Understanding the problems with Climate Change Alarmism

If you believe the #FakeNews media all real scientists support Al Gore's apocalyptic view of the existential crisis we face if people other than Al don't stop producing CO2.

The reality is that the only consensus is that the earth is warming, how much is not agreed on, and that some portion, not necessarily even most of that warming, is due to human generated CO2

Of course consensus is meaningless in science.  Back in the 1930s only on geologist supported the idea of continental drift and even though there was an overwhelming consensus that he was wrong it turns out he was right.

So what are the actual facts?  Are there good reasons to doubt that we're facing an existential crisis?

The answer is yes; there are many good logically and scientifically valid reasons.

Here's a list of some of the arguments that go against the idea that we need to give up our freedoms and live in poverty to avert disaster:

1) Climate Alarmists don't believe what they say:  Climate Alarmists are all very big fans of the Paris Accords.  The Paris Accords allow China and India to massively increase their CO2 production for at least the next decade.  Currently China produces more CO2 each year than the US and the EU combined.

But if we're facing certain doom in 12 years, as AOC says, no sane person could support letting China and India massively increase the amount of CO2 they put in the air.

Hence either climate alarmists are stupid or they don't really believe that we're facing an existential or nearly existential crisis.

Odds are that they don't believe since they hardly ever critique China's abysmal pollution record.  Did you know that China puts 33 times the amount of plastic in the ocean than the US does and that the US puts less plastic in the ocean than North Korea?

2) The Pause:  Climate Alarmists spend years trying to explain away the fact that the earth's temperature wasn't increasing. Then suddenly just prior to a major environmental conference a group announced that the Pause wasn't real.

They did so not by analyzing new data but by "adjusting" existing data.  In order to get the world to appear to be warming they said that the oceans were warming.

We now, thanks to a whistleblower, that the way they did that was by trusting less reliable data over more reliable data.  There are two primary ways to measure the oceans temperature; buoys and ship engine intake water temperatures.

The ship data is less reliable for a variety of reasons including the fact that the ship impacts the temperature of its surroundings.

But the ship data showed the ocean warming while the buoy data did not.  So what did the scientists do? The made the buoy data conform to the ship data.  Not surprising given that they openly discussed that their study had to support global warming...err climate change in order for the upcoming conference to have a basis for declaring that action must be taken.

3) Without "corrections" there is no evidence for a significant warming trend.  If one examines the raw temperature record there is no sign of significant warming. However the plots you see all used "corrected" data.  Interestingly the data is often "corrected" stealthily.

More importantly it turns out the "corrections" are likely all wrong.

The primary factor that has to be corrected for in surface temperature measurements over decades is the changing environment of the thermometers.  For example a thermometer that was in a grassy field in 1933 could now be in the middle of a concrete parking lot.  Concrete, asphalt, and buildings increase the temperature in their vicinity compared to grass and trees.

With the spreading of urban areas many of the temperature censors in the US have gone from rural areas to urban ones. Hence any correction would reduce current temperature readings to correct for the impact of concrete.

But when we examine the actual "corrections" that are applied we find that older temperatures are reduced and modern temperatures are increased. That's the exact opposite of what should be done.

However it's precisely what one would do if one wanted to create the impression of significant warming.

4) Data that doesn't need corrections doesn't show a significant warming trend.  Because of the issues related to correcting temperature data the NOAA established a new set of thermometers across America in 2005.  These new sensors were specifically located where there is no impact due to human construction.

Those sensors show no significant warming:

5) The "Hockey Stick" plot uses fudged data.  It turns out that the tree ring temperature proxy used in the HS plot show continued cooling after 1950. That conflicted with the message that the plot was supposed to send so it was excised.

That's not how science works; you don't simply hide data that doesn't support your hypothesis.

The fact that the tree ring data doesn't show any sudden temperature increase means one of two things; either the tree ring data isn't a good proxy for temperature which means the whole flat section of the plot is meaningless or the earth isn't warming.

Dendrochronologists have warned against using tree ring data as a temperature proxy because ring widths vary with a number of different parameters not just temperature.

Further we know that during the period the HS plot shows that the earth's temperature wasn't changing there were multiple periods when in fact the Earth warmed significantly.

The Climate Alarmists respond by saying that those increases were localized.  The problem with that is that the HC plot uses one tree as its only source for hundreds of years. If one tree can be considered a valid surrogate for the whole world then all of Europe and Greenland warming certainly can't simply be dismissed as a merely local effect.

6) The models aren't predicting the data:  The models didn't predict the Pause at all. But instead of saying the models assumptions are wrong Climate Alarmists simply said that there were mysterious but temporary forces at work that hid the inevitable heating.

That's not how science works.

But even ignoring the Pause the models show a significantly more rapid warming trend than the data does.

The reason the models do so is that they assume that it's not CO2 that is the driving factor but water vapor.  It turns out that CO2 is not that big of a greenhouse gas. The warming due to CO2 alone is fairly minor.  But the models assume that as CO2 goes up water vapor goes up and water vapor is a really powerful greenhouse gas.

But it turns out we're not seeing any increase in atmospheric water vapor so we shouldn't expect to see the greenhouse effect the models predict.  The data shows that in fact the models assumptions are wrong.

7) Climate Alarmists past predictions have all been wrong:  About 13 years ago Al Gore said we had 12 years to fix the problem or we'd be doomed. He's now extended that deadline.

The UN has said that we had till 2010 to fix global warming or whole nations will be wiped off the face of the earth.  Hasn't happened, isn't happening.

8) The rise of the oceans has been going on for centuries:  Long before human CO2 production became environmentally significant, according to climate alarmists, the oceans have been rising.

But in fact the rise has been steady for as long as we've been measuring it:

This isn't surprising given that we're coming out of a little ice age and we expect both warming and ocean level rise.

In fact the ocean depth has changed by huge amounts since the last ice age due to purely natural phenomena.

Oddly climate alarmist papers appear to be fudging the data.  This plot shows what a leading climate scientist from NASA and profound believer in climate change disaster showed as sea level rise in a 1982 paper and how in a 2019 NASA paper his data has all been moved up.  

Once again the data hasn't changed but the corrections have.  There's no other way to explain why the new analysis shows  significant ocean rise starting in the 1950s where the 1982 report showed no such thing.

9) Climate change is not causing more extreme weather events.  Here's a plot of Atlantic Hurricanes since 1851.  While there seems to be a short term increase near the present that increase is smaller than increases we see in the 19th century when human CO2 production, according to Climate Alarmists, wasn't significant enough to impact the climate.

Here's what the NOAA report says:

" there remains just a small nominally positive upward trend in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006. Statistical tests indicate that this trend is not significantly distinguishable from zero"

Yet Climate Alarmists and the media keep saying there have been more hurricanes in direct contradiction to the data.

There are a number of other ways to show that there is no scientific basis for declaring that there is an existential or near existential threat to humanity from human caused climate change.

But these few show why skepticism about claims that bring their authors lots of money and which enable politicians to increase their power over we the people isn't irrational.

Prior to the left latching onto the Green movement as a way to justify limiting human freedoms and transferring power to the government after the Communist dream had been debunked climate science was poorly funded and not considered an interesting scientific field.  

Now literally billions of dollars flow into the pockets of people who declare that the earth is melting due to evil mankind.

We know the politicians don't actually believe that since if they did Obama would have never bought ocean front property and they wouldn't have supported the Paris Accords.

It's a fair question to ask what's wrong about preparing for the worst. The answer is that Greens reject non-CO2 producing energy sources, like nuclear and hydro, that could actually be cost effective.  The much higher costs of solar and wind, when government subsidies are removed, is nothing less than a highly regressive tax on the poor.

The poor spend a much higher percentage of their income on energy than do the middle class or the rich. So drastically increasing energy costs hurts them significantly.

What can we say about the climate?

The Earth is warming as is expected because the current temperature is lower than the historical norms because we're coming out of an ice age.  There is no evidence the warming will cause any sort of catastrophic problems in the next 100 years.

It's unclear what fraction of the warming is due to human activity but it's clearly not the driver.

The climate models are all wrong and their assumptions need to be changed.

It's good to spend time and money investigating the climate and looking for how we should deal with what warming there is because the oceans are rising just not due to mankind.

But it's clearly wrong to panic and advocate massive government programs and reduced human quality of life and freedoms based on the data we have today.