From: Climate Etc.

By: Judith Curry

Date: June 21, 2019

Climate science’s ‘masking bias’ problem

How valid conclusions often lay hidden within research reports, masked by plausible but unjustified conclusions reached in those reports.  And how the IPCC institutionalizes such masking errors in climate science.

In the previous post, we discussed the motivated biases of individual climate researchers, stimulated by the paper by Lee Jussim, Joe Duarte and others entitled Interpretations and methods: Towards a more self-correcting social psychology

The Jussim et al. paper provides additional insights that are relevant to the motivated biases in climate change, which become particularly serious and problematic once these biases are institutionalized. Here are additional excerpts from Jussim et al. for the topic I would like to discuss in this post: ...

Climate science’s ‘masking bias’ problem

The two historical components of “The Big Lie” are exaggeration of the situation and repetition of the exaggerated situation. In the case of climate change, the UNFCCC, the IPCC, national governments and the consensed climate science community have consistently exaggerated the severity of the issues associated with climate change. Their persistent repetition of exaggerated position statements has fed the repetitious support of the government-controlled and corporate media, which still operate on the premise that: “If it bleeds, it leads.”.

However, it appears that the media are preparing to add a new component to “The Big Lie”, an organized and coordinated propaganda push unrelated to any specific topical event, but rather as preparation for a UN climate summit. Kip Hansen recently identified and analyzed this media effort.

“How does the media cover—or not cover—the biggest story of our time? Last fall, UN climate scientists announced that the world has 12 years to transform energy, agriculture, and other key industries if civilization is to avoid a catastrophe. We believe the news business must also transform.”

“The Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation assembled some of the world’s top journalists, scientists, and climate experts to devise a new playbook for journalism that’s compatible with the 1.5-degree future that scientists say must be achieved. We also held a town hall meeting on the coverage of climate change and the launch of an unprecedented, coordinated effort to change the media conversation.”

source: https://www.cjr.org/watchdog/climate-crisis-media.php/

Journalists are being contacted by e-mail by the Columbia Journalism Review to encourage media participation in a weeklong presentation of concentrated climate change coverage.

“Our ask of you is simple: commit to a week of focused climate coverage this September. We are organizing news outlets across the US and abroad—online and print, TV and audio, large and small—to run seven days of climate stories from September 16 through the climate summit UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres hosts in New York September 23. The stories you run are up to you, though we can offer ideas and background information and connect outlets looking for content with content providers looking for outlets.

We’d be happy to schedule a phone call to discuss this further.

Sincerely,

Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope

The Covering Climate Now movement is forming.

“A focused week of coverage

We’ll work to organize as much of the news media as possible—large and small, national and local—to commit to one week of focused coverage of climate change this September. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, is convening a summit in New York on September 23, where nations are urged to show how they will limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. We propose a week of concentrated climate coverage in the lead-up to the UN summit, beginning September 16.” [ source ]

It is difficult to describe this development as anything but a massive coordinated propaganda campaign, orchestrated by the Columbia Journalism Review and several major media outlets in support of the UN, national governments and the consensed climate science community..

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H. L. Mencken

“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

Weather

Weather characteristics can be measured.

Weather events can be counted.

Weather event impacts can be measured.

Weather event frequency and severity can be documented.

Changes in weather event frequency and severity can be documented and compared.

Weather events cannot be predicted accurately on seasonal scales.

Changes in weather event frequency and severity cannot be predicted on annual scale.

Climate

Ideal climate is undefined.

Ideal climate is subjective.

Climate is weather over a 30-year period.

Climate changes.

Climate changed (natural variation) before human influence.

Natural variation continues.

Natural variation is not well understood.

Natural variation cannot be distinguished from anthropogenic influences.

Anthropogenic influences cannot be distinguished by source.

Anthropogenic influences cannot be measured.

Climate sensitivity to CO2 is not known.

Climate forcings are not known.

Climate feedbacks are not known.

Climate change is not consistent globally.

Climate change is not universally positive or negative.

Climate change has contributed to global greening.

Observations

Observations include measurements and counts.

Data are readings taken from measuring instruments.

Data are NOT all created equal.

Data measured with inaccurate instruments are inaccurate.

Data which are “adjusted” are no longer data, but merely estimates.

Numbers “infilled” where no data are available are not data.

Sets of “adjusted” data are not datasets, but merely estimate sets.

Sets containing “adjusted” and “infilled” components are mixed sets.

Data errors might or might not be random.

Biases cause non-random errors.

Errors in estimate sets are not random since the ‘adjustments” are not random.

Errors in mixed sets are not random, since the “infilling” process is not random.

The Law of Large Numbers does not apply to climate temperature data.

            Climate temperature data are not identically distributed.

            Climate temperature sets are not randomly generated after “adjustment”.

            Climate temperature sets are not randomly generated after “infilling”.

Climate Models

Current climate models do not model all aspects of climate.

Current climate models do not accurately model past climate.

Current climate models do not accurately model current climate.

Current climate models cannot be expected to accurately model future climate.

Current climate models have not been verified.

Current climate models are not verifiable.

Current climate models are an unfit basis for policy decisions.

Climate models are being used to create worst case “scary scenarios”.

            Scary scenarios contribute nothing to advancing the science.

Climate models are being used to conduct weather event impact attribution studies.

            Attribution estimates cannot be verified.

Summary

It is far from self-evident that increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations are solely or predominantly responsible for observed changes in global climate.

It is far from self-evident that further increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations have led or would lead to changes in precipitation, storm frequency or intensity, sea level rise, glacier and sea ice volume and extent.

It is self-evident that there are numerous unknowns regarding climate which must be researched thoroughly before the numerous factors which affect climate become self-evident.

It is self-evident that the governments of the nations of the globe are unprepared to control what they clearly do not understand.

It is self-evident that the time has not come to surrender our independence to a socialist global government in an effort to save ourselves from changes in a poorly understood global climate.

One of the keys to “success” of “The Big Lie”, according to Joseph Goebbels, is that its proponents “keep repeating it”. This requires either a media controlled by the proponents of the lie, or a compliant / supportive media, or both. The US currently has both a government-controlled media (The Corporation for Public Broadcasting) and a compliant / supportive media. The US Federal government has, in the past, used the media not only to repeat the lie but to reinforce and enhance it. Numerous government-funded studies have developed “scary scenarios” of potential future cataclysm, which have then been publicized by the researchers with little attention to the underlying assumptions and then broadcast by a media driven by the adage “If it bleeds, it leads”.

This process has been underway long enough that it has taken up a life of its own. There are numerous examples of climate scientists attributing events such as floods, droughts, severe storms, etc. to climate change; or, stating that these events were made more frequent or more damaging as the result of climate change. These attributions are made “without any evidence”, in some cases based on unverified climate models. Professor Michael Mann, the self-appointed spokesperson of the consensed climate science community is a frequent source of these attributions.

However, the compliant / supportive media no longer rely exclusively on the assertions of climate scientists to implicate climate change in the occurrence, frequency or severity of unusual weather events. Rather, they simply assert that any event has somehow been affected by climate change. One recent example of this spontaneous attribution to climate change is this report on a tropical cyclone in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people and massive property damage. The report acknowledges that much of the death toll is the result of failure to evacuate and that much of the property damage was the result of inadequate building construction and inadequate surrounding infrastructure. Another example is this report on recent flooding in the upper Midwest, again attributing the severity of the event in part to climate change “without any evidence”.

The obvious intent of this combination of repetition, reinforcement and enhancement is to cause the public to reflexively associate adverse weather events with climate change; and, ultimately, to demand that government act to “fix the problem”. The media also acts to suppress information skeptical of this association, including refusal to include skeptics in panel discussions regarding climate issues.

As insidious as this reflexive attribution has become “without any evidence”, reporting of increases in the frequency or severity of weather events, despite conflicting evidence, is perhaps an even greater problem. Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. has presented evidence that there are no adverse trends in the frequency of severity of weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts in the period for which CO2 is accused of contributing to climate change. However, these presentations have received scant attention in the media.

From: Competitive Enterprise Institute

By: Marlo Lewis, Jr.

June 11, 2019

A Citizen’s Guide to Climate Change

Climate change is not a hoax, but as a political matter, it is a persistent pretext for expanding government control over the economy, redistributing wealth, and empowering unaccountable elites at the expense of voters and their elected representatives. This pretext rests on three falsehoods:

1. Science has determined that climate change is a “planetary emergency”—a rapidly unfolding global catastrophe.
2. A panoply of market-rigging interventionist policies, called “climate solutions” by their proponents, can deliver meaningful climate protection at reasonable cost.
3. Only deluded science deniers or greedy polluters oppose such policies.

A Citizen’s Guide to Climate Change

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Joseph Goebbels

The “lie” need not be a total intentional untruth. The “lie” can be a partial truth, intentionally repeated out of context. The “lie” can be an opinion stated and repeated as a fact. The “lie” can be assertion of an excessive degree of certainty about something which is uncertain. The “lie” can be an attempt to raise a level of concern regarding an issue which is out of proportion to the actual perceived threat.

The approach of the United Nations, through the UNFCCC and the IPCC, to the issue of climate change bears a startling resemblance to “The Big Lie”. The approach of some government leaders also bears such resemblance. Climate change is frequently referred to as the “climate crisis”, though there is no evidence that climate change is, or is leading to, a crisis. The US House of Representatives leadership is forming a “Select Committee on the Climate Crisis” to address the issue. The “Green New Deal” has been introduced in both the US Senate and House, accompanied by the assertion that the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t act aggressively now. Government-funded studies assert that fossil energy can be replaced by renewable energy within this time frame, without significant adverse economic consequences.

The US Administration has recently suggested establishment of a Presidential Committee on Climate Security (PCCS) to conduct an independent scientific review of climate science related to the potential adverse impacts of climate change on national security. This suggestion has been met with outrage on the part of numerous climate scientists and numerous politicians supportive of the consensus position on climate change. There has even been an assertion that the proposed effort was “Stalinist” and akin to Lysenkoism. This is clearly hyperbolic reaction, though it is consistent with the long-standing position of the consensed climate science community that “the science is settled”, that “the time for debate is over” and that those who do not accept the consensus are “deniers” and their skepticism is disingenuous.

The controversy over the PCCS is essentially a conflict between the current “state”, as represented by the current Administration, and the previous “state”, as represented by the previous Administration and the embedded elements of the previous Administration commonly referred to as “the deep state”. The PCCS is intended to question “the political, economic and/or military consequences of the “lie”.

It is long past time for a skeptical review and assessment of the current state of climate science and the policy recommendations based upon the climate science.

By: Bob Tisdale

Extremes and Averages in Contiguous U.S. Climate

This book includes graphs of NOAA climate data (precipitation, drought, and near-surface air temperature) for the Contiguous United States, for the 9 NOAA Climate Regions of the Contiguous United States, and for the 48 Contiguous United States individually for the 100-year period of 1919 to 2018.

Many people believe that climate here in the United States has worsened over the last 100 years; others believe it has improved. But which belief does the data from NOAA support for the Contiguous U.S. as a whole?

Extremes and Averages in Contiguous U.S. Climate

NPR recently broadcast and published a piece entitled: “It’s 2050 And This Is How We Stopped Climate Change”. The approach they describe has 3 major elements.

• Mass Electrification
• Urbanization of Everything
• Reduced Emissions from Farming

The piece assumes that the technology required to achieve these 3 elements is available today; and, that the challenge is implementation and the societal changes which must occur in the process. There is no discussion of the steps required to achieve mass electrification, merely the statement that it would take lots more solar, wind and batteries. There is no discussion of how people come to choose to live in urban environments, which would grow enormously in size and population, with attendant increases in ambient temperatures as the result of urban heat island effects. There is no discussion of how farm emissions from the growing of food crops would be reduced, while increasing food production.

Electric vehicles are discussed as a transition from internal combustion engine vehicles to pedestrianized cities with mass transit providing virtually all transportation requirements. Electric over-the-road trucks are recognized as a problem, because of their weight and the limitations of battery technology; and, electrified highways similar to electrified railways and light rail systems are mentioned as a possible solution. There is no discussion of the transition from diesel/electric freight railroad propulsion to electric propulsion. Planes are assumed to continue to be fossil fueled, with their emissions offset by carbon capture and storage.

Heavy industries, such as steelmaking and cement production are assumed either to be equipped with carbon capture systems, or to be relegated to operating elsewhere. The piece leaves the reader to assume that elsewhere means some other nation, rather than off-planet. However, relocating heavy industry to different nations with less stringent emissions requirements is inconsistent with stopping climate change, except on a national level. Unfortunately, emissions of “greenhouse gases” know no national boundaries, so they affect climate as long as they persist anywhere on earth.

Of course, the entire premise of stopping climate change is fanciful. Climate changes. Climate has always changed, as far as we have been able to determine. The natural causes of climate change are not well understood, if at all. The anthropogenic causes of climate change are thought to be better understood; and, it is these causes that the NPR piece addresses.

Stopping climate change resulting from natural causes would require a thorough understanding of the full range of those natural causes, their periodicity, the magnitude of the changes they cause individually and collectively and methods to regulate or offset their effects. The current state of climate science is insufficient to deal with active climate management to avoid natural climate change, even if all of the assumed contributors to anthropogenic climate change were eliminated or offset.

The intent of the NPR piece was to suggest that the path ahead is clear and the endpoint achievable; and, that we should get on with the process without further delay.

From: The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)

By: Dr John R. Christy

Date: May 8, 2019

THE TROPICAL SKIES Falsifying climate alarm

Contents

• About the author ----- vi
• 1- Measuring the greenhouse effect ----- 1
• 2- The importance of the troposphere ----- 2
• 3- Another metric ----- 4
• 4- Hiding the problem ----- 7

THE TROPICAL SKIES Falsifying climate alarm

Numerous efforts to validate the results of climate studies have been hampered by refusal of climate researchers to permit open access to study data, statistical data analysis methods, computer code and other study information. This refusal by climate researchers has spawned numerous Freedom of Information Act requests, resulting in significant delays and occasional lawsuits when FOIA requests were denied.

The efforts of the Committee on Climate Security (CCS) to evaluate the potential impacts of climate change on national and environmental security could be seriously hindered by refusal of climate scientists to provide CCS with access to study information. Therefore, the Administration should establish ground rules regarding cooperation with the CCS; and, new ground rules for funding of future climate science research.

Most US climate science is funded by Executive Branch agencies and much of the research is conducted by these agencies. The CCS is an Executive Branch effort and is entitled to full cooperation in its investigations from other elements of the Executive Branch. The Administration should clearly establish this requirement for cooperation and the consequences of failure to cooperate.

Any agency administrator who refuses to cooperate with the efforts of the CCS should be summarily relieved of duty. Any agency researcher who refuses to cooperate with the CCS should be suspended without pay until such cooperation is forthcoming. Any researcher working on an agency funded program who refuses to cooperate with CCS regarding either current or past programs should have current program funding suspended until such cooperation is forthcoming.

Researchers involved in past studies performed for Federal agencies or conducted with Federal funds who refuse to cooperate with CCS reviews of their studies should be prohibited from participating in or benefiting from future federally funded research programs.

Future Federal Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for climate research should require proposers to agree to provide open access to all aspects of the proposed program, both during the research effort and upon its completion. Any non-compliant proposal should be summarily rejected. Any researcher or research institution which fails to meet this open access requirement upon completion of the research program should be sued for recovery of the Federal funds expended on the program.

No research results not supported by open access to the full program information should be used as justification for any new or expanded regulation. The only exception to this stipulation would be the personal information of study participants in the case of human health studies related to climate.

The Administration can expect significant resistance to the CCS and its efforts, based on the history of resistance to open access in the climate science community. However, the crisis of irreproducibility in climate science research, including the demonstrated inability of federal agencies, including NASA, NOAA and NCEI to reproduce the results of their own research, demands open access and critical review of study results and conclusions.

The severity of the projected future climate catastrophe and the magnitude of the social and economic upheaval proposed to avoid that catastrophe require a far more rigorous approach to climate research than is the case today. That more rigorous approach is long overdue.

By: Clear Energy Alliance

Elements of the consensed climate science community, the consensed climate change commentariat and numerous environmental activist groups have recently been “triggered” by Administration discussions regarding the formation of a Committee on Climate Security (CCS) to critically evaluate whether climate change is a national security and environmental threat. The CCS would be chaired by Dr. William Happer, an eminent physicist with extensive academic and government experience, who is currently a Senior Director at the National Security Council.

The discussions regarding formation of the CCS are occurring against the background of the formation of the new Select Committee on the Climate Crisis by the House of Representatives and the fanfare regarding the Green New Deal (GND) recently introduced by Senator Edward Markey (D,MA) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D,NY). The House leadership has clearly accepted the assertion that there is a climate crisis, while the GND describes climate change as an existential threat.

Much of the reaction to the Administration proposal is based on the view of the consensed climate science community that “the science is settled” and that the time for debate is over, which is echoed incessantly by the climate change commentariat. This reaction is exacerbated by the selection of Dr. Happer, who is an acknowledged skeptic regarding catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. The New York Times labeled Dr. Happer as a “climate denialist”, though Dr. Happer clearly does not deny that the earth has a climate. The choice of the term “denialist” is an attempt to isolate and disparage Dr. Happer. The reaction to the CCS is so intense that Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D,NY) has threatened to introduce legislation to defund the effort, referring to it as a “fake climate panel”.

The consensed climate science community has a long history of resisting skeptical evaluations of its studies and conclusions by refusing to provide open access to the data on which the studies are based and the statistical analysis methods and computer codes used to analyze the data and reach the study conclusions. These efforts are comprehensively documented in the Climategate emails and in the continuing efforts of Dr. Michael Mann and others to resist skeptical examination of their work.

The CCS bears some similarity to the “Red Team / Blue Team” evaluation effort proposed by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and the “Tiger Team” evaluation suggested by some skeptical climate scientists. The CCS, or a “Red Team” or “Tiger Team” would logically be composed primarily of exclusively skeptical scientists, since the studies they would be reviewing have been performed and peer reviewed by members of the consensed climate science community.

The principal concerns of the CCS would focus on the current inability of climate models to competently model the real climate and produce reliable projections of future climate, since the concerns about catastrophic anthropogenic climate change and any national security risks resulting from such climate change are based on the climate models. The models are currently projecting significantly greater warming than is being observed by either the near-surface or satellite temperature anomaly products.

By: Clear Energy Alliance

The concern regarding potential catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is based upon projected future conditions produced by unverified climate models driven by uncertain climate sensitivity, feedbacks and forcings. Therefore, it is interesting and instructive to periodically assess the accuracy of the climate model projections relative to the observations of global temperature. In this context, it is important to remember that the observations of near-surface temperature are routinely “adjusted” and thus are no longer the actual observations originally recorded. It is also important to remember that the models have been “hindcast” over a prior period, compared to the observations over that prior period and then “tweaked” to minimize the differences between the model output and the observations.

The most famous of the climate models and the model with the longest projection period after “tweaking” is the climate model used by Dr. James Hansen of NASA GISS as the basis for his 1988 presentation to Congress. Hansen modeled three CO2 emissions scenarios:

Scenario A: Continued annual emissions growth of ~1.5% per year

Scenario B: Continued emissions at current (mid-1980s) rates

Scenario C: Drastically reduced emissions rates from 1990 – 2000

Scenario A, which projects the greatest warming based on continued “business as usual” emissions growth, projected a 2018 temperature anomaly of approximately 1.3°C.

Scenario B, which projects more moderate warming based on relative emissions stability in the future, projected a 2018 temperature anomaly of approximately 1.15°C.

Scenario C, which projects the least warming based on drastically reduced emissions in the future, projected a 2018 temperature anomaly of approximately 0.6°C

Emissions since Hansen’s presentation have approximated the emissions path in Scenario A. The observed HadCRUT near-surface temperature anomaly in 2018 was approximately 0.32°C (X in graph), or approximately half of Hansen’s Scenario C projection and approximately one quarter of Hansen’s Scenario A projection. Clearly, Hansen’s model has been falsified.

“It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.” Richard P. Feynman

There are numerous climate models other than the Hansen model, most of which are included in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). The projections of 90 of these models are compared with each other and with the observations of both the HadCRUT4 near-surface temperature anomaly observations and the UAH lower tropospheric temperature observations through 2013 in the graph below prepared by Dr. Roy Spencer of UAH. As noted above, the HadCRUT near-surface temperature anomaly in 2018 was approximately 0.32°C. The UAH lower tropospheric temperature anomaly in 2018 was approximately 0.23°C. Both of these observed anomalies remain below all but 1 or 2 of the 90 models.

The black line plotted through the outputs of the 90 models is typically referred to as the model mean, or the mid-point of the model outputs in each year. The HadCRUT4 anomaly in 2018 is approximately 40% of the model mean, while the UAH 2018 anomaly is approximately 29% of the model mean. This suggests that the model mean is essentially meaningless, since it is the mean of the outputs of 90 models, 88 of which are already demonstrably inaccurate. Note that these models appear to have been “tweaked” approximately 20 years ago, so that the period of projection is only 20 years, compared to the 30-year period assumed to represent climate.

Clearly these models are being progressively falsified by ongoing observations. Equally clearly, these models are not a solid basis upon which to develop public policies regarding climate change.

By: Clear Energy Alliance