Climate hysterics skyrocket by Paul Driessen

Increasingly absurd disaster rhetoric is consistently contradicted by climate and weather reality 

Call it climate one-upmanship. It seems everyone has to outdo previous climate chaos rhetoric.

The “climate crisis” is the “existential threat of our time,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her House colleagues. We must “end the inaction and denial of science that threaten the planet and the future.”

Former California Governor Jerry Brown solemnly intoned that America has “an enemy, though different, but perhaps very much devastating in a similar way” as the Nazis in World War II.

Not to be outdone, two PhDs writing in Psychology Today declared that “the human race faces extinction” if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels. And yet “even people who experience extreme weather events often still refuse to report the experiences as a manifestation of climate change.” Psychologists, they lament, “have never had to face denial on this scale before.”

Then there’s Oxford University doctoral candidate Samuel Miller-McDonald. He’s convinced the only thing that could save people and planet from cataclysmic climate change is cataclysmic nuclear war that “shuts down the global economy but stops short of human extinction.”

All this headline-grabbing gloom and doom, however, is backed up by little more than computer models, obstinate assertions that the science is settled, and a steady litany of claims that temperatures, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts et cetera are unprecedented, worse than ever before, and due to fossil fuels.

And on the basis of these hysterics, we are supposed to give up the carbon-based fuels that provide over 80% of US and global energy, gladly reduce our living standards – and put our jobs and economy at the mercy of expensive, unreliable, weather dependent, pseudo-renewable wind, solar and biofuel energy.

As in any civil or criminal trial, the burden of proof is on the accusers and prosecutors who want to sentence fossil fuels to oblivion. They need to provide more than blood-curdling charges, opening statements and summations. They need to provideconvincing real-world evidence to prove their case.

They have refused to do so. They ignore the way rising atmospheric carbon-dioxide is spurring plant growth and greening the planet. They blame every extreme weather event on fossil fuel emissions, but cannot explain the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age or extreme weather events decades or centuries ago – or why we have had fewer extreme weather events in recent decades. They simply resort to trial in media and other forums where they can exclude exculpatory evidence, bar any case for the fossil fuel defense, and prevent any cross-examination of their witnesses, assertions and make-believe evidence.

Climate models are not evidence. At best, they offer scenarios of what might happen if the assumptions on which they are based turn out to be correct. However, the average prediction by 102 models is now a full degree F (0.55 C) above what satellites are actually measuring. Models that cannot be confirmed by actual observations are of little value and certainly should not be a basis for vital energy policy making.

The alarmist mantra seems to be: If models and reality don’t agree, reality must be wrong.

In fact, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels climbed to 405 parts per million (0.0405% of Earth’s atmosphere), except for short-term temperature spikes during El Niño ocean warming events, there has been very little planetary warming since 1998; nothing to suggest chaos or runaway temperatures.

Claims that tornadoes have gotten more frequent and intense are obliterated by actual evidence. NOAA records show that from 1954 to 1985 an average of 56 F3 to F5 tornadoes struck the USA each year – but from 1985 to 2017 there were only 34 per year on average. And in 2018, for the first time in modern history, not a single “violent” twister touched down in the United States. 

Harvey was the first major (category 3-5) hurricane to make US landfall in a record twelve years. The previous record was nine years, set in the 1860s. (If rising CO2 levels are to blame for Harvey, Irma and other extreme weather events, shouldn’t they also be credited for this hurricane drought?)

Droughts differ little from historic trends and cycles – and the Dust Bowl, Anasazi and Mayan droughts, and other ancient dry spells were long and destructive. Moreover, modern agricultural and drip irrigation technologies enable farmers to deal with droughts far better than they ever could in the past.

Forest fires are fewer than in the recent past – and largely due to failure to remove hundreds of millions of dead and diseased trees that provide ready tinder for massive conflagrations.

Arctic and Antarctic ice are largely within “normal” or “cyclical” levels for the past several centuries – and snow surface temperatures in the East Antarctic Plateau regularly reach  -90 °C (-130 F) or lower. Average Antarctic temperatures would have to rise some 20-85 degrees F year-round for all its land ice to melt and cause oceans to rise at faster than their current 7-12 inches per century pace.

In fact, the world’s oceans have risen over 400 feet since the last Pleistocene glaciers melted. (That’s how much water those mile-high Ice Age glaciers took out of the oceans!) Sea level rise paused during the Little Ice Age but kicked in again the past century or so. Meanwhile, retreating glaciers reveal long-lost forests, coins, corpses and other artifacts – proving those glaciers have come and gone many times.

Pacific islands will not be covered by rising seas anytime soon, at 7-12 inches per century, and because corals and atolls grow as seas rise. Land subsidence also plays a big role in perceived sea level rise – and US naval bases are safe from sea level rise, though maybe not from local land subsidence.

The Washington Post did report that “the Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot.” But that was in 1922.

Moreover, explorers wrote about the cyclical absence of Arctic ice long before that. “We were astonished by the total absence of ice in Barrow Strait,” Sir Francis McClintock wrote in 1860. “I was here at this time in [mid] 1854 – still frozen up – and doubts were entertained as to the possibility of escape.”

Coral bleaching? That too has many causes – few having anything to do with manmade global warming – and the reefs generally return quickly to their former glory as corals adopt new zooxanthellae. 

On and on it goes – with more scare stories daily, more attempts to blame humans and fossil fuels for nearly every interesting or as-yet-unexplained natural phenomenon, weather event or climate fluctuation. And yet countering the manmade climate apocalypse narrative is increasingly difficult – in large part because the $2-trillion-per-year climate “science” and “renewable” energy industry works vigorously to suppress such evidence and discussion … and is aided and abetted by its media and political allies.

Thus we have Chuck Todd, who brought an entire panel of alarmist climate “experts” to a recent episode of Meet the Press. He helped them expound ad nauseam on the alleged “existential threat of our time” – but made it clear that he was not going to give even one minute to experts on the other side.

“We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it,” Todd proclaimed. “The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period. We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.” The only thing left to discuss, from their perspective was “solutions” – most of which would hugely benefit them and their cohorts, politically and financially.

Regular folks in developed and developing countries alike see this politicized, money-driven kangaroo court process for what it is. They also know that unproven, exaggerated and fabricated climate scares must be balanced against their having to give up (or never having) reliable, affordable fossil fuel energy. That is why we have “dangerous manmade climate change” denial on this scale.

That is why we must get the facts out by other means. It is why we must confront Congress, media people and the Trump Administration, and demand that they address these realities, hold debates, revisit the CO2 Endangerment Finding – and stop calling for an end to fossil fuels and modern living standards before we actually have an honest, robust assessment of supposedly “settled” climate science.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and author of articles and books on energy, environmental and human rights issues.

Charles R. Anderson Comment:

"On and on it goes – with more scare stories daily, more attempts to blame humans and fossil fuels for nearly every interesting or as-yet-unexplained natural phenomenon, weather event or climate fluctuation."

In the pre-science era of mankind's history, every unexplained natural phenomena was attributed to the will of God and man had no need to understand that phenomena because it was sufficient that God understood it.  In the post-science era every unexplained phenomena is attributed to the Climate Change God and no one is supposed to question that god either.

I still aim to actually use science to understand reality, which is why I have written so often about the many huge errors and the inconsistencies in the physics which is claimed to provide the basis for the alarmist catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  Because of these errors, there is no reason to be surprised that the climate models supposedly based on this erroneous science have been making wrong predictions.

However, in the post-science era an hypothesis that makes wrong predictions is held to be unquestionable, when in the science era it would have been obvious that wrong predictions invalidate the hypothesis.  This is the difference between science and theology.

Claims of Long Life for Man's CO2 Emissions in Atmosphere are False

A post by Pehr Bjornbom discussing Gosta Pettersson's comments on the life of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere as CO2 shows that the model commonly used to predict the lifetime of man's CO2 emissions is seriously in error.  The Bern model for man's emissions is used in the many global climate models which my last post showed provided a very poor temperature prediction.  But C14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon that is produced in atmospheric atomic bomb tests.  Since those tests ended decades ago the C14 thrust into the atmosphere has diminished exponentially with time.  The concentration of the C14 over time is shown below in the graph and compared to the Bern model used in the climate models.

The x-axis is the time in years and the y-axis is the percentage of C14 compared to its start at 100%.  Note that the long dwell time of the Bern Model is entirely wrong.  In fact, the half-life of the C14 from this data appears to be about 10 years.  This is carbon that was thrust very high into the atmosphere.  There are also studies that claim that carbon dioxide generated at ground level has a shorter half-life than that deposited into the higher atmosphere.  These are all short lifetimes compared to the hundreds to thousands of years of the Bern Model.

One of the favorite arguments of the AGW alarmists is that man's emissions coming from the combustion of fossil fuels has less C13 isotope in it than the most common C12.  They use studies of the decreasing ratio of C13 to that of C12 in the air and in corals as shown below to argue that man-made CO2 emissions must linger a long time in the air and deplete the C13.

The argument is based on the idea that plants prefer C12 to C13.  If that is true, as more CO2 becomes available to plants in the air, will they not actually increase the ratio of C12 that they use to what they consider undesirable C13?  As they have more and more CO2 molecules to choose from, they can reject more and more of them having C13 in them.  Ocean absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere is also high, but the absorption of the less volatile CO2 molecules with the heavier isotope will be higher than that of molecules with only C12 in them.  So, the oceans with more CO2 molecules available for absorption will absorb more of the C13 and leave the atmosphere more and more short of C13.  These are dynamic situations.

There is even more to consider.  There are many natural sources of CO2 with varying concentrations of C13.  CO2 comes from deep sea vents and volcanoes as well.  It comes also primarily from the decay of vegetation in tropical areas and that source is low in C13.  In addition, any change in the flux of cosmic rays will change the amount of C13 created by cosmic radiation in the atmosphere.  Dr. Murry Salby recently showed that the higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was primarily a consequence of a higher surface temperature and secondarily a function of the moisture of soil and is not substantially due to man's emissions.



An increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide causes plants to use more of it.  A recent study using satellite observations found that the rise in atmospheric CO2 caused an increase of foliage coverage in arid areas in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa by 11%.  This happens because higher CO2 concentrations allow plants to reduce their water use in the photosynthesis process.  This adds to the complex dynamic response of the sources and sinks for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. 

The idea that C13 ratios to C12 tell us a simple story about man's emissions dwell time in the atmosphere is clearly simple-minded and wrong.  We know this from the atomic bomb test data on C14, which plants also discriminate against in favor of C12.  We know this from the results of Dr. Murry Salby.  The much bally-hoed carbon cycle is not well-known and settled science despite the claims of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming alarmists.

The Unsettled Science of Global Warming Revealed by the Climate Models

The last 15 or so years of stasis in the global temperatures, is making it very obvious that the settled science we are told is so well-known and so well-executed in the climate models is full of holes.  Yet, Obama and many others claim that 97% of scientists are blind to these obvious problems.  Well no, 97% of scientists are not that blind and that claim of settled science and a consensus on it is hogwash.

Dr. Roy Spencer recently discussed a plot of the early fits and later predictions of 44 climate models for the lower troposphere temperatures for comparison with the University of Alabama Huntsville and the RSS satellite observations.  The plot was provided by John Christy based on data from the KNMI Climate Explorer.  Dr. Spencer's post was entitled Global Warming Slowdown: The View from Space.

The plot of the 44 climate model results for the temperature in the lower troposphere with comparison to the UAH and RSS satellite observations:

The heavy black line is the average of the 44 climate models.  The UAH satellite measurements are in blue and the RSS measurements are in red.  Both the UAH and RSS satellite measurements are now at lower temperatures than any of the 44 climate models predicted.  To be sure, a few models might say that they are still within their expected errors.  However, it is an obvious conclusion that the settled science of climate represented both by the average and by the wide dispersion of the results, is a myth cultivated by a tireless propaganda machine.

It is likely that most of the developers of these models believe in catastrophic man-made global warming due to man's emissions of carbon dioxide from his use of fossil fuels.  That belief is pretty much a requirement to get funding from governments around the world to develop these models.  This must certainly result in a significant bias of the average result of these models.

The UAH lower troposphere measurement has risen compared to the zero baseline temperature only 33% of the rise predicted by the model average.  The RSS lower troposphere measurement has risen only 28% as high as the model average.  Saying that climate science is settled in this case is like saying that the average of 44 models for the gravitational acceleration at the surface of the Earth is 32.1 m/s^2, but those doggone measurements keep coming up 9.8 m/s^2.  Despite that difference, there is a consensus among scientists that the science of gravity is well-understood and settled science!  It is not important whether the gravitational acceleration is 32.1 or 9.8 m/s^2 when we measure out gold for sale!

The settled science is also so well-known that the predicted temperature change in the lower troposphere for 2025 for the highest prediction based on the well-known and settled science is 2.63 times the lowest predicted change.  Even a non-scientist should be able to easily see that this implies a great disagreement in the science between these model-builders.  It implies a large uncertainty about the science the respective models believe they know well enough to try to incorporate into their models.

In fact, there are many uncertainties that are actually known and many others that may well be unknown.  Predicting the future solar insolation is not all that well known.  The effects of aerosols and of blown dust are not well-known.  The factors that change the degree cloud cover and type of clouds over time are not well-known.  These models have a bias toward assuming that radiation transport of energy in the lower troposphere is greater than it actually is.  They underestimate the energy transport effects of water evaporation and of air convection.  They do not understand the cycles in the oceans sufficiently well.  Thermal inputs from ocean vents and volcanoes and from solar wind and electromagnetic field effects are not well-known.  The large numbers of bacteria in the atmosphere came as a recent surprise.  How do they affect solar insolation and longwave IR scattering?  The non-human sources of CO2 are still not well-understood and this affects predictions of natural CO2 emissions over time.  For that matter, the amount of man's CO2 emissions over time and the time that CO2 remains in the atmosphere is not well-known in these climate models either.

So how do these government-funded and coddled global warming alarmist scientists, most of the print media, and the Obama administration get away with claiming that the science of catastrophic man-made global warming is settled?  How can they believe and expect anyone else to believe that 97% of scientists are on-board with this hogwash?

They ought to be laughed at were the consequences not so dire.  But, they advocate so many limits on our freedoms and so much economic damage in the name of this scientifically bogus theory that it is hardly a laughing matter.  What is more, it is very harmful to the respect that real science should be given.

The Fatal Missing Atmospheric Hotspot of CO2 Alarmist Theory

Dr. David Evans has written a very good summary of the fatal problem of the climate computer models that claim to provide a good match to the increasing temperatures of the late 20th Century based on atmospheric CO2 concentrations.  What the modelers have done is taken a theory of greenhouse gases and added theories of sulfate aerosols, ozone, volcanic aerosols, and solar irradiance to plot the expected temperature changes as a function of altitude in the atmosphere and as a function of latitude over the Earth.  In reality, they have tuned the many variables and theories to produce results which they claim are predictive of the land surface temperatures for the period from 1958 to 1999.  If these theories are valid, then the predictions of temperatures at various altitudes and latitudes must also be correct.  The following plots show changes relative to the baseline temperatures prior to 1958 as modeled by Santer et. al in 2000 and are taken from Fig. 1.3. of a report by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program in 2006, Chapter 1.  This data was also used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.

It should be noted that the upper left plot is for the measured increases in CO2 concentrations and those increases in water vapor which Santer and others believed would result from the warming caused by the CO2.  Most of the actual warming in this model is actually provided by the increase in the amount of water vapor, which is greatest in the Earth's warmer areas.  The warming of this extra water vapor over the Equator and nearby latitudes produces the hot spot over the equator and near it.  The enhanced warming due to water vapor is what is termed a positive feedback and is a situation which is inclined to be susceptible to run-away events in which a vicious cycle of CO2 and water vapor in the atmosphere lead to more and more heating, then more and more CO2 and water in the atmosphere and more and more heating.  This is an important assumption of this theory and forms its primary basis for the claim that catastrophe may result.

We should note that only direct changes in the solar irradiance are modeled here.  The changing flux of cosmic rays as solar activity varies with changing affects on cloud formation and the ozone layers are not included.  Many other natural effects are also not included since little was known about them in 2000 and not much more is known today, thanks to the misspending of most of the climate research funds due to the alarmist scare.  But, if the factors modeled are the most important factors pertaining to climate change, such features as the very prominent hot spot near and above the equator at altitudes of 8 to 12 km with elevated temperatures of 1.0 to 1.2C should be measured by balloons equipped with transmitters to send back temperatures measured as the balloon ascends to high altitudes in the atmosphere.  There are good records going back to the 1960s with hundreds of balloon flights having the ability to measure temperatures with an accuracy of better than 0.1C.

The actual measured warming from 1979 to 1999 in the atmosphere by balloons is shown below.  This is Part E of Fig. 5.7 on page 116 of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Report of 2006.

The lower atmosphere, or the troposphere, is relatively uniformly warmed compared to the Santer model results used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.  Note that the entire range of variation in the plot with altitude and latitude is much less than in the alarmist model plot.  The cooling of the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, is also less severe and is also more uniform.  The hottest warm areas are mostly in the northern hemisphere and only reach up to about 0.3C warmings, not the 1.2C of the models touted as good matches to reality by the UN IPCC.  Also, very notably, the major hot spot over the equator and latitudes nearby is missing.  This area is largely warmed only about 0.1C and parts of this area are cooled by -0.1C!  The warming is at least an order of magnitude less than in the alarmist model at 10 km altitude over the equator!

So, the UN IPCC model result, which is said by them to verify the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming predicts much greater temperature changes due to their greenhouse gas theory in the atmosphere than is observed and the pattern of those changes is very different than that actually measured.  It is inescapable that the UN IPCC and Santer theory is wrong.  This is not a case of a theory that needs a bit of tuning yet.  This is clearly a case of a very wrongheaded theory.

So, if this theory is wrong, then there is no reason to believe that the rise in temperatures of the late 20th Century was caused in significant part by the increased concentration of CO2 during that period.  There is also no reason to believe that one of the affects of increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere must be an increase in water vapor which then causes more net warming than the CO2 increase itself did.  This means that the claim that increases in CO2 concentrations may cause runaway global warming are without basis!  In fact, this part of the model was clearly very dubious, since if it were correct, the Earth would have been likely to have had many such catastrophic run-ups of temperature in the past.  There is no evidence of this in the geological record.  In fact, recent work has established that the water vapor feedback to warming in general and to CO2 increases in particular is one of negative feedback.  The water cycle is a moderating effect on climate.

It is clear that the warming effect of CO2 is much, much smaller than that predicted by the Santer and other climate models touted by the UN IPCC.  In fact, it is very much more likely that it is not more than about a tenth as strong an effect as these models believed it to be.  In fact, now that we know that the land surface temperature data Santer, the UN IPCC, and other alarmists have been trying to explain was inflated with urban heat island effects and data manipulations, the CO2 greenhouse effect had to be exaggerated to match that falsely higher temperature data at the ground.  By manipulating data to create a sense of alarm due to large temperature increases, the alarmists also guaranteed that they could not explain real atmospheric temperature data with any theory that would match what they claimed the ground temperatures were.

Lies will always get you in the end.  It is especially foolish to lie about science.  Political lies may have a long lifetime, but science lies rarely do.  It is shameful that this science lie had as long a life as it did though.  It is painful that it has also had so much harmful impact on society and government.  Scientists will be paying a price in lost respect for a long time due to the lie that man's emissions of CO2 have created what is likely to be or might be a catastrophic climate future.  I know I am using strong language here, but any scientist worthy of the name should long ago have backed away from the embarrassing claims made by the anthropogenic global warming alarmists.  This episode has borne a strong resemblance to Stalinist science.