Why I stopped debating Climate Science with Science denialists...

This is amusing.
Embarrassed Experts Flip-Flop, Now Warn: “Will Snow More Heavily In Coming Years”!
By P Gosselin on 8. December 2023

Much of Europe has been hit with cold temperatures and heavy snow falls so far this month, taking Europeans by surprise. “Experts” blame warming.



Rare early December snow at the German North Sea coast, December 2, 2023. Photo: P. Gosselin

Not “a thing of the past”

Don’t be surprised by all the surprise. After all, global warming-obsessed climatologists and media told us back in 2020 that snow and frost would be rare – a thing of the past!

Now with the heavy, record snowfall, global warming astrologists are looking a bit foolish and embarrassed. Their predictions are wrong. Already in November snow arrived and record amounts have already fallen, like in Munich. This has sent the media scrambling for an explanation, and they have concocted one, reports German news magazine FOCUS. Here’s the explanation:

Experts agree: Heavy snowfall is a sign of climate change!”

Strange how whenever there’s a winter with very little snowfall, that too is a sure sign of climate change. And when there are a couple of years of drought, it is the new climate normal. But when there’s too much rainfall, that too proves the climate is warming. No matter what happens, it’s a sign of climate change!

Snow now means it’s getting warmer

In a “fact-check” on ARD German national public television, Ms. Gudrun Mühlbacher of the German DWD national weather service basically said:

The opposite is true, say experts. Rather, they say, the snow is a sign of climate change: snow is becoming rarer, but when it does snow, it is heavy. One reason: due to global warming, it rains more, especially in the fall and winter. The completely rainy November confirmed this.”


More heavy snowfalls ahead!

FOCUS then goes on to explain precisely how our climate works, noting how important it is to distinguish between “climate” and “weather”. “Snowfall does not disprove global warming,” says Melania Botica from the Weather Channel.

“According to climate researchers, the atmosphere can absorb seven percent more moisture for every one degree Celsius increase. More moisture in the air also means more precipitation in the long term,” FOCUS writes. “In the fall and winter, this moisture is released in the form of heavy rainfall or snowfall.”

While climate scientists told us snow would be rare in the future, FOCUS and other German media outlets now report:

It will snow more heavily in the coming years.”

Yet at the same time, the DWD’s Gudrun Mühlbacher says “there will be 65 percent fewer days with at least three centimeters of snow cover at lower elevations.” For Oberstdorf in Bavaria, “it will, however, continue to snow in the coming years, sometimes even more heavily. And this is apparently also due to climate change.”

Junk science at its finest. No wonder Germany’s PISA results are plummeting. You can see it, especially in journalism.

 

The dishonesty of a key part of the AGW narrative is now becoming clear after decades of cover-up.
Discovery of Data for One of the “Other 26” Jacoby Series
Dec 12, 2023 – 1:32 PM
We’ve long discussed the bias imparted by ex post selection of data depending on whether it went up in the 20th century. Likening such after-the-fact selection to a drug study carried out only on survivors.

The Jacoby and d’Arrigo 1989 network was a classic example: the original article reported that they had sampled 36 northern treeline sites, from which they selected 10 with the “best record…of temperature-influenced tree growth”, to which they added a chronology of Gaspe cedars that was far south of the northern treeline at low altitudes.



In 2004 and 2005, I made a determined effort (link) to obtain the measurement data for the 26 sites that weren’t included in the final calculation. Jacoby refused. I tried over and over to get this data, but was never successful.

Gordon Jacoby died in October 2014. In June 2014, a few months prior to his death, the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory unit of Columbia University (Jacoby’s employer) archived a large collection of tree ring data collected by Jacoby and associates (link). By then, it was 25 years since publication of Jacoby and D’Arrigo 1989 and 8 years since publication of D’Arrigo et al 2006.

By then, the paleoclimate community had “moved on” to the seeming novelties of PAGES2K. A few Jacoby and d’Arrigo series re-appeared in PAGES2K. I wrote a couple of articles on these new Jacoby and d’Arrigo avatars: on their Central Northwest Territories (Canada) series in January 2016 here; and on their Gulf of Alaska series in February 2016 here and here. But the articles attracted little interest. Jacoby and D’Arrigo had successfully stonewalled availability of data until no one was interested any more. Not even me.

However, while recently refreshing myself on ancient MBH98 issues, I discovered something interesting: buried in the dozens of measurement data sets in the belated 2014 archive was one of the datasets that Jacoby had withheld back in 2004. (Thus far, I’ve only found one, but there may be others.) It was a northwest Alaska dataset collected in 1979 – . What did the withheld data show? Despite the passage of time, I was interested.

Long-time readers will undoubtedly recall Jacoby’s classic data refusal:

We strive to develop and use the best data possible. The criteria are good common low and high-frequency variation, absence of evidence of disturbance (either observed at the site or in the data), and correspondence or correlation with local or regional temperature. If a chronology does not satisfy these criteria, we do not use it. The quality can be evaluated at various steps in the development process. As we are mission oriented, we do not waste time on further analyses if it is apparent that the resulting chronology would be of inferior quality.

If we get a good climatic story from a chronology, we write a paper using it. That is our funded mission. It does not make sense to expend efforts on marginal or poor data and it is a waste of funding agency and taxpayer dollars. The rejected data are set aside and not archived.

As we progress through the years from one computer medium to another, the unused data may be neglected. Some [researchers] feel that if you gather enough data and n approaches infinity, all noise will cancel out and a true signal will come through. That is not true. I maintain that one should not add data without signal. It only increases error bars and obscures signal.

As an ex- marine I refer to the concept of a few good men.

A lesser amount of good data is better without a copious amount of poor data stirred in. Those who feel that somewhere we have the dead sea scrolls or an apocrypha of good dendroclimatic data that they can discover are doomed to disappointment. There is none. Fifteen years is not a delay. It is a time for poorer quality data to be neglected and not archived. Fortunately our improved skills and experience have brought us to a better recent record than the 10 out of 36. I firmly believe we serve funding agencies and taxpayers better by concentrating on analyses and archiving of good data rather than preservation of poor data.

They may also recall Rosanne D’Arrigo’s remarkable 2006 presentation to a dumbfounded NAS Panel, to whom she explained that you had to pick cherries if you want to make cherry pie, as I reported at the time (link):

D’Arrigo put up a slide about “cherry picking” and then she explained to the panel that that’s what you have to do if you want to make cherry pie. The panel may have been already reeling from the back-pedalling by Alley and Schrag, but I suspect that their jaws had to be re-lifted after this. Hey, it’s old news at climateaudit, but the panel is not so wise in the ways of the Hockey Team. D’Arrigo did not mention to the panel that she, like Mann, was not a statistician, but I think that they already guessed.

D’Arrigo et al (2006) was relied upon by both NAS Panel and IPCC AR4, but, once again, D’Arrigo refused to provide measurement data – even when politely asked by Gerry North, chair of the NAS Panel. . . . .

 

In a First, Nations at Climate Summit Agree to Move Away From Fossil Fuels

For the first time since nations began meeting three decades ago to confront climate change, diplomats from nearly 200 countries approved a global pact that explicitly calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels” like oil, gas and coal that are dangerously heating the planet.

The sweeping agreement, which comes during the hottest year in recorded history, was reached on Wednesday after two weeks of furious debate at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai. European leaders and many of the nations most vulnerable to climate-fueled disasters were urging language that called for a complete “phaseout” of fossil fuels. But that proposal faced intense pushback from major oil exporters like Saudi Arabia and Iraq, as well as fast-growing countries like India and Nigeria.

In the end, negotiators struck a compromise: The new deal calls on countries to accelerate a global shift away from fossil fuels this decade in a “just, orderly and equitable manner,” and to quit adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere entirely by midcentury. It also calls on nations to triple the amount of renewable energy, like wind and solar power, installed around the world by 2030 and to slash emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that is more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/climate/cop28-climate-agreement.html

How Electricity Is Changing, Country by Country

Carbon-free electricity has never been more plentiful. Wind and solar power have taken off over the past two decades, faster than experts ever expected. But it hasn’t yet been enough to halt the rise of coal- and gas-burning generation. That’s because global demand for electricity has grown even faster than clean energy, leaving fossil fuels to fill the gap. The dynamic has pushed up carbon emissions from the power sector at a time when scientists say they need to be falling — and fast — to avoid dangerous levels of global warming.

Much of the rising power demand has come from rapidly-developing countries like China and India, where new coal plants are still coming online alongside wind and solar farms to power meteoric economic growth. But many industrialized nations are also not moving away from fossil fuels fast enough to meet their stated climate change goals.

Even on today’s trajectory, many experts expect that fossil-fueled power will peak globally in the next few years. It’s already falling in major economies like the United States and Europe, and analysts expect China, by far the world’s largest power producer, to begin reducing coal-fired generation soon.

The world’s climate future will depend, in large part, on what happens next.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...obal-power-electricity-fossil-fuels-coal.html

Progress, but too slow.

 

In the words of Lee Corso, "Not so fast, my friend."
Just how significant is the COP28 deal, anyway?
6:43 a.m. EST
The wins for fossil fuels in the COP28 deal

The carefully crafted language of Wednesday’s climate deal gives fossil fuels space to keep working, even in a world where countries have all agreed they need to start cutting back.

This COP28 deal gets far more specific than any prior COP on the options for cleaning up the world’s energy systems. And in many cases, those options are tied to fossil fuels.

One such section calls on “accelerating zero- and low-emission technologies,” with the “low emissions” language itself opening the door to fossil fuels. The deal then suggests the options for doing that could be “abatement and removal technologies such as carbon capture and utilization and storage, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors, and low-carbon hydrogen production,” more nods to fossil fuels.

Hydrogen burns with little greenhouse-gas emissions — but often it is made with natural gas or other fossil fuels, producing greenhouse-gas emissions during the process. In its raw form it can also cause chemical reactions that trap heat in the atmosphere, raising questions about how climate-friendly it is if leaks are widespread.

Carbon-capture — or “abatement” — systems have been pitched as technological solutions that can strip the greenhouse gases out the emissions from fossil fuels. But they, too, come with environmental risks and uncertainty, including how effectively they work or how much energy they use in the process.

And in the COP28 deal, scroll down just five short points from the call to transition away from fossil fuels to find language likely to be used to justify their continued use. The agreement, “Recognizes that transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security,” it says.

Transitional there is almost certainly a nod to natural gas, which burns cleaner than coal or oil and has long been pitched as a “bridge fuel” societies can use while they take years to build up cleaner alternatives. Natural gas, however, still produces carbon-dioxide emissions, and can also be a risk for creating methane emissions, an even more powerful greenhouse gas. But many countries, especially in Europe, have grown more reliant on as energy prices have soared and Russia has tried to leverage the power of its energy exports against its enemies.

That language might be vague and open to interpretation. But that’s a feature, not a bug for diplomats trying to craft a broad compromise in a dangerous world full of economies not yet ready to phase out fossil fuels entirely.

 

And yet you don't understand why people would vote for Trump.

Here's a hint. It's this kind of blatant idiocy.

 

There is resistance among the scientists.
Alan Longhurst 1925-2023: oceanographer and climate skeptic
Posted on December 14, 2023 by curryja
by Javier Vinós

Alan Longhurst died last December 7th in the hospital of Figeac in Occitanie (France), where he had been admitted a few days earlier following a fall in nearby Cajarc, the small town where he lived.

Alan has authored numerous posts at Climate Etc. and is also author of the book Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science.

Continue reading →

". . . Like me, Alan started from a position of confidence in the work of climate scientists. But he had the experience of virtually every year of oceanographic cruises that had taken him all over the world’s seas and oceans, and he had a deep understanding of the clear response of marine species to climate changes. In addition, Alan had a vast knowledge of the literature and studies of decades and centuries of ocean biology and conditions, including those conducted by the British Navy. One of his main complaints was that all this knowledge, obtained with great scientific rigor, was being completely ignored in the study of climate change, and that everything prior to the significant increase in our emissions was no longer ignored, but unknown to current scientists. He commented on how some of his published observations on the effects of nitrogen upwelling off the California coast on tuna populations had been republished as if they were new by a group in Northern California. He jokingly noted that a few months of research can often save a few hours at the library.

Such oceanographic and climate knowledge led him to a deep skepticism of the consensus proposed by the IPCC, which crystallized in several climate articles published on the Climate Etc. blog and in the writing of the book “Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science,” which took him several years to complete. Kip Hansen masterfully defined it in his review of the book as follows:

“Longhurst’s comprehension and recall of the details of hundreds of scientific papers from related and adjacent fields enter into this brilliant synopsis of the state of Climate Science – what doubts we still have and what, if any, certainty we can claim.”

However, the publishers of his oceanography books refused to publish a book that went against the prevailing climate dogma. This saddened Alan. If you have dedicated your life to science with honesty and integrity, it is not easy to deal with such rejection. It is an experience I share. . . . "

 

Reminds me of the old saw of the baseball broadcaster proudly claiming, "We have 3700 here in attendance today, Only another 43,000 and we'd have a full house!"

 

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king....

 

The consensus has a crack in its foundation.

Climate attribution method overstates “fingerprints” of external forcing
Posted on December 18, 2023 by curryja
by Ross McKitrick

I have a new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Environmetrics discussing biases in the “optimal fingerprinting” method which climate scientists use to attribute climatic changes to greenhouse gas emissions. This is the third in my series of papers on flaws in standard fingerprinting methods: blog posts on the first two are here and here.

Climatologists use a statistical technique called Total Least Squares (TLS), also called orthogonal regression, in their fingerprinting models to fix a problem in ordinary regression methods that can lead to the influence of external forcings being understated. My new paper argues that in typical fingerprinting settings TLS overcorrects and imparts large upward biases, thus overstating the impact of GHG forcing.

While the topic touches on climatology, for the most part the details involve regression methods which is what empirical economists like me are trained to do. I teach regression in my econometrics courses and I have studied and used it all my career. I mention this because if anyone objects that I’m not a “climate scientist” my response is: you’re right, I’m an economist which is why I’m qualified to talk about this.

I have previously shown that when the optimal fingerprinting regression is misspecified by leaving out explanatory variables that should be in it, TLS is biased upwards (other authors have also proven this theoretically). In that study I noted that when anthropogenic and natural forcings (ANTH and NAT) are negatively correlated the positive TLS bias increases. My new paper focuses just on this issue since, in practice, climate model-generated ANTH and NAT forcing series are negatively correlated. I show that in this case, even if no explanatory variables have been omitted from the regression, TLS estimates of forcing coefficients are usually too large. Among other things, since TLS-estimated coefficients are plugged into carbon budget models, this will result in a carbon budget being biased too small.

Continue reading →

 

Of course I do. Blatant idiocy.

The world’s climate future will depend, in large part, on what happens next.

Experts broadly agree that keeping global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, the world’s self-imposed climate goal — and ideally as low as 1.5 degrees — will require peaking and then rapidly reducing fossil-fueled power, in favor of carbon-free sources, like wind and solar. (The world has already warmed about 1.2 degrees since preindustrial times.)

“The big question,” said Dave Jones, an electricity analyst at Ember, a London-based think tank, is whether countries can increase the pace of renewable energy deployment so that they’re not just bringing down power sector emissions slowly, but “actually enabling deep and rapid carbon dioxide emissions cuts.”

 

The answer to that question is no. They cannot, they will not, and they should not.

 

No. It's people like you.

 

Very cogent post. It typifies an inherent but completely under-the-rug problem with mathematical analyses like regression, correlation, causation, and complex probabilities. They are always portrayed as inherently natural yet in fact all are derived by mathematical wizards who view their analytical process perfectly aligned with physical process. But they ain't. They are human constructs are easily misconstrued.

 

Which begs the questions, 1. Do they know for sure what they are talking about? And 2. Is a 2 degree rise a good thing or a bad thing?

 

Case closed.

“The Arrhenius type greenhouse effect of the CO2 and other non-condensing GHGs is an incorrect hypothesis and the CO2 greenhouse effect based global warming hypothesis is also an artifact without any theoretical or empirical footing.”



Image Source: Miskolczi, 2023

 

Fascinating. Super good post. I downloaded the full report and hope to read it. A minor caution that might be in order as it could be misconstrued for the article. The so-called green house effect of CO2 is in fact valid.. The question is how much marginal increase in temperature (if an) do we get from marginal increase in CO2. There is some strong indication that, from satellite spectography, virtually all of the OLR radiation in the CO2 bands is currently being absorbed so that any increase in CO2 will have near zero effect. This is a base line fundamental in climate science that the scientists simply make SWAGs of such a value that the computers say the temp is increasing a lot. There are other things as the article points out that are simply swept under the rug and ignored because there is no way it can be modeled into the computer by the unknowing scientists, like the unpredictable nature of tropospheric humidity and the elusive cloudliness and wind flows as mentioned in the article