So much fraud, so little time. Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Or Intentional Fraud? December 14, 2023/ Francis Menton It’s the question that must always be front and center in your mind when you read anything generated by advocates of energy transition as a supposed solution to “climate change”: Is this just rank incompetence, or is it intentional fraud? (The third possibility — reasonable, good faith advocacy — can generally be ruled out in the first few nanoseconds.). As between the options that the advocate is completely incompetent or an intentional fraudster, I suppose it would be better to be merely incompetent. However, often the misdirection is so blatant that it borders on impossible to believe that the author could be so stupid as to actually believe what he or she is saying. So let’s apply this inquiry to a piece that has come to my attention in the past few days. READ MORE
There is resistance among the scientists. Alan Longhurst 1925-2023: oceanographer and climate skeptic Posted on December 14, 2023 by curryja by Javier Vinós Alan Longhurst died last December 7th in the hospital of Figeac in Occitanie (France), where he had been admitted a few days earlier following a fall in nearby Cajarc, the small town where he lived. Alan has authored numerous posts at Climate Etc. and is also author of the book Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science. Continue reading → ". . . Like me, Alan started from a position of confidence in the work of climate scientists. But he had the experience of virtually every year of oceanographic cruises that had taken him all over the world’s seas and oceans, and he had a deep understanding of the clear response of marine species to climate changes. In addition, Alan had a vast knowledge of the literature and studies of decades and centuries of ocean biology and conditions, including those conducted by the British Navy. One of his main complaints was that all this knowledge, obtained with great scientific rigor, was being completely ignored in the study of climate change, and that everything prior to the significant increase in our emissions was no longer ignored, but unknown to current scientists. He commented on how some of his published observations on the effects of nitrogen upwelling off the California coast on tuna populations had been republished as if they were new by a group in Northern California. He jokingly noted that a few months of research can often save a few hours at the library. Such oceanographic and climate knowledge led him to a deep skepticism of the consensus proposed by the IPCC, which crystallized in several climate articles published on the Climate Etc. blog and in the writing of the book “Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science,” which took him several years to complete. Kip Hansen masterfully defined it in his review of the book as follows: “Longhurst’s comprehension and recall of the details of hundreds of scientific papers from related and adjacent fields enter into this brilliant synopsis of the state of Climate Science – what doubts we still have and what, if any, certainty we can claim.” However, the publishers of his oceanography books refused to publish a book that went against the prevailing climate dogma. This saddened Alan. If you have dedicated your life to science with honesty and integrity, it is not easy to deal with such rejection. It is an experience I share. . . . "
The opponents of race realism point out that universities reject it, but they are unable to post fact based arguments against race realism, using their own words, and using the internet only to document factual assertions. The debate on race realism has been coerced since the 1960's. An accusation of racism can get you fired. I mention that to acknowledge that relying on the testimony of experts does not prove an argument. You still need to prove your case using your own words, and using words that any reasonably intelligent person can understand. I say that because I agree with the informed consensus on global warming, but I do not stop there. During my life I have noticed milder winters and hotter summers. When I moved to my present location two decades ago summer days where the temperature exceeded 90 degrees were rare. Now they are frequent. It snowed every winter. Some of the snows were deep. It has been several years since it has snowed at all. Also, I understand the science. During the age of the dinosaurs the earth's climate was quite a bit warmer than it is now. Sea levels were higher. Much that is now the United States was under water. Tropical plants lived closer to the north pole and the south pole than do now. Over the millions of years plants removed carbon from the atmosphere in photosynthesis. When plants died they frequently became what we know today as fossil fuels. As carbon was removed from the atmosphere the level of carbon dioxide declined. The climate grew colder. By consuming fossil fuels we are reducing a process that lasted several hundred million years in two centuries.
Which years, specifically, are you talking about? Are you aware that the earth cooled substantially from the 1940s to the 1970s? It had warmed rapidly ~1910-1940, and many heat records were set in the 1930s and 40s. The first recorded one-season navigation of the Northwest Passage in history occurred in 1944: the arctic sea ice was too thick before that, and got too thick again afterwards. My mom was born in 1924, and she remembered the 1930s as being warmer than the 2010s. Sorry, no, that's not the science. While there is a weak statistical relationship between CO2 and temperature in the paleoclimate record, it's mainly because warmer temperature makes CO2 less soluble in sea water. So temperature leads CO2. The paleoclimate record shows there have been periods of high CO2 and low temperature, and low CO2 and high temperature: https://www.quora.com/Have-there-be...-than-today-and-the-global-temperature-cooler https://climatediscussionnexus.com/2020/08/19/this-just-in-co2-doesnt-drive-temperature/ https://i0.wp.com/judithcurry.com/w...creen-shot-2021-05-29-at-7.13.03-am.png?ssl=1
Don't blame "deniers" for the flaw in climate attribution. Climate attribution method overstates “fingerprints” of external forcing Posted on December 18, 2023 by curryja by Ross McKitrick I have a new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Environmetrics discussing biases in the “optimal fingerprinting” method which climate scientists use to attribute climatic changes to greenhouse gas emissions. This is the third in my series of papers on flaws in standard fingerprinting methods: blog posts on the first two are here and here. Climatologists use a statistical technique called Total Least Squares (TLS), also called orthogonal regression, in their fingerprinting models to fix a problem in ordinary regression methods that can lead to the influence of external forcings being understated. My new paper argues that in typical fingerprinting settings TLS overcorrects and imparts large upward biases, thus overstating the impact of GHG forcing. While the topic touches on climatology, for the most part the details involve regression methods which is what empirical economists like me are trained to do. I teach regression in my econometrics courses and I have studied and used it all my career. I mention this because if anyone objects that I’m not a “climate scientist” my response is: you’re right, I’m an economist which is why I’m qualified to talk about this. I have previously shown that when the optimal fingerprinting regression is misspecified by leaving out explanatory variables that should be in it, TLS is biased upwards (other authors have also proven this theoretically). In that study I noted that when anthropogenic and natural forcings (ANTH and NAT) are negatively correlated the positive TLS bias increases. My new paper focuses just on this issue since, in practice, climate model-generated ANTH and NAT forcing series are negatively correlated. I show that in this case, even if no explanatory variables have been omitted from the regression, TLS estimates of forcing coefficients are usually too large. Among other things, since TLS-estimated coefficients are plugged into carbon budget models, this will result in a carbon budget being biased too small. Continue reading →
How to talk to a climate science denier Try useful information instead of fear mongering. The planet is in a warming era at the moment but it is trivial. Global temperatures (according to climate science) has increased a mere 1 degree C over the past 100 years. 8 years ago they developed a technology to measure ground temperatures from satellites. That technology hasn't detected any warming yet. Stop using shrinking glaciers and other phenomena as evidence without explaining growing glaciers and other opposing phenomena in other areas. Explain how the climate change thing makes money for those fostering it and power and control for government. Be honest and sell it as a potential future problem instead of a crisis. It simply is not a crisis. It is called a crisis for money and power. It is a political issue, not a scientific one.
