20 false representations in one 10-minute video

by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

On December 8, 2015, Senator Cruz, chairman of the Space, Science and Competitiveness Committee of the U.S. Senate, held a hearing on climate change, Data or Dogma? He displayed a red rag to the merchants of bull – a graph well known to WUWT readers:

The monthly graph that shows the generally lengthening Pause in global warming has been a profound and continuing embarrassment to the believers in the totalitarian Party Line on the climate question. Recently, the dogmatists struck back in a much-promoted 10-minute video, How Reliable are Satellite Temperatures? The new Party Line is that they give the wrong answer.

The short video contained 20 false representations, pretenses or implications, calculated individually and by mutual reinforcement to deceive. The deceptions are summarized briefly here and are discussed in more detail, with additional evidence, in the document linked here –

1. (without qualification) that 2015 was the warmest year since reliable records began, though the satellite records do not show it as the warmest year (see the above graph);

2. that satellite datasets have historically proven biased to show too little warming, though the UAH dataset showed too much warming until its 2015 correction:

3. (twice) that the satellite data, and in particular the UAH data, wrongly showed cooling in the 1990s, though they showed warming, and in the 2000s, though the terrestrial data agreed and after adjustments still agree with the satellites that there was cooling:

After all adjustments from 2010-2015, the graphs for 2002-2008 still show cooling:

4. that Drs John Christy and Roy Spencer, keepers of the UAH dataset, had been “chastened by their repeated mistakes and failures”, though all datasets, not only theirs, have undergone adjustments;

5. (twice) that all the UAH adjustments had left the warming rate understated, though until the most recent adjustment the UAH dataset had for much of the previous decade shown a warming rate greater than most other datasets;

6. that satellites were unique in not measuring temperature directly, though no method of measurement measures temperature directly, and the satellite temperature datasets are unique in being independently calibrated both by balloon radiosonde datasets and by platinum resistance thermometers themselves calibrated against the known temperature of the cosmic background radiation;

7. that satellite datasets had been shown to contain errors, with the implication that the terrestrial datasets had not undergone repeated adjustment, though all global temperature datasets are prone to adjustment and have been repeatedly adjusted;

8. that Dr Judith Curry and Senator Cruz accept the satellite data uncritically, though their statements that the satellite global temperature data are the best we have do not imply that those datasets should be accepted uncritically;

9. that Senator Cruz likes to focus on the portion of the RSS temperature dataset that begins after the El-Niño-driven spike in global temperature that peaked in 1998, though the graph displayed by Senator Cruz, on which Dr Mears was commenting, visibly began in May 1997, before the spike commenced:

10. (twice) that the spike in temperatures in 1998 entailed a downhill trend thereafter, though the graph had begun before the spike and, in any event any effect of the spike on the trend had been offset by a trough in 1999-2000 caused by the countervailing La Niña cooling that followed the 1998 El Niño, so that the trend in the RSS data for the 15 full years from January 2001 to December 2015, after the el Niño and la Niña, is if anything somewhat negative:

11. that the zero-trend “18-year dataset” displayed by Senator Cruz (actually 18 years 9 months) would produce a markedly different trend from the data over 10, 15 or 20 years, though the 10-year dataset after removing the distorting effect of the 2015-2016 El Niño shows a trend of little more than 0.5 Celsius degrees per century, the 15-year dataset shows a zero trend and the 20-year dataset shows a trend of little more than one-third of a degree per century, and all trends are within natural variability.

12. that a trend-line starting after the 1998 El Niño temperature spike and ending before the 2011-2012 La Niña trough would show an uptrend, though the trend-line is falsely positioned on the graph displayed in the video so as to steepen the true (green) trend:

13. that period chosen by Admiral Titley, the “Democrats’” witness at the hearing, showed an uptrend (which he then misrepresented so as to steepen it), though the period he chose was unduly short and, if he had not excluded an el Niño at the outset and a La Niña at the end, there would have been a downtrend:

14. that the video deploys a device used by the IPCC and by the Met Office, displaying global temperature in decadal blocks, though the decadal blocks were calculated to conceal the absence of global warming over much of the past two decades, while the full HadCRUT4 dataset clearly shows the recent slowdown in global warming:

15. that Arctic sea ice is declining, though Antarctic sea ice has been on a rising trend and reached a satellite-era record in early 2015, and though the decline in Arctic sea ice is chiefly only in a few late-summer weeks and is a small fraction of the seasonal variation in sea-ice extent, so that neither the extent nor the trend of global sea ice (from the University of Illinois) shows much change throughout the satellite era:

16. that column water vapor is increasing, though not all records show an increase and at least one, ISCCP, shows a decline:

17. that sea level is changing, though it has always changed and much of the increase in recent years is attributable to a “glacial isostatic adjustment” that, whether justifiable or not, is not an actual sea-level rise:

18. that the heat content of the global ocean is increasing, though the increase is calculated from ARGO bathythermograph temperature measurements that show warming of the top mile and a quarter of the ocean over the entire 11 full years of the record at a rate equivalent to only 1 Celsius degree every 430 years:

19. that the Earth’s allegedly rising temperature may be deduced from moisture, rainfall, water vapor, surface humidity, snow and ice, though no definitive conclusions about global temperature can be drawn from any of these indicators

20. (throughout) that, by implication, the terrestrial temperature records are in reasonable agreement with the predictions by IPCC on which the official concern about global warming is based, though on all datasets, the warming is so far below what IPCC had originally predicted that IPCC has itself had to reduce drastically its interval of near-term warming predictions:

Conclusion

The perpetrators of the offending video are, so they think, so well protected by the current U.S. Administration’s prejudice on the climate question that they can get away with a campaign of multiple, wilful, mutually reinforcing and no doubt profitable deceptions on this monstrous scale with impunity, to the detriment not only of the truth but also of two diligent and hard-working scientists.

Without saying anything more in public at this stage, we shall see. In the meantime, readers may care to recall the terms of 18 U.S. Criminal Code §1343 (wire fraud):

“Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”