Check out these headlines.
Wall Street Journal: U.N. Panel Warns Drastic Action Needed to Stave Off Climate Change
New York Times: Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040
The Intercept: FOSSIL FUELS ARE A THREAT TO CIVILIZATION, NEW U.N. REPORT CONCLUDES
Earther: We Have a Decade to Prevent a Total Climate Disaster
MarketWatch: Drastic action needed to prevent climate catastrophe, U.N. panel warns
Daily Caller: AL GORE: ‘WE’RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME’ ON GLOBAL WARMING
Q&A
Q.What do all of those headline have in common?
A. They are all based on the same study. The study is riddled with huge numbers of blatant errors making the study for lack of better words, pure bullshit.
Riddled With Errors
Watts Up With That reports BOMBSHELL: audit of global warming data finds it riddled with errors
- Almost no quality control checks have been done: outliers that are obvious mistakes have not been corrected – one town in Columbia spent three months in 1978 at an average daily temperature of over 80 degrees C. One town in Romania stepped out from summer in 1953 straight into a month of Spring at minus 46°C. These are supposedly “average” temperatures for a full month at a time. St Kitts, a Caribbean island, was recorded at 0°C for a whole month, and twice!
- Sea surface temperatures represent 70% of the Earth’s surface, but some measurements come from ships which are logged at locations 100km inland. Others are in harbors which are hardly representative of the open ocean.
- The dataset starts in 1850 but for just over two years at the start of the record the only land-based data for the entire Southern Hemisphere came from a single observation station in Indonesia. At the end of five years just three stations reported data in that hemisphere. Global averages are calculated from the averages for each of the two hemispheres, so these few stations have a large influence on what’s supposedly “global”.
- According to the method of calculating coverage for the dataset, 50% global coverage wasn’t reached until 1906 and 50% of the Southern Hemisphere wasn’t reached until about 1950.
- In May 1861 global coverage was a mere 12% – that’s less than one-eighth. In much of the 1860s and 1870s most of the supposedly global coverage was from Europe and its trade sea routes and ports, covering only about 13% of the Earth’s surface. To calculate averages from this data and refer to them as “global averages” is stretching credulity.
- When a thermometer is relocated to a new site, the adjustment assumes that the old site was always built up and “heated” by concrete and buildings. In reality, the artificial warming probably crept in slowly. By correcting for buildings that likely didn’t exist in 1880, old records are artificially cooled. Adjustments for a few site changes can create a whole century of artificial warming trends.
- Data prior to 1950 suffers from poor coverage and very likely multiple incorrect adjustments of station data. Data since that year has better coverage but still has the problem of data adjustments and a host of other issues mentioned in the audit.
- Another implication is that the proposal that the Paris Climate Agreement adopt 1850-1899 averages as “indicative” of pre-industrial temperatures is fatally flawed. During that period global coverage is low – it averages 30% across that time – and many land-based temperatures are very likely to be excessively adjusted and therefore incorrect.
Complex Systems Reduced to Single Variable
Also consider Watts Up With That Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup 331.
A participant in the IPCC, who resigned, atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT. He is noted for his work in dynamic meteorology, atmospheric tides, ozone photochemistry, quasi-biennial oscillation, and the Iris hypothesis. Lindzen is certainly qualified to talk about the physics of the atmosphere, where the greenhouse effect occurs. Several key points of the talk are summarized below.
- “Nature has numerous examples of autonomous variability, including the approximately 11-year sunspot cycle and the reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field every couple of hundred thousand years or so. In this respect, the climate system is no different from other natural systems.
- “Now here is the currently popular narrative concerning this system. The climate, a complex multifactor system, can be summarized in just one variable, the globally averaged temperature change, and is primarily controlled by the 1-2% perturbation in the energy budget due to a single variable – carbon dioxide – among many variables of comparable importance.
- “This is an extraordinary pair of claims based on reasoning that borders on magical thinking. It is, however, the narrative that has been widely accepted, even among many sceptics.
- “Many politicians and learned societies go even further: They endorse carbon dioxide as the controlling variable. And although mankind’s CO2 contributions are small — compared to the much larger but uncertain natural exchanges with both the oceans and the biosphere — they are confident that they know precisely what policies to implement in order to control CO2 levels.”
- Sea level has been increasing by about 8 inches per century for hundreds of years, and we have clearly been able to deal with it. In order to promote fear, however, those models that predict much larger increases are invoked. As a practical matter, it has long been known that at most coastal locations, changes in sea level, as measured by tide gauges, are primarily due to changes in land level associated with both tectonics and land use.
- The small change in global mean temperature (actually the change in temperature increase) is much smaller than what the computer models used by the IPCC have predicted. Even if all this change were due to man, it would be most consistent with low sensitivity to added carbon dioxide, and the IPCC only claims that most (not all) of the warming over the past 60 years is due to man’s activities. Thus, the issue of man-made climate change does not appear to be a serious problem. However, this hardly stops ignorant politicians from declaring that the IPCC’s claim of attribution is tantamount to unambiguous proof of coming disaster
- Cherry picking is always an issue. Thus, there has been a recent claim that Greenland ice discharge has increased, and that warming will make it worse. Omitted from the report is the finding by both NOAA and the Danish Meteorological Institute that the ice mass of Greenland has actually been increasing. In fact both these observations can be true, and, indeed, ice build-up pushes peripheral ice into the sea.
- Misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry picking, or outright lying pretty much covers all the so-called evidence.
Lindzen’s entire speech is much needed and worth reading. Simply because the IPCC names its process as science, does not make it science.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
By 2040 climate will be the least of humanities worries… food and water shortages, phosphate depletion, pollution and environmental poisoning from things like particulate plastics, the end of fossil fuels, economic collapse and general starvation will inevitably garner a much more brutal future for humankind.
Real issues: overpopulation in Africa mainly, and third world.
Invasion of the West by agenda:
“Orwell’s 1984 helped the world understand the last century’s crisis: the struggle between totalitarianism and freedom.
Jean Raspail’s novel tackles this century’s crisis: whether the white world can survive the Third World’s demographic tidal wave.
That crisis is upon us now”
I can’t prove man made climate change is real but I think its likely. The world is over run with people, people driving, breathing and barbecuing. I’m tripping over people, that isn’t good for my quality of life.
Whether the world is warming (due to excessive fossil fuel exploitation) or cooling at this time may be moot. Either side of this debate seems to admit that the planet’s climate changes, with one side arguing that this is due to anthropogenic causes and the other side suggesting it is due to historical cycles. Regardless of your support/belief in one side of this or the other, industrial civilization is still at risk; just as every complex society is during its existence. Should archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s thesis in The Collapse of Complex Societies hold true, every complex society is at risk during its tenure due to diminishing marginal utility and the lack of resource surpluses during a significant crisis. If we just focus on the crisis of a significant climate change (warmer or cooler), one of the questions to ponder is do we have adequate resources/surpluses available to deal with the loss of present agricultural lands that would be loss with a significant change in climate. I would argue we do not and the argument of the cause of a warming or cooling planet is akin to arguing the cause of the Titanic’s hull breach as the water laps around your ankles while sitting in its bar having another martini.
Steve, climate change is not a “belief.” It’s science. The deniers have a smaller and smaller handful of cherry-picked graphs and data points to support their belief.
Yes, civilizations becomes more fragile as they become more complicated. But not steering the Titanic away from the iceberg (catastrophic AGW) when you can see it well in advance is just plain stupid.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you (in fact, I’m very much in favour of pursuing degrowth on our planet) but one must have ‘faith’ in science; it is not the purely ‘objective’ endeavour many make it out to be since it is performed by humans with all their biases and prejudices impacting their interpretation of the ‘facts’.
Let me guess, the “solution to climate change” requires ceding individual and corporate autonomy to the state. That’s a road to serfdom, not a solution.
Let me guess, you have no credible “solution” of your own.
There is no credible solution, considering that climate is going to change, whether we like it or not.
Wake up you big-govt useful idiots. We all know govt and their establishment hacks lie about everything, but this is the one thing they are truthful about, really?
Ice Ages and warming periods have existed well before human civilization where they began to burn wood to stay warm. Only a linear-thinking idiot could believe that temps will only continue upward and cycles do not exist.
Go study the Greenland ice core data, which shows CO2 levels were higher 2000 years ago.
Pollution, which is totally seperate from climate cycles, is best addressed by technology-based prosperity. The global warming BELIEVERS want to go back to caves, even though the poorest countries are the most polluted.
The Left believes that sin taxes will reduce the sin, but taxing incomes and energy will not reduce productive activity. Everything about the Left is one big contradiction. At least the Left should be willing to sell their ocean-front and southern homes and move north.
Prosperity increased during warming periods and contracts during cooling periods. We are headed into a cooling period, that could be amplified by the peaking in the earthquake/volcano cycle and Maunder minimium. This is what we should be planning for!
Nope, so sorry, Greenland ice core data does NOT show CO2 levels were higher in the past. Wrong. And stop with the “climate has always changed so global warming isn’t a problem.” It’s so stupid of an argument it doesn’t merit a response.
I prefer sources without agenda’s, beliefs of biases. Global warming is not the problem, as economic expansions take place during warming periods, and contraction occur during cooling periods, which are associated with crop failures, famines and plagues.
Nice, you get your climate data from an economics website that uses thoroughly DEBUNKED sources. If you’d like to learn more about why that graph of yours has no bearing on today, see here
Note that the author of the source listed in that graph is a firm believer in global warming.
I bet you don’t care about any of this though. Your identity is wrapped up in your position, facts be damned.
Oh and Mish – take a look at that chart and tell me again “we don’t even know what is causing global warming, if global warming even exists.”
OK “we don’t even know what is causing global warming, if global warming even exists.”
Rum runner, you forget to mention that in the first half of the Mauna Loa data that the earth’s temperatures came down, about the first 30 years or so. Remember the Time magazine cover and the world locked in ice?
Since then, temperatures have gone up and now you and the environmental whackos are freaking out the earth is warming up when before you were freaking out it was cooling. In fact, you whackos attribute the warming in part to the banning of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) .
So seeing as how you all know exactly what the right temperature the earth is supposed to be and man completely controls the climate, how about instead of turning off the CO2, we just turn up the CFCs?
And given the calamity we are going to see from rising temperatures, was it a mistake to ban CFCs?
“The amount of climate scaremongering in the past few weeks is stunning.”
Sunspot activity has been declining the past few years and there have been predictions of a cold snap lasting from about 20 years to one of those mini ice ages like the one that struck Europe ca. 1645-1715.
Should such a cold period occur, especially if it includes a few winters like 1976-77, the global warming movement will be cold ‘toast’. Perhaps some climate scientists realize this and are running scared.
…and want to get some CO2 ‘reduction’ legislation through to which they will credit the cooling.
Sunspot activity has been declining and yet we keep setting new global high temperature records. As usual, a clueless, unsubstantiated, conspiratorial post from know-nothing deniers. You’re right on point.
“… we keep setting new global high temperature records…”
I am still waiting for someone to point to RAW THERMOMETER DATA, at a single location in a remote area (so not affected by urban heat), taken at consistent times during each day, over a 100-year-period that shows the earth is getting warmer at that point.
If you can point to that, then show the same thing for 19 other such sites scattered around the world.
Opinion is not science, btw, even if the opinion comes from a scientist.
The best land based measurements are from the US Climate Reference Network, which is a network of stations in pristine areas and the data is not fudged like other temp. data. Last time I looked it showed a slight (statistically insignificant cooling trend).
The driver behind the man-made global warming propaganda is taxes. Govt’s are quickly running out of money as rising interest rates sucks more out of bloated budgets. The establishment needs to get a carbon tax imposed ASAP – almost as fast as a ban on guns to prevent freedom-loving people from objecting to anything imposed by govt largess.
Annan began his quest last winter after hearing Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who questions the extent to which human activities are influencing climate, say he was willing to bet that global temperatures will drop over the next 20 years. …
But no wager was ever agreed. Annan says that Lindzen wanted odds of 50-to-1 against falling temperatures: this meant that Annan would pay out $10,000 if temperatures dropped, but receive only $200 if they rose. In total, Annan says he tried and failed to agree terms with seven sceptics.
… In May, environmental activist George Monbiot challenged climate sceptic Myron Ebell to a 5,000 (US$9,000) wager live on BBC radio. Ebell, a global-warming specialist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington DC, declined, saying he has four children to put through university and so does not “want to take risks”.
Annan’s search ended with Mashnich and Bashkirtsev, who are based at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk, Russia. They say that global surface air temperatures closely correlate with the size and number of sunspots. Sunspot levels follow regular patterns and the Sun is expected to be in a less active phase over the next few decades, leading Mashnich and Bashkirtsev to predict a drop in temperature.
The results were in a while ago, and of course Annan won easily, as the blue lines in the graph below show. …
Yada yada yada
Earth is reaching point of a cooling trend and it’s in all the data and charts unless it has been left out for political reasons. It takes decades of time to slightly change average temps. Average temps also are not the normal temps you live with on a daily weekly, monthly term. Climate extremists want to control the world’s order and gain power and profit by attempting to make an end run around using very scary over the top fear tactics.
Ok – what are they? Climate scientists take into account solar cycles – which is completely negligible relative to the radiative forcing caused by hundreds of extra GIGATONS of CO2 in the atmosphere. But by all means, just leave it at “many variables.”
And this is supposed to be comforting when multi-meter rise is possible this century?
Man’s contributions are small? Go to link to co2levels.org Do you think it’s purely a coincidence that that graph lines up with the industrial revolution?
Don’t you think the fossil-fuel industry with its hundreds of billions of dollars would be able to fund all the scientists necessary to totally debunk this anthropogenic climate change “myth”? Instead what do we find – that they knew about the global-warming effects of fossil-fuel burning and buried the evidence.
I saved this comment you made in a past article as it succinctly captures your breathtaking ignorance on the subject.
“”There is no “proof” of man-made global warming. .. It is likely, we do not yet know the biggest cause of what’s happening. … the free market will take care of this problem anyway, assuming there is a problem” – Mike Shedlock
The sun is 99% of the entire solar system. The sun burps the right way and we have another Carrington Event. But somehow CO2 is more of a problem? May this be similar to the ozone hole of a few years ago?
You have got to be a bot with such vague, pointless associations.
“And this is supposed to be comforting when multi-meter rise is possible this century?”
I first saw Santa Monica Beach over 45 years ago. It doesn’t look noticeably different today.
Thank goodness for that. My cousin went swimming in Maine and said the water was freezing! Proof that the oceans aren’t warming. Y’all are doing some fine science. What’s yer gut tell you about transmutation of lead to gold? There’s gotta be a way..
In his famous Farewell Address, President Eisenhower followed his warning about the Military-Industrial Complex with a warning about the politicization of science through dependence on government funding. The Anthropogenic Global Warming scam is the classic example of what Ike was warning about.
Let’s remember that decisions on what research gets funded by the taxpayer are generally made by the same kind of bureaucrats who have made the FBI so respected for its integrity and objectivity.
I think that majority of libertarians prematurely dismiss possibility of human caused global warming because of the “anti-libertarian” measures put out by our governments (e.g. clean energy subsidies and CO2 taxes).
But is it right to dismiss something just because you disagree with measures put out by goverment to control something?
Here are the facts:
Now the big question is – after burning the oil what happens with the CO2? Do rain forrests absorb ALL of that CO2 back into biomass at the same rate we burnt oil?
If you answered “Yes”, then you technically admitted that oil is renewable resource (how long it takes for biomass to convert to oil?). If you answered “No”, then CO2 in atmosphere had to increase, there is no other way around it. Period.
The open question to me is whether we can reach some equilibrium point at higher temperatures where forests can absorb all the CO2 emitted due to human activity at higher rate than now?
Also, is it the absolue CO2 concentration that matters or is it the CO2 emission rate that matters? Maybe 50 million years ago plants slowly through evolution got accustomated to that climate. Could our plants do the same on short notice.
Global warming is expensive experiment humans are performing now.
You forgot to mention C02 levels increase after it gets warmer NOT before. Basic science 101 and this applies to our environment.
Not sure I understood what you are trying to say.
Are you implying that CO2 is not warmhouse gas and that CO2 is not cause for increasing temperatures (ie it is the other way around that increasing temperatures cause higher CO2?)
I doubt you’re interested in learning why you’re wrong but in the small chance that you are, here’s an explanation as to CO2 and planetary warming with an eye towards your myth that CO2 always lags temperature.
Don’t you know that a hurricane has never hit Florida before?
As long as the only solution, nuclear energy, remains taboo the problem isn’t.
Check out Paleomap Project by Professor Chris Scotese http://www.scotese.com
and specifically the section on Earth’s Climate history link to scotese.com . Shows estimates of Earth’s average temperature over hundreds of millions of years. Lot’s of temperature variation when humans didn’t exist. In addition, the Earth’s average temperature tends be higher than 17C for extended periods of time. The late Professor Robert Berner spent many years researching CO2 production/absorption.
This link link to geocraft.com contains a graph named Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time that shows an overlay of estimated average temperature versus estimated average CO2 levels. It is estimated that recent glacial melting started about
20, 000 years ago, well before any major human influence. I doubt that humans can stop the warming already in place.
Sigh.. What you AGW deniers fail to grasp is that climate scientists completely agree that the climate has always changed and the Earth has been much hotter and much colder in the past.
What is not going to work out so well for us is how rapidly the Earth is warming in response to the injection of hundreds of gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. We are supposed to be heading back into a mini ice age but the level of CO2 addition has completely swamped that natural process.
rum runner, I welcome your opinion, which adds to the discussion. Name calling makes you sound like you are more interested in political fighting than science.
Most problems can be easily solved without spending much money. Once governments place a price tag, you should know that then it isn’t a real problem in the first place.
Healthcare, under what logic do you need more money to solve an affordability crisis. How could you need more $$$$ to fix the most expensive healthcare in the world?
Ditto with climate change, a convenient way to getting more cash out of gullible consumers.
“Complex Systems Reduced to Single Variable”
The climate is not carbon dioxide.
Discovery Channel had a space exploration show on Saturday. Part was related to climate. They had a graph of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, going back a few thousand years. The temperature peak of the Minoan Warming occurred when there was much less carbon dioxide than there is now. Conversely, with the much higher CO2 now, the current temperature is well below the Minoan Warming peak.
Temperature has been rising from the low of the Little Ice Age and has not even reached the peak of the Medieval Warming, which was lower than the peak of the Roman Warming, which was lower than the peak of the Minoan Warming.
As a voracious reader of history, it is quite telling how much climate has changed time and time again. The Mayans were done in by a drought, the Roman Empire had three distinct climates changes, etc. It seems to me that climate cycles are about 300 years long.
According to this…
There seems be a historical correlation between CO2 levels and tempeartures.
“According to this…
CO2 levels are at their highest in 800,000 years
There seems be a historical correlation between CO2 levels and tempeartures.”
Except that it was warmer during the Minoan, Roman and Medieval Warming periods, than it is now, when they had less CO2 in the atmosphere.
Nobody has ever said that CO² is the only variable. It is a variable that explains temperature once other variables have been accounted for. Ice ages wax and wane because of the Milankovitch cycles, but temperature swings last much longer than can be accounted for in terms of differences in radiative forcing, introducing a momentum effect. Today the increase in CO² is not just a function of solar radiation, warmth, plant growth, ocean solution levels, etc. We have amplified the cycle, or better said, turbo-charged it.
“We have turbo-charged it” – ACCORDING TO Paid “scientist” that have been caught numerous times omitting, cherry-picking, and falsifying data. You are proof that people believe what they want to believe.
World C02 levels are gradually increasing and the earths surface is gradually warming. If they weren’t, that would be truly alarming as it would go against common sense and physics. I think this has been pretty well established. How else can you explain shrinking glaciers? There may be a few odd examples where they aren’t shrinking, but in aggregate, they definitely are.
The debate is how this will effect the world. No one really knows. It’s true that the climate scientists have done a poor job of predicting the specifics of future temperatures, but they’ve been right about the general trend of increasing temperatures.
I personally am not alarmed as the scientists greatly underestimate how resistant the earth is to warming. As surface temperature increase, the earth will increase it’s radiative heat flux by an order of the absolute temperature raised to the 4th power. Which means the earth will be losing a lot more heat as it warms up. They also tend to overstate the effect that losing ice will increase surface absorptivity. Most of this will occur over water at high latitudes and most of the solar flux will just bounce off the water surface. Not be absorbed,
Kid, Earth has been coming off a mini-ice age since the mid 18th century. Warmer weather means more green stuff and most CO2 comes from rotting green stuff. The Thames River used to regularly freeze over. It hasn’t since the 1820s. It’s a cycle.
The radiative heat flux doesn’t much matter if there is more CO² and H²O in the atmosphere to absorb it. The difference in absorption between ice/snow cover and water is 90% and 20%, so pretty significant. The IPCC is rightly criticized for being very converative and not going beyond what is abolutely certain. They never venture to tell what could happen if certain positive feedbacks kick in (such as ocean saturation, more drying/dying forests, permafrost methane and methane clathrates).
It’s not a single study. The IPCC is a bundling and summary of thousands of the best recent scientific papers. Lindzen is an old crank, and Alan Watts specializes in making a big deal of isolated details while missing the big story. These last refuges of science denial have been rebutted point by point by experts many many times.
Instead of listing a bunch of old excuses, people should acquaint themselves with the history of the subject and immerse themselves in the actual science. People were in general very reluctant to accept the gravity of what the science was telling them. A good person to examine is Richard Muller, a physicist who literally wrote the text book on the Milankovich cycles. He was paid by so-called climate skeptic money to re-examine the whole issue, and, instead of coming up with the hoped contra-indications, overcame his own scepticism and concluded that CO² concentration furnished the only real correlation with long term temperature trends. Google a little about the Berkely Earth project.
Civilization is indeed at risk by 2040 (but this isn’t the reason). Continuing deficits will push the US (and other countries) to the brink of economic collapse. Social Security will be bankrupt, and by then the politics of age will replace the politics of race, just as the politics of race replaced the politics of religion that preceded it. The next 2 decades will be very interesting indeed.
We just need to revert to living in caves and becoming hunter-gatherers again. Problem solved! (Just ignore Al Gore’s mansion on the hill).
I blame Tindell – his plan to increase taxes on Americans in 2018 by maliciously inventing CO2 infra red absorption in 1859 was a long game. The 10,000 of researchers from all over the world and in multiple sciences who have kept this conspiracy going in secret for almost 160 years has been found out by Anthony Watts and some dedicated marketing executives from big oil at last!
Your snark is typical…however the MetOffice actually responded to the audit findings, surprisingly… I added a link not sure if it will show up
The Hadcrut4 data set used by the MetOffice is only one data set. There are many. Not only that, but there are thousands of data series using proxy records in addition to the direct thermometer measurements. The audit means nothing. Everyone already knows that the millions of data points are not all equally accurate, that’s why they keep trying to improve the data set from the raw record. Note that the improvements have almost no bearing on the bigger trends.