Another week, another climate ‘fact check’ for the Daily Sceptic. Four in the last month – not a single fact proved wrong, but plenty of gripes from green activists about scientific interpretations. Maybe it is time for an appearance by the Monty Python Colonel, who frequently interrupted sketches by claiming they were “too silly”.
Virginia-based academic public relations company Newswise has claimed our June 10th article titled “Net Zero Shock: Carbon Dioxide Rises AFTER Temperature Increases, Scientists Find”, was “mostly false”. The Newswise story was written by Editor-in Chief Craig Jones and Texas-based professor of atmospheric sciences Andrew Dessler. Professor Dessler is a man of considerable scientific certitude, and has been described as the “alarmist’s alarmist”.
In our article, we reported that two climate science professors, Demetris Koutsoyiannis and Zbigniew Kundzewicz, sequenced the changes in temperatures and carbon dioxide growth rates from 1980 to 2019 from widely available sources, and discovered that CO2 values lagged temperature by about six months. The scientists made the obvious point that in attempting to prove causality by stating that increases in temperature are the result of human-caused CO2, cause cannot lag effect. I went on to note that other scientists had struggled to find evidence that CO2 was the global climate thermostat knob. In 2015, Professor Ole Humlum from the University of Oslo found similar lags in the recent record. In addition, the Vostock Ice Core, providing 422,766 years of Antarctic snow accumulation, showed that CO2 lagged the onset of glaciations by several thousands of years. Finally, a wider reconstruction of CO2 and temperature going back 600 million years to the start of life on Earth showed few correlations between the two.
Of course, nobody denies that CO2 has warming properties in the atmosphere. The debate within science over the human contribution to warming, now largely ignored, if not actually demonised by mainstream media, is over the extent. Some scientists say it is a lot, many others say it is negligible. The notion that the matter is ‘settled’ is little more than a political corruption of the scientific process.
Professor Dessler kicks off with the statement that the argument is “nonsense”. He says the scientific community is “100% sure that the increase in CO2 we see in the atmosphere is from the combustion of fossil fuels (with a contribution from land-use changes)”. Of course it depends how Dessler defines “land-use”. If he is only talking about peat bogs and building skyscrapers, he is plain wrong. If he includes the 96% of C02 that arises naturally from the planet as oceans outgas, volcanoes emit and animal and plant life evolves, he is stating the obvious.
This conclusion (whatever it is) is said to be supported by several lines of evidence. “First, for the past half century, each year’s increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been on average 44% of what humans released into the atmosphere in that same year. Thus, when humans were emitting smaller amounts of carbon dioxide in the 1960s, atmospheric carbon dioxide was increasing at a slower rate than when humans were dumping large amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as we are today.”
As with Dessler’s opening remarks, it is a little difficult to know what he is writing about. The sentence producing the 44% figure presumably relates to the 3-4% of CO2 that humans release into the atmosphere. If, as many distinguished scientists suggest, the gentle 1°C increase in global temperatures that has occurred over 200 years is largely a natural response after the lifting of the so-called mini ice age, most of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere would have arisen from natural causes, as rising temperatures trigger natural CO2 release. So far as references to the 1960s are concerned, it is always interesting to point out that CO2 was rising during this period, as temperatures were briefly falling.
Dessler is a keen supporter of every command-and-control green deal and Net Zero project going. If we don’t take action, warming up to 9°F (5°C) is as “certain as death and taxes”, he claims. Scientists are said to be “certain” that humans are the cause of climate change. Such absolute certitude is of course rare in scientists, although not, it might be noted, in green activists. Recently he informs us that his work had shifted towards the “intersection of climate change and human society”. If he gets his way and removes fossil fuel from the world economy (about 80% of current energy supply) within less than 30 years, he must be hoping that he can stop nature in its tracks, and the 96% of CO2 still being emitted will co-operate with his grand designs.
Activist scientists often claim that carbon isotope ‘finger printing’ proves the recent increases in atmospheric CO2 arises from fossil fuel. Dessler notes: “Scientists measuring the composition of the increasing CO2 in the atmosphere find it matches the isotopic composition of fossil fuels.”
Again, one might wish for a little more precision in Dessler’s prose. Presumably he is not referring to all the CO2 entering the atmosphere, just the 4% produced by humans. The isotope evidence – of carbon, again one must presume, not fossil fuels – is interesting, and needless to say the science on the matter is not settled. The carbon in living matter has a slightly higher proportion of 12C isotope, and when burnt it is said to slightly alter the balance of other atmospheric carbon isotopes. But a recent study by a team of scientists at the University of Massachusetts led by Professor Kenneth Skrable found that the claims of the dominance of anthropogenic fossil fuel in the isotope record had involved the “misuse” of statistics to validate the suggestions. The scientists concluded that the amount of CO2 released by fossil fuel burning between 1750 and 2018 was “much too low to be the cause of global warming”.
The Daily Sceptic welcomes debate all on scientific matters, including climate change. But the recent flurry of ‘fact checking’ the subject is composed of little more than asserting ‘your facts are false or misleading’ and ‘my opinion is right’.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Great stuff. Thank you for all the good work.
For me, as this article also implies, the jury is out on the contribution of humans to climate change. One thing in the article made me raise an eyebrow however, and that was “Of course, nobody denies that CO2 has warming properties in the atmosphere.”. Surely if temp. rise causes CO2 rise, and CO2 causes temp. rise, then temp. rise would be self-feeding? Anyone?
Global warming alarmism relies on the idea of assumed ‘feedbacks’ (such as increased atmospheric water vapour, outgassing of trapped methane from permafrost etc.) to enhance the small warming effect of CO2. That despite far higher historical levels of CO2, the world hasn’t experienced runaway warming, is one of the main reasons these feedbacks are unlikely to positive, if they exist as simple ‘feedbacks’ at all.
Homeostasis is the name of the game…
“Of course, nobody denies that CO2 has warming properties in the atmosphere.”.
I do.
Utter BS!
It’s interesting to see figures like Dessler reveal their true political colours now they feel secure that politicians, politically colonised institutions and corporations are on board, seeing the great potential for wealth, status and influence in controlling a cowed, distracted public. All means justify the ends.
It’s worth keeping in mind that, as a result of short wave solar radiation being absorbed by the ground, re-emitted as long wave infra red radiation, and a portion of that being reflected back to the ground by a layer of greenhouse gasses (including water vapour), the direct effect of carbon dioxide is generally agreed to be around a trivial 1 degree Celsius per doubling. Global warming (sorry, ‘climate’) catastrophism depends on the idea of feedbacks – that this small warming is claimed to cause an increase in other factors that enhance this warming (including increased water vapour which is 100x more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2, but short lived in the atmosphere).
There is no empirical evidence outside of noise for the dire warming effects of these posited feedbacks – even in the face of the obvious fact that the effect of natural feedbacks must be net negative (if ‘feedbacks’ at all) or we wouldn’t be around to talk about it. This means that ‘the science’, must be entirely derived from the average of the predicted global future temperature from a multitude of models.
Global, because no computer model has the ability to predict temperatures on an even roughly regional basis, let alone the timing and frequency of El Nino / La Nina events, which undoubtedly have the most profound effect on global and regional climate of any phenomena. Let’s leave aside obvious problems with this.
Why an ensemble of models? There’s obviously validity in running one model repeatedly with the same parameters in order to study variation and similarity between the runs. If you spot a repeating pattern, you might be on to something. This is how the weather is forecast (though only accurate to within a few days).
Claiming that the averaged results of dozens of models – all with different parameters – have predictive power though? It reminds me of a Derren Brown show a few years ago where he was able to ‘successfully’ predict the national lottery numbers. The act concluded with a fake documentary showing how it was done. He claimed to harness the latent psychic ability of a large group of people, with the idea that the tiny bias towards precognition in an individual would be amplified by the group. The pool of people chose random numbers (while meditating or something), and the recurring numbers would be chosen for the lottery draw prediction. It was all obvious nonsense, and no more nonsense than claiming an ensemble of computer models, all with some shared baseline assumptions (with emphasis on that word), but different parameters can accurately predict future temperatures.
Even worse, imagine if Derren Brown was wrong in his prediction, so was able to go back, cull any contributions that were wildly out, then repeat his ‘experiment’. It’s easy if you present the average of a model ensemble to cull those that don’t conform to your expectations. You can justify it to yourself by claiming that there’s obviously something wrong with the model, when there’s no future ‘ground truth’ to compare it with. This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is wrong with basing climatic predictions (and pretty much every cargo-cult science paper covering everything from glaciation to butterfly populations to global conflict) on the output of models.
The other option to give your modelled garbage the appearance of validity is to try to game the temperature records to match your model predictions. Have you ever seen a comparison of the different revisions of historical surface temperature records over the past three decades? These are measurements that were taken (and mostly compiled by the GHCN) with a reasonable and increasing degree of accuracy for 140 years, yet they have been repeatedly changed over time by the organisation to match the narrative derived from computer simulations, erasing notable warm peaks and extremes in the 20th century, to create a homogenised, monotonically increasing curve (not necessarily to increase the overall temperature trend, as some sceptics claim). Justifications used for this meddling are as cherry picked as the data used to compile the records.
This comment is getting too long to go into meddling with the historical surface temperature record, but it’s well worth anyone with a sceptical mind to look into the methods used to doctor the presented data via homogenisation.
Going back to the original point – given the agreed effect of CO2 is utterly swamped by a huge range of other variables – including cloud cover, regardless of its source, there is no reason to be alarmed.
Long, but interesting. As a keen amateur gardener, I’m well aware of the variation between years across a range of different factors, weather wise. Cloud cover is one of them. As it happens, I keep a record of the performance of some kit on my house, to wit solar PV. For the last five years, it’s presented as a graph. In the main, it’s cloud cover that influences it, although at higher temperatures the system’s efficiency declines a bit. Solar PV panel efficiency goes down as their surface temperature rises.
The test I’d like to see is to load these models with data only up to 1992, then run them to see where they predict where we’d be today. Anyone think they’d get within 5%.?
The use of models to ‘prove’ something is always wrong as assumptions are made for the parameters to be used, not empirical data. This leads to the well known 1st principle of computing – GIGO. The economist J K Galbraith summed it up perfectly: “There are two types of forecaster, those who are wrong and those who don’t know they are wrong”.
I’ve heard people who claim to be involved in climate modelling argue that their models cannot be tuned because they’re based on physical interactions. They seem to have become impervious to the reality that factors determining the behaviour of a model – no matter how powerful the computer running it – must necessarily be a gross abstraction of physics. The fact that models can only simulate the rough interaction of chunks (grid cells) of atmosphere miles wide; that the errors in interaction between these cells must be compensated for with fudged numbers to prevent the models spinning out of control; that they can barely model the vertical interaction of cells (if at all) essential for reproducing factors like air convection; that fudging factors or continual resetting need to be carried out to prevent small deviations (feedbacks within the model) spinning out of control over a matter of modelled days and months; that in order to give the appearance of accurately ‘hindcasting’ past temperatures, data fed in to create ‘initial conditions’ bears no relationship to reality (see hugely exaggerated volcanic effects); the fact that there are an infinite number of physical ‘fudge factors’ that can be drawn on or ignored to make a model tell the story you want; the fact that much of the data necessary for modelling the real world, such as atmospheric effects and quantity of Ozone, has only been collected for a relatively short time; the fact that circularly, a key input of models is a corrupted surface temperature record; and the fact that the whole thing is patently an exercise in post-hoc reasoning – the epitome of the barn door fallacy – shows that climate modelling is not in any way a branch of ‘science’, but a money laundering scheme whose critical component is a cabal of computer programmers and administrators grown fat on government grants and hubris.
Thank you! Another breath of fresh air. It’s like I took a deep breath.
We know that our politiciasns don’t believe there’s a climate crtisis: their policy of mass immigration from lower-emission countries is all the evidence we need.
Eemian was two to three degrees Centigrade warmer than now.
CO2 much lower.
There is no formal proof of what is a very simple hypothesis – CO2 & CO2 alone controls temperature.
Of course, REAL science demands the NULL HYPOTHESIS must be disproved.
This WRT climate, is that natural variability determines climate.
This is not been proved to be false.
It’s a scam. It’s the Century of Scams
It would be good if down tickers explained their reason. I guess it’s the same as climate “scientists” refusing to debate with sceptics. Scaredy cats…
In a Court case brought by a parent concerned by the misinformation in Al Gore’s film shown to his child at school, the judge ruled that there were 9 false claims made in the film.
One concerned a graphic over thousands of years purporting to show CO2 levels rising ahead of and correlating with increase in global temperature and therefore causing them.
The judge accepted evidence and ruled that the graphic misrepresented the data and that in fact CO2 increase followed temperature increases.
As a politician, AL Gore’s net worth was worth 1.5 million. Today his net worth is over 300 million, plus he has a Nobel Prize. That alone tells you all you need to know about the causes of climate change.
Been cooling for 7k years. Facts, aren’t they a BLOODY nuisance
BTW, the pattern of this interstadial mirrors the preceding three
Rapid warming
Gradual cooling, interspersed with warm periods, each of which is cooler than the preceding one.
CO2 levels over time. Sorry, climate loonies…
Can we find out whose payroll Professor Dessler is on? Climate change lies must be challenged urgently. It’s been allowed to become a given and if it’s not attacked and dismantled quickly it will become the religion we will all be forced to live under.
Is this component – geoengineering, i.e. if true, another case of problem – reaction – solution – something anyone here has evaluated for credibility?
https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/geoengineering-a-chronicle-of-indictment/
If Dessler is against you then that is a badge of honour for you. Keep up the good work
Perhaps you will report on chem trails over the Uk? Devon has daily chem trails. Anyone else witnessing a decrease in sunshine lack of rain? We are unable to grow crops without sun and rain, our bodies will not make Vit D without sun, life as we know it will extinguish. Geo engineering is alive and damaging our lives. Any pilots witnessing the chem trails?
Nicely written JB75. The trouble is, is anyone outside listening?
Logic doesn’t apply. Physics has no traction. Geology is ignored.
Let us try shame and ridicule. E10 is burning crops. That is evil. “Carbon” is carbon dioxide which plants turn into carbohydrates, i.e. food. Cutting carbon is cutting food. That is shameful. CO2 follows temperature so cannot drive climate. Saying effect is cause is ridiculous.
Very great discussion. Thank you for the sanity.
Itt is estimated the climate change industry is now worth almost a trillion dollars a year, all funded with rich western countries tax dollars. Until this money is stopped this movement will continue to grow unabated. The climate change movement only occurs in rich western countries for a reason.