Suzanne Goldenberg displayed the establishment media’s inexcusable ignorance and/or willful distortion of the global warming debate in a Thursday ‘news’ article in the prominent U.K. newspaper The Guardian.

Writing about an effort by the Obama administration to politicize the global warming debate and direct public ridicule at Republicans who are skeptical of alarmist global warming claims, Goldenberg describes that effort as one that will “shame members of Congress who deny the science behind climate change.”

Expressing skepticism about alarmist global warming claims and alarmist predictions by one segment of the scientific population whose prior alarmist claims and alarmist predictions have routinely proven to be false is not “denying the science behind climate change.” Subjecting theories, predictions, and scientific claims to critical scrutiny is the lifeblood of science. Attempting to vilify, stifle, and shut down critical scientific analysis of scientific theories, predictions, and claims is the very definition of anti-science.

Goldenberg’s distortion and bias merely grow worse as the article continues. Describing an Obama administration video that attacks Republicans on the topic of global warming, Goldenberg writes that the video features Republicans “who are notorious for denying the existence of climate change, or positing bizarre notions about its causes.”

A key point made by global warming ‘skeptics’ is the Earth’s climate is constantly changing. The nature and extent of current climate change must be viewed within the context of the nature and extent of climate change that has occurred for billions of years. To the extent any faction in the global warming debate “denies the existence of climate change,” it is the alarmists who contend that any climate change that may be occurring now must be unprecedented and alarming. It is these alarmists not skeptics who deny climate change. Both factions agree the Earth’s climate is currently changing, but alarmists deny the longstanding and ongoing existence of past, present, and future climate change.

Regarding Goldenberg’s comment about Republicans “positing bizarre notions about its causes,” she does not identify any examples. How convenient for Goldenberg that she does not feel an obligation to factually justify derogatory opinions that she inserts in her ‘news’ columns.

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Every one of the claims the president (and clueless members of the administration and congress like Markey, Waxman, Boxer) made in the SOTU address were wrong. See John Christy’s testimony to the senate. See this fact checking analysis PDF.

Physicist Clive Best has analyzed the latest NASA satellite and radiosonde data to find that global water vapor has declined despite the consensus belief among climate scientists that it would rise in response to man-made carbon dioxide. Dire predictions of global warming all rely on positive feedback from water vapor. The argument goes that as surface temperatures rise so more water will evaporate from the oceans thereby amplifying temperatures because H2O itself is a strong greenhouse gas. The fact that water vapor has instead declined indicates water vapor feedback is negative, overwhelming alleged warming from CO2, and accounting for the stall in global temperatures over the past 16+ years. As Dr. Best notes, “All climate models (that I am aware of) predict exactly the opposite. Something is clearly amiss with theory. Is it not now time for “consensus” scientists to have a rethink?”

Prior posts on negative feedback from water vapor

H2O decreasing while CO2 rises !

Reblogged from Clive Best by Clive Best [emphasis added]:

Dire predictions of global warming all rely on positive feedback from water vapor. The argument goes that as surface temperatures rise so more water will evaporate from the oceans thereby amplifying temperatures because H2O itself is a strong greenhouse gas. Climate models all assume net amplification factors of between 1.5 and 6. Has the water content of the atmosphere actually been increasing as predicted?

NASA have just released their latest NVAP-M survey of global water content derived from satellite data and radio-sondes over the period from 1988 to 2009. This new data is explicitly intended for climate studies . So lets take a look at the comparison between actual NVAP-M atmospheric H2O levels and those of CO2 as measured at Mauna Loa. I have extracted all the daily measurement NVAP-M data and then calculated the global average. Figure 1 shows the running 30 day average of all the daily data recorde between 1988 and 2009 inclusive. The 365 day (yearly) running average is also shown. Plotted on the right hand scale are the Mauna Loa CO2 concentration data in red over the same period.

Fig1: Total precipitative H2O (running 30 day average) compared to Mauna Loa CO2 data in red. The central black curve is a running 365 day average.

There is indeed some correlation in the data from 1988 until 1998, but thereafter the two trends diverge dramatically. Total atmospheric water content actually falls despite a relentless slow rise in CO2. This fall in atmospheric H2O also coincides with the observed stalling of global temperatures for the last 16 years. All climate models (that I am aware of} predict exactly the opposite. Something is clearly amiss with theory. Is it not now time for “consensus” scientists to have a rethink?

The ongoing battle over Global Warming with Western Washington University geology professors has been fascinating for what it reveals about second tier supporters of the apocalypse who have backgrounds in science but not in climate science. These are not the knowledgeable first string players on the ‘Hockey Team,’ working together to manipulate climate data and keep opponents from challenging them in the scientific journals, as Climategate revealed. There are no Michael Manns, no Phil Jones, no Gavin Schmidts, and no James Hansens here. These are the Inspector Clouseaus of the climate clique, the suave but hopeless practitioners of bumbling politicized science.

What distinguishes them from the Great Global Warming Guru James Hansen? The most obvious thing about Hansen is that he can discuss a wide range of topics related to Global Warming and display considerable scientific insight. He does not resort to popular political tactics based on consensus, authority, or belief.

For instance, he and I agree about the lack of global warming for more than a decade, about Milankovitch cycles, nuclear power, and radiation safety. He even uses a temperature reconstruction of this Holocene interglacial period similar to what I prefer. It shows the gradual average temperature decline over the last few thousand years as we sink toward the next ice age. We also agree that ethanol based motor fuel is a carbon reduction scam that needs to be abandoned. I chuckled with him about the difficulties he must face coming from Iowa where government-subsidized corn ethanol is very popular among those making money from it.

Had we gotten into a detailed discussion of carbon dioxide, we would have disagreed substantially. But that would have involved questions of ‘climate sensitivity’ where he is completely aware of the need to invoke an amplification from water vapor, because CO2 alone lacks sufficient horsepower. Perhaps it was the wine or the fact that we are both astrophysicists that kept things constructive. Clearly, neither of us wanted to fall into the black hole of scientific nonsense, even though our disagreements about a climate catastrophe are profound.

The Professor Clouseaus from WWU are a world apart. Gone is the congenial atmosphere and discussion among colleagues where the objective is to find common ground before addressing difficult questions. These professors are going for a knockout blow against ‘deniers’ whom they equate with cranks. Emeritus Professor of Geology Don Easterbrook was their lone crank, until I came along. Then there were two! When I pointed out that many well-known physicists have views similar to mine, they supposed that physicists do not understand the complexities of climate, as they do. “FINE,” I said, “Show me!” “Let’s have a seminar at WWU.” That precipitated panic and retreat with a helpful twist. One professor admitted to an insufficient knowledge of climate science to argue with me.

But just as one blunder after another never discouraged Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther, Professor Clouseau (played in this case by Dave Hirsch) was sure that ‘consensus’ is the way we properly do things in science. Oh, really?

The geological establishment has been famous for clinging to the majority opinion even when it is no longer scientifically viable and consequently being wrong time after time. One prominent example involves J. Harlen Bretz, once a high school biology teacher from Seattle, who proposed that the unusual geology of Eastern Washington was caused by catastrophic floods from an ice age lake in Montana and not by gradual erosion over millions of years. He spectacularly prevailed over the ‘consensus’ with convincing logic and evidence. Similarly, the concept of ‘continental drift’ overcame stiff establishment resistance to become the present paradigm.

In 1905 a little Jewish man who was but a clerk in a patent office challenged the perception that Classical Physics was ‘settled.’ He recognized that the two hundred year old theory of Newtonian Mechanics had to be significantly modified to keep Maxwell’s equations unchanged in a moving frame. Although popular opinion quickly embraced Albert Einstein, he was content to wait decades for the necessary physical evidence to back up his new concepts of space, time, and gravity. To no surprise, Einstein understood how science works.

The Professor Clouseaus at WWU fall flat with their attempts to short circuit the scientific method using ‘consensus.’ If they want to legitimately participate in climate discussions, they should learn something about this topic and discuss it with their peers, including physicists. Although many scientists seek assistance in understanding complex topics by consulting the most informed among us (like Don Easterbrook), the bottom line still comes down to the best ‘logic and evidence.’ All else is a sideshow.

Gordon J. Fulks has no conflicts of interest on Global Warming, lives near Portland, Oregon, and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago, Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.

An interesting contrast in the manner of debating climate issues arose as a result of my testimony before a Washington State Senate hearing March 16, 2013.  The hearing concerned a senate bill based on five very badly flawed assertions, and I was invited to present scientific evidence related to the basis of the bill. I began my testimony with the famous quote “In God we trust, all others bring data” and then presented graphical data that can be viewed here.

The five assertions that formed the basis for the bill were:

1. Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities is the principal cause of global warming.

2. Sea level is rising at an increasing rate because of global warming.

3. The frequency of severe storms is increasing because of global warming.

4. Mountain winter snow packs and streamflows are diminishing because of global warming.

5. Ocean acidification is occurring because of global warming.

The graphic data and physical evidence for rejecting these assertions may be found in the video above.

Almost immediately upon completion of my testimony, the chairman of the geology dept. at Western Washington University, Bernie Housen, who has never published a single paper on climate and who knows nothing about any of the climate topics I discussed, issued a statement to the AP wire service that I was neither an expert in my field nor active in my field.  The following Sunday, March 31, 12 members of the geology department at WWU, none of whom have ever published a single paper on climate and who have no climate expertise, published a vicious personal character assassination against me in the Bellingham Herald.

They claimed that (1) my work is “filled with misrepresentations, misuse of data,” (2) every graph I showed was flawed, (3) none of my 180 publications had been peer reviewed, (4) my evidence was “not supported by any published science,” (5) my views “require the existence of a broad, decades-long conspiracy amongst literally thousands of scientists to falsify data, and (6) they “decry the injection of such poor quality science into the public discourse.”

Needless to say, they didn’t address any of the issues that I discussed in the Senate hearing.  You can read their op-ed online at the Bellingham Herald website

Here is my response, published in the Bellingham Herald:

“WWU faculty find overwhelming scientific evidence to support global warming.” Of course there is overwhelming evidence of global warming! Everyone agrees!

But that doesn’t prove it was caused by carbon dioxide! The authors fail to understand:

(1) Of the two periods of global warming this century, the first, and warmest, occurred before rise in carbon dioxide; (2) Twenty periods of global warming occurred over the past five centuries; (3) The past 10,000 years were warmer than present; and (4) Multiple periods of intense warming (20 times more intense than recent warming) occurred 10,000-to-15,000 years ago. All of these happened long before rise in carbon dioxide, so could not possibly have been caused by carbon dioxide.

The Bellingham Herald opinion column is a diatribe against me personally (just read the slurs and innuendos) containing misrepresentations, no real data to support their contentions, and displays an abysmal ignorance of published literature. The reason becomes apparent when you realize that not a single one of the 13 Western Washington University authors has ever published a single paper on global climate change and none have any expertise whatsoever in climate issues.

Their claim that my publications “have not passed through rigorous peer review” is false. Virtually all of my 180 publications were peer-reviewed. The real joke here is they “fully support the 2007 IPCC report,” but Donna Laframboise in 2011 documented that 30 percent of the references used were not peer-reviewed, so using their own standard, they would be forced to reject the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report!

The authors claim that “CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas” that has “significant and measureable impact on surface temperature.” Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but it has little impact on temperature because it makes up only 0.038 percent of the atmosphere, has changed only 0.008 percent since carbon dioxide rose after 1945 (if you double nothing, you still have nothing), and accounts for only 3.6 percent of greenhouse warming. Carbon dioxide is incapable of changing global temperature by more than a fraction of a degree.

The authors “decry the injection of such poor quality science into the public discourse.” I work with 20 of the world’s top scientists, including atmospheric physicists, astrophysicists, geologists, and marine geophysicists who wouldn’t waste time working with me if my research was “of poor quality.”

The authors claim that my work requires “broad, decades-long conspiracy...to falsify climate data.”

In 1999, NASA data showed the 1930s were the hottest decade of the century and 1936 the hottest year. In 2012, NASA subtracted temperatures from the 1930s data and added to recent temperatures to claim that recent years were “unprecedented and the warmest ever recorded.” Check NASA data tampering here. This lies behind all of the false claims that recent global warming is “unprecedented.”

The authors claim a “vast consensus of the science community.” However, 31,487 U.S. scientists (including 9,000 with doctorates) with degrees in atmospheric, Earth sciences, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science have signed a statement that reads: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” Check names and expertise here. Signatures of 1.5 million scientists would be required to achieve the claimed “vast consensus” of scientists!

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chairman admitted that 80 percent of the people involved in the panel were not even scientists!

The WWU faculty was challenged to debate the issues. The response from David Hirsh was: “I don’t want the media to present both sides of an issue.” “Well, the problem is it’s not ‘my’ science. I do not now, nor have I claimed to be an expert in climate science. The question was would I support a debate-type forum to be hosted at WWU? I would not.” He went on to say that he didn’t want to debate because he had not addressed any of the scientific issues, but supported the personal attack.

So what can we conclude about The Bellingham Herald opinion column? Perhaps more than anything it shows that amateurs with no expertise in climate issues are way out of their league and would be wiser to stick to their own areas of expertise, hard rock geology. In the end, nature will tell us who is right and that is happening right now as the climate continues to cool with no warming in 15 years.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Don Easterbrook, a professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University. For more information about him, go online to myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny.

A top official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rejected claims by environmental activists that the outbreak of tornadoes ravaging the American South is related to climate change brought on by global warming.

Greg Carbin, the warning coordination meteorologist at NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, said warming trends do create more of the fuel that tornadoes require, such as moisture, but that they also deprive tornadoes of another essential ingredient: wind shear.

“We know we have a warming going on,” Carbin told Fox News in an interview Thursday, but added: “There really is no scientific consensus or connection [between global warming and tornadic activity....Jumping from a large-scale event like global warming to relatively small-scale events like tornadoes is a huge leap across a variety of scales.”

Asked if climate change should be “acquitted” in a jury trial where it stood charged with responsibility for tornadoes, Carbin replied: “I would say that is the right verdict, yes.+ Because there is no direct connection as yet established between the two? “That’s correct,” Carbin replied.

Formerly the lead forecaster for NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center, Carbin is a member of numerous relevant professional societies, including the National Weather Association, the American Meteorological Society, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the International Association of Emergency Managers. He has also served on the peer review committee for the evaluation of scientific papers submitted to publications like National Weather Digest and Weather and Forecasting.

This evaluation by a top NOAA official contradicted pronouncements by some leading global warming activists, who were swift to link 2011’s carnage to man-made climate change.

“The earth is warming. Carbon emissions are increasing,” said Sarene Marshall, Managing Director for The Nature Conservancy’s Global Climate Change Advocacy Team. “And they both are connected to the increased intensity and severity of storms that we both are witnessing today, and are going to see more of in the coming decades.:”

Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, an activist and author who believes industrialized societies expend too much money and energy combating global warming, instead of focusing on more immediate, and easily rectifiable, problems, doubted the tornadoes have any link to warming trends.

“We’ve seen a declining level of the severe tornadoes over the last half century in the U.S.,” Lomborg told Fox News."So we need to be very careful not just to jump to the conclusion and say, “Oh, then it’s because of global warming.“‘

In fact, NOAA statistics show that the last 60 years have seen a dramatic increase in the reporting of weak tornadoes, but no change in the number of severe to violent ones.


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For many, the high casualties of 2011 recalled the so-called “Super Outbreak” of April 1974, which killed more than 300 people. “You have to go back to 1974 to even see a tornado outbreak that approaches what we saw yesterday,” W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), told Fox News.

Asked earlier, during a conference call with Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley about the possibility that climate change is playing a role in the tornado outbreak, Fugate shot back: “Actually, what we’re seeing is springtime. Unfortunately, many people think of the Oklahoma tornado alley and forget that the Southeast U.S. actually has a history of longer and more powerful tornadoes that stay on the ground longer—and we are seeing that, obviously, in 2011”

The activity this week with 21 tornadoes was caused like in 2011 by very strong contrast with unseasonable cold and snow north and warmth south. This season is unlikely to be as severe as 2011 when we were coming off the second strongest La Nina with a powerful La Nina jet stream. It will be more active than 2012, a very warm spring with little contrast and very few tornadoes.

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