By Andy May

Global Climate Models (GCM) are used to compute the social cost of carbon dioxide emissions and to compute man’s contribution to recent global warming. The assertion that most of “climate change” is due to man’s influence is based solely on these models. They are also the sole basis for concluding “climate change” is dangerous. Just how accurate are they? How close are their predictions to observations?

Dr. Judith Curry has written an important white paper, for the layman, describing how the models work. It is easy to understand and well worth reading.

Her key conclusions:

GCMs have not been subject to the rigorous verification and validation that is the norm for engineering and regulatory science.

There are numerous arguments supporting the conclusion that climate models are not fit for the purpose of identifying with high confidence the proportion of the 20th century warming that was human-caused as opposed to natural.

There is growing evidence that climate models predict too much warming from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Some portions of the GCMs are rooted in fundamental physics and chemistry, but there are thousands of atmospheric and surface processes that cannot be deterministically modeled and must be “parameterized” using simple empirical formulas based on observations. These empirical formulas are “tuned” or “calibrated” to make the models match observations. They are tweaked to match the twentieth century, especially the warming period from 1945 to 2000. Even with all of the tuning, the models do a very poor job matching the warming from 1910-1945.

Since all models are “tuned” to the twentieth century (see Voosen, et al., Science, 2016) and since the “more than half of warming is due to man” conclusion is based upon comparing two model runs “from 1951 to 2010” the validity of the computation of man’s influence is highly questionable. Dr. Curry points out:

“GCMs are evaluated against the same observations used for model tuning.”

This is not something that inspires confidence. Further, the Earth has been warming for 300 to 400 years, as Dr. Curry writes:

“Understanding and explaining the climate variability over the past 400 years, prior to 1950, has received far too little attention. Without this understanding, we should place little confidence in the IPCC’s explanations of warming since 1950.”

She adds:

“Anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is a theory in which the basic mechanism is well understood, but of which the potential magnitude is highly uncertain.”

Precisely so.

By Andy May

ExxonMobil released its 2017 Outlook for Energy, A View to 2040 in mid-December. David Middleton has written that the report reveals wind and solar will supply a whopping 4% of global energy by 2040! He also reports that wind and solar capacity will grow, but we will only be able to utilize 30% of the wind capacity and 20% of the solar capacity due to their intermittent nature. This is true, but the report has much more to say and this year the nomination of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State makes it even more important. Here we will cover some the other numbers in the report.Continue reading “Energy and Society from now until 2040”

By Andy May

Some will recognize the title as part of a line by Launcelot Gobbo in Act II, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. In plainer and much less poetic language it means that the truth will be known eventually. The film version, with Al Pacino playing Shylock, is the best in my amateur opinion. The play is considered anti-semitic by some, but is actually a carefully considered analysis of bias and prejudice and their awful effect on people. It opens the dark world of prejudice to the light, uncovering it for all to see. It does this in the same way Huckleberry Finn opens the injustice of slavery to the light of day. Sometimes we need to see all the bad out in the open, as uncomfortable as it may be to look at or discuss.

We are all seeing a shift in opinion about the so-called dangers of man-made climate change. It has taken a long time, but there is an awakening to the idea that climate changes, man’s activities may play some role in the changes, but the role of man is likely small and not very dangerous. In any case, the public believes (correctly in my opinion) it is way too early to panic.

So, with all this in mind, I’d like to share a short lecture on bias, prejudice and intimidation in climate science by Dr. Willie Soon. The December 8, 2016 lecture can be seen on Youtube here or by clicking on figure 1, the slide deck he uses can be downloaded here.

Figure 1, Dr. Willie Soon delivering his talk on bias and intimidation in climate science. Click on the figure to hear the talk at Youtube.com

The viciousness of the media attacks on the reputation of Dr. Soon are amazing, considering his long-established credentials as an astrophysicist and climate scientist. It was gratifying that Myron Ebell (Trump’s pick to lead the EPA transition) leapt to Dr. Soon’s defense when the New York Times shamefully published an unwarranted and untrue attack on him. The article was written by Greenpeace. The New York Times placed it on their front page (see Dr. Soon’s second slide) and unethically disguised it as an article by two of their reporters. Mr. Ebell’s expose can be read here. Other sources that uncover the dishonesty in the New York Times reporting can be read here and here.

As bad as the attacks on Dr. Soon are, they pale in comparison to the attacks on science itself. Dr. Soon’s talk details the complete corruption of the peer-review process in climate science. I was once on the SPWLA (Society of Petrophysics and Well Log Analysts, the journal Petrophysics) publications committee and can assure you that the actions described by Dr. Soon are far more egregious and corrupt than any I have seen in a long publishing career.

Further, even though Dr. Soon had no direct support from the Southern Company as Greenpeace and the New York Times claimed, what if he did have? Why does the government have to be the only source of research funding? Clearly, the climate change debate is political and no longer scientific. We have the proponents of dangerous man-made climate change claiming the science is settled and a “consensus” of (government funded) scientists certifying it is dangerous. Since when has science ever been “settled?” Settled issues are political issues, not scientific issues. Likewise, consensus is a political word, not a scientific one. We have politicians, pundits and environmentalists who wish to jail “deniers.” Of course, it is political, as a result one would hope that funding for climate research was not all from the government. The government is clearly biased.

Dr. Soon clearly shows the bias against one point of view on climate change and the suppression of dissenting views, no matter how well they are supported. He shows that prejudice against dissenting views exists and that dissenters will be punished, humiliated and tormented. I have no illusion that my small post will heal his wounds or repair his reputation, but I hope it brings some daylight to this issue and illuminates the abusers. The only way to confront this sort of behavior, behavior that thrives in darkness, is to force it into the light. Shakespeare and Twain knew this, we need to follow their lead.

By Andy May

There is an excellent new post up at notrickszone.com on the global cooling scare of the 1970’s and the efforts to erase it from the record by the climate alarmists at realclimate.com. For some the scandal at Wikipedia over William Connolley deliberately posting false articles and altering factual ones on climate is old news. This is for those who missed the story. William Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. “Fake news” is an old story, used extensively by radical climate alarmists and environmentalists. Indeed, Greenpeace seems to be based on the concept of fake news.

The following anecdote by author Lawrence Solomon is instructive. He tried to correct an article that stated Naomi Oreskes infamous 97% paper in Science had been vindicated and Dr. Bennie Peiser had conceded that she was correct. He had spoken with Dr. Peiser and confirmed he had said no such thing.

“Of course Oreskes’s conclusions were absurd, and have been widely ridiculed. I myself have profiled dozens of truly world-eminent scientists whose work casts doubt on the Gore-U.N. version of global warming. Following the references in my book The Deniers, one can find hundreds of refereed papers that cast doubt on some aspect of the Gore/U.N. case, and that only scratches the surface.

Naturally I was surprised to read on Wikipedia that Oreskes’s work had been vindicated and that, for instance, one of her most thorough critics, British scientist and publisher Bennie Peiser, not only had been discredited but had grudgingly conceded Oreskes was right.

I checked with Peiser, who said he had done no such thing. I then corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.

Peiser wrote back saying he couldn’t see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again. I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.”

Connolley was hardly the only offender, Kim Dabelstein Petersen and many others are also guilty. Rewriting history is not their only offense. They also slander eminent scientists such as Dr. Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service; Dr. Richard Lindzen a former MIT Professor of atmospheric physics, and Professor William Happer a professor at Princeton. Many, many others like Willie Soon, Roy Spencer, John Christy and Judith Curry have also been unfairly slandered.

Probably fake news has been with us for a very long time, but thanks to the Internet it is produced quicker and debunked quicker these days. I get a sense of déjà vu when reading this Brittanica.com article on yellow journalism.

As noted in the notrickszone.com post William Connolley and his team tried to show that the global cooling scare of the 1970’s was a myth. They also tried to scrub Wikipedia of any mention of the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warm Period. A perfect example of fake news, along the lines of the 97% consensus myths. They claimed only seven scientific papers of the period discussed global cooling, when there are 163 papers on the subject, including seven that claim CO2 is causing global cooling. These include an article by the CIA. A complete list of the papers can be found in the post, it is well worth the time it takes to scan the informative summaries at the end of the post.

By Andy May

h/t Joachim Seifert

There is a new post by Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, translated by Pierre Gosselin, on the effect of ocean cycles on 20^th century warming and the 21^st century pause. They had previously written about this in their popular book The Neglected Sun, in English here. Marcia Wyatt and Judith Curry have also written about the effect of ocean cycles here. These roughly 60 to 65-year cycles have the advantage of explaining the warming from about 1910 to 1944 and the warming from 1975 to 2005 with a similar mechanism. This is important, because the two warming events are very similar, as shown here and in figure 1.

Figure 1

In the IPCC WG1 AR5 document (page 887), they have a hard time explaining the earlier 20^th century warming. The text is so confusing we will not attempt to paraphrase it:

“Nonetheless, these studies do not challenge the AR4 assessment that external forcing very likely made a contribution to the warming over this period. In conclusion, the early 20^th century warming is very unlikely to be due to internal variability alone. It remains difficult to quantify the contribution to this warming from internal variability, natural forcing and anthropogenic forcing, due to forcing and response uncertainties and incomplete observational coverage.”

Why is this warming “difficult to quantify” and the later warming “extremely likely” due mostly to man? The two temperature profiles are nearly identical after removing the secular trend out of the Little Ice Age.  But, the first is a mystery and the second is understood? We have a problem with this.

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