By Dr. William Briggs, William M. Briggs Blog

Physicist Richard Muller has a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal that should be read by everyone (The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism).

Muller concedes - in public - what many skeptics have claimed for years: that our temperature record is poor, especially over the oceans, that it is limited, filled with errors and biases, and when used as a basis for judgment, leads to over-certainty.

The temperature-station quality is largely awful. The most important stations in the U.S. are included in the Department of Energy’s Historical Climatology Network. A careful survey of these stations by a team led by meteorologist Anthony Watts showed that 70% of these stations have such poor siting that, by the U.S. government’s own measure, they result in temperature uncertainties of between two and five degrees Celsius or more. We do not know how much worse are the stations in the developing world.

Using data from all these poor stations, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates an average global 0.64C temperature rise in the past 50 years, “most” of which the IPCC says is due to humans. Yet the margin of error for the stations is at least three times larger than the estimated warming.

Even more delightfully, Muller admits that it has not been growing stormier (sorry, Big Al):

The number of named hurricanes has been on the rise for years, but that’s in part a result of better detection technologies (satellites and buoys) that find storms in remote regions. The number of hurricanes hitting the U.S., even more intense Category 4 and 5 storms, has been gradually decreasing since 1850. The number of detected tornadoes has been increasing, possibly because radar technology has improved, but the number that touch down and cause damage has been decreasing. Meanwhile, the short-term variability in U.S. surface temperatures has been decreasing since 1800, suggesting a more stable climate.

Nevertheless, the Berkeley project he led - which brought together physicists and (finally!) statisticians - were able to perform a complete re-analysis of all the temperature data, this time taking the main statistical statistical criticisms into account. Let’s leave aside whether these analyses were complete, rigorous, or recommended. Assume that they were. The findings?

We discovered that about one-third of the world’s temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming. The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming. The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2C, much greater than the IPCC’s average of 0.64C.

His conclusion is that “Global warming is real.” He hopes that “Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.”

But this blog, and all of the scientists who are critics, have agreed with this conclusion since this beginning. There simply is no debate on this question. There are no tempers to cool.

There has been, and still is, a vigorous disputation on the size of the warming and our confidence on this magnitude of warming. And Muller forgets that there has been a much more contentious argumentation about why the temperature has increased (in some places and cooled in others).

Just one thing about the first point of contention. If you look, say, at the year 1945 and compare it to the year 2010, you find warming of a certain size. But if you begin at 1940, just five years earlier, you find much less warming. Temperature increases (or decreases) are always relative to something (this is a point of logic, not physics). The choice of the comparator is arbitrary and subjective. Because of this, it is possible, and it has oft occurred, that someone wanting to stress the size of the increase will choose a comparator that best makes his case. Muller doesn’t state in his editorial what his comparator is; or why he has chosen just one.

However, we can afford to be as generous as Muller when he invited skepticism and allow that his statistical results are far more certain than any prior analysis. This merely brings us to the big question. As to that, Muller admits:

How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.

From that he insists, “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.” Somebody has to remind Mr Muller that skeptics aren’t skeptical of that some warming (and some cooling) has occurred. We are skeptics about our ability to explain this warming (and cooling), and to predict skillfully future warming (and cooling).

The fallacy - and it is a fallacy Mr Muller commits - is to suppose that because many climatologists have offered one theory for the observed warming (and cooling), and that, at least for the moment, they cannot think of one better, that therefore their theory is true. Thus, I remain skeptical.

Journalist Donna Laframboise has published a new book, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert: An Expose of the IPCC, that blows the lid off of misconduct within the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Laframboise’s book is available at Amazon.com and is already receiving rave reviews.

According to Georgia Tech climate professor and moderate “warmist” Judith Curry, “The book is well written with ample documentation (numerous hyperlinks in the kindle version). The target audience is the broader public, and the ‘spoiled child’ metaphor provides a readable narrative for her arguments about the IPCC. Most (not all) of this material I’ve seen before, but Laframboise’s narrative makes a clear and compelling case regarding problems with the IPCC. Notably, she covers distinctly different ground from Montford’s book ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion.’ Her final chapter is entitled ‘Disband the IPCC.’ She makes a good case for this.”

Noting the strong reviews of the book posted at Amazon.com, Curry takes prominent global warming alarmist Peter Gleick to task for panning the book without apparently ever reading it.

“Reviews are pouring in at amazon.com: 38 out of 46 reviewers give it 5 stars,” wrote Curry. “Peter Gleick gives it 1 star, stating “This book is a stunning compilation of lies, misrepresentations, and falsehoods about the fundamental science of climate change.’ It is difficult to believe that Gleick has read the book from the statements in his reviews; the book is not about the science of climate change. Rather, it is about the IPCC as an institution: the use of graduate students, WWF and Greenpeace sympathizers as IPCC authors; the use of gray environmentalist literature in IPCC (especially WG2); lack of conflict of interest oversight; the review process and the process producing the executive summaries; etc.”

Laframboise documents how the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has infiltrated the IPCC, with nearly two-thirds of chapters in the IPCC’s most recent report being co-authored by an individual affiliated with WWF. In fully one-third of the chapters, an individual affiliated with WWF put together the final content of the chapter as Coordinating Lead Author.

Laframboise also sheds light on the extreme political agenda of IPCC Chair Raj Pachauri, IPCC’s scientifically unjustified reliance on Michael Mann’s hockey stick temperature graph, Climategate, and a host of other IPCC-related issues.

“Overall, this is a very good book on an exceedingly important topic,” writes Curry, giving the book a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars.

By Norman Rogers

Imagine that you are a climate scientist and the Earth is threatened with a climate disaster.  You need to warn the people of Earth and lobby Earth’s governments.  If you are tired of poring over boring computer printouts, you may be only too ready to accept this mission of transcendent importance.

On the other hand, maybe you have lost touch with reality.  Maybe you have become a true believer fighting a dubious battle.  Maybe you are Dr. James Hansen, high civil servant, recipient of cash awards from left-wing foundations, and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  Hansen was arrested in front of the White House, dressed up to look like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 1950s scientific martyr.  Hansen wants CEOs of energy companies to be prosecuted for “crimes against humanity.”

When scientists are fanatical believers in a cause, the authority and credibility that attach to science are turned into political capital to be spent in pursuit of that cause.

The late Stephen Schneider, Stanford climate scientist, explained how this works:

To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have.  Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.

Global warming catastrophism is convenient for climate science.  It is simplistic to claim that climate scientists are making up the global warming scare in order to promote research funding.  But global warming catastrophism clearly does promote research funding.  So there is a convenient congruence between catastrophism and the bureaucratic ambitions of research establishments.

Climate science deals with the energy balance of the Earth and the behavior of the atmosphere.  This is a very complicated system involving convection, evaporation, precipitation, clouds, ocean heat storage, reflection, and emission of radiation, and more.  Although scientific understanding of the system has advanced, especially with the advent of computers and satellites, the system is still quite mysterious in important respects.  It’s not at all clear that climate science will ever advance to a point where long-range predictions can be trusted, or, as they say, demonstrate skill.

Burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the atmosphere faster than natural processes can remove it.  As a result, CO2 has been slowly increasing.  Increasing the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere will probably exert a warming influence because CO2 has an inhibiting effect on the outgoing infrared (heat) radiation that cools the Earth.  Nearly everyone, skeptic or believer, agrees with these basic facts.  Another basic fact that the purveyors of global warming like to keep quiet about is that more CO2 in the atmosphere makes plants grow much better with less water.  That’s because plants in general struggle to extract the scant CO2 in the air.

What is controversial is how much warming can be expected and whether the warming will create practical problems.  The evidence supporting substantial warming (i.e., 3 degrees C) is output from bad computer models.  It’s said that dogs come to resemble their masters.  Computer models tend to reflect the aspirations of their creators.

The global warming promoters try to hang all kinds of supplementary disasters on their proposed 3-degree warming over a century.  This is even more dubious than the warming itself.  Some of their claims are absurd, such as the suggestion that the oceans are going to rise substantially, a claim for which there is zero credible evidence.  The data has been running against the theories of global warming.  The atmosphere has failed to warm since 1998, and, more importantly, the upper ocean has failed to warm since 2003.

The idea that we are on the verge of a climate disaster caused by modern civilization is a romantic idea that appeals to people who have lost traditional religion.  It’s another iteration of the environmentalist dogma that civilization is ruining the earth.  It’s a Garden of Eden story.  Anyone can see that the landscape of areas where industry and technology dominate nature, like Germany or New Jersey, is in far better condition than the landscape is in most third-world countries—countries that lack evil industry and that practice the precious local small-scale agriculture so loved by the ideologues who want remake the economy to prevent global warming.  The idea that the Earth would be a paradise without civilization is contradicted by the wild climate swings that we know have taken place in recent geological time.  Ice sheets a mile thick retreated from much of North America 10,000 years ago.

The reports of the International Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) are often taken as the authoritative last word on climate change.  These reports are are disorganized and unfocused.  As a result, most people go no further than the introductory Summary for Policy Makers.  If you dig deep into the reports, solid scientific support for the claims of impending catastrophe is not there.  Computer models are the shaky foundation of global warming.  Models from different modeling groups disagree with each other by wide margins.  As the IPCC admits, the models have serious deficiencies.  The IPCC uses misleading graphical illustrations to make it appear that the models can accurately mimic the Earth’s climate.

The CO2 reduction proposals of the global warming gang are relentlessly ideological and impractical.  CO2-free nuclear power supplies 80% of France’s electricity and 20% of the electricity in the U.S.  Nuclear fuel is very cheap, and vast supplies are available.  The real problem with nuclear is that environmentalist groups have run a hysterical anti-nuclear campaign for the last 50 years.  A reversal now would be a severe blow to their credibility.  So, instead of nuclear, the global warming gang proposes that we use solar power and wind power, technologies that can cost 10 times more per kilowatt-hour.  They don’t seem to understand that solar doesn’t work when a cloud blocks the sun or at night, and wind doesn’t work when the wind isn’t blowing.  As a consequence, solar and wind need to be backed up by fossil fuel or hydro plants with spinning generators ready to quickly assume the load of the grid.  People who are ignorant concerning engineering or science may accept the notion that wind and solar are realistic sources of electricity.  It is more difficult to explain why the government is dumping billions of dollars into these technologies, both in the form of cash and in the form of mandates that shift the cost to electricity users.

Many scientists may have a predilection for green fashion—for example, backyard compost heaps, organic food, bicycles, solar panels, or giant wind turbines.  Nobody cares.  But it is wrong to misuse the authority and credibility of science to scare the rest of us into embracing the green lifestyle.

Norman Rogers is a physicist and a Senior Policy Advisor at the Heartland Institute.  He maintains a website: www.climateviews.com.