expressed by the IPCC were the consensus of a leadership cadre of just 53 (about 2%) of them, 44 of whom were very closely linked professionally, having co-authored papers with one another and so very likely to share the same opinions. The author of the study, John McLean (climate data analyst at the Australian Climate Science Coalition and an Expert Reviewer for the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report), concluded that ‘Governments have naively and unwisely accepted the claims of a human influence on global temperatures made by a close-knit clique of a few dozen scientists, many of them climate modellers, as if they were representative of the opinion of the wider scientific community.’

One of the most comprehensive reviews5 ever performed of surveys of the scientific consensus on climate change concluded:

  • The articles and surveys most commonly cited as showing support for a ‘scientific consensus’ in favor of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis are without exception methodologically flawed and often deliberately misleading.
  • There is no survey or study showing ‘consensus’ on the most important scientific issues in the climate change debate.
  • Extensive survey data show deep disagreement among scientists on scientific issues that must be resolved before the man-made global warming hypothesis can be validated. Many prominent experts and probably most working scientists disagree with the claims made by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

So what is the real scientific consensus on climate change? There is almost total scientific consensus that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing, that that increase is predominantly due to human activity, that the climate system is warming, that climate change is happening and that human activity has contributed to some extent to the warming, changing climate. Note again that skeptical scientists, like Dr Roy Spencer and Dr Judith Curry and Dr Richard Lindzen, are part of this ‘scientific consensus on climate change’; the idea that they constitute the 3% of scientists who do not support the scientific consensus on climate change is a false idea, misrepresenting what the ‘scientific consensus on climate change’ actually is6. This misrepresentation is designed to bolster the ‘climate change crisis’ narrative and to marginalize and neutralize the skeptical scientists by making their views appear to fall far outside the overwhelming consensus view, even though they actually share that consensus view. Basically, the ‘consensus’ breaks down over the issue of whether or not human activity has been predominantly responsible for recent warming – and whether or not that warming is ‘dangerous’. The power of the false ‘97% scientific consensus that human activity has been predominantly responsible for climate change’ meme, perpetuated by Wikipedia, NASA, Facebook (and many others) is that it can be used very effectively to strangle at birth any debate about the science. As Dr Richard Lindzen has put it, ‘The claim is meant to satisfy the non-expert that he or she has no need to understand the science. Mere agreement with the 97 percent will indicate that one is a supporter of science and superior to anyone denying disaster. This actually satisfies a psychological need for many people.’

So if we return to Dr Michael Mann’s statement that, ‘There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity’ this is very disingenuous. Whilst there is almost total scientific consensus that climate change is ‘real’ and happening and that there has been some human-caused influence, there is no such scientific consensus over the extent of the human-caused influence and whether or not it could reasonably be described as ‘dangerous’, let alone a ‘crisis’.

References

1 Legates et al. (2015), Science & Education and ‘Consensus? What Consensus?’, GWPF Note 5, thegwpf.org, September 2013 and ‘Richard Tol’s Excellent Summary of the Flaws in Cook et al. (2013) and ‘The Infamous 97% Consensus Paper’, wattsupwiththat.com, 26 March 2015 and ‘The Cook ‘97% consensus’ paper, exposed by new book for the fraud that it really is’, wattsupwiththat.com, 12 March 2016

2 ‘Cooked Up Consensus: Lynas et al “Should Rather Be Classified As Propaganda, Bad Science”’, wattsupwiththat.com, 26 October 2021

3 Bart Strengers, Bart Verheggen and Kees Vringer (2015), Climate Science Survey, Questions and Responses, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, pp 1 – 39

4 ‘Prejudiced authors, prejudiced findings’, John McLean, (Science and Public Policy Institute), July 2008

5 Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming (2015) – Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, S. Fred Singer

6 ‘Study: 3% Contrarians Derailing the 97% Climate Consensus’, wattsupwiththat.com, 18 December 2021

February 11, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

The silly science of climate alarmism

By David Wojick | CFACT | November 19, 2021

You may think that climate science is complicated and that the scientists who are alarmed about climate change know what they are doing. Well, yes and no. The climate is complicated but scientists have bought into some very silly science.

Happily this is all easy to see with no science involved. Seriously, don’t back away. There is no science coming, especially nothing hard. Happily the world’s top alarmists have provided everything we need in a very simple way. Of course they do not see it because they are committed to alarmism. But I will point it out and you can use your own judgement.

Here goes. Globally, climate alarmism is led by the United Nations. Huge sums of money are at stake but that is not the point here, although it does explain much of what is going on. On the science side alarmism is led by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, usually just called the IPCC.

“Intergovernmental” sounds like a word you might learn as a joke. In this case it means that the members of this Panel are most of the world’s national governments. Most or maybe all of these governments pay lip service to climate alarmism.

Every five years or so the IPCC puts out a monster report that claims to be an overview of the latest climate science. In reality they just pick the science that best supports alarmism. This year is one of those years and they outdid themselves. Instead of the usual 1,000 page report it is a whopping 4,000 pages. Of course no one in their right mind will read it, but it sure shows how smart they are, right?

Where it gets useful is that there is a 40 page Summary for Policy Makers, which means for ordinary people. Anyone who votes is a policy maker of sorts. It is here that we find the basic scientific arguments for alarmism and they don’t amount to much.

In fact there are just two arguments for alarmism, which occur as two windows in the very first figure. They are labeled figure 1a and 1b. They are easy to describe so you don’t have to look them up. If you want to see them go here: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/.

Figure 1a is called the Hockey Stick by skeptics of alarmism (like me). It claims to be the global average temperatures for the last 2,000 years (like we can know that). It is pretty much a flat line until about 150 years ago and this is the hockey stick handle. Then it suddenly shoots up with big rapid warming from then until now, making the hockey stick blade. Handle flat then blade pointing up.

In short they say there was no global warming until we started it 150 years ago. What makes this silly is that there is lots of evidence for two prior periods of warming that may have been just as warm as today’s. These are so well known that they have names — the medieval warm period (when Vikings farmed Greenland) and the Roman warm period (when civilization flourished).

In between there were really cold spells including the little ice age that ended with the recent warming. In fact our warming may be nothing but the natural end to the little ice age.

There are thousands of research reports on these natural periods of warming and cooling but the IPCC simply ignores them. Alarmism depends on the recent warming being unprecedented. Natural warming disappears. Do not look behind the curtain!

So much for the bogus hockey stick. Figure 1b then zooms in on the recent warming, with a fancy variation on the same disappearing act. This time it is about the computer models of climate change, which is where alarmism comes from. It is these silly computer models that say we are causing dangerous global warming, with worse to come.

Figure 1b shows two computer model outputs. Each line is the global temperature over the last 150 years, when the recent warming occurred. One is supposedly the temperature history as it would have been without human interference, the natural history, and the other is the history with human inputs. Guess what? The natural history has no warming, while the human history shows all the warming that has occurred over the period.

The IPCC says this proves all the warming is caused by us humans. What makes this silly is figure 2, which gives the game away. It is a list of all the things in the models that can cause warming. All are human! There are no natural causes.

This means the models are programmed so that only humans can cause warming. Thus what figure 1b really says is “If we assume that only humans can cause long term warming then we find that the long term warming is caused by humans”. This is called circular reasoning because the conclusion is just a restatement of the assumption. It is truly silly.

What is missing of course is just what was missing In the hockey stick, namely nature. There is actually a great deal of research on possible natural causes for some of the long term warming, maybe even all of it. Keep in mind that the recent warming is very small, just around one degree over 150 years. Small changes in the sun, or the ocean, or even just in the clouds, could easily cause this little bit of global warming.

The IPCC simply ignores all this research, just like it ignored the warm and cold periods in the 2,000 year hockey stick. In fact this extreme alarmist bias dominates government funded climate science, which is most of it.

That is really all there is to alarmist science and it sure is silly! No deep scientific mystery. Just assume that everything that happens is our fault, program the computers that way, and let the computer then predict worse to come. Ignore all the research that says otherwise. Ignore the little ice age and the medieval warm period. Ignore natural change even though it is right in front of us.

Ignoring nature is the silly science of climate alarmism.

Reprinted with added stuff from RANGE magazine, Winter 2021/2022 issue. For more information see http://www.rangemagazine.com 

December 3, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | 1 Comment

How we fool ourselves. Part III: Social biases

By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | April 25, 2021

“Is the road to scientific hell paved with good intentions?” – political psychologist Philip Tetlock (1994)

Part I in this series addressed logical fallacies. Part II addressed biases associated with a consensus building process. Part II addresses the role of social conflicts and biases.

Additional biases are triggered by social conflict between an individual’s responsibility for responsible conduct of research, and the larger ethical issues associated with the well-being of the public and the environment. Further, social biases are triggered by careerist goals, loyalty to one’s colleagues and institutional loyalties.

Scientists have the responsibility of adhering to the principles of ethical research and professional standards. But what happens when other responsibilities get in the way of these professional standards? These might include responsibilities to their conscience, their colleagues, institutions, the public and/or the environment. One can imagine many different conflicts across this range of responsibilities that that can bias the scientific process. As an example, scientists that have been heavily involved with the IPCC may be concerned with preserving the importance of the IPCC and its consensus, which has become central to their professional success, funding and influence.

Arguably the most important of these are conflicts between the responsible conduct of research and larger ethical issues associated with the well-being of the public and the environment. Fuller and Mosher’s book Climategate: The CruTape Letters argued that ‘noble cause corruption’ was a primary motivation behind the Climategate deceits. Noble cause corruption is when the ends of protecting the climate (noble) justify the means of sabotaging your scientific opponents (ignoble).

Psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia claims that the most common and problematic bias in science is ‘motivated reasoning’. People that have a ‘dog in the fight’ (reputational, financial, ideological, political) interpret observations to fit a particular idea that supports their particular ‘dog.’ The term ‘motivated reasoning’ is usually reserved for political motivations, but preserving their reputation or funding is also a strong motivator among scientists.

The embedding of political values into science occurs when value statements or ideological claims are wrongly treated as objective truth. Scientists have a range of attitudes about the environment; the problem occurs because there is the presumption that one set of attitudes is right and those who disagree are in denial. This results in conversion of a widely shared political ideology about climate change into ‘reality.’

Confirmation bias can become even stronger when people confront questions that trigger moral emotions and concerns about group identity. People’s beliefs become more extreme when they’re surrounded by like-minded colleagues. They come to assume that their opinions are not only the norm but also the truth – creating what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls a ‘tribal-moral community’ with its own sacred values about what’s worth studying and what’s taboo. Such biases can lead to widely-accepted claims that reflect the scientific community’s blind spots more than they reflect justified scientific conclusions.

Psychologists Cusiman and Lombrozo found that people facing a dilemma between believing an impartial assessment of the evidence and believing what would better fulfill a moral obligation, people often believe in line with the latter. Cuisman and Lombrozo found that morally good beliefs demand less evidence than morally bad beliefs. They also found that people sometimes treat the moral value of a belief as an independent justification for belief.

Motivated biases become particularly problematic once these biases are institutionalized, with advocacy statements made by professional societies, editorials written by journal editors, and public statements by the IPCC leadership.

April 25, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Why Many Climate Crisis Claims Are Based On Manipulated Science

Climate Change Dispatch | March 28, 2021

We are constantly being warned by activists, politicians, and some climate scientists that we face a climate crisis; that if humanity collectively doesn’t alter its lifestyle and consumption patterns now, the world will end in 10 years, 12 years, 50 years—pick your number.

This is a lie, and I suspect most of the people making these apocalyptic prophesies know it. For them, it’s the modern-day equivalent of Plato’s noble lie—lying to people to get them to act in ways they don’t realize are in their own best interest.

Not coincidentally, those telling the lie profit from it in terms of influence, money, and/or power.

This lie is not in fact noble, nor is it based upon sound science. Rather, it is perpetrated through the regular suppression of inconvenient scientific data: data altered, suppressed, or scrubbed from journals and textbooks, which put the lie to insupportable claims made by politically connected climate scientists that an anthropogenic climate apocalypse is in the offing.

The big lie is built on a faulty premise that science can realistically trace the cause of modest recent warming of the Earth primarily to human greenhouse gas emissions, and that from this we can confidently predict what the world will look like 50, 100, and 300 years from now.

Award-winning climate scientist Richard Lindzen, Ph.D., described the big lie this way:

“One problem with conveying our message is the difficulty people have in recognizing the absurdity of the alarmist climate message. They can’t believe that something so absurd could gain such universal acceptance. Consider the following situation. Your physician declares that your complete physical will consist of simply taking your temperature. This would immediately suggest something wrong with your physician. He further claims that if your temperature is 98.7F rather than 98.6F, you must be put on life support. Now you know he is certifiably insane. The same situation for the climate is considered ‘settled science.”

Among the most egregious attempts to suppress inconvenient climate science came in 2001 when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tried to replace established climate history with the “hockey stick” graph.

The hockey stick dispensed with the long-recognized Medieval Warm Period from approximately 950 AD to 1250 AD, and the Little Ice Age, which ran from approximately 1350 AD through 1850 AD.

Its originators postulated global temperatures had been fairly stable over the past millennium, until the twentieth century when they began to rise sharply, due to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions.

This fit the IPCC’s climate change narrative, so it embraced it as the truth. Ultimately, even the IPCC couldn’t defend the hockey stick temperature reconstruction and removed it from subsequent reports.

Then came Climategate, in which a treasure trove of inconvenient email exchanges between IPCC-connected climate scientists was hacked and leaked.

These emails detailed the scientists hiding data that indicated the recent warming trend was not historically unusual and censoring scientific research that undermined claims of apocalyptic warming.

The Surface Station Project exposed the dirty little secret that temperature readings from the vast majority of the ground-based temperature stations were compromised by urban growth, skewing temperature readings higher.

Indeed, the research found 89 percent of surface stations—nearly 9 of every 10—fail to meet the National Weather Service’s requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial source of heat.

Additional scientific misconduct comes in the form of temperature monitoring agencies “adjusting” raw temperature recordings from unbiased, isolated temperature stations and reporting them in a way that indicates past temperatures were colder than were actually measured and recent temperatures have been warmer than actually measured.

This action produces an artificially steep temperature trend, making recent warming appear larger than it has been. In some instances, when these nefarious actions were exposed, the government agencies involved tried to scrub the official records of past temperatures.

Fortunately, in the age of the internet, where data once posted is forever, these Orwellian attempts to rewrite climate history have largely failed.

When global warming went on a 15-year hiatus, with temperatures flat-lining despite a steady rise in carbon dioxide emissions, a team of climate researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) altered how ocean temperatures were measured.

Voilà, like magic, the hiatus disappeared. As David Rose wrote for the Daily Mail, describing the incident “[NOAA researchers] took reliable readings from buoys but then ‘adjusted’ them upwards – using readings from seawater intakes on ships that act as weather stations … even though readings from the ships have long been known to be too hot.”

Most recently, some of the same characters that brought the world the “hockey stick” have now published a widely publicized paper that claims a long-recognized ocean circulation pattern, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which impacts climate, never existed at all but was an artifact of volcanic pulses.

Commenting on this paper, climate scientist Judith Curry, Ph.D., writes:

“Wow. In one fell swoop, the pesky problems of the ‘grand hiatus’ in the mid 20th century, debates over the attribution of 20th-century warming and the role of multidecadal internal variability, and the difficulty of attributing the recent increase in Atlantic hurricane activity to AGW, all go away. Brilliant! Almost as ‘brilliant’ as the Hockey Stick.”

There is little doubt the Earth is warming, but the list of breaches of the scientific method and ethics by researchers whose careers are intimately tied to the “truth” of climate alarmism provides more than enough reason to doubt the claim that the science is settled and the Earth is doomed, absent giving government authoritarian control over all aspects of peoples’ lives.

March 28, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

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