Archive for the 'Climate change' Category

Published by paulmacrae on 25 Jan 2024

‘Climate science’ is ‘post-normal’ science, not traditional science, so how can ‘the science’ be ‘settled’?

Claims that ‘the science has spoken’ and ‘the science is settled’ are based on the false idea that climate scientists follow the same scientific standards as traditional scientists. They don’t

By Paul MacRae, January 22, 2024

Those who dare to question or criticize the apocalyptic claims of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (“if we keep adding carbon to the atmosphere we’re all gonna fry,” basically) are told “the science is settled” or “the science has spoken.”

We’re told “the science” is the product of a “consensus” of more than 2,000 climate scientists who contribute to the IPCC’s reports; and we’re told this “consensus” is not to be questioned by non-scientists or even scientists from other disciplines because, again, the science is “settled.” Anyone who says otherwise is a “climate denier.” End of story.

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Published by paulmacrae on 25 Jun 2014

University of Victoria petition based on misinformation

The following is an opinion article sent to the Victoria Times Colonist on March 14, 2014. It was initially rejected by the TC’s editorial page editors (as have all my opeds over the past few years, even though I used to work there on the editorial page), then accepted, a month later, by the editor. By that time the issue was stale and I didn’t resubmit. I’m told the TC is now more willing to accept opinion articles from climate skeptics than it has been in the past, and I hope skeptics will begin to submit opinion articles critical of the “consensus”.

A student-led open letter to the University of Victoria is asking the university to divest itself of its fossil-fuel investments. “The science is clear,” the letter says. “Anthropogenic carbon emissions are causing rapid climate change worldwide.”

This is a bad idea for many reasons, but here are four reasons why the university should reject this proposal.

1. For a start, the student letter is based on inaccurate information. “Rapid climate change” is currently not happening worldwide, and hasn’t for at least the past 15 years. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledges the reduced rate of warming in its latest report: “The rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998–2012; 0.05°C per decade) … is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012; 0.12 °C per decade).”[1]

That is, the actual, observed warming over the past 15 years, far from being “rapid,” is less than half of the warming trend from 1951. And 0.05°C of warming is so small it can only be detected by instruments. Continue Reading »

Published by paulmacrae on 10 Aug 2013

University of Victoria promotes climate alarmism

University of Victoria home page raises fears of runaway greenhouse

“Runaway greenhouse easier than previously thought,” shouts a headline on the University of Victoria home page in August. A sidebar headline asks: “Is Earth the next Venus?” With pictures of belching smokestacks, the clear implication is that human carbon emissions are going to create this runaway greenhouse.

The home page text reads: “UVic researcher Colin Goldblatt (School of Earth and Ocean Sciences) has found that the amount of solar energy the Earth now receives could trigger the greenhouse effect, where the planet would be sterilized and left with an atmosphere like that of Venus.” Scary!

Under a “Read More” link is short summary of Dr. Goldblatt’s research paper, published in Nature Geoscience. While the headline this time is more restrained—“Runaway greenhouse effect possible but difficult”—the first paragraph rather breathlessly announces that a runaway greenhouse effect would be “easier” to trigger than was previously believed. Yikes!

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Published by paulmacrae on 20 Jul 2012

Back to the Future: Paradise Lost, or Paradise Regained?

By Paul MacRae

In June, a NASA climate study announced that the warm middle Miocene era, about 16 million years ago, had carbon dioxide levels of 400 to 600 parts per million. The coasts of Antarctica were ice-free in summer, with summer temperatures 11° Celsius warmer than today. The study concluded that today’s CO2 level of 393 ppm was the highest, therefore, in millions of years, and could go to Miocene levels by the end of the century[1]. It was implied, although not directly stated, that readers should react with horror.

A UCLA team, writing in Science, had already pushed the Miocene button in 2009, claiming: “The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today [15 million years ago, again the mid-Miocene]—and were sustained at those levels—global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit 1 higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland.”[2] Back to the Miocene! Scary!

James Hansen, the alarmist head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), regularly refers to past eras as a warning of the climate catastrophes that could occur today. For example, in 2011 Hansen warned: “[An increase of] two degrees Celsius is guaranteed disaster…. It is equivalent to the early Pliocene epoch [between 5.5 and 2.5 million years ago] when the sea level was 25m (75 feet) higher.” [4] Back to the early Pliocene! Horror!

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  1. 7-5.5°C

Published by paulmacrae on 01 May 2012

Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink

By Paul MacRae

A while ago, I received an email from a friend who asked:

How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. …  Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?

The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, there are many such cases, both within and outside climate science. In fact, the graveyard of science is littered with the bones of theories that were once thought “certain” (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others). Science progresses by the overturning of theories once thought “certain.”

And so, Carl Sagan has written: “Even a succession of professional scientists—including famous astronomers who had made other discoveries that are confirmed and now justly celebrated—can make serious, even profound errors in pattern recognition.”[1] There is no reason to believe that climate scientists (alarmist or skeptic) are exempt from this possibility.

That leaves the first question, which is how so many “respected, competitive, independent science folks [could] be so wrong” about the causes and dangers of global warming, assuming they are wrong. And here, I confess that after five years of research into climate fears, this question still baffles me.

 Climate certainty is baffling

It is not baffling that so many scientists believe humanity might be to blame for global warming. If carbon dioxide causes warming, additional CO2 should produce additional warming. But it’s baffling that alarmist climate scientists are so certain that additional carbon dioxide will produce a climate disaster, even though there is little empirical evidence to support this view, and much evidence against it, including a decade of non-warming. This dogmatism makes it clear, at least to those outside the alarmist climate paradigm, that something is very wrong with the state of “consensus” climate science.

There are many possible reasons for this scientific blindness, including sheer financial and career self-interest: scientists who don’t accept the alarmist paradigm will lose research grants and career doors will be closed to them. But one psychological diagnosis fits alarmist climate science like a glove: groupthink. With groupthink, we get the best explanation of “how can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong.” Continue Reading »

Published by paulmacrae on 16 Aug 2011

Climate science’s decade of deception

In order for a democracy to function well, the public needs to be honestly informed.

—James E. Hansen(1)

 

 

By Paul MacRae

A recent Rasmussen U.S. poll found that 69 per cent of 1,000 respondents believed it at least “somewhat likely” that climate scientists had falsified their research data to support the case for catastrophic human-caused global warming (CAGW). A full 40 per cent of respondents said falsification of research data was “very likely.” Only 22 per cent were confident that climate scientists wouldn’t falsify data.(2)

This is an astonishing poll result. Is it possible that, in their passion for the CAGW hypothesis, prominent climate scientists would knowingly fudge their data to mislead the public? Surely the 69 per cent in the Rasmussen poll were innocent dupes of what global-warming activists call the “denial industry.”

Unhappily, as I discovered during more than two years of research for my book False Alarm: Global Warming—Facts Versus Fears, the 69 per cent have got it right. Over the past decade alarmist climate scientists—including the top figures in the field—have been deliberately misleading the public on many climate issues. One might even say alarmist climate scientists have developed a culture of deception, a culture that is very clear in the “Climategate” emails.

Blatant dishonesty

 

Among many deceptions—too many to deal with here—one is particularly blatant. For more than a decade, the public has been bombarded by claims that the planet was not just warming but experiencing “accelerated”, “unequivocal,” “unprecedented” and “dangerous” warming. Yet the actual temperature record shows that during the past decade, on average, there has been little or no warming.

Only recently, faced with a gap between the climate reality  and alarmist theory that was too great to ignore, has official climate science begun to admit the facts to the public.

And so, in June, the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a peer-reviewed article that began: “Data for global surface temperature indicate little warming between 1998 and 2008. Furthermore, global surface temperature declines 0.2 °C between 2005 and 2008.”(3) (As we will see below, the cooling trend has continued past 2008 despite a warm, El Nino-influenced 2010.)

Early in August, a press release from the British Meteorological Office admitted there had been no warming—the Met delicately called it “a pause in the warming”—in the upper 700 metres of the world’s oceans since, get this, 2003.(4) Yet, for the past eight years, the Met has warned the public about a dangerous heating up of the oceans. Continue Reading »

Published by paulmacrae on 08 Jun 2011

Alarmist climate science and the principle of exclusion

In 1837, Charles Darwin presented a paper to the British Geological Society arguing that coral atolls were formed not on submerged volcanic craters, as argued by pioneering geologist Charles Lyell, but on the subsidence of mountain chains.

The problem, as Darwin saw it, was that corals can not live more than about 30 feet below the surface and therefore they could not have formed of themselves from the ocean floor. They needed a raised platform to build upon.

Charles Darwin as a young man

However, the volcanic crater hypothesis didn’t satisfy Darwin; he thought the atoll shape was too regular to have been the craters of old volcanos. There were no atoll formations on land, Darwin reasoned; why would there be such in the ocean? Therefore, Darwin proposed that corals were building upon eroded mountains, an hypothesis that, he wrote happily, “solves every difficulty.”

Darwin also argued, in 1839, that curious geological formations—what appeared to be parallel tracks—in the Glen Roy valley of Scotland were the result of an uplifted sea bed.

Darwin didn’t have any actual physical evidence to support these two hypotheses: he arrived at them deductively, through the principle of exclusion. A deductive conclusion is reached through theory—if X, then logically Y must be so—as opposed to induction, which builds a theory out of empirical data. The principle of exclusion works from the premise that “there is no other way of accounting for the phenomenon.”[1] Continue Reading »

Published by on 27 Nov 2010

The ‘accelerated’ warming that wasn’t….

In 2008, IPCC president Rajendra Pachauri told an audience in Australia:  “We’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate [than before].” Globe and Mail columnist Geoffrey Simpson wrote in 2009: “Climate-warming predictions of three or four years ago are already out of date. New science suggests an even faster warming than had been thought possible.” [italics added in both cases]

This week (Nov. 25, 2010), Vicky Pope of the British Meteorological Office announced: “There’s a very clear warming trend but it’s not as rapid as it was before.” [italics added] She said that while the average temperature had been rising at about 0.16 degrees per decade since the 1970s, the rate through the 2000s had been from 0.05 to 0.13 degrees.

The figure of 0.05 to 0.13° Celsius is also suspect. The figures from the Met Office’s Hadley Institute show nothing of the kind (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: HadCrut temperatures 2000-2010

Figure 1: HadCrut temperatures 2000-2010

The increase shown here is about .01°C. Extrapolated over the rest of the century, the temperature increase (aka “global warming” or “climate disruption”) would be .1°C, or one-sixth the .6°C increase claimed for the 20th century.

As part of her announcement, Pope also said the Met Office is planning to review the way it reports temperatures. It seems the temperature record isn’t showing the warming the Met expects and wants, so it’s planning to move the goal-posts, as it were, by arbitrarily raising the temperatures for the past decade.

There’s an easier way to go: Accept that the HadCrut temperatures are correct, or as correct as humanly possible, and that the last decade hasn’t warmed as predicted by the anthropogenci global warming hypothesis. Real scientists accept the facts when the facts don’t match the hypothesis; they don’t change their measurement of the data to conform to the hypothesis….

… As the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen’s personal fiefdom, does with its figures. Figure 2 is GISS’s estimate of temperatures over the past decade. The figures are clearly inflated (the technical term is “adjusted”) to match the hypothesis of increased, “accelerated” warming. In other words, the Met Office admits warming hasn’t accelerated, while exaggerating (“adjusting”) the tiny bit of warming that its thermometers said did occur, while GISS wildly exaggerates to get accelerated warming. Neither can be trusted.

Figure 2: GISS temperatures 2000-2010

Figure 2: GISS temperatures 2000-2010

Published by on 01 Nov 2010

Why the cooling of 1945-75? Response to a reader III

Two recent posts (here and here) have dealt with a comment by sTeve on my blog on NOAA’s claim that the temperature had increased by .2° Celsius in the past decade. As I showed, this claim is based on one of the four climate monitoring agencies, the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, headed by arch-warming alarmist James Hansen and therefore so politicized as to be of little credibility. The other three agencies, as I’ve written, show little (“statistically insignificant”, to quote Climatic Research Unit head Phil Jones) warming since 1998.

This lack of warming for the decade was not predicted by the IPCC’s climate models, yet if the models were correct the past decade would have warmed by the suggested .2°C. This failure suggests that natural factors, particularly the oceans and sun are more powerful than human activities in causing warming, or in not causing warming. This should not be a surprise, given that the sun and oceans have always been the main causes of climate change-are at least, they were until alarmist climatology came into being. Continue Reading »

Published by on 02 Oct 2010

Polar bears: Maybe the prospects aren’t so gloomy

The Oasis nature channel is presenting a series of programs entitled Extinctions, about creatures threatened with extinction due to geological changes, including global warming. The first of the series was about polar bears, which have been called the canaries in the global-warming coal mine, even though polar bear numbers are actually the highest on record.

Surprisingly, since most programs like this offer misanthropic global warming propaganda (humans are evil carbon-spewers who are going to destroy the planet), the polar bear program was remarkably even-handed.

Polar bears survived the previous interglacial. They will survive this one, too.

For a start, not once did the program suggest that humans were causing global warming, although we definitely are responsible for some of the other evils afflicting Arctic populations, including toxic pollution and habitat loss, and we may be contributing, slightly, to warming that would otherwise be occurring anyway. That is, this documentary stayed away from sermonizing and tried to stick to the facts.

To that end, the program went out of its way (at least compared to most recent nature documentaries) to get some sort of balance. And so, along with scientists who believe the bears are severely threatened, the producers also interviewed Mitch Taylor, a Canadian expert on polar bears who doesn’t believe the bears are endangered (he says only two of the 19 polar bear populations are in decline; the program itself said half are in decline) and doesn’t believe global warming is primarily human-caused or potentially catastrophic.

The program also mentioned another fact that is almost always ignored by global warming catastrophists: during the last interglacial 125,000 years ago, called the Eemian, the Arctic also melted pretty much completely, as may be happening now. No humans were involved in that previous global warming; modern humans hadn’t even evolved yet. This interglacial fact is usually ignored because it pretty much destroys the hypothesis that warming and sea-level rise are primarily human caused, rather than natural in an interglacial period. Continue Reading »

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