Home/Blog…we are the “Red Team”; the “Blue Team” has had their say since the late 1980s.
PREFACE: What follows are my own opinions, not seen by my four co-authors of the Dept. of Energy report just released, entitled A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate. Starting sometime tomorrow, the comment docket at DOE will be open for anyone to post comments regarding the contents of that report. We authors will read all comments, and for those which are substantiative and serious, we will respond in a serious manner. Where we have made mistakes in the report, we will correct them. That is the formal process for adjudicating these issues. Regarding the informal process, tomorrow I expect we will agree on how to handle media requests to respond to objections from the few “climate alarmist” scientists that journalists usually turn to for such comments. To those journalists I would say: read our report, as journalists used to do; you might be surprised to learn a lot of the published science does not support what the public has been led (by you) to believe.
Yes, Increasing CO2 Causes a Warming Tendency in the Climate System… So What?
In my experience, much of the public has splintered into tribal positions on climate change: We either believe increasing CO2 (mainly from fossil fuel burning) has no effect, or we believe it is causing an existential crisis. There are a smaller number of individuals somewhere in the center (climate independents?)
But there is a lot of room between those two extremes for the truth to reside. Among other things, our report presents the evidence supporting the view that (1) long-term warming has been weaker than expected; (2) it’s not even known how much of that warming is due to human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; (3) there are good reasons to believe the warming and increasing CO2 effects on agriculture have so far been more beneficial than harmful to humanity; (4) there have been no long-term changes in severe weather events than can be tied to human GHG emissions; and (5) the few dozen climate models now being used to inform policymakers regarding energy policy are not fit for purpose.
Those models, even after decades of improvement, still produce up to a factor of 3 disagreement between those with the least warming and with the most warming (and ALL produce more summertime warming in the critically-important U.S. Corn Belt than has been observed). How can models that are advertised to be based upon “basic physical principles” cause such a wide range of responses to increasing CO2?
And there are many more than those 5 elements contained in our report; those are just my favorites as I sit here thinking at 4:30 a.m.
One of the things we did not delve into was costs versus benefits of energy policies. Clearly, the politically popular switch to energy sources from only wind and solar involves large tradeoffs. If it were not so, there would already be a rapid transition underway from fossil fuels to wind and solar. Yes, those “renewable” sources are growing, and becoming less expensive. Yet, global energy demand is growing apace. But there are practical problems which make ideas such as “Net Zero emissions” essentially impossible to achieve. Maybe that will change in the distant future, who knows? I personally don’t really care where our energy comes from as long as it is abundant, available where it is needed, and is cost-effective. But I won’t buy an EV until it can transport me 920 miles in 14 hours during winter.
But I digress. Yes, recent warming is likely mostly due to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. But is this necessarily a bad thing, in the net? Cold weather kills far more people than hot weather. Increasing CO2 is causing global greening and contributing to increased agricultural yields. These are things that need to be part of the national conversation, and things our Report begins to address.
Virtually everyone on Earth endures huge changes in weather throughout the year, with as much as 130 deg. F swings in temperature. Can we really not adapt to 2 or 3 degrees more in the yearly average?
Sure, if we can “fix” the “problem” without sending us back to the Stone Age, then do it. But the public has been grossly misled about what that would entail in terms of human suffering (energy is required for literally everything we do), and they have been grossly misled about how much climate change has actually occurred. Read the report.
Why Would Climate Science Be Biased Toward a Specific Outcome?
I’m old enough to remember when climate change meant the global cooling resulting from particulate pollution in the atmosphere. And there was a lot of that pollution as late as the 1970s. In the 1960s during my family’s car trips between Iowa and Pennsylvania, every pass through Gary, Indiana was dreaded. You could see maybe one or two blocks away, because there was so much industrial pollution. I could not understand how anyone could live in those conditions.
Then the EPA was formed in 1970. Messes were cleaned up, on land, in the air, and in our waterways. We came to believe any environmental problem we created could be fixed.
Then we had the ozone depletion scare. With the Montreal Protocol signed in 1987 the countries of the world agreed to gradually phase out production of chlorinated compounds that are believed to cause destruction of the protective ozone layer in the stratosphere.
Finally came the Big Kahuna of manmade pollution: Carbon Dioxide, and fears of global warming. By the late 1980s the U.N. formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to evaluate the science of greenhouse gases and how they affect the climate system. Large amounts of federal funds went into this new area of science.
In the early 1990s I visited Robert (Bob) Watson at the White House who was Al Gore’s science advisor on environmental matters. Bob, a stratospheric chemist, was instrumental in getting the 1987 Montreal Protocol established. In that meeting, Bob remarked on the formation of the IPCC something to the effect of, “We are now regulating ozone-depleting chemicals, and carbon dioxide is next”.
I was astounded that the policy goal had already been decided, and now all we needed to do was to fund enough science to support that goal. That was how I interpreted his statement.
In the early years the IPCC was relatively unbiased in its assessments, and conclusions were tentative. All scientists, whether climate alarmists or skeptics, were allowed to participate. But as the years went by, those with skeptical viewpoints (e.g. John Christy) were no longer invited to participate as lead authors of IPCC report chapters.
Other scientists simply chose to stop participating because their science was being misrepresented (e.g. Chris Landsea from the National Hurricane Center, who thought the hurricane data did not support any human influences.)
Today, global warming is big business. According to Grok, since 1990 the U.S. Government has spent $120-$160 Billion on climate change research. As one of the NASA instrument lead scientists on “Mission to Planet Earth”, I was also a beneficiary of that funding, and most of my funding over the years has come from climate-related appropriations.
So, why is climate science biased? First, when we decided that essentially 100% of research funding would come from the government, we put politicians (and thus policy goals) either directly or indirectly in charge of that funding.
Second, Congress only funds problems to be studied… not non-problems. As President Eisenhower warned us in his 1961 farewell address, these forces could lead to a situation where “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”.
That has now happened. We now have a marching army of scientists (myself included) whose careers depend upon that climate funding, and possibly trillions of dollars in renewable energy infrastructure in the private sector dependent upon the whims of government regulation and mandates. If the climate change threat were to disappear, so would the government grants and regulations and private investments.
As they say, follow the money.
I used to say there are two kinds of scientists in the world: male and female. (Now I’m probably not even allowed to say that). My point was that scientists are regular people. They have their own opinions and worldviews. I went into a science field because I thought science had answers. How naive of me. I should have been an engineer, instead. In the field of climate science (and many other sciences) two researchers can look at the same data and come to totally opposite conclusions. Your data can be perfect, but what the data mean in terms of cause and effect is often not obvious. With engineering, either it works or it doesn’t.
We proved this cause-vs-effect conundrum in the context of climate feedbacks (positive feedbacks amplify climate warming, negative feedbacks reduce it) back in 2011 in this paper. We showed that natural variations in clouds, if not accounted for, can make the climate system seem very sensitive (lots of warming) when in fact it is insensitive (little warming).
The morning that (peer-reviewed) paper appeared in the journal Remote Sensing, the journal editor publicly apologized for letting it be published and was (we believe) forced to resign. Who forced him? Well, from the Climategate emails we get a hint: as it was revealed by one of the “gatekeepers” of climate publications, “[name redacted by me] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
That same morning I was called by a particle physicist who heard all of this news and said something to the effect of, “What’s wrong with you climate guys? We have people who believe in string theory and those who don’t, but we still work together”. We both laughed over the divisive nature of climate science compared to other sciences.
Which tells you there is more than science — and even more than money — involved in the disagreement. Every environmental scientist I have ever met believes Nature is fragile. That is not a scientific view, but it is a view that colors how they interpret data, and then what they tell environmental news reporters as it is passed on to the public.
Finally, wouldn’t everyone like to work on something that can make a difference in the world? And what higher calling could there be than to Save the Earth™?
About unreliable “renewables” the economics was thoroughly studied by Google engineers few years ago. Google invested billions pursuing them (es: Ivanpah solar plant, among other things). Their conclusions? “Renewable energy ‘simply won’t work'”. You should add those findings in you report. Here the link I bookmarked, you should easily go to the source.
https://www.theregister.com/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/?page=2
“there have been no long-term changes in severe weather events than can be tied to human GHG emissions”
IPCC is wrong?
It is an established fact that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions have led to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since pre-industrial time, in particular for temperature extremes. Evidence of observed changes in extremes and their attribution to human influence (including greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions and land-use changes) has strengthened since AR5, in particular for extreme precipitation, droughts, tropical cyclones and compound extremes (including dry/hot events and fire weather). Some recent hot extreme events would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human influence on the climate system. {11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.6, 11.7, 11.8}
Regional changes in the intensity and frequency of climate extremes generally scale with global warming. New evidence strengthens the conclusion from the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR1.5) that even relatively small incremental increases in global warming (+0.5°C) cause statistically significant changes in extremes on the global scale and for large regions (high confidence). In particular, this is the case for temperature extremes (very likely ), the intensification of heavy precipitation (high confidence) including that associated with tropical cyclones (medium confidence), and the worsening of droughts in some regions (high confidence).
What I stated was FROM THE IPCC. Read the report. You have been misled. -Roy
Im sorry Ken,but what you say about climate extremes is just not true,extremes occurred many imes in the past when C02 levels were at pre industrial levels or lower, they occur with or without C02’s influence, as Hubert Lamb said,the climate slaps from one state to another all by itself. Droughts and extreme heat in England followed by prolonged periods of heavy rain are common knowledge to any one who follows British climate history, one that sticks in the mind is the big sun summer and prolonged drought of 1911, it was followed by the cool wet summer of 1912 .a summer of floods and storminess on par with any in recent years.what we do not have are extensive temperature records before 1600. The report you quote from, never mentions the fact that modern day deaths from climate related events are miniscule compared with the past. Great North Sea floods killed tens of thousands on both sides of the North Sea,Ancient China had deaths in the millions on more than one occasion, a great Typhoon in the bay of Bengal killed a quarter of a million in Bangladesh. The governments of the world should be pleased they do not have to live with such events today.
Dear Dr. Spencer,
Please accept my deepest condolences for your loss. I am truly amazed at your continued ability to produce high-level work during this time. I have followed your research, particularly your and Dr. Christy’s satellite temperature records, for decades. I also want to commend your common-sense perspective on CO2-induced climate change.
It raises a significant question: how can anyone definitively attribute recent warming trends? While a doubling of CO2 alone is estimated to cause approximately 1°C of warming, the extent of climate feedbacks remains largely uncertain. I have skimmed your new report and intend to read it much more carefully soon. I am curious to understand your reasoning behind attributing most of the recent warming to increases in CO2, and I ask this not necessarily as a disagreement, but out of genuine interest in your insights.
Respectfully,
Dave
I have a technical question. Any Climateball player should be able to guess who wrote which chapter, except for the one on sea level.
So, who wrote it, and is it the same author that has decided to talk about “neutralizing ocean alkalinity”?
We all contributed to each chapter, but a few chapters depended much more on one or 2 of the authors, due to their niche nature. But I take the blame when it comes to using “alkaline” then referring to ocean pH. I *THOUGHT* I had gotten all the references to “alkalinity” removed, because chemically that is something different from the oceans being alkaline, having to do with the pH buffering ability of seawater. So, we need to remember to fix that next time around.
If your “report” had been peer-reviewed, gross errors of this nature could have been caught. What other nuggets of error are there throughout the entire thing?
We all contributed to each chapter, but some chapters had one author who had the most experience. We all agreed “ocean acidification” was misleading. “Alkaline oceans” was what I insisted on as terminology… but I tried to remove all references to “ocean alkalinity”, which is a different issue (chemically) having to do with pH buffering ability. But from your comment it looks like at least one reference remained. So, that’s one of the needed fixes.
Thanks, Roy.
Looks like I found what I wanted:
https://judithcurry.com/2018/11/27/special-report-on-sea-level-rise/
Do you or an other author happen to have the citations file, by any chance? No need to be a bib file, but that’d help.
If not, I’ll see what I can do.
For my fairly new description marrying climate and political science on this all, in a what-how-why summary of three student-papers, search amazon.com/books for “climate-certainty trough”.
You might want to consider the one point that is crucial for climate sensitivity within climate models. They do not allow changes in the lapse rate to determine lapse rate feedback (LRF). If they did, this would generate a huge negative and dominant negative feedback, with ECS collapsing. Instead they do something else..
“Feedback parameters in climate models are calculated assuming that they are independent of each other, except for a well-known co-dependency between the water vapour (WV) and lapse rate (LR) feedbacks”
(AR6, p.978)
So LRF gets “coupled” with WV feedback and their sum is a hard coded ~1W/m2. I am afraid this is cheating logic and physics, but a total necessity to claim any substantial ECS.
https://greenhousedefect.com/the-holy-grail-of-ecs/the-climate-kill-switch-why-feedbacks-are-actually-negative
No, the models do not specify lapse rate. That’s why different models produce different lapse rate feedbacks. The fact that the (negative) correlation between lapse rate feedback and water vapor feedback across models is pretty strong is because POSITIVE WATER VAPOR FEEDBACK AMPLIFIES UPPER TROPOSPHERIC WARMING (NEGATIVE LAPSE RATE FEEDBACK).
Thx for your response.
As explained in the article, it is a simple mathematical problem. Either you “cheat” around it, or feedbacks turn negative. Theoretically if you look at an emagram, you should get ~1.7K of warming at average emission altitude for every 1K warming of the surface. Let us do the math:
255^4*5.67e-8 = 239.74
256.7^4*5.67e-8 = 246.2
246.4 – 239.74 = 6.46W/m2 dOLR per K warming of the surface.
You can also reduce this by Planck Feedback and get..
6.46 – 3.3 = 3.16W/m2 negative LRF
You can play around with this, try different assumptions on how much the lapse rate shrinks, or introduce multiple emission layers, but the problem prevails and can not be fixed. You get a dominant negative feedback. An LRF of only -0.5W/m2, as central estimate in AR6, would only be compatible with a negligible change in the lapse rate. But that is not what the models have.
Having trouble with comments appear, I’ll try again…
What you are seeing is the fact that all climate models have positive water vapor feedback. The stronger the water vapor feedback, the more the upper troposphere warms, which is stronger negative lapse rate feedback.
These are not “specified” in climate models. But they fact they tend to track together, and their sum remains fairly constant, is (in my opinion) evidence that the models’ convective parameterizations are all pretty similar. That doesn’t mean they are accurate, though.
Water vapor feedback still dominates in the models, and so the lack of a “hotspot” in the tropical upper troposphere in the observations means positive water vapor feedback is weaker than in the models.
I hope that makes sense.
I know, and I also know what the idea is based on: observation. More precisely the observed dOLR/dTs relation. So it has to be right. The problem is, what you see is not necessarilly what you believe to see, Plato’s cave allegory sends greetings.
If say the observed dOLR/dTs relation is 2.2W/m2 (with clear skies), as opposed to a Planck Feedback of 3.6W/m2, then the combination positive WV and negative LR feedback must have reduced OLR by 1.4W/m2. The question is just about the respective combination. Maybe it is 1.8 – 0.4, 2 – 0.6, or.. whatever. We know the total.
But this includes the assumption the lapse rate would behave as expected over variations of Ts by latitude, season or interannual. The assumption is wrong. Over these variations, the lapse rate is not negatively, but positively correlated to Ts. Dessler et al 2008 points that out, at least with regard to “latitude”:
“This result demonstrates the unsuitability of using variations in different regions in our present climate as a proxy for climate change.”
But it is equally true for seasonal variations and, although to a lesser degree, for interannual variations. The whole approach is nonsensical.
There is one point that is crucial for climate sensitivity within climate models. They do not allow changes in the lapse rate to determine lapse rate feedback (LRF). If they did, this would generate a huge negative and dominant negative feedback, with ECS collapsing. Instead they do something else..
“Feedback parameters in climate models are calculated assuming that they are independent of each other, except for a well-known co-dependency between the water vapour (WV) and lapse rate (LR) feedbacks”
(AR6, p.978)
So LRF gets “coupled” with WV feedback and their sum is a hard coded ~1W/m2. I am afraid this is cheating logic and physics, but a total necessity to claim any substantial ECS.
https://greenhousedefect.com/the-holy-grail-of-ecs/the-climate-kill-switch-why-feedbacks-are-actually-negative
pls. delete
There is one point that is crucial for climate sensitivity within climate models. They do not allow changes in the lapse rate to determine lapse rate feedback (LRF). If they did, this would generate a huge negative and dominant feedback, with ECS collapsing. Instead they do something else..
“Feedback parameters in climate models are calculated assuming that they are independent of each other, except for a well-known co-dependency between the water vapour (WV) and lapse rate (LR) feedbacks”
(AR6, p.978)
So LRF gets “coupled” with WV feedback and their sum is a hard coded ~1W/m2. I am afraid this goes against logic and physics, but is a total necessity to claim any substantial ECS.
This “report” is just another instance of the right-wing fixing facts to the policy.
Roy, you and your co-authors know that’s true. Not only did you rush to get it done with zero peer review, you know that its sole purpose is to provide “scientific” CYA for undoing the endangerment finding.
Any other claim is just pure nonsense. This “report” isn’t science, it’s a political screed.
It was reviewed by several scientists, and it is now open for public comment from anyone. We will respond to all substantive and serious comments. -Roy
Who were the “several scientists” that reviewed it? DIck and Willie?
Dear Alan Smithee, your comment is ill conceived. It does not deserve a response. Roy was very polite to give one.
Dr. Spencer
That was a good blog post! I have been reading the 5 person report and agree with much. I am the tiny middle you talk about. I think it is wrong to link every extreme weather event to climate change. When i look at past data i always see extreme weather events happening. I think this is the bad science when they try to link every severe weather to global warming of 1 C. I think attribution studies are voodoo science. Not a big fan. I do accept GHE as solid science and MOTRAN model (which is a good model that closely matches observations) cleary shows increasing CO2 will increase temperature (adding more insulation). The severe weather side is not sound evidence based science. It is more an emotional belief.
The reason MODTRAN “clearly shows increasing CO2 will increase temperatures” is because that’s how it’s programmed. The relevant acronym is “GIGO”.
He must have meant Motrin. MODTRAN is not raw data. Neither is UAH, but I trust its integrity.
This is a superb post. Roy, you’ve touched on nearly all things I decided are the big points since 2008 when I got deeply involved in understanding what climate change is all about.
The only two things I can think of off hand that you may have missed are James Hansen (though I don’t know what I would say about him) and the Holocene Warm Period (aka Climate Optimum) some 5,000-7,000 years ago. It was warmer then than it is now, yet we survived. That is the major thing that makes me confident we will survive the current warm period. (I’m not so sure about surviving the next glaciation.)
I’ll add a link to this from my climate WWW page. BTW, the last entry in my “Preservation” section are links to Chris Landsea’s resignation letter. Well worth saving.
You might also like:
https://www.salon.com/2006/09/19/noaa/
Climateball is baaaack.
Thank you so much for all of your work. I have followed your work for years and always considered you honest and clear headed, even when your temperature data wasn’t going the way I would have preferred.
I look forward to getting into the detail of the report. I must admit It seems I have beenscreaming the evidence of the 5 key points you listed for nearly 20 years.
I’m am a retired economics and finance adviser who majored in econometrics, so I was pretty good at compiling and reading data. I made a pretty good living out of it but was forced to retire more than 20 years ago due to chronic illness. My first wife departed with much of what we’d built,but thankfully left the two great kids. I’m no genius but by following the data I’ve been invested pretty much in the right areas to achieve acceptable growth and avoid losses. Unfortunately I was far too practical and sensible to get into Bitcoin, but in the 1990’s I was absolutely convinced that renewable energy, specifically solar and wind, was the place to be.
I didn’t look at the science, that’s what climate scientists were for. But if they were right then we’d all be scrambling for wind and solar power. So I put some seed capital in with a bunch of engineers and we developed some good stuff. First with the objective of replacing all those remote locations around Australia and the world burning diesel 24/7 for power. We got some contracts and we won some awards, but we couldn’t get away from the unreliability of wind and solar, and whenever there was a problem in a remote location, there was never a technician for the wind and solar, but there was always a diesel mechanic.
The only solar and wind farms that were financially successful for the owner, were those which came with hefty guaranteed prices for all power generated whether it was needed or not.
But I was still a true believer and when Al Gore came out with an Inconvenient Truth I booked a premier and got tickets for all my friends and colleagues.
As I watched that movie, because it wasn’t a documentary, I started getting a very dark feeling in my gut. Gore was doing all the things we taught in Statistics 101 including how not to present a graph.
I thought why the hell would he have to do that if the science was so clear? At the end of the movie the true believers attending gave it a standing ovation. I was doing my best not to throw up.
I then went and read everything I could on the topic including of course what the three men you mentioned had to say, (who dropped out of the assessment reporting). I was horrified at what I found. I spoke to my engineering professor friend. All he said is I’ve got to rely on the peer review process. He figured if it worked in his area it’d work in Climate Science.
Then Climate gate happened and I thought at last, now everyone will see the emporer has no clothes. But when all that got wallpapered over I understood it had go beyond the science and the environmental evangelists who always wanted de-industrialisation. It now involved the income redistribution commies, the population explosion worriers, but more importantly the kingdom building bureaucrats nationally and internationally, the financiers who liked the numbers involved in rebuilding the global grid and transport systems and so on, the developing countries, particularly China who saw a massive upside for them and so much more.
So to see you guys make those 5 points I’ve tried to make for so long, is just magic. I just hope Trump still has enough political capital to get his team on board and to get a lot of countries on board.
These last couple of weeks or so can’t have been easy for you. I was lucky to find the love of my life, who is so easy to live with, I had to go through 20 years of difficult times to get there, but I’d hate to lose her. So I really appreciate the work you are doing and have done when it was probably the furthest thing from your mind in recent times..
If I could, right after I give Trump the Nobel Peace Prize, (does anyone even know what he did for Rawanda and the Congo to add to his long list?), I’d be giving you the Medal of Honour.
Dr Spencer.
I read your post with interest.
While I may not agree with every conclusion in your report, I appreciate your willingness to challenge prevailing narratives and highlight underexamined aspects of the climate policy debate. There is indeed a wide middle ground between denial and alarmism, and we need more voices engaging there with clarity and rigor.
That said, I’m less convinced by the argument that the climate models’ variance alone invalidates their utility for policy forecasting; uncertainty does not necessarily imply unreliability, only the need for cautious interpretation.
Rgrds.
“The morning that (peer-reviewed) paper appeared in the journal Remote Sensing, the journal editor publicly apologized for letting it be published and was (we believe) forced to resign.”
For completeness here’s a link to the journal editor’s letter of resignation:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258547322_Taking_Responsibility_on_Publishing_the_Controversial_Paper_On_the_Misdiagnosis_of_Surface_Temperature_Feedbacks_from_Variations_in_Earth's_Radiant_Energy_Balance”_by_Spencer_and_Braswell_Remote_Sens
The key takeaway is, “the problem I see with the paper by Spencer and Braswell is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents.”
“I’m old enough to remember when climate change meant the global cooling resulting from particulate pollution in the atmosphere.”
False memory syndrome. Science publications were 6:1 warming cooling.
Peterson, T. C., W. M. Connolley, and J. Fleck, 2008: THE MYTH OF THE 1970s GLOBAL COOLING SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 89, 1325–1338, https://doi.org/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1.
From Peter Gwynne who wrote the seminal Newsweek story.
https://www.aip.org/inside-science/my-1975-cooling-world-story-doesnt-make-todays-climate-scientists-wrong
Jack,
I must suffer from the same false memory syndrome, except I didn’t read the Newsweek article then and I don’t trust _anything_ written by William Connolley.
My favorite article then was Science News’ “Chilling Possibilities,” https://www.sciencenews.org/archive/climate-change-chilling-possibilities – it may have been the first place I read about the meridional jet stream flow that is so tied to extreme weather, both recently and in my all-time favorite blizzard in 1978.
I see Peterson et al references the SN article and actually say some nice things about it. Perhaps the ratio of warming:cooling articles was 6:1, but I suspect more people read the SN article and others than any of the journal articles they reference. Which ones do you recommend we read?
Two things alleviated my concerns. First, I flew out to the west coast on a business trip and saw Ponderosa pine trees sticking above the snow. Perhaps the tundra wouldn’t lose snow cover some summer (a suggestion was that might trigger the new glaciation), but tree covered mountains certainly would capture enough heat to melt most of their snow.
The other was David Keeling Sr’s first paper with Mauna Loa data, released in 1976. My sister was working on her Marine biology PhD at MBL on at Woods Hole MA. That graph wound up getting included in just about every students’ papers that season! (Sigh – I finally found the image, but still haven’t gotten it online.) Still, the Blizzard of ’78 was truly awesome. (Oh – that was the New England blizzard, apparently the midwest blizzard was equally awesome, but it brought us rain that washed away a lot of the record snow from our storm before the blizzard. It was quite a year!
Finally, can you go into more about my false memory syndrome? It does turn out that a lot of people in New England completely forgot about the midwest blizzard – including some of the TV Mets! You can readily find my web pages on the storms. I spent some time with old Boston Globe and NY Times articles and I think I got things straightened out.
I was in my first or second year of meteorology at U. of Michigan during the 1978 blizzard. First time U of M was closed due to heavy snow. I had a recording barograph, and it went all the way off the bottom of the drum. The storm was so wound up that the warm front went all around the east side of the low, up north, and started coming back south through Michigan. It believe it set record low barometric pressures at many stations. It was well forecast by the weather forecast model, which was still an evolving technology back then.
Harold The Organic Chemist Says:
ATTN: Roy and Everyone
RE: CO2 Has Caused No Warming Of Air Since 1920.
Please go to the late John Daly’s website:
“Still Waiting For Greenhouse” available at:
http://www.john-daly.com. From the home page, page down to the end and click on “Station Temperature Data”. On the “World Map”, click on “NA”, then page down to U.S.A.-Pacific. Finally, scroll down and click on “Death Valley”
The chart shows plots of temperatures at the Furnace Creek weather station in Death Valley from 1922 to 2001. In 1922, the concentration of CO2 in dry air was ca. 303 ppmv (0.59 g CO2/cu. m.) and by 2001, it had increased to 371 ppmv (0.73 g CO2/cu. m.), but there was no corresponding increase in air temperature at this remote desert. The reason there was no increase in temperature at this arid desert is due to saturation of absorption of the out-going long wavelength IR light by the CO2 band at 667 wavenumbers. In 1920 the concentration of CO2 was 300 ppmv.
John Daly found over 200 weather stations located around the world that had no warming up to 2002. The many charts of temperature from weather stations falsify the hypothesis that the increasing concentration of CO2 in air causes an increase in air temperature and hence “global warming”. How is it that the climate scientist community did not know of John Daly’s website?
At the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in dry air is currently 439 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air has mass of 1.29 kg and contains 0.86 g of CO2 at STP. There is too little CO2 in air to have any effect on weather and climate.
RE: The Saturation of the Absorption of IR Light by CO2.
After a search on this topic, I found this paper:
“The Saturation of Infrared Absorption by Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere” by Dieter Schildknecht. He shows that the absorption of IR light CO2 becomes saturated when the concentration of CO2 in air reaches 300 ppmv. This means that an increase in the concentration of CO2 in air above 300 ppmv will not result in an increase in air temperature and there is no need to control or reduce the emission of CO2 from the use of fossil fuels.
URL: https://arixiv.org/pdf/2004.00708v1 or
URL: https://arixiv.org/abs/2004.00708
Roy, you should send copies of my comment to the other members of the committee.
Sorry, but you can always find some stations that haven’t warmed in certain areas. And the IR saturation issue is a half-truth… all climate models (even those that warm a LOT) already include that effect. It is impossible for the atmosphere to have its IR effect saturated, even at 1000x todays CO2 values… because it just raises the effective emitting layer to higher and higher in the atmosphere. The modelers aren’t that stupid… they are just wrong in some important ways, and unduly confident in other ways.
As much as I appreciate the effort of these five, I would have liked to have seen some physicists included. But, even with physicists you have to be careful. You might end up with someone like Pierrehumbert, who has claimed Sun could heat Earth to 800,000K! Like all of the climate science industry, he doesn’t understand radiative physics or thermodynamics.
So when I say physicists, I mean REAL physicists.
Steve Koonin is a physicist. Except for Ross McKitrick (economist and statistician), the rest of us were trained in the physics that matter to the atmosphere and climate: thermodynamics, radiative transfer, etc.
There is “climate science” physics, and there is REAL physics.
In “climate science” physics, Earth flux is treated as energy and can be estimated to accuracy exceeding +/- 0.5% In REAL physics, flux is NOT energy, and estimates are worthless in considering the bogus EEI.
In “climate science” physics, Earth can be compared to an imaginary sphere, to claim the surface is 33K hotter than it is “supposed to be” due to CO2. In REAL physics, it makes no sense to compare Earth to an imaginary sphere. That would be like comparing a tortoise on the ground to a soaring eagle in the sky, and claiming the reason the tortoise can’t fly is due to CO2!
In “climate science” physics, all infrared is “heat”. In REAL physics, only infrared with the “right stuff” can raise the temperature of a surface.
In “climate science” physics, putting on clothing is an example of “cold warming hot”. In REAL physics, that would be an example of someone not understanding thermodynamics.
In “climate science” physics, all incoming flux is simply added. In REAL physics, only incoming flux with the correct entropy matters. That’s why ice can NOT boil water.
The list goes on and on. REAL physics brings the CO2 nonsense to a sudden death.
*** Oh, OK, so that’s what this is about. Sorry, but cooler objects keep warmer object warmer than they otherwise would be ALL THE TIME. The examples are endless. Insulation around a heated oven, the walls of a house in winter. The greenhouse effect is radiative insulation around the Earth. –Roy
—Insulation works by trapping air. It inhibits conduction and convection. Radiant insulation is reflective material like clouds reflecting incoming solar radiation. Are you saying CO2 acts to reflect IR back to the Earth? Are there any real-world examples of where CO2 is used to trap IR as in a building? Are greenhouses warmer because of the high CO2 or because of the trapped air? Do greenhouses become 15% warmer when they are filled with CO2? How do you explain the adiabatic lapse rate?
Oh, OK, so that’s what this is about. Sorry, but cooler objects keep warmer object warmer than they otherwise would be ALL THE TIME. The examples are endless. Insulation around a heated oven, the walls of a house in winter. The greenhouse effect is radiative insulation around the Earth. –Roy
Yes Roy, that’s what it’s about. That and the other items I mentioned, as well as many I didn’t mention.
Of course house insulation works by slowing conduction. But CO2 does not effectively slow conduction. It’s oxygen and nitrogen that form Earth’s “blanket”. To be a radiative insulator, the spectrum of the radiator must be largely returned. CO2 doesn’t do that.
Also, clouds reflect radiant energy back into space, not back to the Sun. The Sun is at lower entropy than the Earth. How do Greenhouse gases reflect energy back to the Earth when the Earth is at lower entropy than the atmosphere?
Dr. Spencer,
P.S.-They’re hitting you from one side and we’re hitting you from the other. You are not in an enviable position even with your newly elevated status.
REAL physicists.
I agree.
Not ones who do not understand the WDL.
Why is there so much lying in mainstream science on a global scale about so much fundamental science?
Politics has always interfered with science, especially in modern times.
The root of the problem is the same reason, so many people voted for Trump/MAGA. The vast majority of humans have very low ethics. Low ethics comes from lack of empathy and compassion. People with low ethics don’t care about the truth and most human life around them. They are similar to the bad guys. The good guys are a small minority on earth, so politically very weak. The vast majority of humans support authoritarianism.
This political criminality pervades the corrupt political systems that is sanctioned by most humans. That political criminality will impact scientific research because political agendas are more important than scientific truth.
The most corrupt people in science are driven by money will tend to rise to the top in sciences where truth could irritate the power structures and the people at the grassroots levels. Education systems are built to indoctrinate humans all over the world. Truth has been suppressed to protect the religious establishments across the world.
The MAGA forces were around way before Trump, have promoted truth as a strategy of deception, sort alike a pied piper. On global warming, they expose the lies with one hand while endorsing political forces like Trump on the other that maintain the global warming lies. They talk out of both sides of their mouth.
It shows they have a hidden agenda. Longer term, they have been part of the extremist and violent organized crime force suppressing science. They couldn’t do it without a very corrupt extremist population. Racism and greed is what fuels the conservative political forces. They have long been the dark side of humankind.
Our earth is built on monumental lies because the truth is anathema to the vast majority of humans. The past election is a testament to how very low in ethics people will go. Putting scientists under a system dominated by such political criminals will help crush the scientific truth in the system.
It is the vast majority of humans who have aided and abetted in creating the system. When was the last time humans in any country complained to their school boards about the lies their children are taught about history and science. Virtually never. Because they simply don’t want to know or care. They have very low ethics. These people help fuel the conservative agenda and current political mindset, who see critical thinking in children as a political and religious threat.
Any scientist allying themselves with these conservative forces show a lack of conscience.
Are you familiar with the studies of professor emeritus Jyrki Kauppila from University of Turku in Finland? For over 10 years he has done his work with his own money. Nowadays it’s difficult to get
funding if you are a so called “climate denier”, which means you don’t support political science aka consensus science. He should be in your “Red Team”.
Here are some links to his studies:
1) “NO EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FOR THE SIGNIFICANT ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.00165
2) “NO RELIABLE STUDIES OF CLIMATE CHANGE WITHOUT HENRY’S LAW AND
A NEW THERMOMETER FOR THE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.01245
3) “MAJOR FEEDBACK FACTORS AND EFFECTS OF THE CLOUD COVER AND
THE RELATIVE HUMIDITY ON THE CLIMATE”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.11547
4) “Major Portions in Climate Change: Physical Approach”
https://homepages.tuni.fi/tapio.rantala/opetus/files/FYS-1550.Fysiikan.seminaari/Fileita/J.Kauppinen-IREPHY-21Nov13.pdf
Many so-called climate deniers have been defunded. The problem is a lot larger than just climate.
We can talk about archaeology where mainstream spout the theoretical bs on how something was built. They have been given over a hundred years to demonstrate it, yet they have done nothing. Yet somehow the retain credibility. Countries around the world cooperate to keep the real history hidden whether it is Machu Petu, Pyramids or Gobelteki.
Astronomy/Astrophysics is another monumental lie filled subject. When this collapses, all the other lies will collapse in a cascade. The path to greater understanding is the plasma based electric universe.
Zoology won’t recognize the existence of the cryptids Sasquatch (with human dna) and Dogman (giant bipedal/quadripedal wolf) which run all over the landscape of North America. If we can’t admit to a Sasquatch in 2025, why would one expect the climate lies to be exposed.
Many other sciences are strewn with lies.
We can talk about all the suppression from the power structures, but the real source comes from the low ethics of grassroots level population who condone, sanction, easily indoctrinated, denial or indifferent to the truth.
War comes from the same place. The low ethics of the grassroots population sanction the imperialism or militarism of their country or other countries.
During the late 70s, I came to the conclusion that our bodies are biological computers imbued with some immaterial life force. We are the result of extraterrestrial terraforming/seeding. AI is bringing us closer to unraveling human consciousness and spirituality.
I think most humans low ethics is at the root of all the lies in science and the result of genetics which imprisons us in scientific lies and hate. It explains the support of racism, authoritarianism and criminality in the general populations.
As an aside, until we know the true physics or even biology of the universe beyond the material, we will be left with uncertainty about spirituality. We can’t even define what life is. Some cultures consider a rock a living thing. It seems conceivable that a life force is in everything but is limited by inherent functionality in the matter it resides in.
The monumental lies of mainstream science go way beyond climate. It involves astronomy, astrophysics, archaeology, zoology, subatomic physics etc. The vast majority of humans on earth have very low ethics. Human population as a whole are the soil that gives rise to authoritarianism, racism, war, criminality, corruption, indoctrination etc. The truth struggles in such a soil, whether it has to do with science or anything else. It is a taboo subject for most humans.
Dr. Spencer,
I’ve been following the back and forth between “alarmists” and “skeptics” for a while now. I’m not a scientist but I can read and understand to a degree most scientific articles on the subject along with the comments, replies and critics from relevant experts.
One thing that keeps me siding with the scientific consensus represented by the IPCC and most climate scientists has little to do with science though. It has to do with rhetorics instead and how each side presents their views.
Consistently the “skeptics” side use rhetorical tactics rather than scientific arguments because their goal seems to be to convince the general public and policy makers rather than correct or improve scientific understanding of the subject (which partly explains “What’s wrong with you climate guys”).
I’m afraid a blatant exemple of such tactics can be found in your post.
You mention a paper you co-authored published in the journal Remote Sensing that has attracted a lot of comments and controversies, mainly because its finding and conclusions have been exagerated in partisan blogs and outlets.
And then you say : “the journal editor publicly apologized for letting it be published and was (we believe) forced to resign. Who forced him? Well, from the Climategate emails we get a hint: as it was revealed by one of the “gatekeepers” of climate publications, “[name redacted by me] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!””
1) The editor explained why he chose to stepped down and it has to do with the perceived quality of your paper :
“The problem is that comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted in open discussions and to some extend also in the literature, a fact which was ignored by Spencer and Braswell in their paper and, unfortunately, not picked up by the reviewers. In other words, the problem I see with the paper by Spencer and Braswell is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents”
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/9/2002
2) The reference to “Climategate” is only there to stimulate the conspiracy-minded skeptics. So many scientists agreeing with each others findings can’t mean the skeptics arguments are wrong, it must mean they’re all part of a conspiracy, right?
So of course the CRU hack was (and apparently still is) a trove of out of context quote that would validate all that. And you used it, either failing to provide context or intentionnally removing it.
Despite the strong implied connection, the quote from Jones hacked email has nothing to do with your paper, the journal in question or its editor. Here’s the full email with names redacted :
“The other paper by MM is just garbage – as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well – frequently as I see it. I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !”
So it turns out the exchange was about including some articles in the IPCC report, not about forcing them out of peer-reviewed litterature as you implied.
Here’s what Dr. Osborn from CRU qualifies this exchange :
“First, the majority of climate science articles are not discussed in the IPCC assessment reports – there simply is neither space nor need to do so. The focus has to be on those that are most relevant to the requirements of the report, or that represent greatest advancement in knowledge. It is quite reasonable (indeed necessary) for IPCC authors to form and express their opinion about which papers do or do not meet those requirements. The remaining body of literature still provides the supporting framework within which the IPCC reports are based. Second, these papers were discussed in the IPCC report, demonstrating that the IPCC writing and reviewing process works well. Third, these papers have both received considerable criticism since the IPCC report, perhaps substantiating the initial judgement about the quality of these papers. Fourth, redefining the meaning of peer-reviewed literature is not possible for an IPCC author and the final comment is clearly flippant.”
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc2802.htm
I’m sorry this comment turns out to be this long but here’s the point I’m making : as long as so-called “skeptics” keep grasping at out of context straws in this manner, they will remain of limited credibility regardless of their scientific credentials because it shows a level of disreguard AND disrespect for civil debates, sound and apolitical science and ultimately the general public they are trying to influence.
Ask a cosmonaut who observes the Earth from space if he is surprised how thin the troposphere is with its clouds, where all weather phenomena occur. In contrast, the pressure of the stratosphere and its influence on circulation is underestimated in winter.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_int/
“Virtually everyone on Earth endures huge changes in weather throughout the year, with as much as 130 deg. F swings in temperature. Can we really not adapt to 2 or 3 degrees more in the yearly average?”
This leads me to my simple challenge to anyone who believes climate change represents an existential threat to the human race. Go to the climate normals at, I believe, the NWS. Look at the current annual average temperature at the NWS weather station closest to your home. This is a 30 year average (1990-2020). Now look at the “legacy” average, also available at the same site (1980-2010). The increase (not all show increases) will be quite underwhelming. Now, pick a city 100 miles or so directly south of you. Look at several stations and find one that is approximately warmer by the same amount that your local station increased by over a ten year period. Could you survive there? I live in Cincinnati and London Ky, I believe, fits those parameters for me (my memory is a bit foggy there, but I think that works.)I have traveled through London, Ky and actually survived that harrowing experience. In fact, I have traveled to Key West and even the Caribbean and came back to tell that harrowing tale. Phew!
Roy, make journalists who call for an interview take that test first. You could even walk them thru it.
The purpose of this “critical report” is to provide “scientific” support as Zubrin revokes the EPA CO2 endangernent finding.
This may be a bad idea, even for the fossil fuel companies at whose behest it is being done.
https://theconversation.com/revoking-epas-endangerment-finding-the-keystone-of-us-climate-policies-isnt-simple-and-could-have-unintended-consequences-252271
You’re precisely right. Roy and the gang concocted a political document to serve an ideological end. It’s not scientific at all.
I respect Dr Spencer as a scientist of considerable ability though his views on the environmental effects of climate change differ considerably from my own.
Seeing him used as a political tool like this is, at the very least, disappointing.
Testing.
“Sure, if we can “fix” the “problem” without sending us back to the Stone Age, then do it.”
Apparently we can. Solar and wind are competitive sources of energy in many places right now.
Going forward, the renewables growth looks bright. Do we, as a country, want to be left behind in this development by China and Europe?
“In my experience, much of the public has splintered into tribal positions on climate change: We either believe increasing CO2 (mainly from fossil fuel burning) has no effect, or we believe it is causing an existential crisis. There are a smaller number of individuals somewhere in the center (climate independents?)”
I don’t think that number is small. I think a good many people agree with the basic proposition of AGW, and understand that there is uncertainty about how much it will warm in the future.
I think what some ‘skeptics’ miss is that we don’t get a second chance if the worst comes about. As Pielke once said, it is not because we know what will happen that we should be cautious, it is precisely that we don’t know for sure. If we knew, we could plan appropriately. But while we are inside the test tube with no way to undo the experiment in short order, prudence now is the sensible avenue.
It’s not that the “blue team has had their say since the 1980s”, Roy. The understanding of the importance of CO2 to the energy balance of the climate system goes back to Arrhenius and continues through Callendar, to Keeling, then on to Revelle and the report given to LBJ and all that’s happened since.
If you’ve seen the clip from the Bell Telephone science series (directed from Frank Kapra) that describes the burning of fossil fuels as changing the climate then you know that the issue was acknowledged in 1958.
It’s not a “blue team” thing unless you want to force a partisan trope onto a subject that’s been studied for well over a century and by scientists worldwide.
When I say “Blue Team” I’m not referring to those who believe adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes a warming tendency. I already believe that, too. I’m talking about the organized effort to build scientific justifications for desired policy outcomes, which started with the IPCC’s formation in the late 1980s. Did you not even read my article??
“I’m talking about the organized effort to build scientific justifications for desired policy outcomes”
Unfortunately you are doing exactly that.
The Trump administration are not interested in the science per se. They are interested in maximising the profits of those who benefit from burning fossil fuels.
To do so they are distorting the evidence to manipulate public opinion and bringing in policies designed to make life difficult for anyone competing with the fossil fuel burners.
“they are distorting the evidence to manipulate public opinion and bringing in policies”
Oh, and so the existing policies just kind appeared in the clouds beyond the magic rainbow, and everyone saw and loved them dearly?
Are you really that “naive”?
Probably not.
Andrew
That’s correct, Alan. The CO2 nonsense started back in the time of Arrhenius. The story goes that he was trying to figure out what ended the last ice age. He believed that CO2 was the cause. But, beliefs ain’t science.
Have you ever figured out how CO2’s 15μ photons can warm a 288K surface? Realizing that can’t happen would be REAL science.
“the importance of CO2 to the energy balance of the climate system”
This part has been, shall we say, abused?
All the gases in the air are important to all the balances.
But then you need to get more scientific, not political.
Andrew
“In my experience, much of the public has splintered into tribal positions on climate change: We either believe increasing CO2 (mainly from fossil fuel burning) has no effect, or we believe it is causing an existential crisis. There are a smaller number of individuals somewhere in the center (climate independents?)”
Nonsense. The “mainstream” argument has always been “lukewarmer” vs. “alarmist” whilst both groups demonise and try to make socially unacceptable the group and position that questions the GHE. And, that’s deliberate. The whole idea from the beginning has been to try and steer the “debate” in that direction so that it became unthinkable to even question the GHE. But, questioning the GHE is what all scientists and public alike should be doing.
DREMT
Why should scientists and the public question GHE? It is and observable fact. I think I have already linked you to Measured radiant energy ground observations which show a GHE. Also satellite measurements of outgoing Longwave Radiation confirm a real GHE. The surface is emitting a much greater IR energy than what is measured leaving the planet. First Law of Thermodynamics is Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
Norman, when preposterous claims are made, they need to be questioned.
But, you have to understand the basics to ask meaningful questions. Too often people just believe whatever they find. Like with your SURFRAD stuff. You’re still having trouble understanding the graphs.
Since that confuses you, let’s keep it simple and just address your last sentence:
“First Law of Thermodynamics is Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.”
That’s not really 1LoT, but we can accept it. But that’s exactly what the CO2 nonsense does. The original Arrhenius CO2 equation creates flux out of thin air.
ΔF = αln(C/Co)
The scientific question would be: “How does it do that?”
Magic!
“Why should scientists and the public question GHE?”
That’s like saying, “why should scientists and the public be skeptical?”
Scientists should be skeptical because that’s their job. The public should be skeptical so as not to get hoodwinked.
“It is and observable fact.”
That GHGs absorb and emit IR is an observable fact. For some, that’s enough. But the E in GHE stands for “Effect”, and that “Effect” is, supposedly, warming. Tying the fact that GHGs in the atmosphere absorb and emit IR to “warming” is the difficult thing. Even though warming has been observed, linking the two things together is problematic to say the least. There’s quite a lot of other stuff going on. And, that’s an understatement.
Clint R
1st Law of Thermodynamics is kinda conservation of energy.
https://www.chadsprep.com/chads-general-chemistry-videos/3-laws-of-thermodynamics-definition/?srsltid=AfmBOormZ6MKbzPO9CcWXz2CPa9w9EKFpoUjUFnLAJ12C9lSxa4vu8jZ
DREMT
The GHE is not a slight unmeasurable effect that is drowned out by other processes. It is a very considerable effect that allows life to thrive on Earth. It is around a 33 C effect.
It is okay to be skeptical and highly encouraged in science. Denial of observation and evidence are not admirable characteristics that help science. There are some who strongly believe the Earth is flat and provide some “proofs” of their misguided beliefs. The problem is when confronted with vast amounts of observation that reject their claims they will not consider the evidence and alter their views.
The GHG act as barriers to radiant energy flow. The only way the Earth system loses energy is by radiant means as the vacuum above does not support the other heat transfer modes (conduction or convection). The surface emits and average of 396 Watts/m^2 (give or take since it is an average and depends on how the average is arrived at might vary by a few watts from different researchers). The amount of energy lost to space at TOA is averaged at 240 W/m^2. The GHG create a strong radiant barrier from surface to space and act like a radiant insulation that keeps the heated surface warmer than it would be without such gases. Clint R believes that N2 and O2 insulated the surface but he has zero explanation of how they inhibit radiant energy loss.
Norman, if you were looking for a way that energy from the surface and lower in the atmosphere could be delayed in its escape to space then the N2 and O2 molecules are your prime suspects, simply because they don’t absorb and emit anywhere near as effectively as GHGs. In other words they “hold on” to the energy for far longer than GHGs. Maybe this is what Clint R is trying to explain to you.
Dr Spencer.
Given the overlap in messaging between your Climate Working Group report and longstanding policy positions of organizations such as the American Petroleum Institute, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the Heartland Institute, and others aligned with fossil fuel interests, how do you ensure that your work remains independent of such advocacy networks, and is not perceived as producing science in service of predetermined policy goals?
Rgrds.
Your piece ahead of the comments and journalistic stampede is well written and balanced.
The polarisation to two tribes diametrically opposed through ideology, politics, self interest, attention seeking or outright delusion is clear in all we see around the topic and especially from the groups and institutions that profit from either alarm or denial.
I align with your “so what” statement Dr Spencer. The media and those that shout loudest without the requisite education, knowledge or insight have had the stage too long. Rational thinking and management of energy transition (I speak of Europe with its crazy decisions and politics as the “first world” that has depleted its resources and charges into reorganising its energy mix with seriously questionable policies, decisions and outcomes) is not the place for misguided politicians that seek to surround themselves with advisors that are ideologues with equal measure of ignorance. This only creates bad policy that damages the most vulnerable in society and destroys economies as we see with Germany and the UK who have the highest energy costs in the world but amoung the highest penetration of RE at the same time. Interestingly Safran, an aerospace equipment manufacturer, decide this week to invest c. $500 million in a carbon brake pad manufacturing facility in France based upon the cost of energy, ironically France owes its low reliable energy cost to nuclear power the nemesis of the greens from the 1970’s until now and the energy source Germany chose to shut down while still operational, economic and many years of life in their generating sites. Europe demonstrates what energy madness is in abundance.
You are not only a voice of reason Dr Spencer but an accomplished professional scientist that has stayed the course seeking truth. In spite of the irrational hostility you have suffered you have stayed the course and yes the tide has turned and the blues are on the way out, the red team needs grown up, sensible and grounded discussion to bring sense and order to the chaos the blues have created.
The swamp needs draining of those that have the oxygen of undue public exposure and to be replaced by people of your calibre so the public may benefit from qualified insight rather than the sound bites of maniacs.
Keep doing the good work Dr Spencer.
“I’m talking about the organized effort to build scientific justifications for desired policy outcomes, which started with the IPCC’s formation in the late 1980s.”
Isn’t that exactly what this report is all about?
Then you are OK with ‘science’ being decided by elections?
Would it not be better to try to achieve a balanced assessment of the state of the actual science?
And apropos, the President just announced that he was firing the head of the BLS after the weak jobs report.
The BLS collects and analyzes the employment data.
He’ll try to appoint someone who will give him the ‘stats’ he’s looking for.
He’s allowed to fire and appoint anyone he wants. I wouldn’t want a
Biden appointee if I were him.
Humphrey’s still there, so Troglodyte tells another porky.