Summary Points

1) Global wildfire activity has decreased in recent decades, making any localized increase (or decrease) in wildfire activity difficult to attribute to ‘global climate change’.

2) Like California, Australia is prone to bushfires every year during the dry season. Ample fuel and dry weather exists for devastating fires each year, even without excessive heat or drought, as illustrated by the record number of hectares burned (over 100 million) during 1974-75 when above-average precipitation and below-average temperatures existed.

3) Australian average temperatures in 2019 were well above what global warming theory can explain, illustrating the importance of natural year-to-year variability in weather patterns (e.g. drought and excessively high temperatures).

4) Australia precipitation was at a record low in 2019, but climate models predict no long-term trend in Australia precipitation, while the observed trend has been upward, not downward. This again highlights the importance of natural climate variability to fire weather conditions, as opposed to human-induced climate change.

5) While reductions in prescribed burning have probably contributed to the irregular increase in the number of years with large bush fires, a five-fold increase in population in the last 100 years has greatly increased potential ignition sources, both accidental and purposeful.

Historical Background

Australia has a long history of bush fires, with the Aborigines doing prescribed burns centuries (if not millennia) before European settlement. A good summary of the history of bushfires and their management was written by the CSIRO Division of Forestry twenty-five years ago, entitled Bushfires – An Integral Part of Australia’s Environment.

The current claim by many that human-caused climate change has made Australian bushfires worse is difficult to support, for a number of reasons. Bushfires (like wildfires elsewhere in the world) are a natural occurrence wherever there is strong seasonality in precipitation, with vegetation growing during the wet season and then becoming fuel for fire during the dry season.

All other factors being equal, wildfires (once ignited) will be made worse by higher temperatures, lower humidity, and stronger winds. But with the exception of dry lightning, the natural sources of fire ignition are pretty limited. High temperature and low humidity alone do not cause dead vegetation to spontaneously ignite.

As the human population increases, the potential ignition sources have increased rapidly. The population of Australia has increased five-fold in the last 100 years (from 5 million to 25 million). Discarded cigarettes and matches, vehicle catalytic converters, sparks from electrical equipment and transmission lines, campfires, prescribed burns going out of control, and arson are some of the more obvious source of human-caused ignition, and these can all be expected to increase with population.

Trends in Bushfire Activity

The following plot shows the major Australia bushfires over the same period of time (100 years) as the five-fold increase in the population of Australia. The data come from Wikipedia’s Bushfires in Australia.

As can be seen, by far the largest area burned occurred during 1974-75, at over 100 million hectares (close to 15% of the total area of Australia). Curiously, though, according to Australia Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) data, the 1974-75 bushfires occurred during a year with above-average precipitation and below-average temperature. This is opposite to the narrative that major bushfires are a feature of just excessively hot and dry years.

Every dry season in Australia experiences excessive heat and low humidity.

Australia High Temperature Trends

The following plot (in red) shows the yearly average variations in daily high temperature for Australia, compared to the 40-year average during 1920-1959.

Also shown in Fig. 2 (in blue) is the average of 41 CMIP5 climate models daily high temperature for Australia (from the KNMI Climate Explorer website). There are a few important points to be made from this plot.

First, if we correlate the yearly temperatures in Fig. 2 with the bushfire land area burned in Fig. 1, there is essentially no correlation (-0.11), primarily because of the huge 1974-75 event. If that year is removed from the data, there is a weak positive correlation (+0.19, barely significant at the 2-sigma level). But having statistics depend so much on single events (in this case, their removal from the dataset) is precisely one of the reasons why we should not use the current (2019-2020) wildfire events as an indicator of long-term climate change.

Secondly, while it is well known that the CMIP5 models are producing too much warming in the tropics compared to observations, in Australia just the opposite is happening: the BOM temperatures are showing more rapid warming than the average of the climate models produces. This could be a spurious result of changes in Australian thermometer measurement technology and data processing as has been claimed by Jennifer Marohasy.

Or, maybe the discrepancy is from natural climate variability. Who knows?

Finally, note the huge amount of year-to-year temperature variability in Fig. 2. Clearly, 2019 was exceptionally warm, but a good part of that warmth was likely due to natural variations in the tropics and subtropics, due to persistent El Nino conditions and associated changes in where precipitation regions versus clear air regions tend to get established in the tropics and subtropics.

Australia Precipitation Trends

To drive home the point that any given year should not be used as evidence of a long-term trend, Australia precipitation provides an excellent example. The following plot is like the temperature plot above (Fig. 2), but now for precipitation as reported by the BOM (data here).

We can see that 2019 was definitely a dry year in Australia, right? Possibly a record-setter. But the long-term trend has been upward (not downward), again illustrating the fact that any given year might not have anything to do with the long-term trend, let alone human-induced climate change.

And regarding the latter, the blue curve in Fig. 3 shows that the expectation of global warming theory as embodied by the average of 41 climate models is that there should have been no long-term trend in Australia precipitation, despite claims by the media, pseudo-experts, and Hollywood celebrities to the contrary.

It should be kept in mind that wildfire risk can actually increase with more precipitation during the growing season preceding fire season. More precipitation produces more fuel. In fact, there is a positive correlation between the precipitation data in Fig. 3 and bushfire hectares burned (+0.30, significant at the 3-sigma level). Now, I am not claiming that hot, dry conditions do not favor more bushfire activity. They indeed do (during fire season), everything else being the same. But the current 2019-2020 increase in bushfires would be difficult to tie to global warming theory based upon the evidence in the above three plots.

Global Wildfire Activity

If human-caused climate change (or even natural climate change) was causing wildfire activity to increase, it should show up much better in global statistics than in any specific region, like Australia. Of course any specific region can have an upward (or downward) trend in wildfire activity, simply because of the natural, chaotic variations in weather and climate.

But, contrary to popular perception, a global survey of wildfire activity has found that recent decades have actually experienced less fire activity (Doerr & Santin, 2016), not more. This means there are more areas experiencing a decrease in wildfire activity than there are areas experiencing more wildfires.

Why isn’t this decrease being attributed to human-caused climate change?

Concluding Comments

There are multiple reasons why people have the impression that wildfires are getting worse and human-caused climate change is to blame. First, the news tends to report only disasters… not a lack of disasters. The desire for more clicks means that headlines are increasingly sensationalized. The media can always find at least one expert to support the desired narrative.

Second, the spread of news is now rapid and it penetrates deeply, being spread through social media.

Third, an increasing number of environmental advocacy groups seize upon any natural disaster and declare it to be caused by increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. The hyperbolic and counter-factual claims of Extinction Rebellion is one of the best recent examples of this.

This is all against a backdrop of government funded science that receives funding in direct proportion to the threat to life and property that the researcher can claim exists if science answers are not found, and policy is not changed. So, it should come at no surprise that there is political influence on what research gets funding when the outcome of that research directly affects public policy.

My personal opinion, based upon the available evidence, is that any long-term increase in wildfire activity in any specific location like Australia (or California) is dominated by the increase in human-caused ignition events, whether they be accidental or purposeful. A related reason is the increasing pressure by the public to reduce prescribed burns, clearing of dead vegetation, and cutting of fire breaks, which the public believes to have short term benefits to beauty and wildlife preservation, but results in long term consequences that are just the opposite and much worse.

Recent news reports claim that dozens of people have been arrested in Australia on arson charges, a phenomenon which we must assume has also increased by at least five-fold (like population) in the last 100 years. Accidental sources of ignition also increase in lockstep with the increasing population and all of the infrastructure that comes along with more people (vehicles, power lines, campfires, discarded matches and cigarettes, etc.)

So, to automatically blame the Australian bushfires on human-caused climate change is mostly alarmist nonsense, with virtually no basis in fact.

2019 was the third warmest year (+0.44 deg. C) in the 41 year satellite record, after 2016 (+0.52 deg. C) and 1998 (+0.48 deg. C).

The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for December, 2019 was +0.56 deg. C, statistically unchanged from the November value of +0.55 deg. C.

The yearly rankings over the 41-year satellite-based temperature record shows 2019 as the third warmest, behind 2016 and 1998.

The linear warming trend since January, 1979 remains at +0.13 C/decade (+0.11 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).

Various regional LT departures from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 24 months are:

YEAR MO GLOBE NHEM. SHEM. TROPIC USA48 ARCTIC AUST
 2018 01 +0.29 +0.51 +0.07 -0.10 +0.70 +1.39 +0.52
 2018 02 +0.25 +0.28 +0.21 +0.05 +0.99 +1.22 +0.35
 2018 03 +0.28 +0.43 +0.12 +0.08 -0.19 -0.32 +0.76
 2018 04 +0.21 +0.32 +0.10 -0.14 +0.06 +1.02 +0.84
 2018 05 +0.16 +0.38 -0.05 +0.02 +1.90 +0.14 -0.24
 2018 06 +0.20 +0.33 +0.06 +0.12 +1.10 +0.77 -0.41
 2018 07 +0.30 +0.38 +0.23 +0.28 +0.41 +0.24 +1.49
 2018 08 +0.18 +0.21 +0.16 +0.11 +0.02 +0.11 +0.37
 2018 09 +0.13 +0.14 +0.13 +0.22 +0.89 +0.23 +0.28
 2018 10 +0.20 +0.27 +0.12 +0.30 +0.20 +1.08 +0.43
 2018 11 +0.26 +0.24 +0.28 +0.46 -1.16 +0.68 +0.55
 2018 12 +0.25 +0.35 +0.15 +0.30 +0.24 +0.69 +1.20
 2019 01 +0.38 +0.35 +0.41 +0.36 +0.53 -0.15 +1.15
 2019 02 +0.37 +0.47 +0.28 +0.43 -0.02 +1.04 +0.05
 2019 03 +0.35 +0.44 +0.25 +0.41 -0.55 +0.96 +0.59
 2019 04 +0.44 +0.38 +0.51 +0.54 +0.50 +0.92 +0.91
 2019 05 +0.32 +0.29 +0.35 +0.40 -0.61 +0.98 +0.39
 2019 06 +0.47 +0.42 +0.52 +0.64 -0.64 +0.91 +0.35
 2019 07 +0.38 +0.33 +0.44 +0.45 +0.11 +0.33 +0.87
 2019 08 +0.39 +0.38 +0.39 +0.42 +0.17 +0.44 +0.24
 2019 09 +0.62 +0.64 +0.59 +0.60 +1.14 +0.75 +0.57
 2019 10 +0.46 +0.64 +0.28 +0.31 -0.03 +0.99 +0.50
 2019 11 +0.55 +0.56 +0.54 +0.55 +0.21 +0.56 +0.38
 2019 12 +0.56 +0.61 +0.50 +0.58 +0.92 +0.66 +0.94

The UAH LT global anomaly image for December, 2019 should be available in the next few days here.

The global and regional monthly anomalies for the various atmospheric layers we monitor should be available in the next few days at the following locations:

Lower Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
Mid-Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tmt/uahncdc_mt_6.0.txt
Tropopause: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/ttp/uahncdc_tp_6.0.txt
Lower Stratosphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tls/uahncdc_ls_6.0.txt

Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue to cause upper atmospheric cooling in the 2020s, which will lead to some of the most beautiful cloud displays ever witnessed by human eyes.

Along with the warming in the lower atmosphere that more CO2 is theoretically expected to produce, the upper atmosphere is supposed to cool even more strongly. For example, in our satellite observations since 1979, we have observed about 3-4 times as much cooling in the middle stratosphere as warming in the troposphere over the last four decades. This cooling is expected to exist even higher up, into the upper mesosphere and beyond, which is at the edge of outer space and where meteors burn up. The current record solar minimum conditions are probably also contributing to this cooling.

Polar Stratospheric Clouds and Noctilucent Clouds are Increasing

As 2019 came to a close, reports of some of the most vivid opalescent displays of wintertime polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) in memory have been coming in from Northern Europe. These clouds require very cold temperatures in the stratosphere (-80 deg. C or colder). They show up shortly after sunset or before sunrise when the sun is still shining at that high altitude (15-25 km), while the usual weather-related clouds in the troposphere are no longer illuminated by the sun.

In the summertime in the polar regions, electric-blue noctilucent clouds (NLCs) are sometimes seen in the upper mesosphere (80-85 km) where temperatures plunge to the coldest anywhere on Earth, -100 deg. C. Like PSCs, they are seen after sunset or before sunrise, but due to their great altitude occur when the sun is well below the horizon and some brighter stars are beginning to shine. These clouds exist at literally the edge of space, above 99.999% of the mass of the atmosphere, and are believed to be seeded by meteoric dust.

These clouds have a rippled appearance, and time lapse photography has revealed an amazing variety of undulations, like waves from multiple pebbles thrown in a pond interacting. The following 4K time lapse video shows cloud behavior unlike any you have seen before, and is well worth the 2 minutes it takes to watch (go full-screen):

2017 NOCTILUCENT CLOUD CHASING SEASON TEASER – 4K (UHD) from Night Lights Films on Vimeo.

Last year (2019) NLCs were observed well outside the polar regions for the first time in recorded history, as far south as southern California and Nevada. This is due to some combination of colder temperatures and higher water vapor amounts (methane is converted to water vapor at these altitudes, and increasing atmospheric methane could be causing higher humidity up there).

I keep getting asked about our charts comparing the CMIP5 models to observations, old versions of which are still circulating, so it could be I have not been proactive enough at providing updates to those. Since I presented some charts at the Heartland conference in D.C. in July summarizing the latest results we had as of that time, I thought I would reproduce those here.

The following comparisons are for the lower tropospheric (LT) temperature product, with separate results for global and tropical (20N-20S). I also provide trend ranking “bar plots” so you can get a better idea of how the warming trends all quantitatively compare to one another (and since it is the trends that, arguably, matter the most when discussing “global warming”).

From what I understand, the new CMIP6 models are exhibiting even more warming than the CMIP5 models, so it sounds like when we have sufficient model comparisons to produce CMIP6 plots, the discrepancies seen below will be increasing.

Global Comparisons

First is the plot of global LT anomaly time series, where I have averaged 4 reanalysis datasets together, but kept the RSS and UAH versions of the satellite-only datasets separate. (Click on images to get full-resolution versions).

The ranking of the trends in that figure shows that only the Russian model has a lower trend than UAH, with the average of the 4 reanalysis datasets not far behind. I categorically deny any Russian involvement in the resulting agreement between the UAH trend and the Russian model trend, no matter what dossier might come to light.

Tropical Comparisons

Next is the tropical (20N-20S) comparisons, where we now see closer agreement between the UAH and RSS satellite-only datasets, as well as the reanalyses.

I still believe that the primary cause of the discrepancies between models and observations is that the feedbacks in the models are too strongly positive. The biggest problem most likely resides in how the models handle moist convection and precipitation efficiency, which in turn affects how upper tropospheric cloud amounts and water vapor respond to warming. This is related to Richard Lindzen’s “Infrared Iris” effect, which has not been widely accepted by the mainstream climate research community.

Another possibility, which Will Happer and others have been exploring, is that the radiative forcing from CO2 is not as strong as is assumed in the models.

Finally, one should keep in mind that individual climate models still have their warming rates adjusted in a rather ad hoc fashion through their assumed history of anthropogenic aerosol forcing, which is very uncertain and potentially large OR small.

I continue to have comment posting problems here.

First, I did an update of all the WordPress plugins a couple days ago, and I immediately became locked out of the website. I could not even ftp in to disable the plugins. The web hosting company had to restore my access.

Secondly, some people have noted that their comments are held for moderation for no apparent reason. This has been a continuing problem for a long time. I have a limited number of key words and people I automatically screen out, but there are many more cases where there is no apparent reason for the comment to be rejected.

If you have the latter problem, try posting your comment in parts (Part 1 of 3, Part 2 of 3…). Let me know by email when you have a small section of comment that will not post so I can see what might be tripping the filter. (I see a LOT of actual spam that has as little as one sentence of irrelevant content, and I have no idea how the algorithm flagged it.) Anthony Watts once told me he has similar problems.

Sorry for the difficulties.

It’s that time of year again, when we are subjected to exaggerated climate claims such as in this Forbes article, 2019 Wraps Up The Hottest Decade In Recorded Human History. Given that the global average surface temperature is about 60 deg. F, and most of the climate protesters we see in the news are wearing more clothing than the average Key West bar patron, I would think that journalists striving for accuracy would use a more accurate term than “hottest”.

So, I am announcing that in our 41-year record of global satellite measurements of the lower atmosphere, 2019 will come in as 3rd least-chilly.

For the decade 2010-2019, the satellite temperatures averaged only 0.15 C higher than in the previous decade (2000-2009). That’s less than a third of a degree F, which no one would even notice over 10 years.

If you are wondering how your neck of the woods has fared this year, the latest year-to-date plot of 2019 temperature departures from the 30-year average (1981-2010) shows the usual pattern of above- and below-normal, with little visual indication that the global average for 2019 is now running 0.36 deg. C above normal.

The use of the term “hottest” to describe recent warming belies the fact that the rate of warming we have experienced in recent decades is minuscule compared to the several tens of degrees of temperature change most people experience throughout the year — and sometimes from one week to the next.

So, how are we supposed to react when the arithmetically-averaged temperature, across all extremes, goes up by only a small fraction of a degree in ten years? With horror? Outrage? Is the term “hottest” in a headline supposed to move us? Seriously?

Should we all get someone to fly across the Atlantic so they can transport us to Europe on a luxury yacht to help Save the Earth™ on our next European vacation?

The click-bait journalism typified by terms like “hottest”, “climate emergency”, and now “climate catastrophe” helps explain why the public is largely indifferent to the global warming issue, at least if we are asked to spend more than a few dollars to fix it.

This is why the alarmist narrative has moved on from temperature, and now focuses on wildfires, droughts, floods, hurricanes, snowstorms, and sea level rise. Yet, none of these have worsened in the last 100 years, with the exception of global sea level rise which has been occurring at a rate of about 1 inch per decade for as long as it has been monitored (since the 1850s, well before humans could be blamed).

And, just in case some new visitors to my blog are reading this, let me clarify that I am not a denier of human-caused climate change. I believe at least some of the warming we have experienced in the last 50 years has been due to increasing carbon dioxide. I just consider the fraction of warming attributable to humans to be uncertain, and probably largely benign.

This is fully consistent with the science, since the global energy imbalance necessary to explain recent warming (about 1 part in 250 of the natural energy flows in and out of the climate system) is much smaller than our knowledge of those flows, either from either theoretical first principles or from observations.

In other words, recent warming might well be mostly natural.

We just don’t know.

The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for November, 2019 was +0.55 deg. C, up from the October value of +0.46 deg. C.

The linear warming trend since January, 1979 remains at +0.13 C/decade (+0.11 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).

Various regional LT departures from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 23 months are:

YEAR MO GLOBE NHEM. SHEM. TROPIC USA48 ARCTIC AUST
 2018 01 +0.29 +0.52 +0.06 -0.10 +0.70 +1.39 +0.52
 2018 02 +0.25 +0.28 +0.21 +0.05 +0.99 +1.22 +0.35
 2018 03 +0.28 +0.43 +0.12 +0.08 -0.19 -0.32 +0.76
 2018 04 +0.21 +0.32 +0.09 -0.14 +0.06 +1.02 +0.84
 2018 05 +0.16 +0.38 -0.05 +0.01 +1.90 +0.14 -0.24
 2018 06 +0.20 +0.33 +0.06 +0.12 +1.11 +0.77 -0.41
 2018 07 +0.30 +0.38 +0.22 +0.28 +0.41 +0.24 +1.49
 2018 08 +0.18 +0.21 +0.16 +0.11 +0.02 +0.11 +0.37
 2018 09 +0.13 +0.14 +0.13 +0.22 +0.89 +0.23 +0.27
 2018 10 +0.20 +0.27 +0.12 +0.30 +0.20 +1.08 +0.43
 2018 11 +0.26 +0.24 +0.28 +0.45 -1.16 +0.68 +0.55
 2018 12 +0.25 +0.35 +0.15 +0.30 +0.25 +0.69 +1.20
 2019 01 +0.38 +0.35 +0.41 +0.36 +0.53 -0.15 +1.15
 2019 02 +0.37 +0.47 +0.28 +0.43 -0.02 +1.04 +0.05
 2019 03 +0.35 +0.44 +0.25 +0.41 -0.55 +0.97 +0.59
 2019 04 +0.44 +0.38 +0.51 +0.54 +0.50 +0.92 +0.91
 2019 05 +0.32 +0.30 +0.35 +0.40 -0.61 +0.98 +0.38
 2019 06 +0.47 +0.42 +0.52 +0.64 -0.64 +0.91 +0.35
 2019 07 +0.38 +0.33 +0.44 +0.45 +0.11 +0.33 +0.87
 2019 08 +0.39 +0.38 +0.39 +0.42 +0.17 +0.44 +0.24
 2019 09 +0.62 +0.64 +0.59 +0.60 +1.14 +0.75 +0.57
 2019 10 +0.46 +0.64 +0.27 +0.31 -0.03 +0.99 +0.50
 2019 11 +0.55 +0.56 +0.54 +0.55 +0.22 +0.56 +0.38

The UAH LT global anomaly image for November, 2019 should be available in the next few days here.

The global and regional monthly anomalies for the various atmospheric layers we monitor should be available in the next few days at the following locations:

Lower Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
Mid-Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tmt/uahncdc_mt_6.0.txt
Tropopause: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/ttp/uahncdc_tp_6.0.txt
Lower Stratosphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tls/uahncdc_ls_6.0.txt

Do the global warming wars ever change anyone’s mind?

I suppose there are a few people whose minds have been changed. As I recall, Judith Curry has said Climategate (now “celebrating” its 10 year anniversary) was her wake-up call that institutionalized climate science might not be all it claims to be. She is now a well-informed and unabashed skeptic of the modern tendency to blame every bad weather event on humans.

While I’m sure there are other examples, the unfortunate truth is that fewer and fewer people actually care about the truth.

The journalist who broke the Climategate story, James Delingpole, yesterday posted an article entitled The Bastards Have Got Away with It!, James concludes with,

“Climategate was the event when, just for a moment, it seemed we’d got the climate scamsters bang to rights, that the world’s biggest scientific (and economic) con trick had been exposed and that the Climate Industrial Complex would be dismantled before it could do any more damage to our freedom and our prosperity. But the truth, it would seem, is no match for big money, dirty politics and madness-of-crowds groupthink. We’ve lost this one, I think, my friends. And the fact that all those involved in this scam will one day burn in Hell is something, I’m afraid, which gives me all too little consolation.”

You see, it does not really matter whether a few bad actors (even if they are leaders of the climate movement) conspired to hide data and methods, and strong-arm scientific journal editors into not publishing papers that might stand in the way of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) mission to pin climate change on humans, inflate its seriousness, and lay the groundwork for worldwide governmental efforts to reduce humanity’s access to affordable energy.

The folks were simply trying to Save the Earth™, and we all know that the ends justifies the means, right? So what if they cheated? Boys will be boys, you know. The science is sound, and besides, 97% of all scientists agree that… something.

The Roots of Polarization

One would think that the practice of science would be objective. I once believed this, too. As a fresh post-doc at the University of Wisconsin, when I discovered something new in satellite data, I was surprised to encounter NASA employees who tried to keep my work from being published because they feared it would interfere with a new satellite mission they were working toward. I eventually got it published as a cover article in the prestigious journal, Nature.

But the subject I was dealing with did not have the profound financial, political, policy, and even religious import that climate change would end up having. Furthermore, 35 years ago things were different than today. People were less tribal. There is an old saying that one should not discuss politics or religion in polite company, but it turns out that social media is far from polite company.

From a practical standpoint, what we do (or don’t do) about human-caused climate change supports either (1) a statist, top-down governmental control over human affairs that involves a more socialist political framework, or (2) an unconstrained individual-freedom framework where capitalism reigns supreme. So, one could easily be a believer (or non-believer) in the ‘climate emergency’ based upon their political leanings. While I know a few socialists who are skeptical of human-caused climate change being a serious issue, this is the exception rather than the rule. The same is true of capitalists who think that we must transition away from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy (unless they stand to make money off the transition through subsidies, in which case they are financially rather than ideologically driven).

Or, on a spiritual level, a human who desires to worship something must ultimately choose between the Creation or the Creator. There is no third option. I find that most Earth scientists are nature worshipers (showing various levels of fervor) and consider the Earth to be fragile. In contrast, those who believe the Earth was created for the purpose of serving humanity tend to view nature as being resilient and less sensitive to lasting damage. Both of these views have equally religious underpinnings since “fragile” and “resilient” are emotive and qualitative, rather than scientific, terms.

So, I would argue it really does not matter that much to most alarmists or skeptics what the evidence shows. As long as 8 billion people on the planet have some, non-zero effect on climate — no matter how small or unmeasurable — the alarmist can still claim that ‘we shouldn’t be interfering with the climate system’. As a counter example, the skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg actually believes the alarmist science from the IPCC, but claims that economics tells us it’s better to live in and adapt to a warmer world until we have more cost-effective substitutes for fossil fuels. For this stance regarding policy, he is labeled a global warming denier despite fully believing in human-caused climate change.

The Role of the Disinformation Superhighway

Baylor Professor Alan Jacobs has an interesting essay entitled On Lost Causes regarding the tendency for people to believe anything they see on the internet if it supports their biases.

He mentions a recent novel in which a high-tech billionaire, fed up with the disinformation he sees on the Web, concocts an elaborate online story that Moab, Utah has been obliterated by a nuclear explosion. He has CGI video, actors, witnesses, and an elaborate (but fake) social media presence to support the story.

The plan is to then show the world how easily they were duped, so that people would become less credulous when digesting information.

But instead, people cling to their belief. Even after many years, the ‘Moab truthers’ claim that anyone who disputes that Moab was destroyed are trolls or paid shills. People could actually travel to Moab to see for themselves, but virtually no one does.

In the climate wars, I see this behavior from both skeptics and alarmists. The alarmists point to increasing storms, heat waves, wildfires, etc. as evidence that humans are making weather worse. When they are shown evidence from a century of more of data that, no, things are not getting worse, these ‘storm truthers’ still bitterly cling to their beliefs while calling us skeptics “deniers”.

On the flip side, I routinely engage skeptics who claim that there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect, and that it is physically impossible for the cold atmosphere to make the surface warmer by increasing its CO2 content, anyway. No matter how many different ways I try to show how they are wrong, they never change their stance.

As a result, despite being a skeptic on the subject of humans having a serious effect on global climate, I’ve had to block more fellow skeptics from commenting on my blog than I have blocked alarmists. So, I get attacked from people on both sides of the issue.

I partly blame the public education system for the current state of affairs. Students are increasingly taught what to think, rather than how to think. Also to blame is the (probably unavoidable) funding of science by government, which President Eisenhower warned would cause science to become corrupted by a handful of powerful elites who did not have the advancement of scientific knowledge as the central goal.

When politicians have control over the purse strings, is it any wonder that politicians would preferentially fund the science which benefits certain policy outcomes, usually involving more government control over the lives of citizens? There have been innumerable funding programs to explore the human influence on climate (spoiler alert: every change we see is human-caused), yet almost no money goes to understanding natural sources of climate change.

Both Delingpole (describing the failure of Climategate to change attitudes) and Jacobs (describing the tendency of people to believe anything that supports their tribal beliefs) end their articles on a sour note. I have already quoted Delingpole’s conclusion, above. Here’s how Jacobs end his essay:

“..if at this stage of the game, given what we know about how social media work and about the incentives of the people who make TV, you’re still getting your dopamine rush by recycling TV-news clips and shouting at people on the Internet, you’re about as close to beyond hope as a human being gets. There is no point talking to you, trying to reason with you, giving you facts and the sources of those facts. You have made yourself invulnerable to reason and evidence. You’re a Moab truther in the making. So, though I do not in theory write anyone off, in practice I do. It’s time to give you up as a lost cause and start figuring out how to prevent the next generation from becoming like you.”

Delingpole and Jacobs come to sobering — even depressing — conclusions. Unfortunately, like these two authors I do not have much reason to be hopeful that things will get better anytime soon.

Here are several photos I took after dawn this morning as these frosty blooms continued to grow.

The following is a re-posting of an article by Dr. Ross McKitrick, University of Guelph, published yesterday, November 11, 2019. I have a comment that follows his post.

Climate Models vs Observations: 2019 Update

Back around 2014 many people, me included, were commenting on the discrepancy between climate models and observations. In a report for the Fraser Institute I showed the following graph:

The HadCRUT4 series (black) was then dipping below the 95% lower bound of the model distribution. The IPCC itself in the 5th Assessment Report (2013) noted that out of 114 model runs, 111 had overstated observed warming since the late 1990s. That same year, Hans von Storch told Der Spiegel that:

“If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.”

But before 2018 came along, the modelers were saved by the El.

El Nino, that is. The powerful 2015-16 El Nino caused temperatures to surge, apparently erasing the discrepancy. It was just in the nick of time. In 2018 the US National Assessment came out, using data sets ending in 2017, as did the Canadian counterpart, and they were able to declare that a lot of warming had occurred, more or less in line with model projections. Blog articles about the 30th anniversary of James Hansen’s predictions did the same.

Well it’s a couple of years later and the El Nino heat has mostly gone from the climate system. What does the model-observational comparison look like now?

This graph, like the earlier one above, compares the HadCRUT4 surface temperature average (black line) against the CMIP5 mean (red line). The pink band shows the 1-sigma (67%) distribution and the tan band extends out to the 2-sigma (95%) distribution. The outer yellow bands show the lower and upper 2.5th percentiles. The lines are positioned so all models and observations are centered on a 1961-1990 zero mean. The model runs follow the RCP4.5 scenario and extend out to 2050.

Let’s zoom in on the post-1950 interval.

The HadCRUT4 series ends in 2018, which is the last complete year. Temperatures in 2018 (+0.60C) are back down to about where they were in 2014 (+0.58C). We’ll know in February or March where 2019 ends up.

The worry back in 2014 was that the Hadley (black) line had dropped below the 97.5th percentile envelope of the CMIP5 model runs. The El Nino pushed it almost all the way up to the mean, but only temporarily. It’s now back to the edge of the yellow band, meaning it’s skirting the bottom of the 95 percent confidence interval.

The big issue is not whether warming has “paused” or not, it’s how it compares to model projections. RCP4.5 is considered a medium, plausible projection. But it’s already pulling away from the observations.

I have indicated 2030 on the graph. That’s the year we all die, or something. But I think it’s more likely that will be the year by which the HadCRUT4 line drops out below the bottom of the CMIP5 RCP4.5 ensemble once and for all. The El Nino disguised the model-observational discrepancy for a few years, but it’s coming back.

There are other versions of this graph that don’t show such a discrepancy. Zeke Hausfather, for example, prefers to use a different set of CMIP5 outputs in which water surface temperatures rather than air temperatures from the (modeled) oceans are used to correspond to the sampling method
in HadCRUT4. The result is that the model temperatures tilt down a bit towards observations. That’s fine, but when governments draw scary charts of future warming those aren’t the model runs they show us, instead they show charts like the one I’ve drawn, so I’m more interested in seeing how it compares to observations.

I referred above to the Der Spiegel interview with Hans von Storch back in 2013. I very much appreciate another of his comments:

“Unfortunately, some scientists behave like preachers, delivering sermons to people. What this approach ignores is the fact that there are many threats in our world that must be weighed against one another. If I’m driving my car and find myself speeding toward an obstacle, I can’t simply yank the wheel to the side without first checking to see if I’ll instead be driving straight into a crowd of people. Climate researchers cannot and should not take this process of weighing different factors out of the hands of politics and society.”

That is very well put.

Roy W. Spencer comment: With the new CMIP6 models coming out suggesting even more warming than the CMIP5 models did, I fear we will see continuing “adjustments” of the instrumental temperature record to produce even more warming. This is the only way that the models can retain credibility in the face of real-world evidence that warming has been modest, at best.