Pseudoscientists’ eight climate claims debunked

Guest Essay By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

The intellectual dishonesty of the Thermageddonites is well demonstrated in a particularly fatuous piece entitled Eight Pseudoscientific Climate Claims Debunked by Real Scientists at the hand-wringing-and-hysteria website billmoyers.com.

The article is full of ad-hom whining – the most childish form of that most infantile of all logical fallacies, the red-herring fallacy, the totalitarians’ customary substitute for serious scientific argument. We shall ignore it. Instead, let us scrutinize the “science” put forward by this self-appointed soviet of “Real Scientists”.

They begin by saying: “Most people who deny that human activity is warming the planet just dismiss a massive body of scientific evidence as a big hoax.” That is mere yah-boo – another instance of the red-herring fallacy.

They go on to say that the climate issue is “settled in the scientific community”. That is the headcount fallacy. More about it anon.

They say They “gathered eight of the most common pseudoscientific arguments” advanced by skeptics and “asked some serious climate scientists [yeah, right] … to help us understand what makes these claims so misleading”. That is the argument from appeal to authority. So far, no science at all from the “Real Scientists”. Just illogic piled upon illogic, fallacy upon fallacy.

The first of the eight “pseudoscientific arguments” of which They accuse us is that the Earth has not been warming recently. They are particularly offended by my reproducing the real-world temperature data, determining the trend on the data, and daring to publish the inconvenient truth every month.

These Pause Deniers are not at all happy that the global temperature record shows no global warming for well over 13 years (mean of all five global-temperature datasets).

Whether They like it or not, there is a large, growing and – for Them – embarrassing discrepancy between the predictions made by “Settled Science” and the inconvenient truth that over no period of ten years or more since the IPCC’s first report in 1990 has global warming ever occurred at anything like the predicted rate.

Since January 2005, the data from which the IPCC’s latest Assessment Report starts its backcast predictions, there has been no global warming at all. Yet compared with little more than nine years ago the IPCC predicts that the weather should now be a sixth of a Celsius degree warmer than it is (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. IPCC (2013) (orange region) predicted that there should have been a sixth of a Celsius degree of global warming since January 2005 (thick red trend-line). However, observed temperature (mean of the RSS and UAH monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly datasets) (thick blue trend-line) has if anything declined a little since that date.

However, They do not like to look at temperature change over such short periods. So let us oblige Them by going back to the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990. If its predictions had been correct, there should have been two-thirds of a degree of global warming since then, but in the real world where the rest of us live there has only been one-third of a degree of warming (Fig. 2).

Figure 2. Predictions from the IPCC’s First Assessment Report compared with outturn since 1990 (RSS & UAH). The world has been warming at exactly half the predicted rate, and the trend falls wholly outwith the prediction interval (orange region).

That is why the IPCC has been compelled to reduce its central near-term global warming prediction from a rate equivalent to 2.78 Cº/century then to 1.67 Cº/century equivalent now.

They say I should have been monitoring ocean heat content and not atmospheric temperature. Two problems with that. The IPCC’s headline temperature predictions are for global atmospheric temperature; and, though the satellites can monitor temperature with something approaching reliability, there are far too few ocean measurements to allow a proper determination of change in ocean heat content – which in any event is rising at about one-sixth the predicted rate.

They also say I cherry-pick 1998 as the start date for my graphs. No: I ask the question, “What is the earliest month since when the global temperature record shows no increase?” The answer, at present, is August 1996, 17 years 9 months ago, predating the great El Niño temperature spike of 1998 by two and a half years.

The “Real Scientists’” second alleged skeptical error – again attributed to me – is that the difference between modeled and observed temperature change is weather, not climate, the latter being what happens over several decades.

Yet Fig. 2 goes back to 1990. It covers very nearly a quarter of a century. That is quite long enough to allow some sharp conclusions to be drawn about how unsettled the “Settled Science” actually is. The graph starts in 1990 because that is the date of the IPCC’s first report.

The “Real Scientists’” third nit-pick is that, notwithstanding Anthony Watts’ US Surface Stations project, which has amply demonstrated what a joke the terrestrial temperature record is, everything is really hunky-dory. They add, bafflingly, that “scientists are not idiots”. On the evidence, this lot are more idiots than scientists.

They say Anthony’s results were “the issue the skeptics were touting, but if you look at the peer-reviewed literature, this was stuff that was answered years ago.” Indeed it was – by Michaels & McKitrick (2007), who found a highly significant correlation between regional rates of industrial growth and of global warming, leading to the conclusion that warming over land had been overstated by double.

The “Real Scientists’” fourth assertion is that “Yes, There Is a Scientific Consensus”. As is now traditional, They define it with artfully-calculated imprecision as “the scientific consensus that human activities are causing the earth to warm”. Let us be as precise as They are vague. The existence of the greenhouse effect is definitively established both in theory and in experiment and needs no “consensus” to prop it up. CO2 concentration is rising, chiefly owing to our activities (unless Professor Salby is right). Therefore, it is established that our activities may cause warming.

But the true scientific debate is not about the long-established qualitative question whether there is a greenhouse effect. It is about the quantitative question how much warming we may cause. The IPCC, whose duty is to reflect the balance of the scientific literature, mendaciously and without statistical rigor assigns a fictitious “95% confidence” to the notion that we caused most of the 0.75 Cº global warming since 1950. However, Legates et al. (2013) have demonstrated that just 0.5% of 11,944 climate science abstracts published from 1991-2011 state that we are the major cause of recent warming. “Consensus” is lacking. The IPCC is wrong.

Fifthly, the “Real Scientists” say global warming is “Not the Sun’s Fault”. They begin by congratulating themselves and their ilk for not having “persecuted” Professor Svensmark for his cosmic-ray amplification theory, and for not having “run him out of the scientific community on a rail”.

In fact, the Royal Society – the world’s oldest whining taxpayer-funded pressure-group – treated the Professor so badly when he presented his results, howling him down and calling him names, that he suffered a serious heart attack not long thereafter. Professor Bengtsson, recently bullied by his peer climate scientists, is by no means the only distinguished scientist to have been subjected to Their global bullying.

The “Real Scientists” say Professor Svensmark’s results “don’t stand up to scrutiny” and add, falsely, that “there’s no evidence to support Svensmark’s contention”. The true position is that there is a considerable and growing body of evidence and support for it in the reviewed literature that so few of them ever read.

To make matters worse, They falsely say his hypothesis is that “the sun explains everything”. I have heard him lecture many times and have discussed his theory with him. Theirs is a monstrous and malicious misrepresentation of his position.

They maintain that if the Sun were the cause of recent warming all altitudes would warm, but that “the upper atmosphere is actually cooling”. Er, no. The stratosphere cooled in the 1990s but its temperature has shown little trend this millennium.

The “Real Scientists’” sixth assertion, in response to suggestions that the Sun has entered a cooling cycle, is that “there is no credible data nor any credible scientist who would make this claim.” Yet, as Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics has long pointed out, the lengthening of the past solar cycle from the usual 10.6 years to more like 13 years may well indicate that the next few solar cycles will be comparatively inactive.

This view is supported by research at NASA showing that the magnetic convection currents beneath the solar surface have slowed to walking pace for the first time since observations of their velocity began. Many solar physicists are at least open to the possibility that the Sun will be less active than usual in the coming decades.

On grind the “Real Scientists” with their seventh assertion, that I was wrong to point out that the fastest warming ever recorded by thermometers occurred in central England in the 17^th century, before the industrial revolution began. They are upset that I have pointed out that this record centennial warming rate occurred between 1663 and 1762. This, They think, is “cherry-picking”.

No: I simply asked the question, “What was the fastest centennial rate of global warming in the instrumental record?” The answer is what it is, like it or not. There was more warming in that century than in any 100-year period since. The warming of 1663-1762 cannot have been caused by us. Therefore the possibility exists that some perhaps substantial fraction of the lesser global warming of the past century may also have been natural.

Inspecting the data seems to me to be the right starting-point for scientific enquiry. But, over and over again, the “Real Scientists” express their dislike of the real world and the inconvenient data that are observable here.

Eighthly and finally, They say Antarctic ice is not increasing, and that to say that it is increasing is “interesting given the two major studies … which found that six large West Antarctic glaciers are in an irreversible state of decline.”

Let us instruct these woeful scientific illiterates in a few facts. First, skeptics say – because that is what the evidence shows – that Antarctic sea ice is increasing. Indeed, it has repeatedly broken the 35-year satellite-era record. Secondly, the “two major studies” were concerned with land-based ice, not sea ice.

And, my oh my, six glaciers declining! Hold the Front PAGE!!! Here is an inconvenient truth that the “Real Scientists” may stumble upon if They ever read anything. There are more than six glaciers on Earth. There are thought to be more than 160,000. Nearly all have never been visited or studied by Man.

A little logic might also help these climate campaigners disguised as “scientists”. Antarctica has not warmed since the satellites have been watching. Therefore, it is difficult to assert with any confidence that the apparent retreat of half a dozen glaciers in a corner of Antarctica known to have an anomalous climate and to be affected by subsea volcanism is attributable to manmade global warming.

The “Real Scientists” say Antarctica’s land-based ice is “melting at an alarming rate”. Since the melting is not caused by warming (for the good and sufficient reason that there has not been any in the region across the entire satellite era), true scientists would first check that the land-based ice is melting “at an alarming rate” (hint: it isn’t), and then try to find out why, rather than adopting a naively but profitably aprioristic stance and blaming Man.

True scientists might also check where the “alarming” ice melt is going. For even the official (and questionable) satellite record of sea-level rise does not show much more than 3 mm of sea-level rise each year. Other records – such as the eight-year Envisat record – show sea level rising at a rate equivalent to just 3 cm/century (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. The Envisat sea-level record during its eight-year life, and before any “global isostatic adjustments” or other tamperings to sex up the apparent rate of sea-level rise.

Figure 4. The extent to which the raw sea-level data have been tampered with to force them to show sea level as rising alarmingly is alarming.

And the GRACE gravitational-anomaly satellites have shown sea level actually falling (Peltier et al., 2009) (Fig. 4). So where has all that melting ice hidden itself? Perhaps it’s skulking at the bottom of the ocean alongside the missing heat.

Sea level rose by about 7-8 inches in the 20^th century, according to the tide-gauges. After adjusting for calibration errors and a bewildering variety of tamperings with the satellite sea-level data, that rate has not changed much. And why would it? For there has been very little global warming over the past decade or two.

Real “Real Scientists” would have examined sea-level reconstructions over the past millennium to see how sea level changed in response to the medieval warm period (warmer than the present) and the little ice age (cooler). That is what I have done in Fig. 5. Grinsted et al. (2009) reconstructed 1000 years of sea-level change. Note how well the sea-level curve corresponds with the curve of 1000 years’ reconstructed temperatures over the same period. Note in passing how poorly both curves track the ludicrous “hokey-stick” graph from the IPCC’s 2001 Third Assessment Report.

And note in particular how small the change in sea level has been: just 8 inches up or down in 1000 years.

Figure 5. Reconstructed sea-level change (Grinsted et al., 2009) and global temperature change (IPCC, 1990) compared over the past millennium. The evident correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but at least the possibility of causation exists.

Let us suppose, ad argumentum, that the main reason for sea-level change is temperature change, and that Grinsted’s sea-level reconstruction is plausible. In that event, the small sea-level response to the large temperature change between the medieval warm period and the little ice age suggests the possibility that even a global warming far greater than what is now likely might not have much impact on sea level.

Given that the “Real Scientists” are manifestly wrong in substance on every point They made in their article, why did They bother to expose Their ignorance and intellectual bankruptcy by writing it in the first place?

The reason is simple. The evidence-based, science-based arguments of the skeptics are gaining traction, and the true-believers in the Thermageddon cult know it. Their shoddy technique is to parade their negligible scientific credentials, to write utter garbage such as that which I have exposed here, and to publish it on some friendly website or another. This allows other climate campaigners to link to the garbage and assert – quite falsely – that our arguments have been “repeatedly and thoroughly debunked” by “Real Scientists.”

In truth, the “Real Scientists” have debunked themselves by writing such transparent drivel that even a layman can see right through it.

The dishonorable conduct of the “Real Scientists”, to which no real scientist would ever sink, is a measure of their sheer, panic-laden desperation. They cannot even pray for deliverance in the shape of another record-breaking el Niño, for remarkably few Thermageddonites believe in God. They are too busy believing in whatever line the Party has handed down, Comrade.

The malevolent bunch who perpetrated the nonsense I have here debunked sneer at Roy Spencer because he is a believing Christian. They do not realize that They have Themselves gotten religion – but that They have made the mistake of subscribing not to a true religion but to a mere shamanistic superstition – a pseudo-religious belief system dressed up as science that can be, as it has here been, demonstrated to be obviously false in just about every material particular.