By Robert Bradley Jr
“As for using proxy data to detect a man-made greenhouse effect, I don’t think we’re ever going to get to the point where we’re going to be totally convincing.” – Thomas Wigley, National Center for Atmospheric Research, (April 28, 1998)
When did the “greenhouse signal” become recognized and “settled science”? Despite the 35th anniversary of James Hansen’s June 1988 testimony to a Senate subcommittee, the historical record should be clear that detection was not in 1988. Or 1991. Or 1995. Or 1998.
And “Exxon Knew“?
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Here is some history from the used-to-be newspaper of record, the New York Times, and its global warming scribe, William K. Stevens.
In early 1991, Stevens reported that scientists were not ready to pronounce evidence of man-made global warming:
most scientists are far from ready to announce that greenhouse warming has arrived, since the warming recorded over the last decade could also be part of a natural climatic change. Instead, they are struggling to answer a crucial question: how can a greenhouse warming of the climate be recognized and distinguished from natural warming? They are focusing their detective efforts on various subtle changes that a greenhouse warming would be expected to induce. These signs are known collectively as the greenhouse “fingerprint.”
The task, climatologists say, is by no means as easy and straightforward as it might seem. Stevens added:
But the greenhouse “signal,” if in fact it is there now, is still so small on a global scale that it is obscured by the “noise” of the many other factors that influence climate. These other factors, the climatologists say, could well be the cause of the overall global warming observed in the last decade.
Or, equally possibly, they could have produced an overall cooling that partly offset an even larger greenhouse warming than the rise in average global temperature might suggest.
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In 1995, Stevens reported that “Global Warming Experts Call Human Role Likely.” And in 1998:
It is clear, climatologists say, that the earth’s surface has warmed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. But is the warmth out of the ordinary? And did people cause it? Scientists have been unable to provide a definitive answer to these questions because they do not know how much the global climate has varied on its own in the comparatively recent past — say, the last thousand years —which offers the best basis for comparison with today’s climate. Temperature records based on thermometer readings go back only about 150 years.
Some scientists were saying ‘yes,’ but others no. Stevens quoted climatologist Thomas Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, “regarded as a leading expert on the issue of detecting the greenhouse signal”:
”They’re making progress, and there is a lot of hard work involved, and I hold them in the highest regard,” Dr. Tom Wigley, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said of Dr. Mann and his colleagues. ”But I think there’s a limit to how far you can ever go.” As for using proxy data to detect a man-made greenhouse effect, he said, ”I don’t think we’re ever going to get to the point where we’re going to be totally convincing.”
And “Exxon Knew”?
Such minor issues as cause and effect and time sequence do not matter to a True Believer.
As the Green Blob advocated the same simple life changes when Global Cooling was on the menu, why should a mere directional change affect policy?
Facts and science doesn’t matter to a true believer because it’s not really about climate. It’s about redistribution of wealth. Pure envy from commi bums too lazy to get a real job.
Ah, the Edinhoffer quote will never be forgotten.
As Rud says, that quote may never be forgotten, but it is we who won’t forget it. The typical believer does not know that quote, can’t recall that last winter was uncomfortably cold, could not read and understand the executive summary of any report on the subject let alone any real science.
What goes in the mind of the 40% of the public who are deeply convinced of a crisis that is in effect and that they can see right now is a mystery. But people have a default setting in their minds about climate always getting worse for some reason and that the end is nigh.
We have emerged from one of the longest and coldest winters here in 50 years. Mortality among big game animals is I think unknown (Game and Fish think it was 80% in some places) but may turn out to be large. June has been wet and offered only a handful of days in the 70s. If one were to provide an “expert” with the weather records from this past half-year, and the corresponding ones from the spring/summer of 1973, they wouldn’t be able to tell you which data set occurred back in the “ice age returning scare” and which is in the “oceans are going to boil” scare.
The search for an ‘anthropogenic fingerprint’ in climate change has been going on for decades. Many have tried, and many have failed. Tropical troposphere hotspot? Nope, doesn’t exist. OHC? Nope, records are too inaccurate even when OHC is expressed in alarmist popular zettajoules or Hiroshimas, because there is a LOT of ocean. Extreme weather? Nope, didn’t increase. See my deconstruction of Chapter 1 of the 2014 US NCA for a number of amusing failed attempts using this angle—essay Credibility Conundrums in ebook Blowing Smoke. Sea level rise acceleration (Hansen 1990)? Nope, didn’t accelerate. Polar warming amplification leading to summer Arctic sea ice disappearance? Nope, didn’t disappear.
After almost 40 years, the warmunists still got nothing concerning CO2 caused warming attribution. Mann’s infamous hockey stick tried and failed in 1999 for AR3. Erased the MWP and the LIA in the handle (both natural variation), then added on an ‘anthropogenic’ blade using ‘Mike’s Nature trick’. Been thoroughly discredited many ways: centered PCA produces hockey sticks from red noise, strip bark bristlecones, upside down Tiljander sediment core,… Marcott’s attempted 2013 revival in Science comprised simple academic misconduct, as shown in essay ‘A high stick foul’ in ebook Blowing Smoke.
Everybody should have a copy of Rud’s ebook “Blowing Smoke.” Likewise Vaclav Smil’s “The Way Things Really Work” and Steven Koonin’s “Unsettled.”
What the warmistas have realized is, it does not matter if any of those things are true or if they really have occurred or are occurring.
All they need to do is make sure they just keep saying they are true, for many tens of millions to buy it all, hook, line, and sinker, with no doubts whatsoever it is all true.
For huge swaths of the population, these things are reality.
What remains to be seen is, how readily can popular delusions be dispelled?
We are not in a climate crisis, CO2 is not the control knob for earth’s climate and we are not going to reach a tipping point and experience irreversible global warming.
The first part is wrong but the second part is right. The land north of 40N is close to gaining more permanent ice. Earth is very close to a tipping point. There is a point within the next few hundred years when ice will accumulate on land again. Once it starts, it will accelerate for the next few thousand years and sustain the drop in sea level for 10,000 years. Compelling evidence is the rapid increase in autumn snow extent in the NH:
How many climate models got that right?
The reason I know this is because it has happened 4 times in the last 400,000 years in the same phase of the precession cycle as now. Each reduction in sea level over every glacial cycle corresponds with rising summer solar intensity in the NH. Once the ice mountains form, the next tipping point will be when the land can no longer support the volume of ice and glacier calving slows down the water cycle such that show melt again overtakes snowfall. Recorded history of humans has all been during an interglacial but it is coming to an end.
The maximum NH snow extent is trending slightly upward while the spring extent is still trending down. As the NH ocean surface get warmer, the snowfall will continue to increase.
This is the inevitable consequence of June solar intensity over the NH increasing causing the August surface temperature of the NH oceans to increase. This warming trend is only a few hundred years in but has thousands of years to go. A lot more of the ocean surface can and will reach the 30C temperature limit.
Better buy more gas furnaces.
Bob:
My prediction differs. We ARE in a climate crisis. We HAVE passed a tipping point (but not because of CO2), and are facing irreversible global warming, unless some geoengineering is utilized.
The cause, as I have been saying for years, is simply the removal of dimming industrial SO2 aerosols from the atmosphere due to global Clean Air efforts, and accelerated now by Net-Zero activities. The cleaner the air is, the hotter it becomes!
As of now, I can see no reason that temperatures will not exceed those of 2015-2016. Read the Wikipedia article “2014-2016 El Nino event” for what we will be experiencing.
Nonsense. The warming/cooling cycles are driven by the ocean oscillations such as the PDO and the AMO. They all have differing cycle lengths between their warming and cooling periods. When the various cycles happen to intersect in any of these variations they can bring about step changes in temperature, such as happened in the middle 1970s when the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) switched to its warm phase. This cycle was only discovered when in the late 80s or into the 90s researchers studying salmon cycles realized the changes in temperatures were affecting the salmon numbers.
And where is the evidence that we have any global warming let alone an irreversible version? There is no proof of that outside of flawed models. Empirical temperature readings don’t support that in the least.
Spren:
You need to read my recent article “The Definitive Cause of La Nina and El Nino Events”
It destroys YOUR nonsense.
https://doi.org/10.30574/wjarr.2023.17.1.0124
And, “Net-Zero Catastrophe Beginning?”
It explains the reason for the coming “irreversible warming”
https://doi.org/wjarr.2022.16.1.1035
G’Day BurlHenry
“ Read the Wikipedia article “2014-2016 El Nino event” for what we will be experiencing.”
Referencing a climate article at Wikipedia? Do a ‘search’ here on WUWT for “Wikipedia articles” and read a few.
Just for starters, from nine years ago: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/29/you-only-need-to-read-a-few-climate-entries-on-wikipedia-to-know-this-spiked-online-article-rings-true/
… and there’s plenty more.
Tombstone Gabby:
You have a good point.
However, the Wikipedia article mentioned is simply a listing of the adverse weather events that occurred around the world during the 2014-2016 El Nino, with no ax to grind.
You need to read it to see what is coming, and it is scary.
To all of you “down voters”:
Sorry, guys. I have the data which proves that the above is happening. It is a “game changer”, not ready to release it just yet.
Climastrology. The moment I heard about global warming I KNEW it would be impossible to discern a human fingerprint on it. So they resort to “models”. QUACKERY!
Nobody knew then any more than they know now, it’s all still guess work, therefor anyone who uses the phrase “settled science” in regards to climate needs to be automatically branded a fraud and removed from the debate, never to return.
You want a clear signal? That is the only one
Settled/consensus science = fraud
If an individual still cannot see how corrupt all these MSM and government narratives are at this point in light of what we have seen and experienced in the last 3 years ( and last 3 days) you might as well consider them a hopeless case.
I think Exxon has caved. The Exxon Knew case can’t withstand a critical examination.
Were Exxon or anyone else interested in a vigorous defense, they could not only defeat the accusation, but very likely prevail in a defamation suit against Naomi Oreskes and her cohorts.
But Exxon does nothing, and in the Montana vs. Held Exxon Knew case, the Montana AG is reportedly unmotivated in opposition. Spines seem to be in short supply.
“Were Exxon or anyone else interested in a vigorous defense, they could not only defeat the accusation, but very likely prevail in a defamation suit against Naomi Oreskes and her cohorts.”
Yes. It is baffling that no one seems to want to push back effectively. There are many ways to show the unreliability of the claimed detection of a GHG “signal”. Your 2019 paper certainly does the job against any claim based on models, as the cloud fraction error so plainly obscures any attempt to isolate the effect of incremental GHGs.
Another way to illustrate the attribution problem is to look at the computed energy implications in the dynamic atmosphere. A reanalysis model does this, as I wrote a while back here. Is it reasonable to think that a “signal” can be isolated for reliable attribution? No way, as I see it. The single-digit static effect vanishes in all the motion and energy conversions.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/01/30/essay-contest-results-delayed-a-bit-and-open-thread/#comment-3443611
Please keep on with your efforts to expose the unsoundness of it all. Much appreciated.
When science cannot prove something it just assumes it is true and continues marching on. Same with dark matter and dark energy.
It is so assumed that climate change was caused by human emissions of CO2 and aerosols that it is calculated how much temperature change each caused:
IPCC AR6 WG1 FAQ 3.1 Fig. 1.
That graph is remarkable, as it is a display more of ideology than physics.
In the main text of WG1, they print it next to the physically correct graph of CO2’s radiative forcing effect, which is without feedbacks.
But when they publish the graph above, there is no physical basis for it.
Implicitly, they pretend that any feedbacks are also due to CO2.
“Observations” = Computer-generated distortions of the temperature record.
It was just as warm in the Early Twentieth Century as it is today. These “observations” don’t show that.
If you see a temperature chart that does not show the Early Twentieth Century to be just as warm as today, then you are looking at a bogus, bastardized “hotter and hotter” Hockey Stick chart.
You can’t correlate with a fantasy, which is what the Hockey Stick chart is.
“If you calculate it, they will come…”
Exactly Tom.
They have tortured the historical data, and it has confessed to whatever they wanted it to say.
But same as with a person, it is 100% meaningless.
From the article: “But the greenhouse “signal,” if in fact it is there now, is still so small on a global scale that it is obscured by the “noise” of the many other factors that influence climate. These other factors, the climatologists say, could well be the cause of the overall global warming observed in the last decade.”
And this is STILL the case in 2023.
From the article: “It is clear, climatologists say, that the earth’s surface has warmed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. But is the warmth out of the ordinary?”
It is clear that the earth’s surface has both warmed and cooled since the end of the Little Ice Age. The temperatures warmed into the 1880’s, then the temperatures cooled into the 1910’s, and then the temperatures warmed again into the 1930’s, then the temperatures cooled again into the 1970’s, and then the temperatures warmed again to the present. And none of the warmings are any warmer than the ones in the past. All the warming pretty much stops at the same temperature level since the 1800’s.
There has been no continuous warming since the end of the Little Ice Age as is implied above, and when anyone says “it is clear the Earth has warmed”. Yes, it has warmed and it has also cooled, with the range between the coolest and the warmest being about 2.0C, and there is NO unprecedented warming today as the climate change alarmists claim. We are no warmer today than in the recent past, yet there is much more CO2 in the air now than then, but the temperatures are no higher. Therefore, CO2 has little effect on the Earth’s temperatures. So little, that it can’t even be detected and obviously has no effect on how the temperatures behave.
Here’s the U.S. temperature chart (Hansen 1999) to give you an idea of how the temperatures move in a cyclical pattern. No Hockey Stick, “hotter and hotter and hotter” temperature profile here:
The same James Hansen that promotes unprecendented warming today creates a temperature chart for the U.S. that shows NO unprecedented warming. There it is, right in front of your eyes.
And do not forget about the fact that the warming still consists of not-as-cold nights, and Winters, and northern latitudes. IOW, it is milder, not hotter.
From the article: “Temperature records based on thermometer readings go back only about 150 years.’
That’s more than enough of a record to show that CO2 has very little effect on the Earth’s temperatures.
There are temperature highpoints in this historical temperature record in the 1880’s, the 1930’s, 1998, and 2016, all of which are within a few tenths of a degree of each other. And, in the past, when this temperature level is reached, the climate starts to cool and cools by about 2.0C.
The written temperature record also shows that it is no warmer today than it was 150 years ago. Yet today there is much more CO2 in the air than there was 150 years ago, but it is no warmer today than then. So CO2 can’t have much of an effect on pushing temperatures higher.
Hansen 1999:
From the article: “Climatologist Thomas Wigley: ”They’re making progress, and there is a lot of hard work involved, and I hold them in the highest regard,” Dr. Tom Wigley, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said of Dr. Mann and his colleagues.”
Really?
I wonder if Thomas would say the same thing today after Mann’s “hard work” was shown to be a fraud?
Wigley did say in one of the Climategate emails
“I have read the M&M stuff criticising MBH. A lot of it seems valid to me. At the very least MBH is a very sloppy piece of work – an opinion I have held for some time”
‘Climategate:The Crutape Letters p9’
From the article: “And “Exxon Knew”?”
Of course they didn’t know. They knew exactly as much as everyone else at that time, which amounted to not very much.
And neither Exxon or anyone else knows anything about CO2’s effects on the atmosphere today any more than they did then.
There is no correlation between CO2 levels and temperatures. The only correlation the climate change alarmists can show is the bogus, bastardized Hockey Stick chart, which we all know (well, most of us) is a fraud.
The real temperature profile of the Earth doesn’t look anything like a “hotter and hotter and hotter” Hockey Stick chart. The Hockey Stick is a fraud meant to sell a CO2 crisis narrative. And it is the ONLY thing the climate alarmist can point to as making their case.
Without the bogus Hockey Stick, the climate change alamists have nothing. And the written, historical temperature records from all around the world refute the “hotter and hotter” Hockey Stick temperature profile. The written record shows it was just as warm in the past as it is today, and shows there is no unprecedented warming today. No unprecedented warming today means CO2 has little effect on the Earth’s temperatures.
Here is a comparison of a regional, written temperature chart (Hansen 1999), on the left, with a bogus, bastardized, “hotter and hotter and hotter” Hockey Stick chart, on the right.
All the written historical temperature records have the same benign temperature profile as the U.S. chart, where it is no warmer today than in the past. Which means CO2 is not a problem. None of the written temperature records have the “hotter and hotter” Hockey Stick temperature profile. The bogus Hockey Stick chart is the outliar.
If CO2 is a greenhouse gas then a greenhouse effect will always occur to some extent at any level of CO2 in the atmosphere, so the ‘greenhouse signal’ must be already there. So what the hell are they looking for?
We can see how radiative gasses effect the atmosphere very clearly if we focus on the effect of water vapor.
Not as cold when it is cold, not as hot when it is hot. IOW, more moderate.
It is really very simple: As time has passed, they have grown ever more shameless in their willingness to simply make stuff up, lie, pretend things that are not so, change the historical records, etc.
It was not that long ago that anyone with a reputation to be concerned about, would never declare a weather event was proof of human caused global warming.
But for a couple of years now, every weather event is not merely evidence of, but an actual example of, the imaginary “climate crisis”.
“It is really very simple: As time has passed, they have grown ever more shameless in their willingness to simply make stuff up, lie, pretend things that are not so, change the historical records, etc.”
I think that’s exactly what is going on. The climate change alarmists are both Shameless and Desperate.