From MasterResource
By Robert Bradley Jr. — June 29, 2023
“Rob, your question makes zero sense & and I don’t have the patience to deal with people like you. Please crawl back under the rock you emerged from or I’ll ban you from my substack. Seriously: your next comment that displeases me is your last, so make sure it’s a doozy.” (Andrew Dessler, below)
Climatologist Andrew Dessler, a leading figure on the alarmist side of the debate, is a piece of work–extremely smart and knowledgeable but biased and short-tempered. His personality is akin to that of Joe Romm of yesterday and Michael Mann today–arrogant, condescending, petty. Dessler is certain that he knows what is to be known about all things climate and energy. But, really, he does not know what he does not know. (Yes, climate science is highly uncertain, and climate models are a mess.) [1]
As an example of Dessler at his worst, consider this quotation:
Hey assholes. We’ve been telling you for decades that this was going to happen if we didn’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You didn’t listen and now it’s all happening. We hope you’re happy. Enjoy the heatwaves, intense rainfall, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and many other things, you fucking morons.
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Here is a recent exchange with Angry Andy on his Substack post, “Is Climate Change Causing the Texas Heat Wave?” His post stated:
Climate change doesn’t typically cause extreme weather. Rather, climate change is an amplifier for extreme weather. You can think of climate change as “steroids for the weather”… So climate change doesn’t cause a hot day, but it can transform a run-of-the-mill hot day into a record-breaking scorcher. Based on this, you might want to ask if climate change is making the Texas heat wave worse. The answer is an unambiguous yes.
I asked in a comment: Isn’t the ‘greenhouse signal’ more minimum temperatures going up (versus maximums)–and more concentrated in the coldest regions of the year during winter? If so, what are the implications for your interpretation here.
Dessler: Global warming tends to reduce gradients, so you do get more warming at night, during winter, and at high latitudes. but climate change certainly does cause warming during the day, in summer, and in the tropics. so this has no implications for the interpretation.
Bradley: It dilutes the effect. So compared to the average, what percentage from (below) 100% is the Texas Dome anthropogenic effect? This is a quantitative discussion, not only a qualitative one, right?
Dessler: why do you ask questions that are clearly answered in the post? pls re-read the last 2 paragraphs.
Bradley: No it isn’t. You should specifically note the distribution of the warming and how it is diminished from the ‘average’ because of summer and afternoons. In general, what is the reduction from the average? 10% …. 25% … ?
Dessler: Rob, your question makes zero sense & and I don’t have the patience to deal with people like you. Please crawl back under the rock you emerged from or I’ll ban you from my substack. Seriously: your next comment that displeases me is your last, so make sure it’s a doozy.
I thought of ending the discussion here but pressed on with an attempt to get my question answered and not get kicked out of his Substack.
Bradley: I am not trying to pick a fight but am politely asking: is anthropogenic warming the least causal (least intense, most benign) during this time of year (summer) and the time of day (afternoons) to relate to your post on the current Texas heat wave?
Dessler: See, it’s not that hard to be polite.
To answer: that’s certainly true for average warming, but I’m not 100% sure if that is true for extremes. For this or any individual event, you have to do attribution studies. But we already know the sign of the answer: climate change made this more severe than it otherwise would be. The only question is the magnitude.
I could have come back with something like “You are waffling around the fact that your Texas summer heat interpretation is weakened by the theory–theory you did not mention in your analysis. This is lawyer-like and not scholarly. And heck, while you are at it, why not mention that loads of concrete that have been added under the ‘heat dome’ in recent years and decades–and even speak to the tens of thousands of huge industrial wind turbines that scientific studies indicate are contributing to local heating.” But that would have gotten me kicked off his Substack. [Update: I just got kicked off from this blog]
——————
Dessler almost cancelled me [Update: he did]. His Cancel Culture applies to economists too. And remember what Dessler called esteemed scientist Steven Koonin, author of Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Does Not, and Why It Matters? A “climate flat earther” and “old white dude whose vast experience in the halls of power gives him a unique ability to point out the errors that other people make? Nope.”
Final Comment
Dessler is a lawyer for alarmism, not a humble, careful scientist. Remember the Polar Bear Scare? Dessler warned about “the extinction of Polar Bears” as a cost of climate change in the first editions of his science primer, An Introduction to the Science of Climate Change (2011: p. 220; 2020: p. 237) only to drop it in the third edition (2022). These are the obvious exaggerations–what about all the subtle ones?
And regarding Texas outlier summers? We had one in 2011 that Dessler pronounced as the new normal. But it was not for more than a decade. But come 2023 (to date), and Andy is all over the heat dome as the climate norm. And notice how he stays vague, as in qualitative rather than quantitative. Is he trying to be careful in a sea of weather unknowns and climate mysteries?
Climate alarmism 2023, continuing what began, officially, at least, 35 years ago this month….
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[1] MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel (author of the 70-page primer, What We Know About Climate Change (MIT Press: 2018) stated: “If I’d written a book called What We Don’t Know about Climate Science, it would have been an encyclopedia.” Also: “… it’s not about this is going to be a climate catastrophe on the one side, or nothing on the other. That’s not the way the world works.”
I guess he assumes Texans forgot about the generations of families that bought property in Colorado or vacationed there to get out of the Texas heat long before climate dogma swept the land. It’s more expensive property these days, but then he can blame that on climate change as well.
Bias, short tempered, arrogant, condescending and petty as Bradley describes him, describes Authoritarians not Scientists. That guy has been hanging out with Politicians and High level Bureaucrats for too long.
Maybe if he had ears he wouldn’t be such a ****head.
Climate change doesn’t cause extreme weather, it make it worse. That seems like a weaselly, waffley way to overcome the inability to link any weather event to climate change. It is equally unprovable.
It’s just another unsubstantiated assertion, like a thousand others climate alarmists make.
They assert something and expect the rest of us to believe it.
Tom Abbott, Robert Bradley,
Claims that climate change is making heatwaves hotter can be answered conclusively with measured data.
For example, here is some long term data from Alice Springs in central Australia, a site chosen because heatwaves develop in the region any get moved by weather systems to our big coastal cities where people feel them.
Here, a 5-day heatwave is the hottest Tmax each year, averaged over 5 consecutive days. I have plotted the hottest one for every year, using official, public Bureau of Meteorology numbers.
I have made no adjustments, done no cherry picking.
See for yourself if these heatwaves have got hotter over the years since data started there in 1878.
They have not got hotter. End of argument.
Now, do the exercise for a Texas site.a It takes under half an hour of rudimentary Excel.
Geoff S
Sherro01;
Your graph ends in 2022. It is warming up this year
How do you explain the cluster showing the decade with the hottest heatwaves was in the 19th century?
Dean S.
There were two American business recessions, the “Long” depression of Oct 1873-March 1879, and another between March 1882 and May 1885, both of which caused El Ninos because of reduced industrial aerosol pollution during the recessions, and thus more intense solar radiation striking the Earth’s surface.
Counter-intuitive, but a WoodforTrees.org temperature plot shows temperatures always rise during American business recessions.
Google “A Graphical Explanation of Climate Change”
“It is warming up this year”
Is BoM telling you that ? 😉
bnice2000
“Is BoM telling you that?”
No, The return of an El Nino has been announced.
“The return of an El Nino has been announced.”
Ah,.. so we agree that El Ninos are the cause of the highly beneficial slight warming. 🙂
Bruce2000:
El Ninos are NEVER beneficial, and the warming from this one, unfortunately, will be especially deadly.
Last Wednesday, the 21st of June, Australia entered the southern hemisphere’s “astronomical” winter season.
Your bald assertion immediately struck me as being somewhere between “counter-intuitive” and, as the IPCC might put it, “counter-factual”.
Daily Tmax data since 1/1/2023 for Alice Springs (Airport, BoM weather station number 15590) can be downloaded from the following embedded link …
That data, along with the 5-day (rolling) averages mentioned by Geoff, are plotted in the graph attached below.
Note that the scale only has to go up to 42°C to accommodate that data, well below the “hottest on record” for the 5-day averages (of just over 44°C).
No, it “is” not.
As expected, on entering SH winter the maximum daily temperatures in Alice Springs, along with the rest of Australia, “are” going down.
Mark BLR:
“No, it “is” not”
An El Nino has officially been called, which means that global temperatures are rising, and temperatures for this one are rising faster than expected.
Look at Anthony’s ENSO meter at right, on this thread. We are now in El Nino territory
And the clowns wonder why there are so many skeptics. An incredible amount of arrogance, especially for a science that inherently has so many uncertainties. They make it so easy to question everything they say. I would have more respect for Andrew’s views if he displayed what real scientists have- some humility.
I wish it was known as ‘global warming’. Because of the 15 year ‘hiatus’ ‘climate change’ was born. If you attribute the unprecedented Brazilian snowfall to ‘global warming’ you get laughed at. But ‘Climate Change’? How wise you are.
It’s the marketing contribution to science, don’t ya know.
Unilever’s Marketing and Digital Chief to Leave (yahoo.com)
AB InBev announces new ad campaign as Bud Light sales continue to crater (yahoo.com)
The switch from global warming (which is quantifiable, sort of) to climate change (which is any weather event you choose) was a brilliant piece of salesmanship. And it’s easy to ramp it up to “climate crisis” and “climate emergency”. A lot of folk have bought it, and unfortunately a lot of them are politicians, journalists and others of limited cognitive ability.
What’s next – “climate armageddon”?
Actually, Climate Change was invented by the far-seekers at the UN precisely because of its nebulous nature. When AGW activists began to talk about actual temperature increases of 1, 2, or even 5 degree heating in a century instead of just blathering on about the planet “burning up”, most people who experience daily fluctuations of 20-40 degrees and annual variations of 100 degrees or more just got bored. But switching to Climate Change meant that every heatwave and blizzard, every flood and drought, could be blamed on that same little CO2 molecule, even though all it can do is store a tiny bit more energy in the atmosphere. But, it’s scary!
“…CO2 molecule, even though all it can do is store a tiny bit more energy in the atmosphere (for an insignificant time). But, it’s scary!”
Texas has been known for miserable summers some much worse than others for- like , well for ever. You could nt get rhetoric much LESS scientific than this guy is spewing.But our cup runneth over with corrupt money and subsidies so of course we get jerks like this.
I’ve seen Dessler on Joe Rogan’s show and watched him debate Koonin. I would take issue with your description of him as smart. He’s not. Scientists from the green mob won’t debate real scientists like Koonin because they routinely get clobbered, as happened to Dessler. Taking Koonin on was not smart.
From the article: “So climate change doesn’t cause a hot day, but it can transform a run-of-the-mill hot day into a record-breaking scorcher.”
How does human-caused climate change transform the high-pressure system causing the extreme warming?
High-pressure systems have caused extreme warming before CO2 was an issue. And there is no evidence that high-pressure systems of today are any more extreme than they were in the past, so where is the CO2 connection?
The answer is he can’t show a CO2 connection, he is just blowing smoke.
My question to these folks is to explain the very very extreme weather of the 1930’s in North America
Mike McHenry:
Two reasons:
An initial temperature reduction due to a 13 million ton decrease in SO2 aerosol pollution between 1929 and 1932, due to greatly reduced industrial activity because of the depression.. The cleaner the air, the hotter it gets.
The “Dust Bowl” of July 1935 was due to a stalled high pressure weather system, where temperatures rise because the atmospheric pollution within the stalled area settles out, also cleansing the air.
Nothing to do with CO2, just like now.
The dust bowl wasn’t caused by weather, it was caused by turning marginal agricultural land into cropland. By tilling and taking out the native grassland they took all the moisture out of the soil and left it exposed.
Sure the drought and other weather events came a long and blew all the soil away, but the land was just sitting there waiting, and it was going to happen sooner or later.
Isn’t that land still being farmed? What’s changed meteorologically or agriculturally?
They got smarter about how to farm it. The settlers used the methods that had been learned in the wet north temperate climate of northwest Europe – they plowed deeply to kill the “weeds”, harrowed the soil into fine particles, planted the seeds, then harrowed again to bury the seeds so they didn’t become bird food. Although rather energy and labor intensive, that worked well in England, and it still mostly worked east of the Mississippi.
But in Oklahoma during the dry part of the natural cycles, they were destroying the plants that held the soil, then reducing it to dust particles. Of course it blew away when the wind rose – and Oklahoma is quite windy.
After the dust bowl, agricultural colleges in the Great Plains found different ways of preparing the soil and passed this on to the farmers. First, there were plowing techniques that left the soil in lumps big enough to resist most wind storms. Except where irrigation water is plentiful, they shifted to crops that need less water.
Now, mostly they don’t plow at all. They use herbicides to kill the existing vegetation, but leave a network of dead roots to hold the soil. They drill through the top crust to plant seeds instead of breaking it up everywhere. They apply fertilizer. And they have equipped most of the good land with irrigation technology that didn’t exist in the 1930’s; water supplies are often limited, but a little irrigation makes a big difference when it’s been too long between rains.
There have also been millions of trees planted all over the central U.S. as a means of preventing Dust Bowls in the future.
Kuzinski:
“The Dust Bowl wasn’t caused by weather”
It certainly WAS. If the weather hadn’t dried out the soil, and if the stalled high-pressure weather system had not occurred, not a grain of soil would have blown away.
He’s like Mark Jacobson, all insults, no substance. Why would anyone pay attention to him?
When you have extreme Dunning-Kruger, like Dessler, you just naturally assume the person you are talking to is an idiot….helps you retain your mental self-image…
He seems like an angry man.
Story Tip —
More EV fires. This time trucks.
Nikola Electric Semi Truck Fire
the guy is a defensive curmudgeon so deeply embedded in climate identity he can’t see past his own BS. it’s f*^ked.
I can’t say what I think of this guy on an upstanding site like this.
There are so many words on this comments thread when we all know that there is only the need for one or at most 2 words to summarise Dessler, his beliefs and his (unjustified and misplaced) arrogance …. I suppose when you have nothing to back up your stories and claims then you just have to “brass it out”
He’s saying out loud what some people grumble quietly to nobody.
“You can think of climate change as ” Anyone who completes Dessler’s sentence by thinking from the opposite category will be angry when Dessler completes it his own way. It’s human.
I can only assume he’s not talking to me.
>>We’ve been telling you for decades that this was going to happen
CMIP 6 models showed one thing very clearly:
Their better cloud parametrization matters!
So I cant help but wonder what the basis for that tale decades ago was. I cant be the models from back then as we now know for sure they were insufficient.
Any modeled data from back then must nowadays be presented with updated uncertainty to reflect that, anything less is just unscientific!
And of course we still dont know if the CMIP6 models are any good, just that all older models were lacking!
It´s actually not that difficult, A. Dessler!
It is quite clear now that you said stuff decades ago without proper scientific certainty!
Like a charlatan would do!
And you should be ashamed of that, clarify the record and ask for forgiveness for it, before we can ever trust that any current statements of yours have any merit!
We know without doubt the ones back then did not!
It is hard to explain to a non-scientist how ethically wrong it is for a scientist to make incorrect statements!
Here is one example how Dessler´s incorrect old statements should be handled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal
I think that covid rather than enabling the Great Reset, has exposed the climate change movements strategy:
Convince people first that there is a crises, then tell them they have do exactly as they are told to solve the crisis.
There can’t be a debate on how serious the threat is because its a terrible crises, and we are all going to die.
We can’t debate the best way to overcome the crisis because its a terrible crises and we are all going to die.
We can’t debate whether the cure is worse than the disease because its a terrible crisis and we are all going to die.
We cant worry about the costs because its a terrible crises and we are all going to die.
And most important we can’t make up our own minds and make our own decisions on how to respond because we are killing people by not doing exactly as we are told.
The parallels are hard to miss.
Dessler has a variation on what’s affecting Greta – see it in his face-muscles and skin
It looks like he’s been doing (a lot of) Botox – the muscles in the face aren’t working properly and is a variation on what used to be called Mongolism
Notably around the cheekbones and eyes and esp for someone like Dessler – because of his age and (blindingly obvious) immense sugar consumption, which should have rapidly aged his skin and it patently hasn’t.
See it in autistic children everywhere. Hence Greta.
Sometimes diagnosed as Borderline Asperger’s but because every person and every case is different, we now have the term : “On The Spectrum” to cover all the disorders, the variations and eventualities.
Having encountered and become friends with many such people over the last 20 years, aged 7 through 50 years old, I recognise the signs and they explain Dessler perfectly
There is also the real possibility that, because of his sugar consumption, he has had and without even knowing, a small Transient Ischaemic Attack (stroke)
Strokes don’t hurt but they kill part of your mind. You lose your mental agility, thinking speed and memory
With TIAs though, after a few days of feeling weak or numb or tingly in some part your body, you seemingly just get better and never ever know or could guess that anything happened
Or is he, again due to his diet, deficient in B Vitamins = especially Niacin = Pellagra and what you get from eating a lot of maize (corn)
i.e. Delusional with mental confusion = exactly what he’s projecting onto others.
His skin-tone says no pellagra, esp for his age.
Just sugar would do most of what we see in him.
It makes people lazy, can’t be bothered and short-tempered/angry because The Only Thing on their minds, constantly, is when will they next be getting ‘something to eat‘
i.e. more sugar because the last lot just wore off and they’ve got a headache/hangover.
So they cut corners, they pass the buck, they join tribes & consensus, they do shoddy work and if/when the craving gets too much, simply cut & run.
Nothing matters more than getting some sugar-drug inside them and getting it now.
Hence the craic about ‘climb back under a rock‘ and ‘I’m too busy‘
Yes he is busy – feeding a serious and desperate sugar-addiction and nothing else matters.
And the Truly Great Thing about all addicts, is their immense capacity for telling lies – the drug does all the talking and it: Simply Doesn’t Care.
except for itself – as we see relentlessly in climate activists everywhere = Massive Hypocrisy
But ‘handling’ such people is damn near impossible – they really do exist on a different plane.
Fine. OK. Everyone’s different. Make room. Accommodate. Let them be.
BUT NOT, as I’ve said before, do not find accommodation for them in the corridors of power, in schools & universities and (as we see consequences now in France, also UK recently) not in the police.
Heaven forbid that one gets into the Oval Office…..
One briefly got into #10 Downing St but it was sussed fairly quickly (actually it self destructed as they always do) yet still, look at the efffing damage it did while in there.
Just. Look.
Here is a very simple request for Dessler & his ilk:
Please show actual evidence that man’s CO2 is causing serious global warming.
Please note:
1-Evidence of warming, unusual weather, storms, floods IS NOT evidence that man’s CO2 is the cause.
2-Correlation is not causation
3-An expert’s assertion, or government’s assertion is not evidence. It is hearsay.
4-Consensus of experts, Polls or Majority belief is not evidence
5-Climate models are not evidence.
6–Warmest weather in 100 years means it was warmer 100 years ago when CO2 was lower.
7-If an event is NOT unprecedented, then you have to explain why whatever caused the earlier events is NOT the cause of the latest occurrence of that event.
Evidence is actual data PRO AND CON with reasoned analysis and logical conclusions while FULLY CONSIDERING OPPOSING evidence.
PS: “arrogant, condescending, petty. Dessler is certain that he knows what is to be known about all things climate and energy”
Does that make him a prat?
Whenever I see a picture of Dessler, I think of that nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty.
Particularly the line “Had a great fall”
He certainly makes himself a bit of a
jyoke!