Made up climate data - Update

Last November I posted about a revelation that the UK weather bureau (the Meteorologic Office) had 113 weather stations in Britain that were reporting daily temperature data, but which actually didn't exist at all:

I've posted many times about how the temperature data is modified after its initial collection, but this takes the cake.  One third of UK weather stations simply do not exist

 A full third of the database is imaginary.  Except not so fast, said the "experts".  Those 113 weather stations don't exist, but the data is based on nearby, well-sited (i.e. high quality) different stations.

Hmmmm.  So can we get a list of those stations?  Well, not really:

Last year the UK Met Office was shown to be inventing long-term temperature data at 103 non-existent weather stations. It was claimed in a later risible ‘fact check’ that the data were estimated from nearby well-correlated neighbouring stations. Citizen super sleuth Ray Sanders issued a number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to learn the identity of these correlating sites but has been told that the information is not held by the Met Office. So the invented figures for the non-existent sites are supposedly provided by stations that the Met Office claims it cannot identify and are presumably not recorded in its copious computer storage and archive.  [Bold by me - Borepatch]

I think we've heard something like this before.

Err, the dog ate their homework?  Man, and you wonder why people don't trust climate scientists?  And remember - most people don't know a tenth of the shenanigans that climate scientists are up to, and they still don't trust them.  Quite frankly, the are 100% correct not to trust them.

As I posted last November, this post is tagged "Junk Science" and "Climate Bullshit" because, well, you know.

A Modest Proposal on how the Trump Administration can solve the Global Warming problem

All they have to do is forbid the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from publishing temperature data that has been changed from the original value recorded on the date of recording.

That's it.  Overnight, five sixths of the reported warming in the US over the twentieth century will simply disappear.

Of course, the Usual Suspects will scream and holler about this, but that will simply focus more attention on the subject.  Quite frankly, the public will very likely be shocked when they find out that scientists simply change the data after it was recorded.  There will be a collapse of trust in the climate scientists.  Quite frankly, that collapse of trust will have been earned many times over.

Climate data is just made up

I've posted many times about how the temperature data is modified after its initial collection, but this takes the cake.  One third of UK weather stations simply do not exist:

Shocking evidence has emerged that points to the U.K. Met Office inventing temperature data from over 100 non-existent weather stations. The explosive allegations have been made by citizen journalist Ray Sanders and sent to the new Labour Science Minister Peter Kyle MP. Following a number of Freedom of Information requests to the Met Office and diligent field work visiting individuals stations, Sanders has discovered that 103 stations out of 302 sites supplying temperature averages do not exist.

Now this happens here as well, for example the decommissioned weather station at Ripogenus Dam in Maine was providing data for over a decade.  But what is going on in the UK is on an industrial scale.

So if the "Climate Crisis" is such a big deal, why is a third of the temperature data in the UK fabricated?  It's fake, just like the "Global Warming" crisis.

Tagged "Junk Science" and "Climate Bullshit" because, well, it's pretty obvious.

"Climate Change" is a manufactured crisis

I've said repeatedly that the temperature data is a mess.  Long time readers will remember how the Surface Stations project documented poorly sited weather stations (like ones in the middle of baking parking lot asphalt), where 89% of the weather stations did not meet the Government's acceptable siting requirements.  They all read too hot, sometimes by as much as 2 degrees.

Long term readers may remember how NOAA (the US Government's weather bureau) established a "Climate Reference Network" of only well-sited weather stations.  The Reference Network shows that the poorly-sited stations overstate warming by at least half a degree.  Remember, we are told that temperature increased by 0.6 degrees over the course of the entire 20th Century.  Take away that half a degree and you have no warming at all over 100 years.

Yeah, that's quite a crisis.

But never let a crisis go to waste, even if you have to manufacture one.  What have governments been doing to get more warming?  Well, the UK.Gov is installing brand new weather stations, 80% of which not only are not acceptably sited, but are in Class 4 or 5 - the worst of the worst: 

Over eight in 10 of the 113 temperature measuring stations opened in the last 30 years by the U.K. Met Office have been deliberately or carelessly sited in junk Class 4 and 5 locations where unnatural heating errors of 2°C and 5°C respectively are possible. This shock revelation, obtained by a recent Freedom of Information request, must cast serious doubt on the ability of the Met Office to provide a true measurement of the U.K. air temperature, a statistic that is the bedrock of support for Net Zero. Over time, increasing urban encroachment has corrupted almost the entire network of 384 stations with 77.9% of the stations rated Class 4 and 5, but it beggars belief that new stations are being sited in such locations.

Remember, these aren't 80 year old stations that used to be in a pasture and are now in a parking lot.  These are brand spanking new ones.  Sitting in parking lots.

Tagged Climate Bullshit because, well, you know.

How do you find "Global Warming" when there's no actual warming?

You change the data.  The world's oldest continuous temperature database is the Central England Temperature record which dates to 1659 (!).  The CET has been recently updated to version 2.  And along the way, something really interesting happened:

This is the year-by-year change that was introduced in V2.  You can see kind of random up/down adjustments for hundreds of years right up until 1970.  Then you see massive adjustments.  The upward warming trend from 1970 to the present day is not due to the data as read, but rather to the (made up) adjustments to the data.

Conclusion: Man-made Global Warming is confirmed!*  But it's not observable in real life, but only in computer print outs ...

I'm well past the point of giving the benefit of the doubt to the "Scientists" who do this (and have done this for ages, all over the world).  Now the only explanation that makes sense is that Government wants to scare everyone with "Climate Change" and Scientists are giving governments what they paid for.

Back in the real world, we're still not seeing new high temperature records being set, even with each year as "one of the 10 hottest in the last 1000 years".  The highest temperature ever recorded in these United States was in 1913, 111 years ago.  That's some righteous warming that we're seeing right here.

Go read the very first link at the top of this post, which also delves into just how dodgy the data inputs are (poorly sited weather stations recording heat from RAF jets).  Just like the US Surface Stations Project, he shows that the weather stations in Blighty are not fit for purpose.  So bad in fact that the stations are trying to detect a warming signal of 0.1 degree/decade when the margin of error of the station is 4 or 5 degrees.

There's a reason that I have a post tag here called Climate Bullshit.  And there's a reason that I don't post much anymore about Climate "Science" - it makes me grumpy.

Hat tip to Perry de Havilland at Samizdata.

* The chart there from the US Government weather bureau NOAA is essentially identical to the one shown above for CET.  This game is being played everywhere.

Youtube Shadowbans Climate: The Movie

The Feral Irishman emails to saw that my post about the climate movie looked weird from his Windows computer.  He could watch the movie but there was nothing displayed about Youtube.  Everything looked normal from Safari on his iPhone.

Well, it turns out that Youtube has shadowbanned the film.  This almost certainly made the post look wonky.  If they disappear it I will update the embed to Rumble or something.

You know that you're over the target when you're taking flak.

Judge issues restraining order keeping DOE from tracking bitcoin miners

Interesting:

Earlier this month, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced its intention to gather basic information about the energy consumed by bitcoin mining. In making the decision, the DOE noted that the share of bitcoin mining happening in the US has shot up by a factor of over 10 just within the last three years, leaving the activity consuming as much electricity as a fairly populous state....

Albright's decision to issue the injunction is based largely on the fact that the DOE's decision to delay going forward with the survey was voluntary and could be rescinded at any time.

But he went beyond that by saying that the mining companies were likely to succeed on the merits of their case. In general terms, he noted that the DOE relied on its ability to enact emergency measures, and those are only applicable if there's a risk of public harm. The DOE will likely try to make the case that elevated carbon emissions and electricity costs both count as public harms, so Albright is suggesting that he's unlikely to find those compelling.

Ah, Climate Change.  Is there anything it can't do?  Except in west Texas, where the Judge doesn't buy the whole "Climate Emergency means more Government" thing.

 

More old climate records

When we point out that things aren't as hot as expected (predictions of 5 or more degrees increase being more like half a degree), we are told that the climate is changing in a way that we will experience more extremes.  The problem is that we're not seeing these extremes.  Case in point, the Great Blue Norther of 1911:

On November 11, temperatures in Kansas City had reached a record high of 76 °F (24 °C) by late morning before the front moved through. As the cold front approached, the winds increased turning from southeast to northwest. By midnight, the temperature had dropped to 11 °F (−12 °C), a 65 °F (36 °C) difference in 14 hours.[5] The next day would have a record low of 6 °F (−14 °C) and a high of only 21 °F (−6 °C).[10] In Springfield, the temperature difference was even more extreme. Springfield was at 80 °F (27 °C) at about 3:45 p.m. CST (21:45 UTC), before the cold front moved through. Fifteen minutes later, the temperature was at 40 °F (4 °C) with winds out of the northwest at 40 mph (64 km/h). By 7:00 p.m. CST (01:00 UTC 12 November) the temperature had dropped a further 20 °F (−7 °C), and by midnight (06:00 UTC), a record low of 13 °F (−11 °C) was established. It was the first time since records had been kept for Springfield when the record high and record low were broken in the same day. The freak temperature difference was also a record breaker: 67 °F (37 °C) in 10 hours.

And it wasn't just Kansas City, it was all over - Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Peoria, Columbus, Lexington KY.  So these records are really old.  If the climate were getting more susceptible to extreme weather events, where are the new records?

It's almost like what you read in the Press is biased or something.

A short introduction to climate science

I recently posted about the 100 year old record high temperatures from Australia.  This led me to an old post of mine that covers the most important issues that people need to know about climate science.  I'm reporting it here because it has aged particularly well and condenses a great deal of information on the subject. 

Some things bear repeating.

(originally posted 2 November 2021)

Glossing the Climate Scientists

Back in the Middle Ages, books weren't printed (the printing press hadn't yet been invented).  Instead, they were laboriously copied by hand.  Monasteries were the chief place that this took place, and you can get a great overview of this in the very enjoyable How The Irish Saved Civilization.

One thing that the Monks would often do, especially on more complex books on theology or philosophy was to add short notes in the margins explaining the more impenetrable passages.  These little blurbs were called "glosses" and were essentially a reader's helper.  If you didn't have a teacher - if all you had was the book - then the gloss would provide a welcome overview to guide the reader to the point of the original book.

Reader Lou emailed:

Hi Borepatch,

I am a longtime reader, this is my first reach out.

Great blog, I learn a lot and it is on my daily read list.

Regarding AGW, I am a definite skeptic.  Though only semi-literate on the subject matter. I try to apply my generic engineer-trained, data-driven analytical approach to issues. 

I have read your posts on it (especially the ones from 2010 and 2017) and appreciate you taking these folks on.

I recently came across this article:

https://theconversation.com/the-science-everyone-needs-to-know-about-climate-change-in-6-charts-170556

My lack of command of the subject leaves me ill-equipped to critique or rebut. Would you be willing to look at it and unpack/rebut from your perspective?  I know you have already covered the fundamentals, it’s just these people never quit. And they misuse data to deceive folks.

Either way, thank you for all you are doing, please keep it up you have more positive impact than you may realize!

Thanks for the kind words, Lou.  I haven't posted on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) in quite some time because I think I've written everything I have to say on it.  And so while I won't do a line-by-line fisking of Dr. Weatherhead's article, I will gloss some of my older posts as to how they relate to her article.

We should start with the post that has a permanent sidebar in the upper right hand side of this blog: A Layman's Guide to the Science of Global Warming.  The discussion that is most pertinent to Dr. Weatherman's article is the bit on Carbon Dioxide and how weak a greenhouse gas it is.  Dr. Weatherman repeatedly refers to increasing carbon dioxide but completely skates by the fact that CO2 is saturated in Earth's atmosphere, at least as far as its heat capturing capacity.  The key passage from my old post is this:

The scientific consensus is that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in warming of around 1°C.  We've gone from around 280 parts per million (ppm) atmospheric  CO₂ to around 400 ppm an increase of about 50% over the last 100 years or so, so there should have been an increase of around half a degree.  So why do we hear all of this about how we are destroying the planet?  I mean, half a degree doesn't sound like much.

The next post of mine that is pertinent to Dr. Weatherman's article is How to create a consensus on Global Warming.  She points out in her article that climate data show that all continents are warming.  However, she does not address the very serious problems with adjustments to the data that inject a warming signal where none exists.  This is quite frankly the key problem in climate science: the raw temperature data (temperature readings as originally collected by the scientist many years ago) do not show warming, but the adjusted data (what is reported by scientists like Dr. Weatherman) shows considerable warming.  My post is very difficult to gloss because the information is so, well, shocking but this is the summary:

Let me say this explicitly: I used to believe that the planet was warming, and that this was likely due to natural (as opposed to man made) causes. Now I'm not sure that the planet is warming. The data do not show warming over the last 70 years, maybe longer.

If you only read one of my posts on global warming, this is the one.  It is information-dense and has a bunch of links to scientists who dissent from Dr. Weatherman's "consensus science" view.

A related post about non-adjusted temperature data is relevant.  Understanding Climate Data Made Easy discusses how record temperatures (you can't adjust them, amirite?) do not jive at all with the every-year-is-hotter message from Dr. Weatherman.  Here are the key bits:

So we see [only] 9 states (18% of the total) setting high records in the last 50 years. 41 states (82% of the total) haven't seen record high temperatures in the period we've been told is an accelerating and hotter climate.  You would expect to see a lot more states - another 15 or so setting recent high temperature records.  Weird, huh?  It's almost like if you remove the adjustments to the temperature data, you don't see accelerating warming.

In fact, we may be seeing the opposite.  If you look at record low temperatures you see a lot going on in the most recent years.  15 states have set record low temperatures in the last 50 years (once again ignoring dates listed with an asterisk which tells us the year that the previous low record was tied).  This is only 30% of the total, but that's basically twice as many as set record high temperatures.

July and August 1936 saw 14 States set record high temperatures that have not been surpassed in the subsequent 85 years.  This despite the repeated statements that last year was the hottest ever.  This post suggests a fundamental breakdown in the "Carbon Dioxide is killing us" throry:

Now the establishment science story is that average TMin has been increasing over time, while average TMax has not been increasing much (looking at adjusted data).  Left unexplained is how increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases average low temperatures while not increasing average high temperatures.  Also left unexplained is how increasing average low temperatures (without increasing average high temperatures) will lead to ecological disaster.  Maybe it could, but it's not at all obvious how this would happen.

It's also not explained why Urban Heat Island (UHI) doesn't explain the higher average low temperatures (TMin).  UHI is where a weather station that used to be in a nice grassy field is now in the middle of an airport, surrounded by tarmac and blasted with jetwash.  It's surprising just how many weather stations are not sited to accurate data collection norms - only 8% of GCHN stations are accurate withing 1°C.

The data are a mess - you might even say they are a hot mess.

And now we come to the most pointed argument against Dr. Weatherman's article - Science As Practiced Today Is Very Sick.  The scientists themselves have repeatedly shown themselves to be less than trustworthy.  Dr. Weatherman really needs to deal with the Climategate scandal but is unlikely to touch the subject.  The Layman's Guide post above gives an overview of the scandal:

In November 2009,  someone posted 61 MB of emails, computer program code, and climate data from Hadley servers to an FTP server on the Internet.  One of the most notorious of the emails in this release was from Dr. Jones, and contained the following:

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

Let's unpack this so you understand each piece.  "Mike" refers to Dr. Michael Mann (of the Hockey Stick graph fame).  "Nature" refers to Nature Magazine, one of (perhaps the) most  prestigious scientific journals.  More specifically, it refers to an article that they published, written by Dr. Mann in which he had a temperature reconstruction.  There is a huge amount of dispute over what "trick" means - skeptics allege sleight of hand while Mann said it just referred to a mathematical technique.  So what was the trick?

Dr. Mann's data sets contained many different proxy series.  This is actually a good thing, because you want confirmation of results from different places and types of proxies (say, including ice cores, tree rings, and corals will probably be more reliable than just using tree rings).  Mann's "trick" (call it a mathematical technique if you want) was to remove all proxy data later than 1960 and replace it with measured temperature data.  The result was a hockey stick shaped temperature graph.  This is what Dr. Jones did in the paper referred to in his email.

The $100,000 question is: why go to the trouble to do this if you have proxy data from 1960 up to the present?  Why replace 50 years of perfectly good data?

Hide the decline.

There is an youtube lecture where Dr. Richard Mueller from Berkeley covers what Jones did and why Mueller won't read any more of Jones' scientific papers.  Dr. Weatherman contributes to the IPCC Assessment Reports so she almost certainly knows Jones personally.  She will know Mueller at least by reputation.  But she is a beneficiary of Government funding, running a department at the University of Colorado.  Which leads us directly to the next - and last - post of mine to gloss: "It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist."

Perhaps the single dumbest argument presented in support of Global Warming is that "the scientific consensus is that it's true".  Translation: all the cool kids do it.  Translation [2]: my scientist is red hot; your scientist ain't doodly-squat.  Oooooh kaaaay.

Of course it's as untrue as it is stupid. And so we get the "you're not qualified"/"we only look at peer-reviewed scientists" expulsion of the Heretics, as the Establishment desperately tries to keep control of the debate.

That's breaking down.  Hal Lewis is one of the Senior Statesmen of American Physics.  He's been a member of the American Physical Society for 67 years (!).

...

Hal Lewis thinks that Global Warming is an anti-scientific, money-grabbing scam by scientists, and says so in a brutal resignation letter sent to the president of the APS:

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

Lewis' letter is utterly damning, and cannot be dismissed as coming from a crank, or an amateur.  And in it he directly addresses the then President of the APS in a passage that must fit Dr. Weatherman's department like a glove:

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I would be much more impressed with climate scientists like Dr. Weatherman if they would address the (it must be said) stink of corruption at the heart of their field.  Or clean up their data.  Of course, as Lewis pointed out there are millions of dollars at stake.

So there you have it, Lou.  There's a lot of reading, but unlike Dr. Weatherman I show my work.  And unlike Dr. Weatherman, I don't say "trust me, I'm a scientist" when so many of her colleagues so clearly are not trustworthy.

Weather, not Climate - special Halloween edition

This is a scary Halloween post - scary for people who believe in Global Warming, anyway.  I've posted for years and years about how the temperature data is adjusted to show warming that is not seen in the recorded data.  I've also posted about how temperature records cannot be adjusted, and are an uncomfortable topic for global warmers to explain - for example, if world climate is getting hotter, why is the highest recorded temperature in the USA from 1913?

Well here is another example of that, from Halloween 100 years ago.  From the Wikipedia article about the town of Marble Bar, Australia:

The town set a world record of most consecutive days of 100 °F (37.8 °C) or above, during a period of 160 days from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924.

That's almost half a year over 100 °F.  you'd think that if the world were warming you would see a longer consecutive hot streak, but you don't.  So this must be an example of weather, not climate.  You remember the difference, don't you?

Weather: a local condition unrelated to global climate.

Climate: anything that proves Global Warming.

Where has all the warming gone?

We are told that the reason that we don't see new record high temperatures despite the global climate getting hotter is that the winters are getting warmer while the summers are not.  Unfortunately for this explanation, this doesn't seem to be the case. Tokyo winters have been getting colder for 40 years: 

Tokyo winters have been cooling since 1984

With all the news about global warming, surely the decades long winter-trend for the city of Tokyo must be one of strong warming. Yet, looking at the mean DJF winter temperature trend for Tokyo going back 39 years using the untampered data from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), we see a trend that has to surprise the global warming bedwetting dolts:

Data source: JMA. 

I seem to be repeating this message - I posted about this last year.  But "hottest year ever!"  Yawn.

Stuff nobody cares about

These days "I believe the science" really means "I believe the science that my team endorses".  I've mostly stopped posting much about climate science because people don't care about the actual, you know, science.  It's devolved into tribal posturing.

But here is a grab bag from the past few months of actual, you know, climate science.

The impact of urbanization on global temperature

While we all know that urban areas are warmer than rural areas, especially at night and during the summer, does an increase in urbanization lead to spurious warming at the GHCN stations that experienced growth (which is the majority of them)?

And, even if it did, does the homogenization procedure NOAA uses to correct for spurious temperature effects remove (even partially) urban heat island (UHI) effects on reported temperature trends?

John Christy and I have been examining these questions by comparing the GHCN temperature dataset (both unadjusted and adjusted [homogenized] versions) to these Landsat-based measurements of human settlement structures, which I will just call “urbanization”.

...

NOAA’s homogenization produces a change in most of the station temperature trends. If I compute the average homogenization-induced change in trends in various categories of station growth in urbanization, we should see a negative trend adjustment associated with positive urbanization growth, right?

But just the opposite happens.

[Borepatch comments]  So the science as performed today takes a known problem of urbanization induced (false) temperature rise and corrects it so that it rises even more.  But remember, kids - the arctic will be ice-free by 2013.  Just ask Al Gore.

Changing how you measure record temperatures to get more record temperatures

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) regularly claims new record hot days, and Australian scientist report that heat records are now 12 times more likely than cold ones. But how reliable – how verifiable – are the new records?

I have been trying for five years to verify the claim that the 23 September 2017 at Mildura was the hottest September day ever recorded in Victoria. According to media reporting at that time, it was the hottest September day all the way-back to 1889 when records first began. Except that back then, back in September 1889, maximum temperatures were recorded at Mildura with a mercury thermometer. Now they are recorded with a temperature probe that is more sensitive to fluctuations in temperature and can thus potentially record warmer for the same weather.

In the absence of any other influences, an instrument with a faster response time [temperature probe] will tend to record higher maximum and lower minimum temperatures than an instrument with a slower response time [mercury thermometer]. This is most clearly manifested as an increase in the mean diurnal range. At most locations, particularly in arid regions, it will also result in a slight increase in mean temperatures, as short-term fluctuations oftemperature are generally larger during the day than overnight.” Research Report No. 032, by Blair Trewin, BoM, October 2018, page 21.

To standardise recordings from temperature probes with mercury thermometers, one-second readings from probes are normally averaged over one minute – or batches of ten second readings are averaged and then averaged again over one minute. That is the world-wide standard to ensure recordings from temperature probes are comparable with recordings from mercury thermometers. But the Australian Bureau of Meteorology do not do this, instead they take one-second instantaneous readings and then enter the highest of these one-second spot readings for any given 24-hour period as the official maximum temperature for that day.

[Borepatch comments] You will no doubt be shocked to learn that with all these new record high temperatures, Sydney has just experienced the longest consecutive number of days with a high temperature reading below 30 degrees Celsius in 130 years.  And remember, the highest temperature ever recorded in the USA was in 1913.  Also remember that 14 States set high temperature records (that stand to this day) in the summer of 1936.  That was 87 years ago.

That's some Top Shelf mockery, right there

Seen at Western Rifle Shooters:

Also:

This is also pretty effective culture war insurgency.  Consider:

1. It's funny, and not just to us Deplorables.
2. The humor comes from an obvious core of B.S., recognized even by non-Deplorables.
3. It forces people to consider that the same sort of weak arguments are used for gun control.

Full marks for effective mockery.

[stands]

[clap] [clap] [clap]

I'm tempted to make one up myself, along the lines of "You can have my Viking Range when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands!"

 

Just how wrong are the Climate Temperature models?

I've written for years and years about how the Climate Temperature Models seem hopelessly broken. So just how broken are they?  This broken:

A major survey into the accuracy of climate models has found that almost all the past temperature forecasts between 1980-2021 were excessive compared with accurate satellite measurements. The findings were recently published by Professor Nicola Scafetta, a physicist from the University of Naples. He attributes the inaccuracies to a limited understanding of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS), the number of degrees centigrade the Earth’s temperature will rise with a doubling of carbon dioxide.

File this under "prediction is hard, especially about the future".  Gosh, it almost seems like the climate system is massively chaotic and difficult to understand, or something ...

The paper groups dozens of models used in the CMIP 6 reference model into low, medium, and high ECS.  Here are the four major temperature databases and their results against the three groupings:

The black lines are the actual temperatures; the yellow bands are the model's predicted temperatures. Notice that the actual temperatures have diverged outside the yellow predicted ranges (i.e. recorded actual temperatures are lower than predicted for all temperature data bases and all model groups). Long time readers know that I prefer the UAH satellite temperature record because (a) it is truly global and (b) it is only minimally adjusted.  I have been vocal for a long time that adjustments to the other temperature records are excessive, and may be wildly excessive.

Let me emphasize here that the models have been wrong for 40 years.

There is another paper just out that corroborates Prof. Scafetta's results.  In other words, the accepted scientific consensus for ECS is out of whack.  Gosh, it seems like "Consensus Science" doesn't understand things as well as they tell us they do.

The Scientific Dark Age

I ran across this photograph somewhere in the last couple of weeks:

It was from the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927.  IIRC, 16 of these gentlemen and one lady received Nobel Prizes.  There are only 29 people in the photograph, so that's a 58% Nobel rate.  I suspect that's a world record for a scientific conference.

Aesop says that we are in a Scientific Dark Age,* and I agree.  He says we may have been in it for a couple hundred years, and that's where our opinions part.  I think that it's been since July, 1969.

I am currently reading Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feinman.  Feynman will need no introduction here, but for those unfamiliar with him he worked on the Manhattan Project and then taught Physics at Princeton for Decades.  He was the guy on the Space Shuttle Challenger Investigation Committee who showed that O-Rings lost their ability to seal pipes when they were cold.

He had a fascinating career - one of the world's greatest scientific minds, he rubbed shoulders with the rest of the world's greatest scientific minds.  One theme that continually comes out in his memoir is a passion to question why things work the way they do.  He independently derived methods of solving mathematical problems that in some case were superior to the "Official" ones.  His was a strict allegiance to experimental proof:

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.

This is from the 1960s.  That's gone now.  Exhibit A for the Prosecution is my last post's reference to the chief of CERN - the world's most prestigious physics lab - and his command to his staff not to comment on the Svensmark experiment (because it calls into question the Scientific Orthodoxy of Global Warming).  Exhibit B is the fact that for multiple reasons the climate databases are "seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted." Exhibit C is how NASA administrators are prohibiting NASA scientists from publishing papers that run against current Global Warming orthodoxy.  There are many more examples of this in yesterday's post, and many, many more (over 500, in fact) here.

So something happened between July 1969 and today.  Back then we were able to make atomic bombs, invent integrated circuits, and land a man on the moon.  Now it's arguments over string theory and why we can't detect more "Dark Matter".

Feynman could have told people about that last one.  I suspect that today they wouldn't listen, because they don't want to listen.  Careers will be lost if the scientific grant gravy train gets upended.

And the funniest part?  That gravy train is controlled by the same Government Leviathan that challenged the scientific community to land a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.

Mission accomplished.  But what to then do with the gravy train?  Well, never let a gravy train go to waste.  And thus the beginning of the Scientific Dark Age dates to July 1969.  It sure as shootin' hadn't started when the 1927 Solvay Conference was fresh in the rear view mirror.  It took the Feb.Gov to royally screw up Science.

They're still having physics conferences at Solvay.  There's a table here showing who chaired each conference.  After Oppenheimer in 1964, the roster lists a bunch of nobodies.

* Interestingly, the picture that appears at the top of Aesop's post is of Percival Lowell in his Flagstaff observatory.  Lowell is best known for his maps of the Canals of Mars, so this shows that the scientific rot had set in well before 1969.

 

The biggest science story in decades is being swept under the carpet

I was going to post about this a couple of months ago, but the story is getting even more interesting.  The new James Webb Space Telescope is showing images of the most distant galaxies ever seen, and it is raising questions on basic, fundamental theories about the universe - most notably, the Big Bang theory.

Plasma physicist Eric Lerner (a long time questioner of the Big Bang theory) lays out the case for the prosecution:

It is not too complicated to explain why these too small, too smooth, too old and too numerous galaxies are completely incompatible with the Big Bang hypothesis. Let’s begin with “too small”. If the universe is expanding, a strange optical illusion must exist. Galaxies (or any other objects) in expanding space do not continue to look smaller and smaller with increasing distance.

Beyond a certain point, they start looking larger and larger. (This is because their light is supposed to have left them when they were closer to us.) This is in sharp contrast to ordinary, non-expanding space, where objects look smaller in proportion to their distance.

Put another way, the galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, assuming that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance.

Smaller and smaller is exactly what the JWST images show. Even galaxies with greater luminosity and mass than our own Milky Way galaxy appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in similar images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the new galaxies have redshifts which are also two to three times greater.

This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe, but it is just exactly what I and my colleague Riccardo Scarpa predicted based on a non-expanding universe, with redshift proportional to distance. Starting in 2014, we had already published results, based on HST images, that showed that galaxies with redshifts all the way up to 5 matched the expectations of non-expanding, ordinary space.

There's a lot more at the link, but this excerpt is long enough to give you the flavor.  Amusingly, Lerner links to a peer-reviewed paper on the subject: Panic! At the Disks: First Rest-frame Optical Observations of Galaxy Structure at z>3 with JWST in the SMACS 0723 Field

I love the first word in the title, although rather think that the authors used this with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

The wagons are being circled by the scientific establishment (which is what makes this story interesting to me).  Space.com has an article filled with the usual name calling: "pseudoscience", "disinformation", claims of "misused" and "out of context" quotes, "serial denier", "anti-science", and even "flat-earth".  The article quotes (at length) a guy who wrote a book called "How To Talk To A Science Denier".

Whew!  That's a lot of insults to pack into a single article.  I'm glad to see scientific discourse advanced!

Now I'm not an astrophysicist (although older brother is), so I don't know which is right - Big Bang or Non-expanding Universe.  Or maybe neither.  Who knows?

But the reaction to this challenge to "Scientific Orthodoxy" is fascinating.  And the science.com brings to mind that quote from Hamlet: Methink the Lady doth protest too much.  It also brings to mind two very old posts of mine.  In The Iron Law and the Bureaucratization of Science I write about the curious fact that scientific progress does not seem to be accelerating, despite hundreds (or thousands) of times more scientists and funding.  In it I posted a chart from Nigel Calder's blog (he founded and edited New Scientist magazine):

These are Calder's opinion but are a reasonable comparison.  It certainly does not seem like things are speeding up - certainly not by a factor of 100x.  There's a lot in my post of complaints by eminent scientists about suppression of views dangerous to the scientific establishment.  I encourage you to click through and read the whole post.  Remember, this is more than ten years old.  And think about the science.com article linked and all their name calling. 

This is not a one-off, a "black swan" event.  The scientific establishment has been doing this for a long, long time.  In Soviet Science, I wrote about how the head of CERN prohibited employees there from commenting on Svenmark's experiment (likely because it casts doubt on Global Warming theories).  In it, I point out the breakdown in the scientific method on display:

At this point, I must confess that I'm an old faht, getting my science education back in the 1970s, from teachers and professors who got theirs in the 1940s.  I was taught that the Scientific Method went something like this:

1. Observe something happening.
2. Formulate a testable hypothesis about what might be causing it.  
3. If your hypothesis isn't falsifiable (i.e. cannot be shown to be wrong), go back to 2.
4. Formulate a Null Hypothesis (likely alternative) for your hypothesis in 3.
5. Construct an experiment to test your hypothesis against the null hypothesis.
6. Perform the experiment, and document the results.
7. Explain which hypothesis was closer to matching the observed reality in 1, and why.

It seems that the head of CERN - one of the biggest scientific research organizations in the world - doesn't want his people to do that last step.  Everything else is OK (for now, at least), but that last one is right out.

You can read more about Svenmark's hypothesis and experiment here.  The scientific establishment seems to hate this theory, as it's so not helpful to the Global Warming position.  Unfortunately for them, it has been experimentally confirmed (see the link) - in great contrast to much of establishment climate science.

So what gives with all of this?  I mean, this is not the public image of cool, rational scientists advancing our understanding of the universe.  I wrote (again) at length about this a long time back in Science and the Cold Civil War.  The post has multiple examples of how the scientific research funding game is played.  The Climategate emails make an appearance here, as does the term "Saganized".  I know that I'm throwing a lot at you, but this is important as a description of the (dare we say it?) pettiness of the scientific establishment.  Physician, heal thyself.

Lastly (I can hear the cheers of relief) is Science as practiced today is very sick.  This seems pertinent as it lets us circle back to the both science.com article and Calder's wonderment at the slowdown of scientific advancement:

Developing new methodologies is harder than inventing new particles in the dozens, which is why they don’t like to hear my conclusions. Any change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this. It’s not institutional pressure that creates this resistance, it’s that scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts.

How long can they go on with this, you ask? How long can they keep on spinning theory-tales?

I am afraid there is nothing that can stop them. They review each other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences, they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the inside, it looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.

It also has what may be (but probably isn't) my first link to RetractionWatch.

So is the Big Bang theory right?  Maybe.  But as older brother told me long ago, the Scientific Method isn't replacing a falsehood with a truth, it's replacing a falsehood with a more subtle falsehood.  But the Big Bang theory is not the point here.  Rather, it's Physicists behaving badly:

The Queen Of The World and I loved that show, and a lot of the reason is in that clip.

So the issue is not whether the Big Bang theory is right or wrong, it's why won't the establishment allow actual scientific discussion of so many issues.  There are too many sacred cows (and gravy trains) at risk.

Oh, yeah - this has been going on a long, long time.  And even NASA scientists admit it.

Glossing the Climate Scientists

Back in the Middle Ages, books weren't printed (the printing press hadn't yet been invented).  Instead, they were laboriously copied by hand.  Monasteries were the chief place that this took place, and you can get a great overview of this in the very enjoyable How The Irish Saved Civilization.

One thing that the Monks would often do, especially on more complex books on theology or philosophy was to add short notes in the margins explaining the more impenetrable passages.  These little blurbs were called "glosses" and were essentially a reader's helper.  If you didn't have a teacher - if all you had was the book - then the gloss would provide a welcome overview to guide the reader to the point of the original book.

Reader Lou emailed:

Hi Borepatch,

I am a longtime reader, this is my first reach out.

Great blog, I learn a lot and it is on my daily read list.

Regarding AGW, I am a definite skeptic.  Though only semi-literate on the subject matter. I try to apply my generic engineer-trained, data-driven analytical approach to issues. 

I have read your posts on it (especially the ones from 2010 and 2017) and appreciate you taking these folks on.

I recently came across this article:

https://theconversation.com/the-science-everyone-needs-to-know-about-climate-change-in-6-charts-170556

My lack of command of the subject leaves me ill-equipped to critique or rebut. Would you be willing to look at it and unpack/rebut from your perspective?  I know you have already covered the fundamentals, it’s just these people never quit. And they misuse data to deceive folks.

Either way, thank you for all you are doing, please keep it up you have more positive impact than you may realize!

Thanks for the kind words, Lou.  I haven't posted on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) in quite some time because I think I've written everything I have to say on it.  And so while I won't do a line-by-line fisking of Dr. Weatherhead's article, I will gloss some of my older posts as to how they relate to her article.

We should start with the post that has a permanent sidebar in the upper right hand side of this blog: A Layman's Guide to the Science of Global Warming.  The discussion that is most pertinent to Dr. Weatherman's article is the bit on Carbon Dioxide and how weak a greenhouse gas it is.  Dr. Weatherman repeatedly refers to increasing carbon dioxide but completely skates by the fact that CO2 is saturated in Earth's atmosphere, at least as far as its heat capturing capacity.  The key passage from my old post is this:

The scientific consensus is that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in warming of around 1°C.  We've gone from around 280 parts per million (ppm) atmospheric  CO₂ to around 400 ppm an increase of about 50% over the last 100 years or so, so there should have been an increase of around half a degree.  So why do we hear all of this about how we are destroying the planet?  I mean, half a degree doesn't sound like much.

The next post of mine that is pertinent to Dr. Weatherman's article is How to create a consensus on Global Warming.  She points out in her article that climate data show that all continents are warming.  However, she does not address the very serious problems with adjustments to the data that inject a warming signal where none exists.  This is quite frankly the key problem in climate science: the raw temperature data (temperature readings as originally collected by the scientist many years ago) do not show warming, but the adjusted data (what is reported by scientists like Dr. Weatherman) shows considerable warming.  My post is very difficult to gloss because the information is so, well, shocking but this is the summary:

Let me say this explicitly: I used to believe that the planet was warming, and that this was likely due to natural (as opposed to man made) causes. Now I'm not sure that the planet is warming. The data do not show warming over the last 70 years, maybe longer.

If you only read one of my posts on global warming, this is the one.  It is information-dense and has a bunch of links to scientists who dissent from Dr. Weatherman's "consensus science" view.

A related post about non-adjusted temperature data is relevant.  Understanding Climate Data Made Easy discusses how record temperatures (you can't adjust them, amirite?) do not jive at all with the every-year-is-hotter message from Dr. Weatherman.  Here are the key bits:

So we see [only] 9 states (18% of the total) setting high records in the last 50 years. 41 states (82% of the total) haven't seen record high temperatures in the period we've been told is an accelerating and hotter climate.  You would expect to see a lot more states - another 15 or so setting recent high temperature records.  Weird, huh?  It's almost like if you remove the adjustments to the temperature data, you don't see accelerating warming.

In fact, we may be seeing the opposite.  If you look at record low temperatures you see a lot going on in the most recent years.  15 states have set record low temperatures in the last 50 years (once again ignoring dates listed with an asterisk which tells us the year that the previous low record was tied).  This is only 30% of the total, but that's basically twice as many as set record high temperatures.

July and August 1936 saw 14 States set record high temperatures that have not been surpassed in the subsequent 85 years.  This despite the repeated statements that last year was the hottest ever.  This post suggests a fundamental breakdown in the "Carbon Dioxide is killing us" throry:

Now the establishment science story is that average TMin has been increasing over time, while average TMax has not been increasing much (looking at adjusted data).  Left unexplained is how increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases average low temperatures while not increasing average high temperatures.  Also left unexplained is how increasing average low temperatures (without increasing average high temperatures) will lead to ecological disaster.  Maybe it could, but it's not at all obvious how this would happen.

It's also not explained why Urban Heat Island (UHI) doesn't explain the higher average low temperatures (TMin).  UHI is where a weather station that used to be in a nice grassy field is now in the middle of an airport, surrounded by tarmac and blasted with jetwash.  It's surprising just how many weather stations are not sited to accurate data collection norms - only 8% of GCHN stations are accurate withing 1°C.

The data are a mess - you might even say they are a hot mess.

And now we come to the most pointed argument against Dr. Weatherman's article - Science As Practiced Today Is Very Sick.  The scientists themselves have repeatedly shown themselves to be less than trustworthy.  Dr. Weatherman really needs to deal with the Climategate scandal but is unlikely to touch the subject.  The Layman's Guide post above gives an overview of the scandal:

In November 2009,  someone posted 61 MB of emails, computer program code, and climate data from Hadley servers to an FTP server on the Internet.  One of the most notorious of the emails in this release was from Dr. Jones, and contained the following:

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

Let's unpack this so you understand each piece.  "Mike" refers to Dr. Michael Mann (of the Hockey Stick graph fame).  "Nature" refers to Nature Magazine, one of (perhaps the) most  prestigious scientific journals.  More specifically, it refers to an article that they published, written by Dr. Mann in which he had a temperature reconstruction.  There is a huge amount of dispute over what "trick" means - skeptics allege sleight of hand while Mann said it just referred to a mathematical technique.  So what was the trick?

Dr. Mann's data sets contained many different proxy series.  This is actually a good thing, because you want confirmation of results from different places and types of proxies (say, including ice cores, tree rings, and corals will probably be more reliable than just using tree rings).  Mann's "trick" (call it a mathematical technique if you want) was to remove all proxy data later than 1960 and replace it with measured temperature data.  The result was a hockey stick shaped temperature graph.  This is what Dr. Jones did in the paper referred to in his email.

The $100,000 question is: why go to the trouble to do this if you have proxy data from 1960 up to the present?  Why replace 50 years of perfectly good data?

Hide the decline.

There is an youtube lecture where Dr. Richard Mueller from Berkeley covers what Jones did and why Mueller won't read any more of Jones' scientific papers.  Dr. Weatherman contributes to the IPCC Assessment Reports so she almost certainly knows Jones personally.  She will know Mueller at least by reputation.  But she is a beneficiary of Government funding, running a department at the University of Colorado.  Which leads us directly to the next - and last - post of mine to gloss: "It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist."

Perhaps the single dumbest argument presented in support of Global Warming is that "the scientific consensus is that it's true".  Translation: all the cool kids do it.  Translation [2]: my scientist is red hot; your scientist ain't doodly-squat.  Oooooh kaaaay.

Of course it's as untrue as it is stupid. And so we get the "you're not qualified"/"we only look at peer-reviewed scientists" expulsion of the Heretics, as the Establishment desperately tries to keep control of the debate.

That's breaking down.  Hal Lewis is one of the Senior Statesmen of American Physics.  He's been a member of the American Physical Society for 67 years (!).

...

Hal Lewis thinks that Global Warming is an anti-scientific, money-grabbing scam by scientists, and says so in a brutal resignation letter sent to the president of the APS:

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

Lewis' letter is utterly damning, and cannot be dismissed as coming from a crank, or an amateur.  And in it he directly addresses the then President of the APS in a passage that must fit Dr. Weatherman's department like a glove:

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I would be much more impressed with climate scientists like Dr. Weatherman if they would address the (it must be said) stink of corruption at the heart of their field.  Or clean up their data.  Of course, as Lewis pointed out there are millions of dollars at stake.

So there you have it, Lou.  There's a lot of reading, but unlike Dr. Weatherman I show my work.  And unlike Dr. Weatherman, I don't say "trust me, I'm a scientist" when so many of her colleagues so clearly are not trustworthy.