Climategate in Review

Dr. Judith Curry resigned from her tenured faculty position at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In a blog post explaining her decision, she makes the following comments:

"A deciding factor was that I no longer know what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science. Research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment — funding, ease of getting your papers published, getting hired in prestigious positions, appointments to prestigious committees and boards, professional recognition, etc.

"How young scientists are to navigate all this is beyond me, and it often becomes a battle of scientific integrity versus career suicide (I have worked through these issues with a number of skeptical young scientists)."

More information concerning the high correlation between solar activity and the earth's temperature continues to emerge. In this article, Kenneth Richard states:

"[S]olar scientists are continuing to advance our understanding of solar activity and its effect on the Earth system, and their results are progressively suggestive of robust correlations between solar variability and climate changes.

"For example, in 2016 alone, there were at least 132 peer-reviewed scientific papers documenting a significant solar influence on climate. Among them there were 18 papers that directly connected centennial-scale periods of low solar activity (the Little Ice Age) with cooler climates, and periods of high solar activity (the Medieval Warm Period and the Modern Warm Period [20th Century]) with high solar activity levels. Another 10 papers warned of an impending solar minimum and concomitant cooling period in the coming decades.

"And this trend of scientists linking climate changes to solar forcing mechanisms — and bypassing an anthropogenic explanation — continues to rage on in 2017."

Citing one paper authored by Harald Yndestad and Jan-Erik Solheim, they conclude:

"Deterministic models based on the stationary periods confirm the results through a close relation to known long solar minima since 1000 A.D. and suggest a modern maximum period from 1940 to 2015. The model computes a new Dalton-type sunspot minimum from approximately 2025 to 2050 and a new Dalton-type period TSI minimum from approximately 2040 to 2065. ... Periods with few sunspots are associated with low solar activity and cold climate periods. Periods with many sunspots are associated with high solar activity and warm climate periods."

Government agencies, along with the media, have loudly been claiming that, once again, 2016 was "the hottest year on record." Robert Tracinski wondered why the New York Times wasn't reporting any hard numbers to back up this claim and went looking for answers. Here is what he found:

"It wasn't just the New York Times. Try finding the relevant numbers ready at hand in the NASA/NOAA press release. You get numbers comparing 2016's temperature with 'the mid-20th century mean' or 'the late 19th century.' But there's nothing comparing it to last year or the year before except qualitative descriptions. So the government's science bureaucracy is setting the trend, making reporters dig for the relevant numbers rather than presenting them up front.

"It's almost like they're hiding something. And that is indeed what we find. I finally tracked down an exception to this reporting trend: the UK newspaper The Independent gives us the relevant numbers.

"They should have been in the first paragraph, but at least they're in the third paragraph: 'This puts 2016 only nominally ahead of 2015 by just 0.01C—within the 0.1C margin of error—but....' There's stuff after the 'but,' but it's just somebody's evaluation. Even this report can't give us a straight fact and leave it alone.

"For the benefit of science reporters and other people who are unfamiliar with the scientific method, let me point out that the margin of error for these measurements is plus or minus one tenth of a degree Celsius. The temperature difference that is supposedly being measured is one one-hundredth of a degree—one tenth the size of the margin of error. To go back to sports reporting, that's like saying that the football is on the 10-yard line—give or take a hundred yards."

This is how the game is played. It is left to each truth-seeking individual to investigate the facts for themselves and not simply swallow the propaganda being manufactured. </p>

In a new study from Brown University, researchers have found a link between the earth's orbital period and the growth/reduction of sea ice in the southern hemisphere. From the article:

"Climate simulations show how changes in Earth's orbit alter the distribution of sea ice on the planet, helping to set the pace for the glacial cycle.

"Earth is currently in what climatologists call an interglacial period, a warm pulse between long, cold ice ages when glaciers dominate our planet's higher latitudes. For the past million years, these glacial-interglacial cycles have repeated roughly on a 100,000-year cycle. Now a team of Brown University researchers has a new explanation for that timing and why the cycle was different before a million years ago.

"Using a set of computer simulations, the researchers show that two periodic variations in Earth's orbit combine on a 100,000-year cycle to cause an expansion of sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere. Compared to open ocean waters, that ice reflects more of the sun's rays back into space, substantially reducing the amount of solar energy the planet absorbs. As a result, global temperature cools.

"'The 100,000-year pace of glacial-interglacial periods has been difficult to explain,' said Jung-Eun Lee, an assistant professor in Brown's Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Studies and the study's lead author. 'What we were able to show is the importance of sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere along with orbital forcings in setting the pace for the glacial-interglacial cycle."

In an article titled Exposed: How World Leaders Were Duped Into Investing Billions Over Manipulated Global Warming Data, David Rose states:

"A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.

"The report claimed that the 'pause' or 'slowdown' in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world's media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.

"But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, 'unverified' data.

"It was never subjected to NOAA's rigorous internal evaluation process - which Dr Bates devised."

Here are some additional snippets from the report:

"The scandal has disturbing echoes of the 'Climategate' affair ... Both datasets were flawed. ... used unreliable methods which overstated the speed of warming. ... The land temperature dataset used by the study was afflicted by devastating bugs in its software ... The paper relied on a preliminary, 'alpha' version of the data which was never approved or verified."

Read the entire article for the full story.

At the Climate Etc. website, John Bates gives a much more detailed account of the manipulations in an article titled Climate Scientists Versus Climate Data".

In the wake of the revelations from NOAA scientist John Bates (see previous item above). Dr. Tim Ball writes a very good article on the corrupting influence that bureaucratic politics has on true science. The entire article is well worth reading. Here are a few excerpts:

"Many jumped to the defense of Dr. John Bates, the former NOAA employee who waited until he retired to disclose malfeasance in the science and management at that agency. Bates claimed he told his bosses about the problem but said they effectively ignored him. [...] All sorts of lame excuses were made for Bates, perhaps the only one with limited merit was that his disclosure was better late than never. The problem is he and his supporters can't have it both ways. He can't be a knowledgeable climate scientist doing valuable work, when what he and all the others around him were doing was corrupted, unquestioning, naive, limited, political science"

"The most obvious answer is that being a scientist and a bureaucrat are mutually exclusive."

"Walter Gilbert said, 'The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.' Both are anathema to bureaucracies. There is a larger explanation that encompasses and limits all current understanding, not just science."

"The Bates event is a symptom of a much wider problem. It is much more than just the fear of speaking out about malfeasance in the workplace. It is more than the problem of bureaucrats doing science or people using science for a political agenda. All those exist and require attention. However, they mask the larger problems of our inability to describe, understand, and advance in a generalist world that has developed a research structure that glorifies specialists who know a great deal about a minuscule piece but don't even know where it fits in the larger picture."

A new research paper shows that the previously 1979-1997 warming of 0.32°C for one section of Antarctica has now reversed, showing an even larger 1999-2014 -0.47°C cooling. Quoting from the paper's abstract:

"The Antarctic Peninsula (AP) is often described as a region with one of the largest warming trends on Earth since the 1950s, based on the temperature trend of 0.54°C/decade during 1951-2011 recorded at Faraday/Vernadsky station. Accordingly, most works describing the evolution of the natural systems in the AP region cite this extreme trend as the underlying cause of their observed changes. However, a recent analysis (Turner et al., 2016) has shown that the regionally stacked temperature record for the last three decades has shifted from a warming trend of 0.32°C/decade during 1979-1997 to a cooling trend of -0.47°C/decade during 1999-2014. While that study focuses on the period 1979-2014, averaging the data over the entire AP region, we here update and re-assess the spatially-distributed temperature trends and inter-decadal variability from 1950 to 2015, using data from ten stations distributed across the AP region. We show that Faraday/Vernadsky warming trend is an extreme case, circa twice those of the long-term records from other parts of the northern AP. Our results also indicate that the cooling initiated in 1998/1999 has been most significant in the N and NE of the AP and the South Shetland Islands (> 0.5°C between the two last decades), modest in the Orkney Islands, and absent in the SW of the AP. This recent cooling has already impacted the cryosphere in the northern AP, including slow-down of glacier recession, a shift to surface mass gains of the peripheral glacier and a thinning of the active layer of permafrost in northern AP islands."

The Economist recently published two articles titled:

The Thawing Arctic Threatens an Environmental Catastrophe

As the Arctic Melts the World's Weather Suffers.

This is some scary stuff ... until you look a bit closer, as Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute did, and then reported on in the article,   What The Economist Didn't Tell You about Greenland's Ice.

The Economist stated:

"The most worrying changes are happening in Greenland, which lost an average of 375bn tonnes of ice per year between 2011 and 2014"

"This is equivalent of over 400 massive icebergs measuring 1km on each side disappearing each year."

to which Michaels responds:

"This is a finely selected cherry that The Economist plucked, 2012 was an exceedingly warm year averaged of the island-continent. Had they included all the recent data, they would have shown that accumulation of ice on Greenland recently reached a record high compared to the previous three decades:"

"At the turn of this century, the U.S. Geological Survey reported the volume of Greenland's ice at 2,600,000km. The maximum melt of 400km is a grand total of 1/5000th of its ice."

There's more. Read the article for the details. It's just business as usual. This lying by omission of the relevant facts demonstrates just one of the tools in the bag of tricks employed by those who are driven by the politicization of climate "science" in order to fabricate a justification for imposing an ever widening net of controls over everyone.

This article provides a very calm and reasoned summarization of many of the facts covered above. It makes a good introductory article to pass along to someone who needs a quick overview of the issues.

The Truth About Climate Change

In an article titled Research Team Slams Global Warming Data In New Report, Zerohedge discusses a new peer reviewed report that concludes that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the UK's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research (HADLEY) have all been artificially adjusting raw surface air temperature readings. As the report authors state it:

"Clearly the historical GAST [Global Average Surface Temperature] data adjustments that have been made have been dramatic and invariably have been favorable to Climate Alarmists' views regarding Global Warming. The question now is whether the latest versions of GAST data by NOAA, NASA and Hadley are credible for policy analysis, or even climate modeling, purposes."

Another in a long history of government agencies—Australia this time—manipulating their temberature data in order to manufacture increased warming trends. Quoting excerpts from the article:

"Meteorologist Lance Pidgeon watched the 13 degrees Fahrenheit Goulburn recording from July 2 disappear from the bureau's website. The temperature readings fluctuated briefly and then disappeared from the government's website.

"'The temperature dropped to minus 10 (13 degrees Fahrenheit), stayed there for some time and then it changed to minus 10.4 (14 degrees Fahrenheit) and then it disappeared,' Pidgeon said, adding that he notified scientist Jennifer Marohasy about the problem, who then brought the readings to the attention of the bureau.

"The bureau would later restore the original 13 degrees Fahrenheit reading after a brief question and answer session with Marohasy."

[...]

"Marohasey <sic> claimed at the time that BOM's [Bureau of Meteorology] adjusted temperature records are 'propaganda' and not science. She analyzed raw temperature data from places across Australia, compared them to BOM data, and found the agency's data created an artificial warming trend.

"Marohasey said BOM adjustments changed Aussie temperature records from a slight cooling trend to one of 'dramatic warming' over the past century."

As reported above here, here, here, here, here, here and here, numerous studies have analyzed the solar cycles and concluded that the earth may actually be headed for a cooling rather than warming period. Two German scientists, Horst-Joachim Ludecke and Carl-Otto Weiss, who previously reported on their solar analysis here, have now published their findings in The Open Atmospheric Science Journal. Quoting from the introduction:

"Periodic or cyclic behaviour is so common in nature and physics that it gives the analysis technique of Fourier transform its outstanding importance. The reason for the abundance of cycles lies in the property of the transition from static to dynamic behaviour. This 'modulational instability' occurs in space and time when the energy input into a dissipative system is increased beyond the range of static stability. It leads overwhelmingly to a periodic state (rare exceptions exist, e.g. the Lorenz model, where the onset of dynamics is chaotic). The Sun and the Earth are classic dissipative systems with energy input. Cyclic dynamics is therefore to be expected. Cycles with periods ranging from several years to more than 100,000 years have accordingly been observed, e.g. in paleoclimate studies."

And from the conclusion:

"We note that the temperature increase of the late 19th and 20th century is represented by the harmonic temperature representation, and thus is of pure multiperiodic nature. It can be expected that the periodicity of G7, lasting 2000 years so far, will persist also for the foreseeable future. It predicts a temperature drop from present to AD 2050, a slight rise from 2050 to 2130, and a further drop from AD 2130 to 2200."

Just another example in a long list showing that the computerized climate models are not providing us with new insights, let alone accurate forecasts. In a report titled, $127 Million Climate Supercomputer No Better Than 'Using A Piece Of Paper'", Dr. David Whitehouse, a former BBC science editor, reported that the computer models didn't:

"give any better information than what could be obtained using a piece of paper."

and then demonstrated how a simple review of the historical record showed that:

"The risk of monthly rainfall exceeding the monthly record in the Southeast of England has not risen, contrary to many claims,"

and that the:

"Met Office computer models do not give any more reliable insight than the historical data."

In an article titled:

Analysis Says NOAA Global Temperature Data 'Doesn't Constitute A "Smoking Gun" For Global Warming'

physicist Mikhail Voloshin discusses statistical methodology indicating that the climate data used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fails to demonstrate any sort of significant warming trend that can be conclusive linked to external causal factors, and might be nothing more than a random walk or Brownian motion in the data set itself. Quoting a few excerpts from the article:

"The global temperature record doesn't demonstrate an upward trend. It doesn't demonstrate a lack of upward trend either. Temperature readings today are about 0.75°C higher than they were when measurement began in 1880, but you can't always slap a trendline onto a graph and declare, "See? It's rising!" Often what you think is a pattern is actually just Brownian motion. When the global temperature record is tested against a hypothesis of random drift, the data fails to rule out the hypothesis. This doesn't mean that there isn't an upward trend, but it does mean that the global temperature record can be explained by simply assuming a random walk."

"My study doesn't address the quality of the underlying data, nor the "massaging" that the NOAA performs on its raw instrument records in order to produce a single numerical value every year representing the global mean temperature anomaly (more on that later). What my study does address is to ask, even given the NOAA's own year-over-year numbers: Do those numbers actually represent an upward trend at all?"

"Now, when it comes to the Earth's mean temperature, the simplest and most basic assumption, i.e. the null hypothesis, is the same as the null hypothesis for any other time series: that it behaves as a Markov process – specifically, a sub-type called a Martingale. What this means, quite simply, is that it has no "memory" outside of its immediate state – and that the single best predictor of any given year's temperature is the temperature that came before it.  [...]  To drive this point home, check out these sample runs of a randomly generated simulation of a temperature sequence, intended to mimic the NOAA's annual temperature anomaly records since 1880."

"The key takeaway is that one cannot merely look at a graph of historical data, slap a trendline on it, and then assert that there's some underlying force that's propelling that trend."

Voloshin goes on to discuss the adjustments that NOAA makes to its data, rendering it unreliable, and then looks at the question of how known statistical error is handled.

"So the question is: how do the climatologists that crunch these numbers, in fact, handle the error bars? Well, not to get into a lengthy digression on the topic, but suffice it to say that I've examined and experimented with their data processing code. Not from the NOAA/NCDC specifically, but from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which compiles a surface temperature analysis called GISTEMP that is then used by organizations such as the NOAA.  [...]  How do they handle error bars? Simple: they don't."

Read the entire article as there is much more contained there. Voloshin sums things up:

"The point of this discussion, therefore, is to emphasize that, when it comes to temperature anomaly data, Occam's Razor suggests that the year-over-year time series is a random walk. The burden of proof is on those claiming that there is a trend to the time series, that the "walk" isn't random. This burden can be met by showing that the data exhibits statistical properties that would be extremely unlikely for a purely random data set.  [...]  But I do need to add this caveat: The data doesn't disprove a trend either. The purpose of this analysis is merely to establish that it is well within reason to believe that the 130-year global temperature anomaly record is the result of a random walk, rather than a forced physical phenomenon; i.e. that a random walk can produce the temperature record as we've observed it."

In what is being called "Tidalgate," two Australian scientists have shown that data from sea level gauges in the Indian Ocean have been manipulated by the databank "gatekeepers," Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL).

"The authors expose how PSMSL data-adjusters make it appear that stable sea levels can be rendered to look like they are nonetheless rising at an accelerated pace. The data-adjusters take misaligned and incomplete sea level data from tide gauges that show no sea level rise (or even a falling trend). Then, they subjectively and arbitrarily cobble them together, or realign them. In each case assessed, PSMSL data-adjusters lower the earlier misaligned rates and raise the more recent measurements. By doing so, they concoct a new linearly-rising trend."

"The authors do not mince their words. They refer to these adjustments as 'highly questionable' and 'suspicious.' That's because they can find no plausible scientific explanation for the adjustments."

"So there is nothing per se wrong with PSMSL making adjustments in order to make the different datasets align. What is wrong is the way that the scientists at PSMSL have adjusted them. In every case, they have revised them in order to make them produce a sharp upward trend in sea level rise – despite the fact that global records do not support this. The truth, Parker and Ollier conclude in their paper, is that sea level has changed very little in the three sites examined."

At Real Climate Science, Tony Heller reports more details regarding how the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has manipulated the data from the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) weather stations in order to create a false accelerating warming trend of 2.5° C between 1895 and today. Heller points out that:

• NOAA adjusts the raw temperature data, but interestingly the temperatures prior to 2000 are all adjusted downward while those after 2000 are adjusted up. This takes a relatively flat dataset and converts it into one demonstrating an upward trend.
• Many of the USHCN stations fail to report temperature data which, instead of being dropped from the dataset, are assigned "estimates." Today the number of fabricated station estimates approaches 50%!
• Compared to the actually reporting weather stations, the fabricated "estimated" temperatures show a 4° greater rise since 1970.
• As the following chart shows, the temperature adjustments NOAA makes end up almost perfectly correlating with the measured increases in CO₂, "showing that the data is being altered precisely to match global warming theory.

Read the full article for more details.

Kenneth Richard has been monitoring various climate-related publications and has assembled a set of 46 recent graphs published in in 2018, showing that Nothing Climatically Unusual Is Happening. These publications — all referenced through links — examine global temperatures from many regions and from many perspectives. The conclusion is that there is no 20th–21st century warming occurring that is abnormal when the historic temperature record is properly examined.

The Danish physical geographer Ole Humlum and the Global Warming Policy Foundation have released the report: State of the Climate 2017 (PDF). The executive summary from the report follows, with certain key points shown on bold, for emphasis.

Executive Summary

1. It is likely that 2017 was one of the warmest years, according to temperature records from the instrumental period (since about 1850). However, it was cooler than 2016.
2. At the end of 2017 the average global air temperature was dropping back towards the level characterising the years before the strong 2015–16 oceanographic El Nino episode. This underscores that the global surface temperature peak of 2015–16 was caused mainly by this Pacific oceanographic phenomenon. It also suggests that what has been termed 'the temperature pause', 'hiatus', or similar terms, may continue in years to come.
3. There still appears to be a systematic difference between average global air temperatures estimated by surface stations and by satellites. Especially since 2003, the average global temperature estimate derived from surface stations has steadily drifted away from the satellite-based estimate in a warm direction.
4. The temperature variations recorded in the lowermost troposphere are generally reflected at higher altitudes also, and the overall temperature 'pause' since about year 2002 is recorded at all altitudes, including the tropopause and into the stratosphere above. In the stratosphere, however, the temperature pause had already begun by around 1995; that is, 5–7 years before a similar temperature pause began in the lower troposphere near the planet's surface. The stratospheric temperature pause has now existed without interruption for about 23 years, with no explanation offered by the climatological community.
5. The recent 2015–16 oceanographic El Nino episode is among the strongest since the beginning of the record in 1950. Considering the entire record, however, recent variations between El Nino and La Nina episodes are not unusual. In late 2017, a new cold La Nina episode appears to have begun to emerge. If this continues, it will influence global temperatures in 2018.
6. Since 2004, when the Argo buoys came into operation, the global oceans above 1900 m depth have, on average, warmed somewhat. The maximum warming (between the surface and 120 m depth) mainly affects oceans near the Equator, where the incoming solar radiation is at its maximum. Net cooling since 2004 is pronounced for the North Atlantic.
7. Data from tide gauges all over the world suggest that average global sea-level rise has been 1–1.5 mm/year, while the satellite-derived record suggests a rise of about 3.2 mm/year since 1992. There is still no widely accepted explanation for this marked difference.
8. Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent since 1979 have exhibited opposite trends, decreasing and increasing, respectively. Superimposed on these overall trends, however, variations of shorter duration are also important to understand year-to-year variations. In the Arctic, a 5.3-year periodic variation is important, while for the Antarctic a variation of about 4.5 years' duration is important. Both of these variations reached their minima simultaneously in 2016, which explains the minimum in global sea ice extent. A shift towards larger ice extents in both hemispheres may have begun in 2017 (Figure 34), as predicted in 'State of the Climate 2016'.
9. The Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent has undergone important local and regional variations from year to year. The overall tendency since 1972, however, is towards overall stable snow extent conditions.
10. Tropical storm and hurricane accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) values since 1970 have displayed large variations from year to year, but no overall trend towards either lower or higher activity. The 2017 global tropical storm and hurricane ACE was above the level recorded for 2016 but was within the range experienced since 1970.

Read the entire 47 page report for the details.

The Engineer, Julius Sanks, published an article titled, Can Humans Melt the Antarctic Icecap?, in which he looks at the specific energy requirements that would be necessary in order to melt polar ice. He starts out by quoting Eric Holthaus from an 11-21-17 article titled, Ice Apocalypse:

"The glaciers of Pine Island Bay are two of the largest and fastest-melting in Antarctica. (A Rolling Stone feature earlier this year dubbed Thwaites "The Doomsday Glacier.") Together, they act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world's oceans — an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet. ... All this could play out in a mere 20 to 50 years—much too quickly for humanity to adapt."

Sanks decided to look at just how much energy would actually be required to melt enough ice to raise the ocean level by 11 feet or 3.353 meters. With some simple math he shows that to raise the water level by that amount would require 361.8 Km³ of additional water, which means the melting of 1.32x10⁶ Km³ of ice which would require 4.05x10²³ Joules of heat energy, all delivered directly to the Antarctic ice. He then observes:

"It should be noted the Antarctic ice sheet is only 2.74 percent of the planet's surface. If human output excites the atmosphere evenly, a reasonable consideration is only that percentage of energy is directly acting on the ice. But let's attack the problem more directly.

"According to the US Energy Information Administration, in 2016 the world produced 84.412479 quadrillion (84.412479x10¹⁵) BTU. That converts to 8.906x10¹⁹ J, consisting of fossil fuel (the largest component), nuclear, and renewable. And if we used all of the world's energy to do nothing but melt the ice, we could not do it in 20 years, or even in 50 years. We could do it in about 4,500 years."

The point is that many of the claims of those predicting environmental apocalypse cannot stand up to even the most rudimentary examination using concepts of basic physics, and the claim that man's activity is having significant impact upon the world in the face of the magnitude of energy represented by natural forces makes no sense.

Postscript: For clarity, it should be pointed out that those driving the Global Warming narrative are not arguing that human activity is directly producing the heat that they say is warming the planet, but instead are saying that man is engaging in activity, such as CO₂ production, which is retaining heat while also producing a multiplying effect. To fully appreciate the point being made in this article, it is necessary to integrate it with other reports (see above) which indicate that there has not been any significant planetary warming over the past two decades (confirmed by satellite measurements) and that the temperature variations we have seen in the 20th and 21st century are well within those observed in the historical record. This article simply highlights the magnitude of the energy budget that would be required in order to effect the planetary changes being discussed and places human activity in perspective.

In Real Clear Markets, Aaron Brown writes about a review of NASA's global temperature records over the past two years and reports that it reveals there has been a drop of 0.56°C — something not being reported in the main stream press.

"From February 2016 to February 2018 (the latest month available) global average temperatures dropped 0.56°C. You have to go back to 1982-84 for the next biggest two-year drop, 0.47°C—also during the global warming era. All the data in this essay come from GISTEMP Team, 2018: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP). NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (dataset accessed 2018-04-11 at https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/). This is the standard source used in most journalistic reporting of global average temperatures."

He goes on to say that, "None of this argues against global warming," but points out the hypocrisy of the media.

"My point is that statistical cooling outliers garner no media attention. The global average temperature numbers come out monthly. If they show a new hottest year on record, that's a big story. If they show a big increase over the previous month, or the same month in the previous year, that's a story. If they represent a sequence of warming months or years, that's a story. When they show cooling of any sort—and there have been more cooling months than warming months since anthropogenic warming began—there's no story."

"How should the global average temperature data be reported? There should be equal attention on warming and cooling records. Coverage should be based on how unusual the event is, not whether or not it increases support for favored policies."

Despite all the evidence to the contrary (see above), those with a man-made global warming agenda continue to assert their claims as self-evident truths, no longer even bothering to try and back them up with any science at all. Take, for example, the raging fires and consequential smoke that has plagued the Pacific Northwest during the past two summers. As they have previously — and incorrectly — attempted to do with tornadoes, droughts, floods, hurricanes, and other normal weather events, they are now attempting to blame the fires on man-made global warming. Here are a few representative samples:

Whether they state it explicitly or simply hint at it, the implication for the reader in all of this obviously coordinated reporting, is that the "New Normal" is just another catastrophic consequence of man-made global warming. Fortunately, Cliff Mass, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of WA, has written an article that sets the record straight.

As the following chart demonstrates, forest fires are normal and it has been man's intervention that has suppressed them. What we are actually seeing today is the result of poor forestry management practices by government stewards, not the effects of increased global temperatures.

Quoting Mass   [All emphasis in the original article]:

"To put it succinctly, during the past few summers we have gotten a taste of the "old normal", one that was very familiar to our great grandparents and their predecessors. And one that we will experience frequently in our future if we don't take steps to restore our forests and to bring back regular fire."

"Smoke and fire was part of life here in the Northwest before the period of near-total suppression began around approximately 1940."

"Today, the bill for our suppression of fire and poor forest management in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia has now come due. Those who blame our dangerous situation on a "new normal" solely resulting from climate change, are not only misinformed, but they can act as obstacles to the actions that are acutely needed: a massive effort to thin our forests and bring back low-intensity fire."

An just to be clear, Mass is no global warming denier, as he states here:

"Warming from increasing greenhouse gases is surely making the situation a bit worse, and its impact will undoubtedly escalate when the real warming occurs later in this century. But today, global warming is a relatively small element of the current wildfire situation, particularly in the slow to warm Pacific Northwest."

He is simply an honest scientist who is unwilling to dismiss facts in service of some overriding political agenda.

Get 'em while they're hot! The Maldives are expiring soon!

On September 26, 1988, the Australian Environmental Affairs director stated that the Maldive Island chain in the Indian Ocean would be completely submerged by 2018 because of rising ocean levels due to catastrophic man-made global warming. Of course, the United Nations also quickly got into the act.

This alarmism over fictitious sea level rises has been reported multiple time above, here, here, here and here.

Read all about it:   Four Weeks Left Until The Maldives Drown

Hurricanes Out of Control!   Not So Much.

With the advent of hurricane Florence, the media is once again filled with reports of how this disaster is the consequence of man-made global — something asserted but never backed up by references to rigorous and comprehensive science made available for review.

This subject has been covered before, here, here, here, here and here.

in response to the latest flood of misinformation, meteorologist Roy W. Spencer wrote an article titled, Hurricane Florence is not climate change or global warning.  It's just the weather., in which he makes the following points:

• Storm variation is normal (see hurricane data here) and most likely due to natural weather patterns.
• Unusual things have always been happening in nature, long before the current "catastrophic global warming" theory was proposed to explain them.
• For example, prior to 2017 there was an eleven year period where the U.S. was not struck by a single hurricane — a NASA-estimated 1-in-177 year event.
• The thirty most costly hurricanes in U.S. history show no increase in intensity over time.
• The cost of storm damage has increased dramatically, not due to heightened storm severity, but because there is significantly more infrastructure built today in the paths of hurricanes, tornadoes and in flood-prone areas.
• "Humanity's greenhouse gas emissions have caused only a 1 percent change in the natural energy flows coursing through the climate system."

2018 US Tornadoes Lowest in 65 Years of Record-Keeping

Anthony Watts reports:

"Get this — a record-low 759 tornadoes formed in the U.S. so far this year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Prediction Center (SPC). According to the SPC data, there were two fewer tornadoes than the previous annual record-low of 761.

Here is the NOAA chart showing the record low in tornadoes:

Additional charts show that neither the number nor the frequency of tornadoes is increasing over time. Watts concludes:

"That certainly blows a hole in alarmist claims that climate change is making severe weather worse."

Wind Turbines Generate More Heat Than They Save

A report in The Harvard Gazette titled, The down side to wind power, indicates that "Wind farms will cause more environmental impact than previously thought."

The conclusion of two published papers, Climate Impact of Wind Power and Observation-based solar and wind power capacity factors and power densities:

"Harvard University researchers find that the transition to wind or solar power in the U.S. would require five to 20 times more land than previously thought, and, if such large-scale wind farms were built, would warm average surface temperatures over the continental U.S. by 0.24 degrees Celsius."

As with so much else that occurs in this field, research is based upon computer models which, time after time, prove to be wildly inaccurate. As the Gazette reports:

"In previous research, Keith (David Keith) and co-authors modeled the generating capacity of large-scale wind farms and concluded that real-world wind power generation had been overestimated because they neglected to accurately account for the interactions between turbines and the atmosphere."

"What was missing from this previous research, however, were observations to support the modeling."

With the 2018 release of data on 57,636 wind turbines in the U.S. by the U.S. Geological Survey, along with other public data sets, Keith and co-researcher Lee Miller were able to make new assessments. As Lee Miller, the lead author of the two papers, report:

"For wind, we found that the average power density — meaning the rate of energy generation divided by the encompassing area of the wind plant — was up to 100 times lower than estimates by some leading energy experts. Most of these estimates failed to consider the turbine-atmosphere interaction. For an isolated wind turbine, interactions are not important at all, but once the wind farms are more than five to 10 kilometers deep, these interactions have a major impact on the power density."

The researchers further determined that if sufficient wind generators were constructed to meet the electrical power requirements of the U.S., they would actually warm the continent by 0.24°C due to a combination of atmospheric mixing and slowing of the wind, a conclusion borne out by satellite data for existing wind farms.

In conclusion:

"The Harvard researchers found that the warming effect of wind turbines in the continental U.S. was actually larger than the effect of reduced emissions for the first century of its operation. This is because the warming effect is predominantly local to the wind farm, while greenhouse gas concentrations must be reduced globally before the benefits are realized."

Oceans Fail to Obey King Canute and the IPCC!

As the story goes, the Norse king, Canute the Great, was surrounded by sycophants who thought him to be all powerful. In response, the king had his throne set at the edge of the sea and commanded the tides to halt. Of course they continued to rise, whereupon he informed everyone, "Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws."

It appears that the IPCC and Climate Alarmists have not yet learned the king's lesson. As reported by Anthony Watts:

"For the last 20 years climate scientists and campaigners have warned that atolls and low-lying islands are facing an imminent threat to their existence due to climate change and sea level rise which could soon cause the complete disappearance of entire islands. A new paper that reviews Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted."

Conclusion:

"Atoll and island areal stability can therefore be considered as a global trend."

If You Can't Beat 'Em ... Lie

Anthony Watts reports:   Moving The Goalpost: IPCC Secretly Redefines what 'Climate' Means

"The definition of 'climate' adopted by the World Meteorological Organisation is the average of a particular weather parameter over 30 years. It was introduced at the 1934 Wiesbaden conference of the International Meteorological Organisation (WMO's precursor) because data sets were only held to be reliable after 1900, so 1901 – 1930 was used as an initial basis for assessing climate. It has a certain arbitrariness, it could have been 25 years.

"For its recent 1.5°C report the IPCC has changed the definition of climate to what has been loosely called "the climate we are in." It still uses 30 years for its estimate of global warming and hence climate – but now it is the 30 years centred on the present.   [Emphasis added]

"There are some obvious problems with this hidden change of goalposts. We have observational temperature data for the past 15 years but, of course, none for the next 15 years. However, never let it be said that the absence of data is a problem for inventive climate scientists."

[...]

"[T]his new definition of climate and global warming is not only philosophically unsound, it is also open to speculation and manipulation. It is one thing to speculate what the future climate might be; but for the IPCC to define climate based on data that doesn't yet exist and is based on expectations of what might happen in the future is fraught with danger.

"This strategy places a double emphasis on the temperature of the past 15 years which was not an extrapolation of the previous 15 years, and was not predicted to happen as it did. Since around the year 2000, nature has taught us a lesson the IPCC has still not learned.

"With this new definition of climate all data prior to 15 years ago is irrelevant as they are part of the previous climate."

Read the entire article for charts and a more complete explanation.

There are many references above regarding the manipulation of the raw temperature data in Europe and the United States so as to fabricate or exaggerate a warming trend beyond what the actual data indicates. The same thing has also been observed being done by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM).

Francis Menton has been publishing a series of blog posts under the heading, The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time. In Part 21 he discusses research conducted by Jennifer Marohasy on the manipulations of the data at the Darwin, AU stations — taken as just one representative example. He points out that early data (1895-1910) has suspiciously been ignored while the raw (direct) temperature readings from 1910 on were artificially lowered, based upon an "impenetrable" rationally.

Most importantly, an original adjustment used to create the ACORN1 dataset lowered the original temperatures by 0.4° C.

However, just six years later, a new dataset — ACORN2 — has been created, lowering the temperatures by an additional ± 1° C.

Quoting from the article:

"Are you still wondering if there is anything honest about this? Marohasy compiles a graph of the raw mean maximum annual temperatures as recorded at Darwin, versus the "adjusted" ACORN2 series that is now Australia's official temperature record. Note that the site did move in 1941, from the post office in downtown Darwin out to the airport. To indicate the discontinuity, Marohasy graphs the post office series in green, and the airport in blue. Here is her graph:"

"Is the post office site systematically warmer than the airport site? Note that the last several years at the post office were considerably cooler than the first years at the airport. But the BoM has made the executive decision to replace the temperatures recorded at the post office in the period 1910 to 1941 with temperatures that average about 1.5 deg C cooler. Pre-adjustments, 1906 looks like the year with the hottest mean maximum temperature, and by a wide margin; and number two is also pre-1910. Post-adjustments, the warmest is 2016. This is how you get to have "hottest year ever" press releases every year or two.

In Part 22, the author responds to some of the questions readers raised regarding the material presented here.

Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), show that the claims that sea level rise has been accelerating over the past three decades is false.

"NOAA tide gauge data measurements exist for 17 locations along the California coast with 8 of these locations having actual measured sea level rise data covering periods for more than 70 to 120 years in duration.

"NOAA measured tide gauge data shows that coastal sea level rise at Ca. locations varies between 3 to 12 inches per century and have remained at those levels during the long measurement periods during which actual measured data have been recorded with a sample of that measured data shown below for San Diego, La Jolla, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

"The recent climate alarmist propaganda study hyped by the media speculating that CA coastal sea level rise levels of 1 to 2 meters (about 3 to 6 feet) by 2100 'could' occur along with associated grossly exaggerated damage estimates are based solely on invalid 'computer models' which ignore the extensive measured NOAA tide gauge data which shows that 30 year old climate alarmist claims of accelerating coastal sea level rise are unsupported by actual measured data."

In the article titled A Sea Level Rise Conundrum — Greenland's Cycles, Jim Steele writes about the ongoing cyclic nature of the melting and reformation of glacial ice on Greenland and it's contribution to both seal level rise and lowering. Here are a few excerpted paragraphs that summarize his point:

"During the last 100 years, Greenland oscillated between gaining and losing ice. Its greatest loss raised sea level by 0.07 inches in 2012, about half the total sea level rise of 0.12 inches a year. That accelerated loss was trumpeted as just what climate models predict. However, Greenland's melt rates then declined and by 2017 it was gaining enough ice to slightly reduce sea level rise."

"[R]esearchers reported Greenland's ice-free regions experienced various warming and cooling trends over the past 15 years, but concluded if there was any general trend, 'it is mostly a cooling'. They also admitted they 'cannot differentiate between anthropogenic forcing [in other words: warming from human added CO₂] and natural fluctuations.'"

"A similar warming and melting episode occurred decades earlier. Climate scientists determined Greenland had warmed most rapidly between 1920 and 1940. ... Intriguingly, much lower CO₂ concentrations still resulted in similar warming, melting and rates of sea level rise."

"Until Greenland's temperatures and ice-melt exceed the 1930s episode, scientists cannot distinguish between natural variability and human-caused warming."

In and article titled, "Cooling Down the Hysteria About Global Warming," Rich Enthoven provides a nice discussion and summary of a number of issues that have been reported elsewhere. His article provides references and links to the sources he cites.

He begins by reviewing the problem with many land-based temperature data sets that do not properly account for urbanization growth and the resulting heat island effect. As one example, NASA reports that 2018 was the fourth hottest year on record, with a total increase of .31° C over the past ten years, depicted in the chart on the left. In contrast, the chart on the right shows NOAA data taken from a set of 114 monitoring stations specifically chosen to avoid the impact from urbanization. These locations report no average temperature increase over the past decade.

"And it is not just the US rural temperatures that are stable — all around the globe, temperature growth is eliminated once land use changes are eliminated."

Next he reviews the problems with ocean temperature measurement.

"Ocean temperatures have been measured over the years with highly inconsistent methods (buckets off ships; water flowing through ship engine rooms; buoys; and lately, satellites) In addition to technology changes, there are short term annual ocean cycles such as the well-publicized El Nino/La Nina and long term (multi decade) cycles such as the Pacific (and Atlantic) Decadal Oscillations which affect ocean temperatures at many depths over decades. A recent report out of UC San Diego described the problem 'Determining changes in the average temperature of the entire world's ocean has proven to be a nearly impossible task due to the distribution of different water masses.'

"Respected climate scientists are tackling the ocean measurement challenge and come up with results very different than the NASA report. [...] The science and history of measuring ocean temperatures is far from 'settled' and there are plenty of credible estimates that ocean temperatures are not changing rapidly or at anywhere near the rate that NASA is estimating."

Enthoven discusses how NASA — and others, as reported many times above – have significantly manipulated their data in order to manufacture the desired warming trend.

"A major problem is that the average adjustments between raw and final data average strongly in one direction — the adjustments tend to cool the past — which makes the present temperatures seem warmer by comparison."

He then covers a number of climate predictions that have been wrong in the extreme.

• "In 1986, James Hansen testified to congress that rising CO2 levels would cause US temperatures to rise by three to four degrees by 2020. This prediction was spectacularly wrong — US land temperatures have moved at most a fraction of that amount since 1986."
• "NASA (and later Al Gore) have made it clear that a warmer planet would cause ice to melt and the seas to expand — rising by up to four feet in 2050. [...] But, NOAA data makes it clear that there is no change in the rate of sea level increase since measurements began."
• "By the early 2000s climate scientists told us to expect an increase in hurricanes due to higher temperatures in the ocean. Instead, the US experienced a major hurricane drought from 2006 — 2016. In fact, global hurricanes/typhoon activity have shown no up trend in frequency or severity for the last fifty years. The IPCC also reported in 2013 that there was no change in frequency of other adverse events such as droughts, floods, and tornadoes."
• "It is certainly true that on average glaciers in the northern hemisphere have been retreating lately. But, glaciers have been retreating since the end of the Little Ice Age (1850) and numerous studies point out that many glaciers were actually melting faster during early 1900's than they are today."
• "In 2001, the scientists at IPCC [...] said that rising global temperatures would result in a reduction in snowfall [...] However, according to both NOAA and Rutgers University, snowfall has been trending up across the northern hemisphere since 1970."

Read the entire article for a fuller picture and sources for this information.

In Forbes, author Michael Shellenberger published an article titled:

The Reason Renewables Can't Power Modern Civilization Is Because They Were Never Meant To

Here, he reviews the state of Germany's bold efforts to transition the country to renewable energy. He reports that in 2018 the government stated that it "would not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction commitments" and that it planned to re-commit to coal mining with "plans to bulldoze an ancient church and forest in order to get at the coal underneath it."

Drawing upon an article titled Murks in Germany ("A Botched Job in Germany") published in the May 3rd, 2019 issue of Der Spiegel, Shellenberger shows the magnitude of the failure that plagues the country's efforts to eliminate fossil fuel usage, as well as the massive cost to its citizens. Quoting from the article: "Germany didn't just fall short of its climate targets. Its emissions have flat-lined since 2009." "Over the past five years alone, the Energiewende has cost Germany €32 billion ($36 billion) annually, and opposition to renewables is growing in the German countryside."

Here are a few other interesting quotes:

"Der Spiegel cites a recent estimate that it would cost Germany '€3.4 trillion ($3.8 trillion),' or seven times more than it spent from 2000 to 2025, to increase solar and wind three to five-fold by 2050."

"Of the 7,700 new kilometers of transmission lines needed, only 8% have been built, while large-scale electricity storage remains inefficient and expensive. 'A large part of the energy used is lost,' the reporters note of a much-hyped hydrogen gas project, 'and the efficiency is below 40%... No viable business model can be developed from this.'"

"[N]o amount of marketing could change the poor physics of resource-intensive and land-intensive renewables. Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear plants, and wind farms take 700 times more land than natural gas wells, to produce the same amount of energy."

"Many Germans will, like Der Spiegel, claim the renewables transition was merely 'botched,' but it wasn't. The transition to renewables was doomed because modern industrial people, no matter how Romantic they are, do not want to return to pre-modern life.

"The reason renewables can't power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could."

Environmental scientist, Vijay Jayaraj, reports on a recent paper published in the Royal Meteorological Society's International Journal of Climatology, titled:

Climate variations over the southern Altai Mountains and Dzungarian Basin region, central Asia, since 1580 CE

"A new temperature reconstruction, using proxy temperature measurements from locations in central Asia, has revealed that there has been no warming in the past 432 years."
...

"[M]ore and more studies are beginning to indicate that there has been no significant warming trend in the past five centuries.

"Among them is the recent paper by Byambaa et.al., which reveals a lack of warming in Central Asia since 1580 A.D.

"The paper used tree ring-width proxy temperature measurements to calculate the mean June-July air temperatures for the period 1402-2012 and June-December precipitation for the period 1569-2012."
...

"The authors conclude that the past 5 centuries have been relatively cooler. They also find the 20th century to be slightly warmer, but the warming was discontinuous. However, the 20th century warming eventually collapsed due to late 20th century cooling, which they deem common across the mountains of China and Nepal. They also find that solar cycles and volcanic activity were the major reasons for temperature anomalies during the past 5 centuries—not carbon dioxide.

"Numerous other studies have attested this recent cooling in Central Asia, especially China. Temperature readings from 118 national weather stations since 1951 in Northeast China reveal a remarkable and significant cooling in China since 1998, the same year since which global atmospheric temperature failed to show any significant warming. Other studies show this trend over all of China.

"China is not the only country to experience this late 20th century cooling."

Read the article for additional details.

Apocalyptic Rhetoric About Extreme Weather Keeps Ramping Up.  But Experts Say There's No Emergency

Canadian economist Ross McKitrick writes in the Financial Post about the many exaggerated weather-related claims constantly being offered up by politicians, environmentalists and the media in support of their alarmist claims regarding "global warming"—claims contradicted by the UN's own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).   McKitrick Addresses the following weather topics:

Flooding

Quoting from chapter two, page 214 of the IPCC's Assessment Report [PDF]:

"In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale."

and from chapter three, page 176 of their 2012 Report [PDF]:

"In the United States and Canada during the 20th century and in the early 21st century, there is no compelling evidence for climate-driven changes in the magnitude or frequency of floods."

Droughts

Quoting from chapter two, page 215 of the IPCC's Assessment Report [PDF]:

"In summary, the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century, owing to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends, and dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice."

The report further indicates that droughts appear to be decreasing in central North America.

Precipitation

Quoting from chapter two, page 202 of the IPCC's Assessment Report [PDF]:

"In summary, confidence in precipitation change averaged over global land areas is low for the years prior to 1950 and medium afterwards because of insufficient data, particularly in the earlier part of the record. Available globally incomplete records show mixed and non-significant long-term trends in reported global mean changes. Further, when virtually all the land area is filled in using a reconstruction method, the resulting time series shows less change in land-based precipitation since 1900."

and from pages 213-214:

"[I]t is likely that since 1951 there have been statistically significant increases in the number of heavy precipitation events (e.g., above the 95th percentile) in more regions than there have been statistically significant decreases, but there are strong regional and subregional variations in the trends. In particular, many regions present statistically non-significant or negative trends, and, where seasonal changes have been assessed, there are also variations between seasons."

Tornadoes

Quoting from chapter three, pages 211-212 of the 2012 Report [PDF]:

"There is low confidence in observed trends in small-scale phenomena such as tornadoes and hail because of data inhomogeneities and inadequacies in monitoring systems."

and from page 150:

"Regarding other phenomena associated with extreme winds, such as thunderstorms, tornadoes, and mesoscale convective complexes, studies are too few in number to assess the effect of their changes on extreme winds. As well, historical data inhomogeneities mean that there is low confidence in any observed trends in these small-scale phenomena."

The repeated acknowledgement by the IPCC itself that there is a low-confidence in projecting trends from the available data for these types of weather events makes it clear that the alarmist views being expressed daily by politicians and the "news" media are nothing more than unfounded propaganda and should be dismissed out of hand.

Anthony Watts takes another look at recent NOAA temperature data, pointing out that the government organization continues to rely upon very questionable data from reporting stations in the Cooperative Observer Program (COOP) Network, while continually ignoring data from the superior US Climate Reference Network (USCRN) which NOAA also maintains. Data from USCRN show that six of the past nine months, including June, have been below normal as indicated in the following table:

"In fact, for the June 2019 State of the Climate Report, NOAA is claiming that the US was 0.2F above average in June, when in fact the US Climate Reference Network reported the June data as below average at -0.14°F"

"The data, taken directly from NOAA's national climate data page, shows not only that much of 2019 was below average, but that the US Temperature average is actually cooler now for 2019 than we were in 2005, when the dataset started."

This is just one more piece of evidence which bring all of the NOAA temperature and climate conclusion under suspicion.

A Deadly Heat Wave After the Hottest June On Record: How the Climate Crisis Is Creating 'a New Normal'
      — Time, 08-01-19

July Was the Hottest Month in Human History
      — Rolling Stone, 08-01-19

July was Earth's hottest month on record, beating or tying July 2016
      — Washington Post, 08-01-19

July was hottest month ever recorded on Earth, preliminary data shows
      — UK Independent

July expected to be Earth's hottest month on record
      — USA Today, 07-24-19

It's not just this heat wave. July 2019 is likely to be the hottest month ever measured.
      — The Atlantic, 07-19-19

Listening to the media, it appears that we are seeing an inevitable climate crisis unfolding before our eyes. Of course, these and other reports are not the product of independent investigative journalism, but merely the regurgitation of pronouncements from a small group of governmental figures such as NOAA, the United Nations or the UK's Met Office, none of which are disinterested scientific observers.

In an article titled July 2019 Was Not the Warmest on Record, Dr. Roy Spencer challenges the conclusions and argues that:

"One would think that the very best data would be used to make this assessment. After all, it comes from official government sources (such as NOAA, and the World Meteorological Organization [WMO]).

"But current official pronouncements of global temperature records come from a fairly limited and error-prone array of thermometers which were never intended to measure global temperature trends."

Read the article for the reasons he draws these conclusions. He then makes the case that meteorological reanalysis, a process used to yield the best local weather forecasting, should be applied to global climate analysis as well.

"Various weather forecast centers around the world have experts who take a wide variety of data from many sources and figure out which ones have information about the weather and which ones don't.

"But, how can they know the difference? Because good data produce good weather forecasts; bad data don't."

"This kind of physics-based extrapolation (which is what weather forecasting is) is much more realistic than (for example) using land surface temperatures in July around the Arctic Ocean to simply guess temperatures out over the cold ocean water and ice where summer temperatures seldom rise much above freezing. This is actually one of the questionable techniques used (by NASA GISS) to get temperature estimates where no data exists."

Spencer then looks at the July 2019 temperature data specifically.

"The only reanalysis data I am aware of that is available in near real time to the public is from WeatherBell.com, and comes from NOAA's Climate Forecast System Version 2 (CFSv2).

"The plot of surface temperature departures from the 1981-2010 mean for July 2019 shows a global average warmth of just over 0.3 C (0.5 deg. F) above normal:"

"Note from that figure how distorted the news reporting was concerning the temporary hot spells in France, which the media reports said contributed to global-average warmth. Yes, it was unusually warm in France in July. But look at the cold in Eastern Europe and western Russia. Where was the reporting on that? How about the fact that the U.S. was, on average, below normal?

"The CFSv2 reanalysis dataset goes back to only 1979, and from it we find that July 2019 was actually cooler than three other Julys: 2016, 2002, and 2017, and so was 4th warmest in 41 years. And being only 0.5 deg. F above average is not terribly alarming."   [Emphasis added]

"Where was the reporting on that?" Exactly. Today's media is a polarized filter, allowing through only statements which support the global warming agenda while filtering out everything else that might bring the forgone conclusions — and the political agenda they support — into question.

In an op/ed piece for the Wall Street Journal titled, If You Want 'Renewable Energy.' Get Ready to Dig, Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, discusses some of the actual up-front monetary and environmental costs of producing the "green" infrastructure that is presented as the ecological future of mankind. Here are a few excerpts that get to the core of his thesis:

"'Renewable energy' is a misnomer. Wind and solar machines and batteries are built from nonrenewable materials. And they wear out. Old equipment must be decommissioned, generating millions of tons of waste. The International Renewable Energy Agency calculates that solar goals for 2050 consistent with the Paris Accords will result in old-panel disposal constituting more than double the tonnage of all today's global plastic waste."

"A single electric-car battery weighs about 1,000 pounds. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving and processing more than 500,000 pounds of raw materials somewhere on the planet."

"If electric vehicles replace conventional cars, demand for cobalt and lithium, will rise more than 20-fold. That doesn't count batteries to back up wind and solar grids."

"Building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of nonrecyclable plastic."

"[M]ining and fabrication require the consumption of hydrocarbons. Building enough wind turbines to supply half the world's electricity would require nearly two billion tons of coal to produce the concrete and steel, along with two billion barrels of oil to make the composite blades."

Michael Mann is the Penn State climatologist who created the infamous 1999 "hockey stick" graph supposedly showing a strong correlation between CO₂ emissions and late 20th century warming. This graph has been used as one of the cornerstones in supporting the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Many people have challenged the accuracy of the graph (see here and here and here), yet all requests for a standard scientific review of the actual data and methodology used in its generation have been continuously rejected by Mann.

Let's recall some of the old "Climategate" correspondence that was so revealing about the methods and intentions of the government-funded researchers.

Back in 1999, shortly after Mann released his hockey stick graph, Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, sent a message to Ray Bradley where he stated:

"I've just completed Mike's [Michael Mann's] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."   [Emphasis added]

In 2004, Jones writing to Mann expresses concern that viewpoints contrary to theirs are getting into print and must be stopped by any means. He writes:

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"   [Emphasis added]

In 2005 Jones replied to Mann who was discussing his efforts to conceal his research data from review by others, and Jones responded:

"The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone."   [Emphasis added]

Timothy Ball, a geographer and instructor at Canada's University of Winnipeg, has been a long-standing critic regarding both the methodology as well as the predictions offered by the global warming alarmists such as Jones and Mann. As a consequence of Mann's role revealed through the Climategate documents, as well as his stonewalling in sharing his research and data for external review, Ball once famously said that Mann "belongs in the state pen, not Penn State." Subsequently, in 2011 Mann sued Ball for defamation.

Because of the ponderous working of the legal system, eight years later the Canadian Court has finally not only dismissed the multi-million dollar suit, but ordered Mann to pay all of Ball's legal expenses. While the hockey stick chart has been roundly discredited long ago, the defamation suit hinged upon the question of whether Mann did or did not intentionally falsify the graph. (i.e., using "Mike's Nature trick" noted above.) In order to determine that, the court ordered that he submit his data for review. Once again, Mann refused and the court was left with no alternative but to dismiss the case.

Patrick Frank, a life sciences research professor at Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has published a peer-reviewed research paper titled, Propagation of Error and the Reliability of Global Air Temperature Projections, in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science. In this article, Frank assesses the UN IPCC's 2013 assertion that man-made CO₂ emissions will raise the average global temperature by 3° C by 2100.

In the discussion of his article at Whats Up With That?, Frank points out that some of the problems he has observed with climate modelers are that they:

did not know to distinguish between accuracy and precision.
did not understand that, for example, a ±15 C temperature uncertainty is not a physical temperature.
did not realize that deriving a ±15 C uncertainty to condition a projected temperature does *not* mean the model itself is oscillating rapidly between icehouse and greenhouse climate predictions (an actual reviewer objection).
confronted standard error propagation as a foreign concept.
did not understand the significance or impact of a calibration experiment.
did not understand the concept of instrumental or model resolution or that it has empirical limits.
did not understand physical error analysis at all.
did not realize that '±n' is not '+n.'

Following up to the Michael Mann entry above, here is a nice five minute video summary by Tony Heller of Real Climate Science, which explains how Michael Mann cherry-picked his data to obtain the "catastrophic" warming results he uses to falsely build his case.

On September 23, 2019, the same day that Greta Thunberg was giving her speech to the UN, an international group of 500 scientists and professionals in climate-related fields submitted a letter to the UN, with an accompanying document expressing their view that There Is No Climate Emergency.

Summarizing the main points of the document:

Despite submitting 500 press releases to media contacts, this was not reported in any of the main stream news outlets, despite their claim to be fairly covering the subject.

The signatories can be found listed at the end of the document.

Tony Heller has produces another 13 minute video which shows how NASA has manipulated its own weather record to conceal the actual hottest month on record prior to 1980 — March 1878 — in order to mislead the public as to the severity of the late 20th century temperature rise. This was done by ignoring (hiding) all temperature data prior to 1880, artificially cooling past temperatures and artificially warming recent temperature data. In 2000, NASA temperature records showed approximately a 0.5° warming between 1860 and 2000. However, using the techniques exposed by Heller, by 2017 NASA's revised data indicated a more than doubling in global warming between 1880 and 2000 of 1.2°. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology was even worse, erasing all temperature data prior to 1910.

NASA Pinpoints Cause of Earth's Recent Record Carbon Dioxide Spike

In a new report, NASA indicates that the largest release of CO₂ seen over the past 2,000 years was entirely natural. Excerpts from the article:

"A new NASA study provides space-based evidence that Earth's tropical regions were the cause of the largest annual increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration seen in at least 2,000 years.

"Scientists suspected the 2015-16 El Nino — one of the largest on record — was responsible, but exactly how has been a subject of ongoing research. Analyzing the first 28 months of data from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite, researchers conclude impacts of El Nino-related heat and drought occurring in tropical regions of South America, Africa and Indonesia were responsible for the record spike in global carbon dioxide."

"'These three tropical regions released 2.5 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere than they did in 2011,' said Junjie Liu of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, who is lead author of the study. 'Our analysis shows this extra carbon dioxide explains the difference in atmospheric carbon dioxide growth rates between 2011 and the peak years of 2015-16. OCO-2 data allowed us to quantify how the net exchange of carbon between land and atmosphere in individual regions is affected during El Nino years.'"

"In 2015 and 2016, OCO-2 recorded atmospheric carbon dioxide increases that were 50 percent larger than the average increase seen in recent years preceding these observations."

"In eastern and southeastern tropical South America, including the Amazon rainforest, severe drought spurred by El Nino made 2015 the driest year in the past 30 years. Temperatures also were higher than normal. These drier and hotter conditions stressed vegetation and reduced photosynthesis, meaning trees and plants absorbed less carbon from the atmosphere. The effect was to increase the net amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.

"In contrast, rainfall in tropical Africa was at normal levels, based on precipitation analysis that combined satellite measurements and rain gauge data, but ecosystems endured hotter-than-normal temperatures. Dead trees and plants decomposed more, resulting in more carbon being released into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, tropical Asia had the second-driest year in the past 30 years. Its increased carbon release, primarily from Indonesia, was mainly due to increased peat and forest fires — also measured by satellite instruments."

"The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere is constantly changing. It changes from season to season as plants grow and die, with higher concentrations in the winter and lower amounts in the summer. Annually averaged atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have generally increased year over year since the early 1800s — the start of the widespread Industrial Revolution."   [Emphasis added]

Aah, there it is! Now NASA could have also just as easily said:

"since the early 1800s — the end of the Little Ice Age, when the earth began to naturally warm once again."

You decide why it's one statement and not the other.

Here is another example of the U.S. government lying through the manipulation of data in order to prop up the catastrophic climate-change narrative, when the data fails to produce the desired results.

In the 2014 National Climate Assessment Report produced by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), the following graph was included as evidence of an increase in North Atlantic hurricane frequency, intensity and duration.

In an article published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Patrick J. Michaels, an environmental sciences research professor, took a look at the data behind this chart, relying on the work of Dr. Ryan Maue.

"By 1970, we could surveil the entire domain where hurricanes roam, so we know both the track and the intensity of every one since then. It then devolves upon someone with a lot of patience to sort through all that imagery and catalog the time-intensity history of dreaded tropical cyclones.

"That's what Dr. Ryan Maue does for fun, besides being a crack-shot weather forecaster and perhaps the world's greatest graphic artist when it comes to presenting weather data. ...

"So Ryan multiplies the square of the wind speed by the length of time that those winds blow to calculate the power of individual storms, which he can then add up through each season, each ocean, each hemisphere and up to the globe to develop the regional, hemispheric, and global "Accumulated Cyclone Energy" (ACE) Index. Here it is:"

Michaels asked Maue to extract the North Atlantic data and recalculate the Power Dissipation Index using MIT's Kerry Emanuel method which was used by the USGCRP. Here are the results:

Michaels concludes:

"You will notice two things.

First, the reason the USGCRP data ended in 2009 (they could have ended in 2013 for their 2014 report) was that the years 2011-2013 wrecked their red-line narrative of an unusual increase in intensity.

"Second, there was clearly a period, from around 1940 through 1965 or so when the Power Dissipation Index increased just like it did from 1982 to the magic year of 2009. So there was nothing unusual going on in the USGCRP's cherry-picked data.

"In closing, I should mention that this is the kind of "science" that is cited as a reason that carbon dioxide emissions "endanger" human health and welfare."

An article titled, Australian legislator uncovers that country's Bureau of Meteorology fiddling with temperature records to hype warming, the author reports that Australian MP Craig Kelly discovered a clear case where the country's Bureau of Meteorology manipulated temperature data in order to manufacture the appearance of accelerating heating of the earth.

In the Bureau's original graph, 1952 showed the highest number of "very hot days," while 2011 showed the lowest.

In the revised graph, the 2011 data was "warmed" to eliminate it as the lowest year, while the data for 1952 and 1990 were obviously decreased and data for a number of other years was altered in order to create the impression of an ever increasing warming trend.

As we have seen time and again in many examples listed above, the data is manipulated to fit the desired result, making the entire enterprise not one of science, but of propaganda — something not lost on Mr. Kelly, who goes on to quote George Orwell's Novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four:

"There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence."

As we near the 10th anniversary of the Climategate scandal (see above) which revealed that the major climate researchers in the government-funded universities were manipulating data, fudging computer models, illegally concealing and/or destroying their research methods, and controlling the flow of information released through professional channels, physicist Dr Kelvin Kemm provides a short retrospective of what we have learned since then and where we now stand. Here are a few points he makes that are worth reviewing:

"The scandal should have ended climate catastrophism. Instead, it was studiously buried by politicians, scientists, activists and crony capitalists, who will rake in trillions of dollars from the exaggerations and fakery, while exempting themselves from the damage they are inflicting on everyday families."

"[S]ince 1998, average global temperatures have risen by a mere few hundredths of a degree. ... Yet all we hear is baseless rhetoric about manmade carbon dioxide causing global warming and climate changes that pose existential threats to humanity, wildlife and planet."

"Since California became a state [in 1850], the measured global rise in atmospheric temperature has been less than 1°C. But most of this increase occurred prior to 1940, and average planetary temperatures fell from around 1943 until about 1978, leading to a global cooling scare. Temperatures rose slightly until 1998, then mostly remained stable, even as carbon dioxide levels continued to rise. Rising CO2 levels and temperature variations do not correlate very well at all."

"[I]f industrial carbon dioxide did not cause recent global warming, what did? A Danish research group, led by Prof. Henrik Svensmark, has found a very credible match between levels of sunspot activity (giant magnetic storms) on our Sun and global temperatures over the last fifteen hundred years. This all-natural mechanism actually fits the evidence! How terribly inconvenient for alarmists.

Cosmic rays from deep space constantly impinge on the Earth's upper atmosphere and produce clouds, much like high-flying jets leave white contrails behind their engines. More clouds can trap heat, but they also cause global cooling because not as much sunlight strikes the Earth. More sunspots mean a stronger magnetic shield, therefore fewer cosmic rays reaching Earth, thus less cloud cover and more global warming. The Sun is currently in a near-record period of low sunspot activity.   (See here and here)

All sorts of interest groups are suppressing this information."

"We in the developing world will no longer let climate truth be suppressed. We will not allow loud, radical activists to put the brakes on African economic development, jobs, and improved health and living standards, in the name of advancing their anti-human, wealth redistribution agendas."

With complete predictability, the occurrence of any and every undesirable contemporary weather event is immediately blamed, by politicians and the media alike, upon global warming, concealed behind the new all-encompassing marketing term "climate change." Scientific evidence for these claims is no longer required. The recent flooding in Venice was no exception. For example, from the BBC we get:

Venice Floods: Climate Change Behind Highest Tide in 50 Years, Says Mayor

From USA Today:

Historic Flooding in Italy: What Role Has Climate Change Played in the Destruction?

And From the Washington Post:

Venice is Underwater — and a Preview of What Climate Change Will Bring to Coastal Cities

These are just three examples of many. At 1.87m or just under 6'-2", this flooding is certainly devastating, but not historically unprecedented. In 1966 a worse flood occurred as reported in Wikipedia:

"On November 4, 1966, an abnormal occurrence of high tides, rain-swollen rivers and a severe sirocco wind caused the canals to rise to a height of 194 cm or 6 ft 4in."

Of course, this was back in the 1960s when "global cooling" and a coming ice age were the then Crisis du Jour. A lowering of sea levels would have been the result of those predictions, so the flooding was blamed on well established causes such as high tides, overflowing rivers and storms rather than the human release of CO₂. That would have to come later.

Official flood recordkeeping only began in 1936, and from Venice's own website the following large floods are noted:

11-04-66		194 cm		12-25-09		145 cm
12-22-79		166 cm		11-03-68		144 cm
02-01-86		158 cm		11-06-00		144 cm
12-01-08		156 cm		12-23-09		144 cm
10-29-18		156 cm		12-24-10		144 cm
11-12-51		151 cm		11-01-12		143 cm
11-11-12		149 cm		02-12-13		143 cm
04-16-36		147 cm		12-08-92		142 cm
11-16-02		147 cm		02-17-79		140 cm
10-15-60		145 cm

However, flooding has been a constant problem plaguing the city long before records began to be kept, as seen by comparing this current photo with the painting made by by Vincenzo Chilone of a flood from 1825. And unfortunately, not a single SUV or coal-fired power plant around back then, to blame.

San Marcos Square flooded 11-14-2019: Photo by REUTERS/Manuel Silvestri

San Marcos Square flooded 12-09-1825: Painting by Vincenzo Chilone

The principle argument put forward to explain an increase in the frequency of Venice floods is that rising sea levels, due to global warming, are responsible. But as has been pointed out above here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here, that:

• Projected catastrophic sea level increases are the product of defective computer models which are continually contradicted by real-world measurements and observations.
• Actual measurements show a periodic rise and fall of sea level, but no significant increase in over fifty years. In other words, periods where the level has dropped (e.g., 1960s) balance out rising levels, for no significant overall change.
• Satellite measurements show a 2cm (0.83") sea level rise over the first decade of the 21st century with a significant slowing trend since 2006. If there is a sea level rise over the next century, it will be 10cm (4") or less, with an uncertainty of 10cm± for a realistic rise of between 0-8".
• Climate "scientists" at various government-funded research institutions are fudging data to "force" desired results contradicted by the facts.
• The Maldives remain above water!

So what is responsible for the increasing Venetian flooding? Well, as for the November 14th flood, the Adriatic Sea was experiencing an exceptional lunar-driven high tide known as the aqua alta. The high water was further driven on shore by the sirocco winds, creating worse than usual conditions. This was then combined with an unusual storm which created river flooding in the region. In other words, the conditions were similar to those which created the 1966 record flood.

As for the increased frequency of flooding, there is no mystery: Venice is sinking! Constructed on silt deposited by river deltas, building foundations were formed of wooden piles driven through the silt to a clay base below. Through natural settling as well as the withdrawing of ground water by way of artesian wells, the entire city has been subsiding for centuries. A peer-reviewed study relying on satellite data concluded that the Italian northern coastal plain was sinking at a rate of up to 1cm/year and the cumulative 1992-2010 subsidence exceeded 11cm. At that rate the drop over the next century would be around 61cm or two feet, far exceeding any anticipated sea level rise! This alone can easily explain why the frequency of flooding has increased over time.

If climate alarmists wish to establish that sea level increases are a significant factor, they will have to do more than simply wave their hands and assert it. As a first good step, they could begin by presenting all the relevant facts, including the well established subsidence figures, when stating their position. Short of that, their claims are meaningless.

On November 11, 2019, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a new peer-reviewed paper. The authors (Grinsted, Ditlevsen and Christensen) examined data for the normalized area-of-total-destruction damage estimates caused by hurricanes from 1900 to 2018 and concluded:

"We find that hurricanes are indeed becoming more damaging. The frequency of the very most damaging hurricanes has increased at a rate of 330% per century."

Meteorologist Roger Pielke reviewed these findings and determined that the report was "fatally flawed" as a result of a number of serious methodological errors, calling for it to be retracted.

"If true, the paper (which I'll call G19, using its lead author's initial and year of publication) would overturn decades of research and observations that have indicated over the past century or more, there are no upwards trends in U.S. hurricane landfalls and no upwards trends in the strongest storms at landfall."

"The first big problem with G19 is that it purports to say something about climatological trends in hurricanes, but it uses no actual climate data on hurricanes. That's right, it instead uses data on economic losses from hurricanes to arrive at conclusions about climate trends. The economic data that it uses are based on research that I and colleagues have conducted over more than two decades, which makes me uniquely situated to tell you about the mistakes in G19."   [Emphasis added]

Pielke points out that the hurricane counts used in the analysis do not agree with official NOAA records. The first half of the period under study is missing 25 hurricanes while the latter half includes an additional 64 storms not categorized as hurricanes. This looks like yet another usr of the typical climategate trick of forcing early data downward and later data upward in order to create the appearance of an increase that does not exist!

Of even more importance is the state of the hurricane losses dataset maintained by ICAT. This data originally came from Pielke's own P08 methodology. However, in 2008 ICAT made major changes by replacing P08 data with that obtained from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). This created a hybrid dataset with a discontinuity at 1980 between the earlier P08 and the later NCEI data. The researchers then used the broken ICAT dataset, combined with the inaccurate hurricane counts, in order to generate erroneous conclusions that contradicted all other past observations.

"The bottom line here is that a fatally flawed paper on climate science passed peer review at a significant journal. It used a dataset found online that had not undergone peer review, much less any quality control. The flawed conclusions of G19 have been loudly promoted by activist scientists and uncritical media.

"The result has been a polluting of our discussions of climate science and policy. I have no doubt that good science will win out in the long run, but if we do not enforce basic standards of research quality along the way, we will make that battle much more difficult than it need be.

Amen.

Another decade, another set of failed global warming predictions.

As reported by ZeroHedge, for many years the public has been told by the many signs throughout the park, that all of the glaciers in Glacier National Park would be totally melted by the year 2020 because of man-made global warming.

"[The glaciers] are now rapidly shrinking due to human-caused climate change. Computer models indicate the glaciers will all be gone by the year 2020."

Well, unfortunately, man has once again failed to live up to the high standards mandated by the revered computer climate models and glaciers remain on display throughout the park. But don't worry, this is nothing that your tax dollars cannot fix. The Park Service has been busily replacing all of these plaques, brochures and videos with new versions informing us that:

"When [the glaciers] will completely disappear, however, depends on how and when we act."

You're still on the hook, but now it's an open-ended hook. ZeroHedge also reports:

"Last year the Park Service quietly removed its two large steel trash cans at the Many Glacier Hotel which depicted 'before and after' engravings of the Grinnell Glacier in 1910 and 2009. The steel carvings indicated that the Glacier had shrunk significantly between the two dates. But a viral video published on Wattsupwiththat.com showed that the Grinnell Glacier appears to be slightly larger than in 2009."

"The 'gone by 2020' claims were repeated in the New York Times, National Geographic, and other international news sources. But no mainstream news outlet has done any meaningful reporting regarding the apparent stabilization and recovery of the glaciers in [Glacier National Park] over the past decade."

Remember kids, never let facts get in the way of a good manipulative narrative.

[Note: This article was originally published back in June, but seemed more appropriate for kicking off the new decade.]

Normal Sea Ice Extent At Both Poles

Real Climate Science reports:

"After fifteen years of nonstop propaganda about record heat and record polar melting, sea ice extent is normal both poles."

These chart, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, show the 2020 ice extent (blue line), falling within the ±2 standard deviations of norm (grey range).

On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

Michael Shellenberger is an award-winning environmentalist who was listed as one of Time Magazine's 2008 Heroes of the Environment and is a regular contributor to a variety of publications including Forbes. Recently, Shellenberger took a hard look at how environmentalism has been used socially and politically to create a false impression of what is actually occurring, instilling inappropriate fear in the general populace. He published his finding in a new book:  Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

Shellenberger then published a companion article on Forbes that broadly summarized the misinformation that has been disseminated by environmentalists, politicians and the press in this arena. After appearing on their website for just a few hours, Forbes censored it. Fortunately other sites such as Quillette and ZeroHedge have made it available. Below is a summary of some of the more interesting points.

"On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It's just not the end of the world."

"Here are some facts few people know:

• Humans are not causing a "sixth mass extinction"
• The Amazon is not "the lungs of the world"
• Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
• Fires have declined 25 percent around the world since 2003
• The amount of land we use for meat—humankind's biggest use of land—has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
• The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
• Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s
• The Netherlands became rich, not poor while adapting to life below sea level
• We produce 25 percent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
• Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
• Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
• Preventing future pandemics requires more not less "industrial" agriculture

"I know that the above facts will sound like "climate denialism" to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism."

"Some highlights from the book:

• Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
• The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
• The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
• 100 percent renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today's 0.5 percent to 50 percent
• We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
• Vegetarianism reduces one's emissions by less than 4 percent
• Greenpeace didn't save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
• "Free-range" beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300 percent more emissions
• Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
• The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants

"Why were we all so misled?"

"In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty "sustainable." And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism."

"Scientific institutions including the World Health Organisation and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science."

So what we have here is an honest environmentalist who actually respects the scientific method and the truth. Much of what he reports here is confirmed by the past work of scientists recorded above, but it forms a good summarization and is a welcome voice standing against the politicization of science and the anti-civilization forces at work.

Facts cannot be allowed to stand in the way of "truth!" When pesky history is interfering with your story, well, just do what all regimes do: rewrite history. As reported by Jennifer Marohasy on her website:

"The Australian Bureau of Meteorology deleted what was long regarded as the hottest day ever recorded in Australia — Bourke's 125°F (51.7°C) on the 3rd January 1909. This record was deleted, falsely claiming that this was likely some sort of 'observational error', as no other official weather stations recorded high temperatures on that day.

"However, Craig Kelly MP has visited the Australian National Archive at Chester Hill in western Sydney to view very old meteorological observation books. It has taken Mr Kelly MP some months to track down this historical evidence. Through access to the archived book for the weather station at Brewarrina, which is the nearest official weather station to Bourke, it can now be confirmed that a temperature of 50.6°C (123°F) was recorded at Brewarrina for Sunday 3rd January 1909. This totally contradicts claims from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology that only Bourke recorded an extraordinarily hot temperature on that day."

"That the Bureau of Meteorology denies these record hot days is a travesty. Is it because these records contradict their belief in catastrophic human-caused global warming?"

"Not only has Mr Kelly MP tracked-down the meteorological observations book for Brewarrina, but over the last week he has also uncovered that 51.1°C (124°F) was recorded at White Cliffs for Wednesday 11th January 1939. This is the second hottest ever!"

"If global warming is indeed the greatest moral issue of our time, then every Australian regardless of their politics and their opinion on greenhouse gases and renewable energies, must be honest to history and these truths."

Some interesting facts from an article titled: What Happened to Summer?

"Summer came to an abrupt end in the mountains of northern Spain last weekend when a sudden cold snap left the Picos de Europa range buried under a blanket of white. The Alps and Pyrenees have recently received heavy summer snow, and now the French are reporting all-time record August lows. And we have strong upticks in the ice in Greenland and in Antarctica where the ice this year is greater than that on the same date in 1979, as well as on the same date in every year of the 1980s and 1990s (barring 1985, 1994, 1998, and 1999)."

"Greenland gained a record-smashing four gigatons of snow and ice,"

"Norway also suffered its 'Coldest Summer for 60 Years'"

"Several cold records shattered in The Netherlands in July, where it has never been colder since the start of the measurements."

Of course this is merely weather. Climate only happens when the data goes in the other direction.