Reposted from the Fabius Maximus blog
By Larry Kummer, Editor / 17 November 2019
Summary: Let’s hit “pause” in the climate wars and see how we got here, where we are going, and what we can learn from this mess.
“I can’t use this result. It doesn’t support the narrative.“
Photo 99364552 © Standret – Dreamstime.
At the time I thought this statement was daft. Now I see that she was spot on, but not in the way she meant it. And with results that she did not intend.
“The time for debate has ended.”
— Marcia McNutt (former director of the US Geological Survey, then editor-in-Chief of Science magazine, now President of the NAS) in “The beyond-two-degree inferno“, an editorial in Science, 3 July 2015.
Science is a structured process of debate. No debate means no science, as we use the term. Since 2015, the debate about a public policy response to climate change has stopped in any meaningful form, because the activists who control it have abandoned science. Now the headlines describe reports by activists describing every form of extreme weather as resulting from rising CO2 – and making increasingly dire predictions of future weather. The former are largely bogus, for reasons described below. The latter are either based on the unlikely-or-impossible RCP8.5 scenario (see here and here) – or fantasies of ever more extreme scenarios. There is little or no effort to base these in hard science. They are presented to the public as certainties. The models making these predictions are presented as a modern form of haruspicy (oracles from the gods elicited by animal sacrifice). Contrary opinions are seldom given, except in a pre-debunked form.
The goal is to arouse fear, even panic – not to inform.
“Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!”
— Editor’s advice to a junior reporter in Hell. From The Screwtape Lettersby C. S. Lewis (1942).
The effect of this on climate science
Almost everybody works for a living. We have aspirations for a good life. Most of us have families to provide for. Almost none of us have any substantial way to influence the conduct of the institutions in which we serve as cogs. We are vulnerable to formal and (more important) informal feedback mechanisms of our rulers.
In climate science, the elites running its institutions – such as Marcia McNutt – want research that supports the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming narrative. After saying “the debate is ended,” she is not likely to support papers that call it into question. As Editor of the Science family of journals, that means they will not get published (damaging careers of junior scientists who did not get the memo). As president of the National Academies, that means no funding (wrecking the careers of upstart junior scientists). Even eminent and senior scientists are discarded if they challenge the narrative (e.g., Roger Pielke Sr., Judith Curry).
That is just good sense for McNutt and her peers. Journalists want doomster stories. Activists controlling the flocks of non-governmental agencies demand doomster research. Powerful political interests want doomster research (“conservative” politicians, organizations, and corporations do not care – knowing that they will have their share of gain from the expansion of government power). The incentives are tilted to one side.
So we get a flood every month of increasingly dubious research about the effects of global warming. Dubious statistical methods, exaggerated claims, endless predictions doom based on bogus claims that RCP8.5 is “business as usual” scenario. Models are used to make increasingly detailed predictions about regional effects and far future events – with little effort to validate them (there is a large body of knowledge of model validation, largely ignored by climate science). But climate science has a deeper and more severe problem.
“Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory – an event which would have refuted the theory.”
— Karl Popper in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
“Viewed as a body of substantive hypotheses, theory is to be judged by its predictive power for the class of phenomena which it is intended to ‘explain.’ Only factual evidence can show whether it is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or, better, tentatively ‘accepted’ as valid or ‘rejected.’ As I shall argue at greater length below, the only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of its predictions with experience.”
— Milton Friedman in “The Methodology of Positive Economics“, from Essays in Positive Economics
Instead of making specific predictions about near-term (testable) weather, climate scientists now explain how current weather results from increased greenhouse gases. A big hurricane (e.g., Katrina in 2005, Irma in 2017) produces papers showing that more and bigger hurricanes are our future (here, here, and here). Large regional droughts are proclaimed the “new normal” (e.g., Texas, California) – until they end. The end of snow, more & bigger tornadoes, more & bigger wildfires (see them all here) – climate scientists seldom accurately predict them, but afterwards confidently forecast more of the same. Even outright falsification of predictions are evidence of global warming, such as the rising and falling of the Great Lakes. False predictions are ignored, preventing progress. My favorite: Terrifying predictions about the melting North Pole!
Climate scientist Richard Betts warned his fellows in a BBC op-ed (which they would not publish today): “Science must end climate confusion” (11 January 2010).
“Of course, we know that these things {extreme weather} happen anyway, even without climate change – they may happen more often under a warmer climate, but it is wrong to blame climate change for every single event. Climate scientists know this, but still there are people outside of climate science who will claim or imply such things if it helps make the news or generate support for their political or business agenda. …
“{D}o climate scientists do enough to counter this? Or are we guilty of turning a blind eye to these things because we think they are on ‘our side’ against the climate sceptics? …Climate scientists need to take more responsibility for the communication of their work to avoid this kind of thing. Even if scientists themselves are not blaming everything on climate change, it still reflects badly on us if others do this.”
But what about the ethics of science? Scientists’ sacred obligation to pursue truth. It is a chimera – a thing that is desired but in fact is imaginary. Biomedical research – with its massive direct effect on people – is severely corrupted. There is no Hippocratic Oath for scientists (and increasingly, nothing like it that is meaningful for doctors). We should expect any field of science whose fruits are valuable to the powerful to be corrupted.
- About the corruption of climate science.
- The noble corruption of climate science.
- A crisis of overconfidence in climate science.
Danger, journalists at work
Fame is money in our society. Journalists boost the careers of scientists whose work supports the narrative. Climate scientists would have to be saints to ignore this. Few are, and the rest cheer journalists who misrepresent or exaggerate their findings.
- A real-time example of the birth and spread of climate propaganda.
- Daily stories of climate death build a Green New Deal!
- A look at the workings of climate propaganda.
- Wildfires and climate change: fake news in action.
- See how climate science becomes alarmist propaganda.
- How journalists helped wreck the climate debate – by climate scientist Roy Spencer.
- A look at the workings of climate propaganda.
- Enlisting peer-reviewed science in the climate crusade.
The policy debate decouples from science
After the IPCC published its Fifth Assessment Report in 2014, activists took a fateful but brilliant step. AR5 did not support the doomster narrative, so they condemned the IPCC as “too conservative” (examples here and here). With the support of journalists and NGOs, they broke free from the tethers of science, birthing the Climate Emergency and Extinction Rebellion – based on false claims of mass extinctions occurring now (here, here, and here). Scientists have joined the parade with increasing bogus claims of dooms present and future. Those that are insufficiently enthusiastic are attacked (e.g., here).
Naked Capitalism, whose daily links are imo the premier source of news from a left perspective, gives a dozen such stories every week. Most are to some extent fake news. But their volume makes refutation, even verification of their claims, impossible for any individual or small group. And there is no money for skepticism (easily seen by comparing the amateurish skeptics’ websites with the lavishly funded, professionally run activists’ websites). A very few climate scientists have spoken out against the growing hysteria (e.g., here, here, and here), but one might as well have tried to save the Titanic with a bucket.
I and others have proposed rational responses to climate change that can get broad support (e.g., here and here). It is hopeless. The tide of alarmism continues to rise, often becoming self-parody. There are rumors that AR6 will go full doomster. The Bandwagon Effect generates positive feedbacks that in America today often converts concerns about real problems into moral panics (e.g., white slavery, satanic ritual abuse). There is nothing visible that can stop this escalation.
Conclusions
The response of our science and political institutions to climate change have been self-defeating – the opposite of what people expect from scientists warning about a severe threat (see here and here). So far they have little to show in America for their vast expenditure of time and money. And China has ignored them. But they have laid the foundation for victory. They need only some help from Nature. With their control of so many key institutions, a big bout of severe weather (e.g., a hurricane hitting downtown Miami or Washington) – blamed on Climate Change – might panic Americans into supporting the Green New Deal.
Mother Nature has been their foe so far. But she is fickle. Like any insurrection, climate alarmists need win only once.
But the damage to climate science is effectively forever. Generations of scientists have learned that success is political, and I believe the resulting long slide of research quality has just begun. Only great effort over long periods of time will reverse that. I doubt we will start in the foreseeable future. We might pay much for our folly when past extreme weather comes again.
“We don’t even plan for the past.”
— Steven Mosher (member of Berkeley Earth; bio here), a comment posted at Climate Etc.
For More Information
Ideas! See my recommended books and films at Amazon. Also, see Chapter One of a story about our future: “Ultra Violence: Tales from Venus.”
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more information about this vital issue see the keys to understanding climate change, and especially these …
- Let’s prepare for past climate instead of bickering about predictions of climate change – Doing something is better than nothing.
- Scientists show us why the climate change campaign failed – so far.
- Experts now run the world using their theories. What if they fail, and we lose confidence in them?
- Paul Krugman shows why the climate campaign failed.
- A demo of why we do nothing about climate change.
- Why climate skeptics will lose. How they can win.
Activists don’t want you to read these books
Some unexpected good news about polar bears: The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened
To learn more about the state of climate change see The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters & Climate Change
So what event or trend would convince the world that the current hypothesis linking rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere to long term climatic changes is false at the scale of CO2 change that currently exists and is projected? Would the temperature anomalies have to decrease or remain the same and if so for how many years? Given the current problems with precision of measurement of the various variables being followed is there any one or two series of measurements that are most valuable in noting significant long term change?
I’ll believe it when Climate Change professorships get cancelled.
Preaching to the choir.
The goal is to “arouse” fear. Looks like something I would do.
“The goal is to around fear, even panic – not to inform.”
arouse fear.
The title could be more succinct, and more accurate. Delete the word, “Climate”.
It’s been happening for a while. Most published research findings are false and cannot be replicated. Often, scientists cannot even repeat their own results. The crap exposed by the Climategate emails also happens in other fields. link
Science in general is sick. The perverse incentives that govern a career in science guarantee bogus results.
“haruspicy (oracles from the gods elicited by animal sacrifice)”
Food for the mind, problem is if I call my Marxist neighbor a haruspicy spreader they won’t know how to respond other then to call me a denier, racist denier…
Time for a quote from H. L. Mencken
“The whole point of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins all of them imaginary.”
“Journalists want doomster stories. Activists controlling the flocks of non-governmental agencies demand doomster research. Powerful political interests want doomster research….” Thus say the Doomster Divers
This.
The point of science is to increase human knowledge—while decreasing delusion—about nature, something Climate Science ceased to do many years ago. (I use a capital C and a capital S here to indicate agnosticism as to whether it’s actually a field of science at all.)
I dare say it’s the only field with comparable manpower and budget of which you can ask, as I’ve asked, “what have we learned in the last 5 years?” and get no answer.
Functionally, C.S. has much more in common than theology as defined by the venerable Jorge, William of Baskerville’s Satanic antagonist in The Name of the Rose:
“But of our work, the work of our order and in particular the work of this monastery, a part—indeed, the substance—is study, and the preservation of knowledge. Preservation of, I say, not search for, because the property of knowledge, as a divine thing, is that it is complete and has been defined since the beginning, in the perfection of the Word which expresses itself to itself …
“There is no progress, no revolution of ages, in the history of knowledge, but at most a continuous and sublime recapitulation.”
Some of the climate movement’s finest minds, public thinkers like Dana Nuccitelli, literally identify new ideas with error, using the adjective flawed interchangeably with non-mainstream.
Understanding C. S. as an essentially ecclesiastical, not a scientific, program pays other theoretical dividends. For starters, it explains the hatred and fear of humor. The venerable Jorge puts it like this:
“Laughter is a devillish wind which deforms the lineaments of the face and makes men look like monkeys….
“Laughter, for a few moments, distracts the villein from fear. But law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God. This [book of jokes] could strike the Luciferine spark that would set a new fire to the whole world, and laughter would be defined as the new art, unknown even to Prometheus, for cancelling fear. To the villein who laughs, at that moment, dying does not matter: but then, when the license is past, the liturgy once again imposes on him, according to the divine plan, the fear of death. And from this book, there could be born the new destructive aim to destroy death through redemption from fear. And what would we be – we sinful creatures – without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?”
The Alarmist cabal declared war on the Truth, on Science, and on those who dared stand against them. They made their bed, so let them lie in it. They wanted war, and they got it. They just didn’t realize how badly it would go for them.
Very good. So true.
The human dynamics of this current phenomena or hysteria about ‘global warming’ are the same as financial cyclical events such as the South Sea Bubble and the Sub Prime Mortgage debacle. In every case the event gains an emotional gravity that pulls in anything that confirms the hysteria and expels anything that contradicts the hysteria.
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
I am seeing this slowly happening. Most everyone has seen the Emperor nude at this point, it’s just taking a bit for the info from the eyes to get to the brain and be processed. Give it another decade or so and a new hysteria will be installed more than likely.
Hopefully the next hysteria won’t be determined to destroy civilization and we can do something fun like go to war with robots.
What brings in more money? Happy, happy stories of people enjoying life? Or doomsday stories of people fleeing 1/2 inch of water in panic?
One might consider that the only thing at all that has kept the possibility of another episode of prolonged snow and cold IS the volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that without the Industrial Revolution and the carbon load it created all by itself, we might be in the middle of Little Ice Age Part II. But this notion hasn’t occurred to the money-grubbing cash-seeking fabricators who pander to the lowest common denominator: news reporters, people with brains the size of a pea and a penchant for manufactured nonsense stories.
Follow the money. Always follow the money.
The Little Ice Age lasted about 300 years and ended around 1850, close to when the temperature measurements that later became known as HadCrut first started. It is therefore not surprising that we have been warming up since then and that current temperatures are at record levels for that particular database.
The UK Met Office and the BBC make a huge fuss every time a month or year produces the highest temperature ever recorded -for that particular database. The public believe it because the Met Office is the government agency responsible for the temperature record. They are not told about the LIA and the inevitability of the subsequent temperature rise.
When scientists use trickery to dupe the public you know they are not scientists.
The function of prediction in Climate Science no longer resembles its rôle in science (as in: actual, science science).
According to Feynman’s 63-second scientific method, we derive predictions from our hypotheses so that we can test them. A hypothesis (or in Feynmanese, a guess) is hostage to the empirical success or failure of its corollary predictions.
Experiments are effectively bets. What’s at stake is the hypothesis itself: whether it must be abandoned and improved upon, or (provisionally) accepted as Truth.
The end product of the scientific project is theory—a body of hypotheses whose predictions have a record of “winning” the bets we make about nature.
But in Climate Science, the prediction is the end product.
The climate-scientific method is a bit like the real thing, only dumbed-down beyond recognition and useless beyond redemption. On the plus side, you can say goodbye to tedious studies that can take more than a minute to complete. With Cli Sci, you’re finished by the 22-second mark:
I think the climate doomsters are vulnerable to a simple counter narrative — for example, the sun slowly cooling off has a more profound effect on the climate than CO2 can ever hope to have. Another possible counter narrative: Sure the world is warming up, and that’s good for us because the deserts will shrink, there will be longer growing seasons, glaciers will disappear giving us more land to live on, etc.
Even in the absence of new evidence, a counter narrative that is different and interesting will have a strong effect on what people talk about
Scientists, especially young scientists, do get tired of the same old stuff all the time. Eventually the notoriety that attaches to “bad boy” scientists — those who hold contrary opinions and push a counter narrative — will advance careers faster and further than just being one more conformist singing in the choir.
Climate science, at least almost all of the modern (post-Lamb) examples, were never alive, so they couldn’t have died.
When my father was born, a new political trend in Germany was in full swing. A little more than 2 years before is birth, Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany. His rise brought an age of certainty. Certainty about anything. Debatte was reviled, soon criminalized. Anything that questioned the dogma of the party was outlawed and there was a crushing majority consensus that this was a good thing. It all ended in the biggest war of all times and endless human suffering. Could this have been avoided if there were more questioning Hitler? We won’t know. What we know is that when a large group of people is so certain about something that they feel the need to kill any debate, horrible things tend to happen. Suppressing criticism is akin to a dictatorship.
You are absolutely right, Larry. There is no debate. Really, there never was, although some of us might have thought there was a debate, preaching to the converted.
Our best hope is that the claims of the doomsters get so absurd that that start to marginalize themselves, and get ignored by the wider population. Extinction Rebellion is helping a lot in that direction. Prospective nominees for the US Democratic presidential candidate are falling over each other to make ever more radical and impractical “green” policy platforms.
I hope that we might be able to look back on this phase as the time when the climate movement began to collapse under the weight of its own absurdity.
One way this could start is that directly imposed carbon taxes are going to make people really angry at the politicians that created them. Gilets Jaunes are a good start. Three very angry provincial governments in Canada are another.
Another thing we can expect is that as the time frame to “save the planet” gets shorter and shorter and the planet doesn’t appear to be on life support, a lot of people are going to start doubting the alarmists.
We can hope………………….
I don’t think that “we” can do much against the green tide
I wonder when peak fear will be reached? After AR6 is published? 2030? Inquiring minds want to know.
Peak fear will be a good time to buy coastal real estate, particularly in California.
Wait for the price to be driven down by the selling of the idiots in California and swoop in and buy.
With SLR rising only about 11 inches per century, you will probably have several centuries of enjoyment before you have anything to worry about. Shhhh – don’t tell anybody in California.
Oboma already figured this out and bought land on Martha’s Vineyard.
Should be lots of deals to be had from now till a bit after peak fear (whenever that will be).
Maybe we should wait for some idiot in California to build an ark – maybe that will signal peak fear?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was not set up to investigate climate science, but to select from the evidence and from time to time produce reports which would show that CO2 was the main driver of dangerous climate change. The Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, later signed by 196 governments.
The objective of the Convention was to keep CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that the government funded scientists guessed would prevent dangerous man made interference with the climate system.
This treaty is a comprehensive, politically driven, political action plan called Agenda 21 designed to produce a centrally managed global society which would control every aspect of the life of every one on earth.
It says :
“The Parties should take precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent or minimize the
causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects. Where there are threats of serious or
irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing
such measures”
Apocalyptic forecasts and fear are used as the main drivers of demands for action and for enormous investments such as those in the new IPCC SR1.5 report and in the work of Nordhaus who advocates a carbon tax .Nordhaus is quoted in the NYT as saying “If we start moving very swiftly in the next 20 years, we might able to avoid 2 degrees, but if we don’t do that, we’re in for changes in the Earth’s system that we can’t begin to understand in depth. Warming of 4, 5, 6 degrees will bring changes we don’t understand because it’s outside the range of human experience in the last 100,000 to 200,000 years.”
It is a disgrace that so few western academic scientists have spoken out against the increasing actionable certainty assigned to the model forecast outcomes in successive IPCC SPMs.
For a summary of how this post- modern political science became dominant see:
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-co2-derangement-syndrome-millennial.html
Those politicians and scientists proselytizing the warming scenario are closely following the UNFCCC Agenda 21 political plan of action. Bernie Sanders says :” Climate change is the single greatest threat facing our planet. The debate is over, and the scientific jury is in: global climate change is real, it is caused mainly by emissions released from burning fossil fuels and it poses a catastrophic threat to the long-term longevity of our planet. If we do nothing, the planet will heat up five to ten degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century. That would cause enough sea level rise from melting glaciers to put cities like New York and Miami underwater – along with more frequent asthma attacks, higher food prices, insufficient drinking water and more infectious diseases.”
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed taxing the wealthy as high as 70% to fund a climate change plan she’s pushing called the “Green New Deal.” She also says “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change”
Fortunately, Reality is finally beginning to intrude upon the dangerous global warming meme.
Curry, 2017 in “Climate Models for the layman” says:
“GCMs are not fit for the purpose of attributing the causes of 20th century warming or for
predicting global or regional climate change on time scales of decades to centuries,
with any high level of confidence. By extension, GCMs are not fit for the purpose of
justifying political policies to fundamentally alter world social, economic and energy
systems…..”
Scafetta et al 2017 states: “The severe discrepancy between observations and modeled predictions……further confirms….that the current climate models have significantly exaggerated the anthropogenic greenhouse warming effect”
Hansen et al 2018 “Global Temperature in 2017” said “However, the solar variability is not negligible in comparison with the energy imbalance that drives global temperature change. Therefore, because of the combination of the strong 2016 El Niño and the phase of the solar cycle, it is plausible, if not likely, that the next 10 years of global temperature change will leave an impression of a ‘global warming hiatus’.
Page, 2017 in “The coming cooling: usefully accurate climate forecasting for policy makers.” said:
” This paper argued that the methods used by the establishment climate science community are not fit for purpose and that a new forecasting paradigm should be adopted.
When analyzing complex systems with multiple interacting variables it is useful to note the advice of Enrico Fermi who reportedly said “never make something more accurate than absolutely necessary”. The 2017 paper proposed a simple heuristic approach to climate science which plausibly proposes that a Millennial Turning Point (MTP) and peak in solar activity was reached in 1991,that this turning point correlates with a temperature turning point in 2003/4, and that a general cooling trend will now follow until approximately 2650.
The establishment’s dangerous global warming meme, the associated IPCC series of reports ,the entire UNFCCC circus, the recent hysterical IPCC SR1.5 proposals and Nordhaus’ recent Nobel prize are founded on two basic errors in scientific judgement. First – the sample size is too small. Most IPCC model studies retrofit from the present back for only 100 – 150 years when the currently most important climate controlling, largest amplitude, solar activity cycle is millennial. This means that all climate model temperature outcomes are too hot and likely fall outside of the real future world. (See Kahneman -. Thinking Fast and Slow p 118) Second – the models make the fundamental scientific error of forecasting straight ahead beyond the Millennial Turning Point (MTP) and peak in solar activity which was reached in 1991.These errors are compounded by confirmation bias and academic consensus group think.
See the Energy and Environment paper The coming cooling: usefully accurate climate forecasting for policy makers.http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0958305X16686488
and an earlier accessible blog version at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-coming-cooling-usefully-accurate_17.html See also https://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-millennial-turning-point-solar.html
and the discussion with Professor William Happer at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2018/02/exchange-with-professor-happer-princeton.html
It is hard to counter this climate -industrial complex as Eisenhower warned in 1961 when he expressed his concern for corruption of the scientific process as part of this centralization of funding in the Federal government, and vice-versa:
“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a {self-appointed} scientific-technological elite.”
To help a little, readers might share this post and my comment on their social media and blog sites.
This Science Mag editorial from NAS President, Ms McNutt, appeared in the 02 August 2019 on-line version of the magazine (several months ago). Her editorial was so full of mendacious claims (i.e. whoppers) that I could barely get through reading when I first saw it.
Here is her Editorial. I’ll refute her bigger whoppers in her Editorial below.
Her first whopper:
“ …decades between CO2 release and the resulting temperature rise. This delay, from disequilibrium effects with the ocean, masks pending temperature increases long before they are apparent.”
– Two whoppers from the NAS President in one with that. According to Ms McNutt the models are wrong in their radiative equations and resulting forcings. According to GCMs, there is no “delay” (especially not decades) in trapping/delaying LWIR photons beyond a few hundred nanoseconds before they escape to space, but not before they raise the effective radiation level enough to warm the air and surface below rather quickly (hours to days – at least in the models). Her second whopper: CO2 rise lags temperature rise on all time scales studied. To claim the CO2 rises and then only decades later the temps will rise flies in the face of everything from paleoclimatology to the cargo cult GCMs.
Her next whopper was in the beginning of the 2nd paragraph:
“and these calculations of the sensitivity of climate to a doubling of CO2 have proven to be remarkably on target. Indeed, on the basis of today’s more sophisticated climate models, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms the climate sensitivity proffered by the Charney report.
Her Ms McNutt is spinning (that is, trying to put lipstick on a pig) the fact that, despite billions of US$D spent (including other countries’ monies on non-US models) over 4 decades, the Charney sensitivity of 1.5℃ – 4.5°C has not been narrowed from ho-hum no-biggee, probably net beneficial to catastrophic sensitivity.. That should in fact be a disgrace for a science modeling community — that 40 years of very expensive work has yielding nothing of value towards narrowing the range. And yet they keep modeling onwards with the same junk cargo cult science. And as far as her “on-target” claim goes, that is a lie too. Observations now suggest the likely ECS range is somewhere between 0.7℃ – 1.7℃, the low-end of, or below the Charney Range.
Her next whopper is actually a call to scientists everywhere should abandon caution and become political activists with this,
“What else can scientists do to spur action to avert the worst impacts of climate change?”
There we have the NAS President discarding any uncertainty or reasoned- approach for an emotion-laden “call to activism” for science. How can the NAS body have allowed someone like her to taken over their organization?
The her next whopper:
” In particular, the science of attributing changes in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events to climate change drivers has been building credibility.” (my bold)
There she goes again, totally off the rails and down the rabbit hole of lies, where any extreme weather event now must be have “climate change drivers.” The only thing the attribution community has been doing is nothing short of propaganda and half-truths. They’ve been ignoring things like moderating cold (low temps), fewer and less intense heat waves since the 1930s, the unprecedented major hurricane landfall hiatus of 2006-2015, Great Lakes were going to dry up and overflow, and every possible outcome is “climate change” attributable. She and the rest of her ilk of activists must know that is not science, yet still ignore it to push an activism and propaganda agenda.
She follows that whopper up into the next paragraph with,
“Whether the extreme event is a heatwave, flood, drought, wildfire, or hurricane, demonstrating to the public how climate change is amplifying the negative impacts of these events can spur more immediate action, even before the most catastrophic warming is upon us. “
That’s total bonkers from the NAS President because now she claims every heatwave, drought, flood, wildfire, or hurricane has a detectable amplification signature from climate change (here must remember the definition they use for CC: the impact to warming of human anthrogenic CO2 emissions). That statement is so bogus it is hard to know where to begin. TheMagicMolecule™ must be so flexible, it can do anything. Permadrought claims became floods and end of droughts, and it was all due to magical Climate Change belief. End of snow has become too much snow. Cold outbreaks from polar vortex incursions are “evidence” of climate change drivers. Total junk.
She makes another call to activism with:
“Geoscientists must work collaboratively with health care professionals, economists, and engineers to link the changing impacts of extreme events and their aftermath to climate change while the effects are still being experienced. This approach could well convince people that climate change is about health, jobs, and the economy.”
Essentially she is saying, that before the collection/evaluation of evidence is done (e.g. real science), “geoscientists” must make un-founded claims to media and to Doctors. This “sky is falling” alarmism is part of a carefully orchestrated propo campaign that time is of the essence after a weather disaster — don’t let a crisis go to waste. Propaganda works best when people are hurting, the wildfire flames are being shown relentlessly on news, etc, and the public is most sensitive to unfounded claims. It is obvious this nut-case NAS President wants more disasters and human tragedy to happen so that more un-established claims can be made for further the cause.
Her final whopper: “Since its release [the Charney Report], scientists have built a formidable evidence base on climate change.”
Here I suppose model outputs for 80 years into the future are “evidence” to her. Continuous cooling the past-warming the present adjustments (loss of station data leading to infilling) to 150year-old data sets is “evidence” to her. The 1920-1945 warm period apparently didn’t happen (ignored evidence). The 1970’s cooling scare didn’t happen (more ignored evidence). The failure of Permadrought claims are quietly ignored. Claims of worsening hurricanes are based on $’s lost, not the physical changes in atmospherics that drive them. The near complete destruction of Miami in 1926 by a hurricane didn’t happen, or the 8,000 – 10,000 lives lost in Corpus Christi hurricane in 1900 didn’t happen. Massive wildfires across Australia in 1920, 1880’s, and in the US in the first half of the 20th Century — none of those happened, or must be sent down the memory hole.
Conclusion: Ms McNutt at the helm of US NAS as its president is an utter travesty on science. She is a charlatan selling snake oil. Her calls for activism, her calls for ignoring evidence, or to have no evidence to make wild speculative climate change claims is not science. Her words in that Editorial clearly show her calls to advocacy are based on emotions and political/ideological-based advocacy. Failures to acknowledge healthy science skepticism, an acknowledgement of uncertainty, and any acknowledgement of past failed predictions, all highlight a clear unscientific mental state in Ms McNutt. She should resign immediately or she should be removed by an upwelling of disapproval from the NAS body membership and a call to heal itself of this activism that is destroying all of science.
– Joel O’Bryan, PhD