Climate Change: Alarmists ignore how changes in the Sun and Earth's motion dwarf CO2's power; ignore major cooling forces; suppress highly qualified dissenters; and alter data—all to hype CO2 hysteria

Bjorn Lomborg is Right: Foster Economic Growth to create new means to adapt better to whatever happens. Otherwise, expect soaring prices, blackouts, suffering, and violence as people rebel.

The Sun with sunspots

I could dash off a number of “one-liners” for the climate issues I address here, but they wouldn’t provide effective information to move thoughtful people who find the carbon-dioxide (CO2) hypothesis of global warming and climate change convincing or plausible, or who want more information before taking action, or who don’t see the grave dangers facing us from blackouts, food shortages, violence, and climate-change totalitarianism.

The issues must be addressed substantively as well as rhetorically to inform as many people as possible, including younger people who have been subjected to terrifying stories of climate apocalypse from early ages in school and are indoctrinated, if not terrorized, by the alarms they get almost daily from the “authorities.”

I have collected information here that can be used, piecemeal or in any combination, to engage people respectfully and convincingly on the merits, both intuitively plausible and factually accurate.

Some examples for conversation:

1. We can’t reliably forecast weather ten days out, so how can we reliably forecast climate 100 years out?

2. Greenland Ice Core data show that the recent warming trend is just a blip in a 2,000-year cooling trend.

3. As Communist China continues to burn more and more coal, it seems perfectly reasonable that soot pollution would settle in the Arctic, darken it, absorb more heat from the Sun, and increasingly warm the Arctic—no carbon dioxide is needed for that.

4. China’s and India’s increasing burning of coal and other fossil fuels, and even Europe’s move to coal to avoid freezing to death, shows how pointless and harmful is the U.S.’s effort to cut out all gasoline, natural gas, and coal while simultaneously demanding far more electricity generation to power electric vehicles and heat buildings—while not upgrading the electrical grid to do it.

Unavoidably, this post became rather long. However, most sections are snack- or meal-sized for convenient consumption. The following list of section headers can help navigate among them. (Sorry, the listed entries do not have internal links to the actual sections.)

1. Changes in the Sun Explain Most of the Heating and Cooling of the past 140 years.

2. WSJ Reports: Honest Greenhouse-Gas Climatologists Admit Clouds Make Greenhouse-Gas-Based Forecasts Unreliable

3. Distortions and Restorations of Historical Temperatures

   1. “ClimateGate” and the “Hockey Stick”—Alarmists “Cook” the Books

   2. The Restored Temperature Record of the past 2,000 years Shows Large-Scale Natural Climate Change Up AND Down

   3. The IPCC and Willie Sutton—$$$—More Cooking

4. Evidence of Natural Climate Cooling

   1. Ice Ages Past and To Come As the Earth’s Orbit and Rotation Oscillate (including Milankovitch Cycles)

   2. Greenland Ice Core Data Show a Cooling Trend Over the Past 2,000 Years

   3. Wikipedia: The Holocene Climatic Optimum Occurred 9,000 to 5,000 Years Ago

   4. The “Water-Vapor Feedback Effect” Deception

5. Unreliability of Weather and Climate Forecasts

6. Warmings Unrelated to Runaway CO2 Heating

   1. City heat and “heat island effects” make the Earth look like it is warming much more than it is

   2. Industrial Soot, Polar-route Jet Contrails, and Volcanoes Muddy the Picture Further

7. Words That Have Been Misused to Mislead

   1. Climate Studies and Computer Programs Employ Facts of Science But Are NOT Science As a Whole

   2. “Greenhouse Gas”

8. Greens’ War on Fertilizers and Food

9. Bjorn Lomborg and the Copenhagen Consensus

[If this post is cut off by your email provider, click the button that will appear at the end to get the rest of it.]

1. Changes in The Sun Explain Most of the Heating and Cooling in the Past 140 years

The above graphs clearly show that temperatures in the last 140 years fairly closely followed variations in the Sun’s energy, both up and down, and were virtually independent of changes in CO2. This is not the message we get from “experts,” politicians, and headline writers. 

So it’s worthwhile to evaluate who produced these graphs.

In the first graph, the temperature line was produced by Dr. Willie Soon et al. He has been an astrophysicist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1997 to the present, according to Harvard-Smithsonian.

The total solar irradiance line was produced by Douglas Hoyt, an astrophysicist (now reportedly retired from Raytheon Corp.), and Dr. Kenneth Schatten, head solar physicist at a.i. solutions, at which he performs work for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and a member of the International Astronomical Union.

In the second pair of graphs, produced by Dr. Soon, arctic temperatures (where everyone says global warming is greatest) follow variations in the Sun with very little observable effect from the rise in CO2.

I take all such estimates with “grains of salt” because no one covered the whole Earth for all that time; but, as estimates, they have been done by people who have long associations with highly regarded institutions. They deserve attention.

Although I have read about global warming (since rechristened “climate change”) since the late 1980s, in such major media as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Forbes, I only found out about the above men and research results from reading one of Joe Bastardi’s books. And I only learned of his views on climate when I heard him speak in a segment on Joe Piscopo’s radio show.

Joe Bastardi was long the weather guru at AccuWeather and now runs his own firm WeatherBELL Analytics, which sells proprietary forecasts to people whose financial investments are materially affected by weather (farming, electricity generation/delivery and usage, air travel, construction, etc.). His recommendation for the above graphs and researchers carries a lot of weight with me because of his real-world success; it can’t be faked.

So I take the above graphs seriously as good-faith attempts by highly qualified people to get at the truth.

Yet these and other estimable people and even establishment research (see below) have been effectively censored—ignored, or smeared, or denied funding, or fired—by big media and “experts” who push the runaway-greenhouse-warming line and dominate public discussion. Despite:

2. WSJ Report: Honest Greenhouse-Gas Climatologists Admit Clouds Make Greenhouse-Gas-Based Forecasts Unreliable

Clouds matter a lot to reliability of climate forecasts because clouds can reflect the Sun’s heat away from Earth, they can insulate Earth from intense night cold, and whether they form and where they form can make huge differences in temperature. Yet honest climate researchers are stumped by clouds.

In a rare public airing of their great uncertainty, this front-page (print edition) article in The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 6, 2022, date of web version) says uncertainty about cloud formation and other matters bedevils their ability to provide understandings of climate change “with the sureness the world needs.” That’s right, they’ve looked at clouds from many sides now, and still, somehow, it’s clouds’ complexities they recall, they “really don’t know clouds at all” (with apologies to Joni Mitchell and her song “Both Sides, Now”).

3. Distortions and Restorations of the Record of Historical Temperatures

3a. “ClimateGate” and the “Hockey Stick”—Alarmists “Cook” the Books

ClimateGate

In 2009, hacked emails showed that leading climate alarmists associated with the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in England were acting to suppress anyone who disagreed with them. This was the “climategate” scandal.

The words “hide the decline” in those emails were featured in headlines and captured the nature of the corruption of data and interpretation taking place (more on this a bit later). Subsequent reporting showed that the CRU didn’t even keep its original raw data. It kept only its “value added” data, so no examination of the real data by independent climate researchers could be made. That, in itself, thoroughly and utterly discredits the CRU as a serious research institution of any kind.

Further, the CRU’s “data” ignored such things as rapid warming in the 1930s (think Dust Bowl), and the fact that the U.S.’s highest temperature occurred in 1934, not later (as of 2009). How convenient it is to suppress earlier natural warming so that the current warming seems so unusual that it must be man-made via CO2. There was more too. I’ve included just these two links to give a taste of what was happening: Here and Here.

Regarding “hide the decline,” defenders of the CRU might point out that it didn’t really mean hiding a decline in current temperatures, because current temperatures weren’t declining.

In actuality, the CRU was using ancient tree ring data to infer lower temperatures in the past. The problem was that recent tree ring data were incorrectly showing recent temperatures to be declining even though they were not declining. Use of tree ring data was subsequently discarded for being unreliable (unless old data is kept and used, which reportedly happens).

This could mean that the current rise in temperatures is not nearly as great relative to the past as climate alarmists allege. (That is, if use of tree rings can lead haphazrdly to underestimating temperatures, using tree rings to estimate past temperatures might make past temperatures seem lower than they really were.)

The Hockey Stick

In 2001, the UN’s IPCC featured a graph purporting to show that temperatures have been constant for a very long time and then began to rise inexorably in a straight line up and to the right as more and more fossil fuel was burned. The graph was dubbed the Hockey Stick because it resembled a hockey stick with the long end flat on the ground and the shorter end rising up and to the right. The author of the Hockey stick was Michael Mann, the same Michael Mann who was exposed in 2009 as being at the core of the climategate shenanigans.

A few years after 2001, two researchers got curious about the computer program Mann wrote to produce the Hockey Stick and started asking tough questions about it. Soon enough, the Hockey Stick was discredited. I read about that in the Tuesday Science section of the New York Times, not in a source that climate alarmists would try to discredit as unreliable. Researchers were quoted as saying the Hockey Stick had surprised them and they were glad to see the longstanding estimation of past temperatures restored.

3b. The Restored Temperature Record for the Past 2,000 Years Shows Large-Scale Natural Climate Change Up AND Down

The restored temperature models included a period 1,000 years ago called the Medieval Warming Period that is estimated to have been as warm as or warmer than now.

In that period, the Vikings colonized Greenland, Leif Erickson discovered “Vineland” in what is now mid-northern Canada, and remains of two (or more) Viking settlements have been found.

Back then too, a 100-year drought occurred in what is now the U.S. Southwest during which the people who now are called the Anasazi abandoned their cliff dwellings. Mesa Verde is the best-known of them. This corresponds exactly to what we are experiencing now: warmer Northern Hemisphere and drought in the U.S. Southwest.

In the 1300s, a “Little Ice Age” began suddenly and brutally; and with it came the black plague that killed one quarter of Europe. Temperatures got even colder in the 1600s as the Sun went “quiet,” meaning few or no sunspots. This period is called the Maunder Minimum. These events of sudden cooling could happen again.

Finally, in the 1800s, the Little Ice Age and the Sun both reversed and temperatures began recovering very rapidly until we are approaching what the climate was 1,000 years ago.

This all means that the present warming fits the pattern of natural climate change; CO2’s rise is not needed to explain it at all. We have no good cause for abandoning fossil fuels and destroying the unprecedented prosperity of the last 150 years that burning fossil fuels has given us. Further, it points to the potential for sudden, severe, renewed cooling, a grave caution to the advisability of trying to cool the Earth now.

The following graph and discussion is just one of many examples showing large-scale natural climate change during the past 2,000 years. It completely obliterates the notion of the hockey stick. Dr. Roy Spencer posts it on his website. Among his many achievements and credentials, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Wikipedia, as of now says: “Spencer’s research work is funded by NASA, NOAA, DOE, and the DOT.” Clearly, he is a climate researcher to be taken very seriously, especially about measuring the Earth’s surface temperature.

3c. The IPCC and Willie Sutton—$$$—More Cooking

Despite all the above, despite all the uncertainties, inadequacies, and revelations, the climate-change bureaucratic machine keeps marching on.

“IPCC” stands for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It’s a UN agency that prepares reports on climate change that are purported to be the best scientific evaluation of climate change. However: Bureaucracies in governments and international organizations pick and pay “experts” to pick and pay other experts to evaluate original research that is submitted.

Have you noticed? Highly qualified climate researchers who dissent from IPCC alarmism are named and their work can be evaluated, but the IPCC writers are bureaucrats shielded by bureaucrats shielded by politicians, government bureaucrats, and big-media colluders with government. Shielded this way, they can say anything they can get away with. There is no credibility in the process at all, nor in the power- and money-hungry motivations of all concerned.

Here’s how it works: The IPCC produces a Full Report that presents all the details it considers; people who have read it report that it is full of uncertainties, but we don’t get to hear that. The Full Report gets whittled down into a Technical Summary, from which A Summary for Policy Makers is prepared by politically appointed people, and “approved line by line by governments” according to Wikipedia. This policy summary is then presented to the media and focuses on alarm and considerable certainty. And if that one is too long to read (I believe it is the one that has 50 to 60 pages, or some such), a “Summary for Policymakers Headline Statements” is presented; the one I saw might fill just one page. I guess we know what will get read and propagated.

The media further magnify the alarm and certainty. Politicians add more exaggerations; the media recycle that, etc.

Then this alarmism gets trumped up as “settled science,” even though it is not science at all (no adequate experiments possible; see below). As a result, establishment media and politicians have created unwarranted, rampant hysteria among a large population, especially among younger people, according to various reports.

They are emulating Willie Sutton “big time.” He was a famous bank robber who reportedly said he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.”

Governments are spending trillions of dollars to force drastic changes on the entire world economy as they cut out fossil fuels at a reckless pace; they frown on nuclear too (which gives the lie to the claim that it’s all to reduce “greenhouse gasses.”) That’s where the new money is, and some climate researchers are following that money, along with media, politicians, and businesses that collude with big government. They are saying anything they need to say, and suppressing anything and anyone they need to suppress, to get portions of those many $trillions and their accompanying prestige and power.

4. Evidence of Natural Climate Cooling

4a. Ice Ages Past and To Come—As the Earth’s Orbit and Rotation Oscillate

I am not a big fan of long-term estimates of past and future climates because we cannot measure them to confirm or reject them. However, since we are getting “expert” climate opinions from such as the IPCC et al, I can report on what they say that doesn’t get into headlines or discussions. (Stick with reading the following; it may seem to be about an irrelevant past, but it has some real “kickers.”)

According to Wikipedia [All references to it are as of when I post this piece; I don’t know what will be censored later.], the Earth has had five or six major periods of glaciation—aka major ice age—in 3 billion years. In one of them, some think the Earth was entirely covered in ice: Snowball Earth. Not to worry. We are not anywhere near that now, but it does put the lie—yet again—to the notion that the Earth’s climate has been constant and only humans have changed it.

Taking from Wikipedia: “The most recent of these major ice ages is the Late Cenozoic Ice Age. It has seen extensive ice sheets in Antarctica for the last 34 [million years]. During the last 3 [million years], ice sheets have also developed on the northern hemisphere. That phase is known as the Quaternary glaciation, divided between the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs. It was marked by more or less extensive glaciation. They first appeared with a dominant frequency of 41,000 years, but after the Mid-Pleistocene Transition [400,000 years ago, shown in the Vostok and EPICA ice cores discussed below], that changed to high-amplitude cycles, with an average period of 100,000 years.”

“After the MPT there have been strongly asymmetric cycles with long-duration cooling of the climate and build-up of thick ice sheets, followed by a fast change from extreme glacial conditions to a warm interglacial [my emphasis added]. The cycle lengths have varied, with an average length of approximately 100,000 years.”

In several places Wikipedia says that the Pleistocene Epoch began 2,580,000 years ago and ended 11,700 years ago with the beginning of the Holocene Epoch continuing to now. In just one place I found the following: “[The Holocene] is considered by some to be an interglacial period within the Pleistocene Epoch.”

Notice how the wording defines away the possibility of a new cyclical ice age starting any time now. I read the same thing 30 years ago. My dictionary of 1968 says the Pleistocene is the geological epoch preceding ours—the Holocene. Yet the Vostok and EPICA ice cores from drilling in Antarctica show no such distinction. The Greenland ice core is positively chilling. Judge for yourself.

Vostok and EPICA Ice Cores Antarctica

In the above (I don’t know why they depict time gaining to the left instead of the usual depiction of time passing to the right), the symbol before D is the Greek letter delta; it represents the change in deuterium (an isotope of the hydrogen atom, with one neutron joining the proton in the nucleus). According to Wikipedia, delta D is calculated to be a proxy for temperature.

The ice core itself is created by a drill that cuts a circle and keeps going deeper and deeper, creating a cylindrical core of ice that can be pulled up. Air bubbles formed in the ice core because when naturally flaky snow got overlaid with new snow, the older snow compacted into ice, and some of the air among the flakes got trapped in the ice as bubbles.

Researches can measure the air in the ice-core bubbles for gasses such as oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide. They even can measure for different isotopes of the atoms. (Isotopes of an atom have the same number of protons in the nucleus but different numbers of neutrons, giving them different weights. For example, deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, “weighs” about twice as much as hydrogen.)

The last time I looked, researchers made the educated guess that atoms and molecules of different weights would evaporate at different rates, which would change in a known way as temperatures change, leaving different concentrations of the isotopes over time. In this way, and assuming the relative concentrations of isotopes then originally were the same as today (one of many assumptions), they calculate the temperatures occurring when the snow was deposited. So, they look at deuterium, as water has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen: H2O.

Don’t ask me to confirm if delta D accurately reflects the past temperatures; but “everyone” takes it or some other molecular analysis as the best estimate. And don’t ask me to confirm that temperature changes in Antarctica accurately reflect Northern Hemisphere temperatures (see Greenland, below). Still, they are used as one of many proxies for global temperature changes; and they have the advantage of being measurable.

No one has a good explanation for why the Earth cooled enough to enter into these cycles of icing and melting two and a half million years ago, so we have no good reason to think anything has changed.

By that logic of the Pleistocene continuing, the Vostok and EPICA results show we are still due for a new cycle of ice-age glaciation, but we don’t know when. However, according to them, recent ice ages as shown in the above graphs have lasted roughly 90,000 years with interglacial periods of roughly 10,000 years. We have had our 10,000 years already.

Milankovitch Cycles

These glacial/interglacial cycles have come to be called “Milankovitch cycles.” They are believed to arise from: a) periodic changes in the shape of the Earth’s orbit, oscillating between more circular and more elliptical. (One analysis I saw said this arises from resonances with the orbit of the giant planet Jupiter.), and b) from wobbles in the Earth’s angle of rotation relative to the ecliptic (the disk of the Earth’s orbit around the sun), much as a spinning top wobbles in several ways. (This is not precession of the equinoxes, which preserves the angle to the ecliptic while rotating the axis.) These two oscillations result in the Earth’s poles getting more or less sunlight and the heat that flows from it.

By current estimates, the past 2.6+ million years have seen sea levels 400+ feet lower (such as in the most recent ice age) and 320 feet higher (for Florida, according to the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Florida, 1998, pg. 19).

Furthermore, researchers generally estimate that CO2 followed the rise and fall in temperatures. The general explanation is that when temperatures rise, CO2 outgases from the oceans (like fizzing warm soda or beer) and gradually gets reabsorbed by the oceans as temperatures fall. CO2 is thus a small factor compared to natural climate changes wrought by the Earth’s movements.

If you haven’t been deprived of a good education, you know two results of the Earth’s cycling between ice and melt.

Human beings are thought to have come to North America about 12,000 years ago or earlier by walking from what is now Siberia to what is now Alaska on the combination of much greater sea ice and the broad continental shelf of land exposed by sea levels being 400 feet lower.

Also, the slow march of ice-age glaciers carved out soft earth and left the Great Lakes when the ice melted.

Less well known is that New York’s Long Island is a glacial moraine. (Where a glacier stops flowing and then retreats, it leaves behind all the surface material it had scooped up or pushed along with it. That material is called a moraine.)

4b. Greenland Ice Core Shows a Cooling Trend over the Past 2,000 Years

Even more interesting for us up north, the Greenland ice core record shows a decided cooling trend for the past 2,000 years. Also, using it as a proxy for the Northern Hemisphere, the Medieval Warming period was much warmer than now, the Roman period warmer still, and the warming of the last 150 years is real but small and preserves the cooling trend.

4c. Wikipedia: The Holocene Climatic Optimum 9,000 to 5,000 Years Ago

Wikipedia presents the above graph and labels the period between 9,000 years ago and 5,000 years ago the “Holocene climatic optimum.”  All those lighter, colored lines represent various proxies for temperature. Typically they would be remnants of plants and animals that lived in various climates, though they really are just educated guesses.

The black line represents an estimated fit of the many proxies. Note the deep recent dip and recovery in temperature to just what it was 1,000 years ago, by this estimate.

The fact that the lines diverge so much among themselves shows how little even the black line can be trusted. This large amount of variation equals a large margin of error, yet this large margin of error is hidden from the public. To show it would demolish the entire notion of “settled” science and 90% certainty.

4d. The “Water-Vapor Feedback Effect” Deception

Despite the insignificant power of CO2 demonstrated in the above considerations, alarmists like to say that molecule for molecule, CO2 is much more potent as a reflector of heat back to Earth than is water vapor, but water vapor is so much more prevalent in the air that it’s insulating effects are very strong. Proponents of the water-vapor-feedback hypothesis say that when a rise in CO2 raises the temperature, more water vapor enters the atmosphere to keep relative humidity constant (warmer air can hold more water vapor), and then that additional water vapor further warms the Earth.

This assumes 1) that CO2 has a predominant warming effect, highly dubious according to the above references, and 2) that relative humidity remains constant. (We can’t actually test #2 because we can’t control everything on the Earth and vary CO2 up and down.).

Estimates I have seen of the water-vapor-feedback effect, combined with CO2’s own warming, range from two to three times the—dubious—estimated warming of CO2 alone. And since they view the increased water vapor to have been driven by the increase in CO2, they say the combined effect is driven by the increases in CO2 alone. It all sounds very clever and convincing. However:

For at least 15 years (to my knowledge), qualified climate researchers such as Dr. Roy Spencer have reminded anyone who will listen that when temperatures are hot, water vapor rises; then it condenses into water and snowflakes in the cold of the upper atmosphere; and the resulting rain and snow bring that cold down to earth. Yet this cooling effect of precipitation is totally ignored by people in the water-vapor-feedback calculation.

How cold? If you have ever ridden in an airplane or went up a mountain, you know that the air is much colder higher up. Everyone knows that a thunderstorm cools off a hot day.

I can say that I have read on the web many explanations of water-vapor-feedback, and not one of its proponents mentions the cooling effects of rain and snow. However, two reports I read (one of them by Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal) said that estimates of the cooling effect just about balanced the warming effect, so there is no “water-vapor feedback effect” of any significance. As generally presented, the “water-vapor-feedback” effect is a fraud.

5. Unreliability of Weather and Climate Forecasts

Of course we all know that weather forecasts are unreliable beyond one to four days, and that alone implies beyond a reasonable doubt that climate forecasts are totally unreliable.

Climate alarmists are quick to say however that their climate models are very different from weather forecasting. That is true.

Weather forecasters can build on weather records hundreds of years old, on land and sea reports communicated instantaneously in real time, on satellite images of weather events, and even on the reports of special airplanes that fly into the hearts of hurricanes.

Climate forecasts have no such data. They use computer programs based on various sets of assumptions. Their results are so bad that, in the words of one wag, they can’t even predict the past—meaning they can’t explain known historical temperatures (unless those temperatures are “fixed” to fit the prediction). How bad?

Al Gore, a joint winner with the IPCC of the Nobel Peace Prize (2007), warned ominously in his 2006 movie that a collapse or melting of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets could raise sea levels 20 feet “in the near future.” That movie was shown in America’s schools and no doubt frightened tens of millions of children who saw it (quite a few adults too). He made similar public pronouncements at the time. Going on memory alone, I recall numerous reports in the 1980s and 1990s that sea levels would rise 20 feet in twenty years. It’s “an inconvenient truth” that nothing like that happened; not even one foot rise; maybe an inch, maybe a small fraction of an inch.

It’s another inconvenient truth that the committee that awards the Nobel Peace Prize did not rescind the award as Al Gore’s dire warnings failed to materialize. It still hasn’t rescinded the award.

You see? The “fix” is in. Nothing the authorities say is believable. Even the right bits are wrong because they are reinterpreted in terms of false contexts—the truth, yes; but not “the whole truth” and not “nothing but the truth.”

For example, while CO2 can reflect some heat back to the surface, assumptions are made to make it seem much stronger than it is, and to minimize or ignore other climate forces, such as what I have discussed above, that demonstrate much greater power than CO2.

To get around the failure of their dire predictions of catastrophic warming and rising sea levels, alarmists changed the name from “global warming” to “climate change” and took to blaming this or that weather effect on climate change. Therefore the expertise of a crack weather forecaster is spot-on relevant.

Joe Bastardi (and others,* see below) routinely show that weather events called extreme or rare by alarmists are in fact in line with historical events; not at all the result of runaway CO2-driven climate change. (Catastrophic weather does surely happen, but it’s not unprecedented). 

For example, Joe Bastardi reports that most of the warming that is occurring in the Arctic is in the winter, and this reduces what he calls the “temperature gradient” that produces strong storms. In other words, the great Nor’Easter storms in winter get their energy from air flows that develop between the large differences in temperature that exist in winter between the Arctic and southerly temperate zones. So, with less of a difference in temperatures, storms are weaker. Data show that winter storms were much stronger in the 1930s and 1940s. And in the summer, hurricanes’ winds are just as strong at the center, but the storm itself is smaller in size—more compact.

Indeed, some say that a warmer climate would produce stronger jet streams that would rip the tops off hurricanes, weakening them.

*Steven Koonin, Ph.D. in physics, Undersecretary for Science in the Energy Department in the Obama Administration, reports in his book “Unsettled” and in this post rebutting alarmist criticisms of his book that “none of [several National Climate Assessments] claim any detectable human influences on hurricanes.”

*Bjorn Lomborg (see below) writes in the Wall Street Journal: “The number of landfall hurricanes isn’t rising and the world is getting better at mitigating their destruction.”

I remember several years in the 1950s when remnants of hurricanes brought heavy rain and subsequent great flooding to the New York Metropolitan area, worse than Irene did in 2011 (search for Winston, Connecticut; 1955 Connecticut floods).

Hurricane Agnes caused great flooding in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in 1972.

“Superstorm Sandy” was reported to be just below hurricane strength when it hit New Jersey and New York City with storm surges in 2012; but those storm surges and the heavy flooding that resulted were not from Sandy alone. A separate storm had come down from the northwest and combined with tropical storm Sandy. The flooding was the product of a coincidence of two ordinary weather events, not of human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming or climate change.

6. Other Warmings Unrelated to Runaway CO2 Heating

6a. City temperatures and “heat island effects” make the Earth look like it is warming much more than it is

The “heat island effect”—cities burn more fuel, get hotter than the rural countryside—extends far beyond what researchers think, according to one estimate I read in the NYT Tuesday Science section. Some “rural” areas are warmed not by CO2 but by cities’ and urban suburbs’ heat generations.

Here’s an estimate, using data from Dr. Soon and Hoyt et al, of Northern Hemisphere land temperatures based on decidedly rural readings and compared to solar output:

Recent temperatures are warmer than the average since 1880, but they track fairly well with the Sun’s changes. No evidence is visible of accelerating warming caused by increasing amounts of CO2.

In support of the above, here’s an analysis dated 12/17/22 on the website of Dr. Judith Curry (another highly qualified climate researcher and dissenter to alarmism) showing that temperature instruments (they may be more complicated than simple thermometers) have long been located overwhelmingly in cities around the world, not in the rural countryside (except for the U.S.), so as cities burned more fossil fuel (and buildings and roads absorbed more heat than trees, bushes, etc.), the cities got hotter, but cities and urban extensions of them still occupy only a few percent of the Earth’s surface. Locating most temperature instruments there absolutely skews the record toward higher temperatures.

And here are two posts by Dr. Roy Spencer from November, 2022, saying the same thing about urban heat New Landsat Data Set and Warming in Vegas stays in Vegas.

By ignoring or underestimating the heat island effect and the effect of skewing temperature readings heavily toward urban heating, alarmists make the Earth look like it is warming much more and more quickly than it really is.

6b. Industrial Soot, Polar-route Jet Contrails, and Volcanoes Muddy the Picture Further

—Soot from air pollution darkens the Arctic, where most of the warming is occurring. Because dark colors absorb more Solar heat, that warms the Arctic. By one estimate I saw in the Tuesday Science section of the New York Times, this amounts to 30% of Arctic warming.

—By another estimate that I saw in the New York Times Tuesday Science section, 30% of Arctic warming can be attributed to clouds that form from polar-route jet contrails. The clouds insulate the Arctic in winter from the great cold of outer space.

—Volcanoes can cause alarming climate changes that shouldn’t be used as an excuse to rush pell-mell into more, more-destructive cuts in fossil fuels.

Extensive underwater eruptions can heat the ocean, send more water vapor into the air, and warm the planet via water vapor’s insulating effect. In his radio segment with Joe Piscabo, Joe Bastardi said that this was happening now.

On the other hand, eruptions from volcanoes above sea level can send large plumes of ash, sulfur dioxide, etc. high up in the atmosphere (the stratosphere or higher), where clouds do not form to wash the extra matter down to earth. They reflect sunlight and cool the surface globally.

Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines cooled the planet for about 15 months after it erupted on June 15, 1991, according to NASA. Krakatoa’s eruption in 1883 caused global temperatures to drop for several years according to the History Channel; Wikipedia called it a volcanic winter.  

Mt. Tambora’s eruption in what is now Indonesia in April, 1815, was so huge that it produced a “year without a summer” in 1816. If that were to happen now, major crop failures and widespread suffering, even famines, might result.

On the alert now: an underwater Tonga volcano erupted so powerfully on Jan. 15, 2022, that it sent a huge plume of water vapor high up in the atmosphere and warmed the planet; but it also sent a huge plume of ash into the stratosphere where it may be cooling the planet, or at least the Southern Hemisphere. Here’s an analysis from Joe Bastardi, dated Nov.17, 2022, that also looks at oceanic effects.

(Super volcanoes can wipe out continents or subcontinents, but, fortunately, their periods of eruption are in the hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Still, the western U.S. has three: Yellowstone, Valles Caldera in New Mexico near Los Alamos, and the Long Valley Caldera that stretches from Mammoth Mountain to Mono Lake in California.)

7. Words That Have Been Misused to Mislead

7a. Climate Studies and Computer Programs Employ Facts of Science But Are NOT Science As a Whole.

Climate studies are not science at all because we can’t hold everything constant, raise and lower CO2, and note the effects over hundreds to thousands of years.

For an extended discussion of how disciplined studies, such as climate research, need more than just using tools of science to be actual science (i.e. highly reliable from repeated real-world testing), see my post When "Following the Science" Is NOT Science. Although that post focuses on how medical authorities misused the word “science” to do great harm when dealing with Covid-19, it makes the point by showing that astronomy is not science either because we can’t alter stars at will. Neither can we alter the Earth at will, so its study can’t have the high reliability of actual science, which comes from conducting any number of experiments getting the same result every time, within acceptable margins of error.

Computer programs rather than real scientific experiments are mendaciously presented to us as inarguable “science” when they amount to nothing more than Garbage In, Garbage Out (meaning garbage data in; garbage results out) and Garbage Inside, Garbage Out (meaning bad assumptions, faulty logic, and errors inside the computer program; garbage results out). “GIGO” applies both ways.

7b. “Greenhouse Gas"

Without a roof, you don’t have a greenhouse, so the words “greenhouse gas” make many people think such gases are much more powerful than they really are.

8. Greens’ War on Fertilizers and Food

The mendacity, fakery, and malevolence of the alarmists’ actions are now beginning to cause great harm; in accordance with them, governments are now moving to choke off our food and energy supplies, with likely enormous suffering and deaths to come as a result.

This report from Bloomberg news, dated August 26, 2022, says “Europe’s Deepening Fertilizer Crunch Threatens Food Crisis” with 70% of production halted.

This report from Reuters, dated March 3, 2022, says “Fertilizer Ban Decimates Sri Lankan Crops.” Riots followed.  Yet most other reports I have seen on the crisis speak of financial difficulties of the government and totally fail to mention that the Sri Lankan government banned fertilizers, and did it to meet green requirements imposed by the European Union and like-minded international agencies.

Numerous reports speak of European governments going along with European Union dictates and moving to ban or greatly cut back nitrogen fertilizers. The reports attribute most of the cutbacks to the high cost of natural gas, which is needed intensively to make ammonia (consisting of one nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms), the key ingredient in nitrogen fertilizers, but natural gas is a “fossil fuel” and targeted for great reduction or elimination by EU greens (and U.S. greens too), so the high price is deliberate, and the reduction in fertilizer production is a direct result of Green dictates.

Further—usually unmentioned in these reports—green activists don’t like nitrogen fertilizer because it breaks down after application and releases what they consider to be the “potent” “greenhouse gas” nitrous oxide.

The suppression of nitrogen fertilizers hit the headlines (if you can find them) when farmers in the Netherlands protested. French farmers have protested new taxes on fertilizers. The German government is moving to ban spreading manure on farmland, because it gives off CO2 as it “airs out.” This too is reportedly at the behest of the EU. And Justin Trudeau is reportedly moving to reduce nitrogen fertilizers in Canada. Sometimes reported, but quietly, is the view of farmers that without sufficient fertilizer, they can’t stay in business. So even a partial reduction in fertilizer can translate into a much greater reduction in food.

Bjorn Lomborg and the Copenhagen Consensus

To leave out or marginalize the data and points of view presented by such estimable experts as Dr. Willie Soon et al, Joe Bastardi, Dr. Roy Spencer, Dr. Judith Curry, Dr Steven Koonin, and many similar people; to only very quietly recognize evidence of natural climate cooling; to hide from the public the great inadequacies and corruptions of the climate alarmists; and to take actions that put every one of us in jeopardy of massive blackouts, food inflation, food shortages, outright famine in poorer countries, and resulting wars to secure food and energy sources: All this is not just breathtaking, it’s criminal. Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus offers a better way: grow and adapt.

For 20 or more years, he has been organizing large-scale discussions among many serious experts, called the Copenhagen Consensus, about the best ways to deal with climate change. Periodically his op eds appear in the Wall Street Journal discrediting this or that terror of climate Chicken Littles.

Lomborg takes the very reasonable position that climate change is real but shutting down the world economy by, for example, rashly cutting out fossil fuels and nitrogen fertilizers [as if we could, when China, India, and other countries won’t go along] will cause enormous harm, especially to poor people,

The best course, he argues, is to foster economic growth by using all sources of energy so that we develop new financial and technological resources to adapt to whatever climate change happens.

Bjorn Lomborg is right.

The above evidence clearly demonstrates that natural forces of climate change are very powerful, yet we don’t know enough to say even if temperatures will get warmer or colder, or when or how much and how quickly they will change.

However, we do know that continued rash suppression of fossil fuels and fertilizers will cause sky-high food and electricity prices, massive electrical grid collapses, and accompanying deaths from no heat in blizzards and no A/C in heat waves. (California and Texas have already suffered this.)  And lower-income people globally who can’t afford the sky-high prices will suffer the most.

The only sensible thing is to Foster Economic Growth to create greater prosperity and new means to adapt better to whatever the climate does.

I add here that fostering capitalism (private enterprise operating in—and disciplined by—free markets and strong but limited government) is the only way to foster enough economic growth to adapt to whatever the climate does. For more on this, see my post Capitalism Makes Life Better. Big-Government Socialisms Make Life Worse.