I’m a denier for several reasons. There is no substantive evidence that the planet has warmed significantly or that any significant warming will occur in the future. If any warming does occur, it likely will be concentrated at higher latitudes and therefore be beneficial. Climate research has largely degenerated into pathological science, and the coverage of global warming in the media is tendentious to the point of being fraudulent. Anyone who is an honest and competent scientist must be a denier.

Have you ever considered how difficult it is to take the temperature of the planet Earth? What temperature will you measure? The air? The surface of the Earth absorbs more than twice as much incident heat from the Sun than the air. But if you measure the temperature of the surface, what surface are you going to measure? The solid Earth or the oceans? There is twice as much water as land on Earth. If you decide to measure water temperature, at what depth will you take the measurements? How will the time scale on which the deep ocean mixes with the shallow affect your measurements? And how, pray tell, will you determine what the average water temperature was for the South Pacific Ocean a hundred years ago? How will you combine air, land, and sea temperature measurements? Even if you use only meteorological measurements of air temperature, how will you compensate for changes in latitude, elevation, and land use?

Determining a mean planetary temperature is not straightforward, but an extremely complicated problem. Even the best data are suspect. Anthony Watts and his colleagues have surveyed 82.5 percent of stations in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network. They have found - shockingly - that over 70 percent of these stations are likely to be contaminated by errors greater than 2 deg C [3.6 deg F]. Of the remaining stations, 21.5 percent have inherent errors greater than 1 deg C. The alleged degree of global warming over the past 150 years is less than 1 deg C. Yet even in a technologically advanced country like the US, the inherent error in over 90 percent of the surveyed meteorological stations is greater than the putative signal. And these errors are not random, but systematically reflect a warming bias related to urbanization. Watts has documented countless instances of air temperature sensors located next to air conditioning vents or in the middle of asphalt parking lots. A typical scenario is that a temperature sensor that was in the middle of a pasture a hundred years ago is now surrounded by a concrete jungle. Urbanization has been a unidirectional process. It is entirely plausible - even likely - that all of the temperature rise that has been inferred from the data is an artifact that reflects the growth of urban heat islands.

The “denier” is portrayed as a person who refuses to accept the plain evidence of his senses. But in fact it is the alarmist who doesn’t know what they are talking about. The temperature of the Earth and how it has varied over the past 150 years is poorly constrained. The person who thinks otherwise does so largely because they have no comprehension of the science. Most of these people have never done science or thought about the inherent difficulties and uncertainties involved.

And what is “global warming” anyway? As long ago as the fifth century BC, Socrates pointed out that intelligible definitions are a necessary precursor to meaningful discussions. The definition of the term “global warming” shifts with the context of the discussion. If you deny global warming, then you have denied the existence of the greenhouse effect, a reproducible phenomenon that can be studied analytically in the laboratory. But if you oppose political action, then global warming metamorphoses into a nightmarish and speculative planetary catastrophe. Coastal cities sink beneath a rising sea, species suffer from wholesale extinctions, and green pastures are turned into deserts of choking hot sand.

In fact, so-called “deniers” are not “deniers” but skeptics. Skeptics do not deny the existence of the greenhouse effect. Holding all other factors constant, the mean planetary air temperature ought to rise as the atmosphere accumulates more anthropogenic CO2. Christopher Monckton recently reviewed the pertinent science and concluded that a doubling of CO2 should result in a temperature increase of about 1 deg C. If this temperature increase mirrors those in the geologic past, most of it will occur at high latitudes. These areas will become more habitable for man, plants, and other animals. Biodiversity will increase. Growing seasons will lengthen. Why is this a bad thing?

Any temperature increase over 1 deg C for a doubling of CO2 must come from a positive feedback from water vapor. Water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere, and warm air holds more water than cold air. The theory is that an increased concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere will lead to a positive feedback that amplifies the warming from CO2 by as much as a factor of three to five. But this is nothing more that speculation. Water vapor also leads to cloud formation. Clouds have a cooling effect. At the current time, no one knows if the feedback from water vapor will be positive or negative.

Global warming predictions cannot be tested with mathematical models. It is impossible to validate computer models of complex natural systems. The only way to corroborate such models is to compare model predictions with what will happen in a hundred years. And one such result by itself won’t be significant because of the possible compounding effects of other variables in the climate system. The experiment will have to repeated over several one-hundred year cycles. In other words, the theory of catastrophic global warming cannot be tested or empirically corroborated in a human time frame.

It is hardly conclusive to argue that models are correct because they have reproduced past temperatures. I’m sure they have. General circulation models have so many degrees of freedom that it is possible to endlessly tweak them until the desired result is obtained. Hindsight is always 20-20. This tells us exactly nothing about a model’s ability to accurately predict what will happen in the future.

The entire field of climate science and its coverage in the media is tendentious to the point of being outright fraudulent. Why is it that every media report on CO2 – an invisible gas – is invariably accompanied by a photograph of a smokestack emitting particulate matter? Even the cover of Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, shows a smokestack. Could it be that its difficult to get people worked up about an invisible, odorless gas that is an integral component of the photosynthetic cycle? A gas that is essential to most animal and plant life on Earth? A gas that is emitted by their own bodies through respiration? So you have to deliberately mislead people by showing pictures of smoke to them. Showing one thing when you’re talking about another is fraud. If the case for global warming alarmism is so settled, so conclusive, so irrefutable...why is it necessary to repeatedly resort to fraud?

A few years ago it was widely reported that the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause poison ivy to grow faster. But of course carbon dioxide causes almost all plants to grow faster. And nearly all of these plants have beneficial human uses. Carbon dioxide fertilizes hundreds or thousands of human food sources. More CO2 means trees grow faster. So carbon dioxide promotes reforestation and biodiversity. Its good for the environment. But none of this was reported. Instead, the media only reported that global warming makes poison ivy grow faster. And this is but one example of hundreds or thousands of such misleading reports. If sea ice in the Arctic diminishes, it is cited as irrefutable proof of global warming. But if sea ice in the Antarctic increases, it is ignored. Even cold weather events are commonly invoked as evidence for global warming. People living in the future will look back and wonder how we could have been so delusional.

For the past few years I have remained silent concerning the Climategate emails. But what they revealed is what many of us already knew was going on: global warming research has largely degenerated into what is known as pathological science, a “process of wishful data interpretation.” When I testified before the US Senate in 2006, I stated that a major climate researcher told me in 1995 that “we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” The existence and global nature of the Medieval Warm Period had been substantiated by literally hundreds of research articles published over decades. But it had to be erased from history for ideological reasons. A few years later the infamous “hockey stick” appeared. The “hockey stick” was a revisionist attempt to rewrite the temperature history of the last thousand years. It has been discredited as being deeply flawed.

In one Climategate email, a supposed climate scientist admitted to “hiding the decline.” In other words, hiding data that tended to disprove his ideological agenda. Another email described how alarmists would try to keep critical manuscripts from being published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. One of them wrote, we’ll “keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Gee. If the climate science that validates global warming is so unequivocal, why is it necessary to work behind the scenes to suppress dissent? You “doth protest too much.”

As described in my book, Science and Technology in World History: The Ancient World and Classical Civilization, systematic science began with the invocation of naturalism by Greek philosophers and Hippocratic physicians c. 600-400 BC. But the critical attitude adopted by the Greeks was as important as naturalism. Students were not only allowed to criticize their teachers, but were encouraged to do so. From its beginnings in Greek natural philosophy, science has been an idealistic and dispassionate search for truth. As Plato explained, anyone who could point out a mistake “shall carry off the palm, not as an enemy, but as a friend.” This is one reason that scientists enjoy so much respect. The public assumes that a scientist’s pursuit of truth is unencumbered by political agendas.

But science does not come easy to men. “Science,” George Sarton reminded us, “is a joykiller.” The proper conduct of science requires a high degree of intellectual discipline and rigor. Scientists are supposed to use multiple working hypotheses and sort through these by the processes of corroboration and falsification. The most valuable evidence is that which tends to falsify or disprove a theory. A scientist, by the very definition of his activity, must be skeptical. A scientist engaged in a dispassionate search for truth elevates the critical – he does not suppress it. Knowledge begins with skepticism and ends with conceit.

Finally, I’m happy to be known as a “denier” because the label of “denier” says nothing about me, but everything about the person making the charge. Scientific theories are never denied or believed, they are only corroborated or falsified. Scientific knowledge, by its very nature, is provisional and subject to revision. The provisional nature of scientific knowledge is a necessary consequence of the epistemological basis of science. Science is based on observation. We never have all the data. As our body of data grows, our theories and ideas must necessarily evolve. Anyone who thinks scientific knowledge is final and complete must necessarily endorse as a corollary the absurd proposition that the process of history has stopped.

A scientific theory cannot be “denied.” Only a belief can be denied. The person who uses the word “denier” thus reveals that they hold global warming as a belief, not a scientific theory. Beliefs are the basis of revealed religion. Revelations cannot be corroborated or studied in the laboratory, so religions are based on dogmatic beliefs conservatively held. Religions tend to be closed systems of belief that reject criticism. But the sciences are open systems of knowledge that welcome criticism. I’m a scientist, and therefore I must happily confess to being a denier.

David Deming [send him mail] is a geophysicist, associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma, and author of the books Science and Technology in World History, Vols. 1 & 2.

Brighton’s Green-controlled council is banking on another big freeze this winter.

Having been badly caught out by last winter’s ice and snow (see above), when its lack of road gritters provoked residents to a mood which, according to an official report, was “angry, vitriolic and even venomous”, Brighton council has spent 1 million pounds on a new fleet of 4x4 gritters to ensure that, in the renewed blizzards predicted for this winter, the city’s roads are kept clear. Bully for them, you might think - what a far-sighted council. Except that, in May this year, the people of Brighton voted in Britain’s first Green council, electing 23 councillors who swept to power convinced that Brighton and the world were faced with catastrophe through runaway global warming.

The day Liam Fox chose power over sense of outrage

People become motivated to take an interest in politics, the writer Paul Johnson shrewdly observed many years ago, either by a love of power or by a sense of outrage. As someone whose lifelong interest in politics has been motivated above all by the second of these things, I ran a campaign in this column nearly 20 years ago to expose the insane way in which people such as John Gummer were improperly using an EU directive to close down hundreds of small craft slaughterhouses, many of which supplied meat as good as any in the country. I did bang on about it for several years, seeing so many good people horribly mistreated in the name of something that turned out to be not even the law of the land, but simply the whim of officials, supported by inanely compliant ministers.

I found an ally in this crusade in a newly elected young MP who lived in a nearby village. Dr Liam Fox was causing the government much embarrassment by enlisting support for the cause among backbenchers. One day, when I had agreed to help him at a non-political constituency function, I naturally referred to our common cause and was startled to find him shiftily changing the subject.

Next day, a small news item gave the explanation. He had been made parliamentary private secretary to Michael Howard, Fox’s first step on the ladder of political preferment. We heard no more from him about slaughterhouses. The sense of outrage which had brought us together had been supplanted by the love of power. Eighteen years later, I am not sure what good it did him.

The sillier the Moonbat gets, the crosser he becomes

In a playful pay-off item last week, I unfavourably compared the over-large 100-kilowatt oil-fired heating boiler I am chucking out with a giant wind turbine nearby, which last year generated, on average, little more than 500 kilowatts.

This provoked the eco-zealot George Monbiot to a long explosion of rage in his Guardian blog, describing it as another “excruciating howler” in my long succession of “superhuman cock-ups” and yet again calling on The Sunday Telegraph to sack me, since much of my journalism “consists of reckless endangerment of the public”.

The problem with poor old Moonbat is that he is not very bright, and is so unable to think outside his own prejudices that he never stops to look carefully at the evidence before going into hyperventilation mode.

What he particularly took me to task for was the suggestion that our wretched local windmill generated on average last year at just over 500 kilowatts. Didn’t I know the difference, he asked, between “capacity and output”?

Well yes, old thing, actually I do. If he had known how to look such things up, he could have seen that the average output of our turbine (now grandly renamed the Chewton Mendip Wind Park) was only 26 per cent of its two-megawatt capacity. Which made it, as I said, just over 500 kilowatts. Poor Moonbat seems to know almost as little about wind turbines as Chris Huhne.

Physics professor Howard Hayden offers the editors of Physics Today a simple algebraic exercise to alleviate climate alarmism.

October 13, 2011

Editor
Physics Today
AIP, Suite 1NO1
2 Huntington Quadrangle
Melville, NY 11741-4502

Re: Two “climate change” articles in October 2011 issue

Gentle Folks:

In elementary algebra - oh, so long ago - we learned how to make graphs with the independent variable on the horizontal axis and the dependent variable on the vertical axis. Later on, in science classes we learned the usefulness of the technique: the independent variable is the cause and the dependent variable is the effect. In the fields of health physics and pharmacy, the graphs are called dose-response curves, but everybody who has done experimental science has made similar plots.

The discussions about whether - and how much - increases of CO2 concentration cause increases in temperature come down to such a cause-effect relationship. A reasonable approach would be to plot temperature rise (effect) on the vertical axis versus CO2 forcing on the horizontal axis. The reason I say “would be” is that climate alarmists have never done it. A pharmaceutical company that approached the FDA for a license to manufacture and distribute a drug for which they failed to produce dose-response curves would be laughed out of the hearing room.

The Somerville/Hassol article talks of “communicating the science of climate change.” There is, of course, no theory of climate, because the all-important Navier-Stokes equations can’t even be solved for turbulence in a 4-inch pipe. The causal relationship of temperature rise to CO2 concentration increase, could, however, be displayed in a simple graph using readily available data. Now that would be a way to communicate.

The Sherwood article is merely reasoning by analogy - giving some cases where good science was opposed by establishment opinion. Curiously, in the present case, he opines in favor of establishment opinion, dismissing opposition as “bogus counterarguments,” the same as was done to Copernicus and Galileo. In any case, reasoning by analogy is inherently illogical. Listing a million analogies would neither strengthen nor weaken the link between CO2 and temperature.

We need not sit helplessly by, waiting to climate modelers to connect effect with cause. I call upon readers to make the requisite graph, using the forcing function 2 5.35 Wm *ln(C/C0) from Table 6.2 of IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (http://ipcc.ch/), temperature data and CO2 data from NASA/GISS here and here respectively. The results may cause you to issue a sigh of relief.

Best Regards,

Howard C. Hayden
Prof. Emeritus of Physics, UConn

The United State Global Change Research Program Strategic Plan 2012-2021 has invited public comments on their Plan here.

The Plan starts with an assumption that they already know the direction of climate change in the coming decades. It does not read as a balanced scinece plan. I encourage readers of my weblog to submit comments.

The text in the Executive Summary starts with the text [highlights added]

Earth’s environment is changing rapidly. Increases in world population and industrialization are altering the atmosphere, ocean, land use, ecosystems and the distribution of species over the planet. Scientific research, including monitoring and modeling of the multifaceted Earth system, provides information for governments, businesses, and communities to understand these changes and to respond to potential risks brought about by global change, such as more severe heat waves, storms, floods, fires, crop failures, and water shortages.

An example of their text includes

The goals acknowledge that global change research is not a purely academic endeavor. To be useful, scientists must understand the needs of decision makers at all levels in the public and private sectors and clearly and effectively make research results relevant to those decision makers. For example, farmers depend upon information to adjust and manage crops as planting seasons, growing zones, and pest and weed ranges change. Health care providers must prepare for more severe heat waves and outbreaks of diseases previously unknown in their regions. Insurers must account for shifting weather extremes in assessing future financial risk.  Inhabitants of coastal cities need to understand the implications of sea level rise, while many regions of the country address changes in the availability of freshwater and increasing energy demands.

The goals recognize that global change is an international concern affecting many aspects of societies, livelihoods, and the environment. Across the Nation and around the world, people are making decisions to effectively minimize (mitigate) and prepare for (adapt to) global change. The global nature of today’s economy, and the speed with which challenges faced in one part of the world can affect others, reinforces the need for a global response based upon the best available science. Vital resources, such as water and food supplies, cross regional and national boundaries, and the effects of global change can disrupt social, economic, and political systems.  Understanding global change and our options to minimize and manage the risks of such change is important for U.S. national security and for maintaining regional and global stability, and for long-term economic vitality.

They are ignoring research that shows we cannot yet skillfully predict how regional climate will change, as well as to consider a new bottom-up approach to societal and environmental vulnerability, rather than continue to focus on the top-down global climate model predictions. This new perspective is summarized in our article

Pielke Sr., R.A., R. Wilby, D. Niyogi, F. Hossain, K. Dairuku, J. Adegoke, G. Kallos, T. Seastedt, and K. Suding, 2011: Dealing with complexity and extreme events using a bottom-up, resource-based vulnerability perspective. AGU Monograph on Complexity and Extreme Events in Geosciences, in press.

Judy Curry has an excellent summary of where we are in the USA with respect to federal support for climate research.

She writes (see)

“...Decision making associated with the issues of climate and global change can be characterized as decision making under deep uncertainty.  The deep uncertainty is associated with our reliance on projections from climate models, which are loaded with uncertainties and do not adequately treat natural climate variability.  Further substantial areas of ignorance remain in our basic understanding of some of the relevant phyiscal, chemical and dynamical processes.

If we as scientists are not humble about the uncertainties and areas of ignorance, we have an enormous capacity to mislead decision makers and point them in the direction of poor policies.  Uncertainty is essential information for decision makers.

Climate scientists have this very naive understanding of the policy process, which is aptly described by the A+B=C model in the context of the precautionary principle.  This naive understanding is reflected in the palpable frustration of many climate scientists at the failure of the “truth” as they “know” it to influence global and national energy and climate policy.  This frustration has degenerated into using to word “denier” to refer to anyone who disagrees with them on either the science or the policy solution.

The path that we seem to be on, whereby the science is settled and all we need is better communication and translation of the science to policy makers, not only has the potential to seriously mislead decision makers, but also to destroy atmospheric and climate science in the process.

Very well said Judy!

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Action item: Demand natural variability included in next round of fed climate research
Posted on October 7, 2011 by Steve Milloy

Now is the time to demand that natural variability be the focus of the U.S. Government’s climate change research program.

Click for the UNITED STATES GLOBAL CHANGE RESEARCH PROGRAM STRATEGIC PLAN 2012–2021.

Click for directions on submitting comments.

Comments are due by November 29, 2011.

One Response to Action item: Demand natural variability included in next round of fed climate research
Jim Barker October 8, 2011 at 8:27 am
My comment was submitted.

I believe it is time to consider natural variability as the main cause of climate change. it is also time to invest much more effort in actual measurements of this complex, chaotic and misunderstood system.

EXPERTS continue to hunt for the psycho-social underpinnings of that alleged mental disorder, climate-change denialism. Unwilling to accept that climate-change scepticism is simply an idea, informed by analysis and ideology, green know-it-alls are always sniffing around for a pseudo-scientific explanation for this apparently unhinged outlook.

So this week Scientific American informs us of a new academic study titled Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States. Having pored over polling data on climate-change denial collected in the US between 2001 and 2010, the study’s authors deduce that 29.6 per cent of conservative white men believe global warming will never have much of an effect, compared with only 7.4 per cent of the general adult population.

When it comes to what the researchers call “confident conservative white males” - those who claim to have a high understanding of global warming - the findings are even more striking: 48.4 per cent of these cocky cons think global warming is a lot of hot air.

What explains this alleged sniffiness about climate-change orthodoxy among the white and well-off in the US? According to the report, it’s down to a mix of evolution and the cult of identity.

Apparently, there’s something called “the white male effect”, where, because white men have faced fewer obstacles in life than other groups, they are “more accepting of risk than the rest of the public”. In short, having lived cushy lives, they now laugh in the face of the End of Days.

There are so many problems with this report it’s hard to know where to begin. First, the report patronisingly treats what it calls climate-change denial - itself a loaded term - as a kind of default behaviour, a group instinct.

In line with authoritarian regimes throughout history, many of which had a tendency to write off alternative views as the products of unstable minds, greens refuse to treat scepticism as a legitimate way of thinking.

Even worse is the report’s suggestion that white male conservatives are likelier to be sceptical about climate change because they don’t like “challenges to the status quo”.

Wait: green thinking represents a challenge to the status quo? That’s a laughable idea. From schools and universities to every corner of the Western political sphere, the climate-change outlook is the status quo. It’s the new conservatism, its aim being to conserve nature at the expense of further developing and transforming society.

Greens like to fantasise that they are radicals whose ideas are continually shot down by what Scientific American calls the white male establishment. Yet at a time when everyone from Barack Obama to stuffy stick-in-the-muds such as Prince Charles sing from the climate-change hymn sheet, in what sense can it be described as a radical creed? These apparently dangerous white male deniers are straw men set up by greens who can’t quite handle the fact it is they and their friends who are now the promoters and protectors of the political status quo. Perhaps this means green-baiting white male conservatives actually represent a new and weird band of rebels?