I Am A Climate Denier

‘didn’t these same scientists say back in 1970 that this mysterious “climate” […] would turn against mankind and plunge temperatures everywhere colder and colder?’

No. Physicists and Actual Climate Scientists™ have been correctly predicting global warming due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions since the late 19th century.

It’s generally colder in Alaska with shorter summers than in Mexico. What do you call this generality if not climate?

Lee,
you’re wrong. I am old enough to remember the coming ice age cries. You may be right that these proclamations weren’t made by “actual” climate scientists (Schneider, for example) but the GW scare didn’t happen until the temp trend reversed. The latest batch was strangely silent during the 70s.

DAV:

Yes, it is generally colder in Alaska than in Mexico, with, of course, shorter summers. The climate is different in different places. When we talk about “global warming”, we’re talking about the global climate, unsurprisingly.

I’m old enough to remember Jahova’s Witnesses proclaiming the end of the world on a specific date within two years. What’s the point?

A little reflection should eventually lead to the insight that today’s mid-career scientist was in elementary or junior high school in the 1970s.

I’m old enough to remember Jahova’s Witnesses proclaiming the end of the world on a specific date within two years. What’s the point?

The point is that 1) some scientists did indeed run the cooling scare 2) no one stepped forward to correct that 3) Anthropomorphic Global Warming didn’t get a start until the 80’s 4) the claimed causes of both anthropomorphic cooling (AGC) and warming (AGW) were strangely the same, i.e., our sinful technology.

The left used to deride preppers for … well … being prepared for some end of the world scenario. Yet I have heard a few lefties saying they are buying generators because, due to climate change, “scientists are saying there will no longer be gentle rains for kids to play in.” All … yes, all … future downpours will be cataclysmic deluges, leaving regions, if not the whole country, without power.

Lee,

I think it is safe to say that the generality called climate does not exist. Global climate is no more concrete than global culture.

I always say weather is real but climate is an abstraction. When you step outside you experience the weather and you might comment on it. You don’t step outside and say the climate is warm today.
I remember in the 1970s Paul Ehrlich telling us that global cooling was going to cause massive crop failures and millions were gong to starve in the 1980s. I watched in amazement as the environmentalists did a 180 degree pivot and then declared that global warming was going to kill us. Environmentalism has turned into a doomsday cult.

“anthropomorphic cooling (AGC) and warming (AGW)”

Sounds like a challenge for a talented cartoonist.

As a general rule I try to refrain from pedantries, but I did laugh at “Anthropomophic Global Warming”, or “warming that has the form of a human”.

Lee Phillips states: A little reflection should eventually lead to the insight that today’s mid-career scientist was in elementary or junior high school in the 1970s.

Maybe not back then:

From 2013

http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html

What is CO2 reduction if it’s not a “technical solution”? What does the Pope think is the answer? 100 Hail Mary’s each?

When I read the words or our bending host, I hear my own internal conflict over the meaning of words. My “feeling” on Briggs intent is that he is trying to get folks to recognize that “climate” is really a worthless term. It has as much use as the words “Worlds Best [fill in product here]”. It isn’t truly worthless. Climate is a word that sort of points at the integration of weather over a specific region. But ‘integration’ here is a word that points at Calculus not at product development. I suspect that most people here have run into the Integral. Many people here may even have read “The Integral Trees”. A lot of people though haven’t.

I suspect that Briggs does not stand firmly on the proposition the word “Climate” is worthless. Except I can see him standing firmly on it, because it is necessary to stand firmly in the firmament to give others a chance of seeing what it is he is seeing. This is not an easy position to maintain. In order to maintain it, he has to assert repeatedly that which is clearly wrong, there is so such a thing as climate. But that is not what I see him asserting. I see him trying to slap those who don’t see that climate is a really squishy idea, into maybe seeing it.

God bless you Briggs.

That’s right. Climate is not a thing. Climate is a statistic and ‘globalizing’ it compounds the error.

The ‘greenhouse effect’ is a bad term. The atmosphere is not a greenhouse, where heated air is physically prevented from fully mixing and water and carbon dioxide are added to enhance plant growth and development where the local weather would not allow it.

Our enhanced recycling of water and carbon dioxide are a good thing for plants. Maybe we are doing what we are supposed to do with the garden to dress and keep it. “Blind” chemical action ends when the reactant’s concentrations are insufficient to sustain it. Plants, in case you didn’t know it, will remove carbon dioxide from the local air rather quickly to the point where photosynthesis stops and photorespiration begins. This point varies from plant to plant. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the air are much more variable than the ‘background’ number demonstrates and the background number is the result of the multiple sources and sink’s relative chemical kinetics.

Arrhenius was a laughingstock when I earned my chemistry degree because his late 19th century hypothesis had been shown to be incorrect in reality.

The thermodynamic temperature is the geometric mean of the kinetic energies of a defined sample of matter’s constituents and *only* the kinetic energy. Not the total energy, not any potential energies such as against gravity or chemical phase changes, and not EM radiation, either. These energies may be converted to kinetic energy (translation in 3D, rotation in 3D, and intermolecular vibration in 3D), and kinetic energy may be converted into other potential energies. Note that the temperature is only defined for a sample and the thermometer does not directly measure this. The thermometer measures volume changes or in the case of electronic sensors, voltage changes that are functions of kinetic energy. These functions are 1. not linear and 2. complex. To extrapolate from this, improperly, increases the inherent uncertainty.

IR active gases in our atmosphere are two-way screens. They clip the extremes of the range. They don’t add additional kinetic energy to the system.

Finally, damped-driven dynamic systems almost never have ceteris paribus apply.

Argh. Read ‘intramolecular’ for intermolecular.

“Argh. Read ‘intramolecular’ for intermolecular.”

Oh, thank goodness. For a while there I was thinking this just made no sense whatsoever….

It’s amusing to track this thing in the press:

1890
“Is our climate changing? The succession of temperate summers and open winters through several years, culminating last winter in the almost total failure of the ice crop throughout the valley of the Hudson, makes the question pertinent. The older inhabitants tell us that the winters are not as cold now as when they were young, and we have all observed a marked diminution of the average cold even in this last decade.”
– New York Times, June 23, 1890

1895
“The question is again being discussed whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period, when the countries now basking in the fostering warmth of a tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions.”
– New York Times, Feb. 24, 1895

1922
“The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot,” [according to a Commerce Department report].

“Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers. . . all point to a radical change in climate conditions and . . . unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone . . . Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones . . . while at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared.”
–Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1922

1923
Professor Gregory of Yale University stated that “another world ice-epoch is due.” He was the American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress and warned that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be “wiped out.”
– Chicago Tribune, Aug. 9, 1923

“The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to the conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age
– Time Magazine, Sept. 10, 1923

1933
Headline: “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise”
– New York Times, March 27, 1933

1934
“America is believed by Weather Bureau scientists to be on the verge of a change of climate, with a return to increasing rains and deeper snows and the colder winters of grandfather’s day.”
– Associated Press, Dec. 15, 1934

1937
Warming Arctic Climate Melting Glaciers Faster, Raising Ocean Level, Scientist Says – “A mysterious warming of the climate is slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, engendering a “serious international problem,” Dr. Hans Ahlmann, noted Swedish geophysicist, said today.
– New York Times, May 30, 1937

1954
“Greenland’s polar climate has moderated so consistently that communities of hunters have evolved into fishing villages. Sea mammals, vanishing from the west coast, have been replaced by codfish and other fish species in the area’s southern waters.”
– New York Times, Aug. 29, 1954

1958
“An analysis of weather records from Little America shows a steady warming of climate over the last half century. The rise in average temperature at the Antarctic outpost has been about five degrees Fahrenheit.”
– New York Times, May 31, 1958

“Several thousand scientists of many nations have recently been climbing mountains, digging tunnels in glaciers, journeying to the Antarctic, camping on floating Arctic ice. Their object has been to solve a fascinating riddle: what is happening to the world’s ice?
– New York Times, Dec. 7, 1958

1961
“After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.”
– New York Times, Jan. 30, 1961

1962
“Like an outrigger canoe riding before a huge comber, the earth with its inhabitants is caught on the downslope of an immense climatic wave that is plunging us toward another Ice Age.”
– Los Angeles Times, Dec. 23, 1962

1969
“Col. Bernt Balchen, polar explorer and flier, is circulating a paper among polar specialists proposing that the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two.”
– New York Times, Feb. 20, 1969

1970
Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor, “the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.”
– Newsweek magazine, Jan. 26, 1970

“The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large-scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages.”
– New York Times, July 18, 1970

1971
“In the next 50 years, fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sun’s rays that the Earth’s average temperature could fall by six degrees. Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, could be sufficient to trigger an ice age.”
– Washington Post, July 9, 1971

“It’s already getting colder. Some midsummer day, perhaps not too far in the future, a hard, killing frost will sweep down on the wheat fields of Saskatchewan, the Dakotas and the Russian steppes…”
– Los Angles Times, Oct. 24, 1971

1978
“An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.”
– New York Times, Jan. 5, 1978

“A poll of climate specialists in seven countries has found a consensus that there will be no catastrophic changes in the climate by the end of the century. But the specialists were almost equally divided on whether there would be a warming, a cooling or no change at all.”
– New York Times, Feb. 18, 1978

1978
“A global warming trend could bring heat waves, dust-dry farmland and disease, the experts said… Under this scenario, the resort town of Ocean City, Md., will lose 39 feet of shoreline by 2000 and a total of 85 feet within the next 25 years.”
– San Jose Mercury News, June 11, 1986

1989
“Global warming could force Americans to build 86 more power plants — at a cost of $110 billion — to keep all their air conditioners running 20 years from now, a new study says…Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010, and the drain on power would require the building of 86 new midsize power plants
– Associated Press, May 15, 1989

“New York will probably be like Florida 15 years from now.” [i.e., in 2004]
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 17, 1989

1990
“[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots . . . [By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers . . . The Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.”
– “Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect,” Michael Oppenheimer and Robert H. Boyle, 1990.

1997
“It appears that we have a very good case for suggesting that the El Ninos are going to become more frequent, and they’re going to become more intense and in a few years, or a decade or so [i.e., 2007 or so], we’ll go into a permanent El Nino. So instead of having cool water periods for a year or two, we’ll have El Nino upon El Nino, and that will become the norm. And you’ll have an El Nino, that instead of lasting 18 months, lasts 18 years,” according to Dr. Russ Schnell, a scientist doing atmospheric research at Mauna Loa Observatory.
– BBC, Nov. 7, 1997

1999
“Scientists are warning that some of the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within ten years because of global warming. A build-up of greenhouse gases is blamed for the meltdown, which could lead to drought and flooding in the region affecting millions of people.”
— The Birmingham Post in England, July 26, 1999

2007
“This year (2007) is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998.”
– ScienceDaily, Jan. 5, 2007

2008
Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer (2008), report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field. “We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history],” David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker.
– National Geographic News, June 20, 2008

2009
“So the climate will continue to change, even if we make maximum effort to slow the growth of carbon dioxide. Arctic sea ice will melt away in the summer season within the next few decades. Mountain glaciers, providing fresh water for rivers that supply hundreds of millions of people, will disappear – practically all of the glaciers could be gone within 50 years. . . Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know . . . We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with sea level 75 metres higher. Climatic disasters would occur continually.”
— Dr. James Hansen (NASA GISS), The Observer, Feb. 15, 2009.

In Strange Weather, (1991)), Andrew Ross discusses “The Cooling” starting on page 200 along with the political and international context for the paranoia: the weather became suddenly more variable, with violent fluctuations, a disasterous drought in the Sahel, the devastating failure of the Soviet grain harvest, a few years later the first of the big freezes in Florida. Country after country faced weather disasters year after year: floods, droughts, famines, food shortages, monsoon failures, rapid increases in snow and ice cover, advances in glaciers, and so on. Books like Calder’s The Weather Machine, Ponte’s The Cooling, and Gribbin’s Forecasts, Famine’s and Freezes in the mid-70s anticipated the flood of global warming books that would replace them in the late 80s.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Strange_Weather.html?id=HQcL0MJ4ZWIC

I read in a newspaper recently that eating fat was bad for me. Then in another newspaper I read that eating fat was fine, and that avoiding it was dangerous to my health. I’m so confused! It’s almost as if getting my science from newspapers isn’t working.

Where does the press get these ideas from, I wonder? Who are these people they quote?

“anthropomorphic …”
Sounds like a challenge for a talented cartoonist.

Hilarious even. Illustrates the folly of accepting the first proposed spelling correction along with the folly of hastily posting via cell phone while waiting for a ride to work. That such triviality earned the total focus of your reply is interesting. Thanks!

OTOH, AGC/AGW are forms of the Boogie Man.

It illustrates something, all right.

When they resort to silliness, you know they’re done.

Stick a fork in them and turn them over…..

cdquarles wrote, “Arrhenius was a laughingstock when I earned my chemistry degree because his late 19th century hypothesis had been shown to be incorrect in reality.”

I highly doubt it. When you were a babe, climate models were already confirming the basic ideas of Arrhenius:

“The First Climate Model Turns 50, And Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly,”
Ethan Siegel, Forbes.com, 3/15/17
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/03/15/the-first-climate-model-turns-50-and-predicted-global-warming-almost-perfectly/#227ae5746614

The First Climate Model Turns 50, And Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly

Kinda makes you wonder why there were so many that followed or why they didn’t predict s well. The linked paper doesn’t seem to have any annual predictions at all. Perhaps the article is referring to a later tuned model.

There are many models because they are all built to analyze different things. In fact, that’s primarily how climate scientists use models — not to predict 2100, since no one knows the future inputs anyway — but as experiments, to see the effect of changing this parametrization or that piece of physics.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
– George Box

Ah, and now Briggs shows he’s afraid of my comments.

Worried your readers might be required to think for themselves a bit?

@David Appell, yeah right. Tell it to the hand.

not to predict 2100, since no one knows the future inputs anyway

So then “Climate Model Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly” is a specious claim since it wasn’t intended to predict? Anyone can fir a curve any number of ways. What would you learn other than what works for the given data and likely no other? Seems pointless it you aren’t trying to predict.

Briggs hasn’t replied to my comment either. I expect he’s huddled in a corner sucking his thumb.

Rich —

Is your elementary school off for the holidays?

Jim, I was satirising David Appell. I generally feel I’ve failed if I have to put /sarc at the end. I guess I failed anyway.

@ David Appell,

“There are many models because they are all built to analyze different things.”

Yes, the low sensitivity ones model the climate, the high sensitivity ones keep the alarmist/leftist gravy train on track. Otherwise I can’t see the point of keeping models which run consistently hot.

@ David Appell

Briggs let you back in?

“not to predict 2100, since no one knows the future inputs anyway” …

In the past you Climate Scientists provided different inputs, didn’t you?
And since CO2 is the primary-strike that- only driver, all you have to do is provide ranges of CO2 to predict … oh yeah … you all did that … how did that work out?

Besides aren’t we past the need for any additional inputs because we’re at or very near that dread “tipping point” where inputs no longer matter?

If Briggs let you back in because of the loss of JMJ, you’re a sad replacement

Still living in an echo chamber I see, trying to publish only in safe places, afraid to hear from anyone who might dare perturb your little cocoon of denialism.

You’re a coward, Briggs. In no way are you a rational scientific intellectual. Real thinkers aren’t afraid of critiques and hearing alternative opinions.

And you wonder why people so easily dismiss deniers just like you.

John B(),

Another anonymous poster afraid to comment under his real name.

1) I’m not a climate scientist.
2) I have no idea who “JMJ” is.

Your ramblings about CO2 don’t make any sense. Next time, try writing like you’re not just writing for yourself.

Presumably you know about RCPs. If not, this is your time to learn.

Sword: Dumb. Models calculate climate sensitivity, they don’t assume it.

And they’re pretty good:

“The First Climate Model Turns 50, And Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly,”
Ethan Siegel, Forbes.com, 3/15/17
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/03/15/the-first-climate-model-turns-50-and-predicted-global-warming-almost-perfectly/#227ae5746614

And

Comparing CMIP5 & observations
https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/comparing-cmip5-observations/
http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/climate-lab-book/files/2014/01/fig-nearterm_all_UPDATE_2017-panela-1.png

“The First Climate Model Turns 50, And Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly,” Ethan Siegel, Forbes.com, 3/15/17

Except that we were recently assured (https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/23171/#comment-174489) that accurate prediction of actual temperatures was not the purpose of the models. So any such predictive perfection can only be coincidental. This is especially the case when the “observations” are not even actual measured temperatures, but “adjusted” temperature observations, the model ensembles are all over the map, and the (not shown) “confidence bounds” on the “parameter” are a mere one standard deviation (which under frequentist philosophy means about one chance in three that the actual parameter has been missed).

Presumably you know about RCPs. If not, this is your time to learn.

Reinforced Concrete Pipe? Revolutionary Communist Party? Rich Client Platform? Rapid Control Prototyping? Royal College of Physicians? Rapid Crack Propagation? Recent Changes Patrol? Rochester Community Players?

Of course, models cannot predict the future. I pointed this out here a couple of years ago, and you banned me (again, typically) for it.

This isn’t rocket science, and should be easily understood by all here.

The Climate Lab predictions use known forcings and other reanalysis data to calculate present climate. Quite different.

PS: Raw data are adjusted to remove biases. How would you prefer to remove these biases, Mr Statistician?

PPS: Adjustments REDUCE the warming trend. Would you prefer it be higher?

Read. Learn.

“Thorough, not thoroughly fabricated: The truth about global temperature data: How thermometer and satellite data is adjusted and why it *must* be done,” Scott K Johnson, Ars Technica 1/21/16.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/thorough-not-thoroughly-fabricated-the-truth-about-global-temperature-data/

cf. W. E. Deming, The Statistical Adjustment of Data (Wiley, 1946) gives a good account of circumstances when such adjustments are useful. They should never be done automatically and without careful analysis of the particular circumstances. For example, if the three angles of a triangular part do not sum to 180 degrees but fall short by, say, 30 min., how many min. should we add to each measured angle? 10 min each? A proportionate amount to each measured angle? I once encountered liquid pharmaceutical fill weights in the range of 50-59 gm. among which was a single measurement of 75 gm. It was fairly evident that this measurement should have been 57 gm. In another instance on another product, a single fill weight on a 1 oz. tube filler had been entered for a 2 oz. tube (and the corresponding 1 oz. tube had been entered on the record for the 2 oz. line. There is no blanket adjustment that would address all such errors; but all must be handled as individual events.

University of Athens air temperatures changed abruptly when a new instrument was installed, and changed again when the new instrument was calibrated (a year later!). So which temperatures should be adjusted: before the new instrument, to agree with the calibrated new instrument? Or the calibrated new instrument to agree with the old instrument? And what do we do with the non-calibrated data in between?

Temperature stations are compared with “nearest neighbor” stations. But the nearest neighbor might not be very near in some regions, like the high arctic, or may be separated by mountain ranges or rivers, which are known to affect the relative temperatures, or are at significantly different elevations, which likewise affect temperatures. What is the effect of normalizing the first station against its nearest neighbors in such situations? That’s why the US set up a pristine climate network of paired stations located well away from heat islands or even potential future heat islands, with all stations having automated modern calibrated equipment. The new network gave readings two degrees lower than the old network of a potpourri of human-monitored Stephenson screens and thermocouples, indifferently calibrated, often located on asphalt and at the exhaust ends of air conditioners. So the new data was adjusted upward to match the old data! Huzzah!

Adjustments are necessary. Read the article. Or specify how you’d rather handle the biases.

By the way, adjustments reduce the warming trend.

Using just raw data gives a larger trend.

So OK.

Read the article.

YOS —

Just for clarification, regarding, “University of Athens air temperatures changed abruptly when a new instrument was installed, and changed again when the new instrument was calibrated (a year later!).”

Are you implying the air temperature changed due to the installation of the new instrument?