RUTHFULLY YOURS

Reasons exist to have serious investigations of the whole of climate change (aka global warming) science.

Global warming inevitably rests on current temperatures setting records in geologic time, or at least since early human civilization. And this is where the 1998 Nature article by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcom Hughes depicting what has become known as the iconic “hockey stick” graph becomes critical. The “hockey stick” showed modern temperatures far hotter than in the year 1400.

The hockey stick graph was adopted into the third assessment report (2001) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and contradicted a chart that had appeared only eleven years before in an earlier IPCC assessment report. The hockey stick eliminated what had traditionally been considered the hottest era, the Medieval Warm Period.

As reasonably accurate thermometers were not developed until well into the 19th century, one would wonder how earlier temperatures were measured. The answer is the use of proxy data – namely, ice cores, tree rings, bee pollen, ocean and lake sediment. But a reasonable person would have to wonder by what standards these items are interpreted.

This leaves only modern thermometer data sets, the primary one being that of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP), “an estimate of global surface temperature change … using current data files from NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration].” The entire 137-year monthly data set, from 1880 through June 2017, in degrees Celsius anomalies (deviations from the corresponding 1951-1980 means), updated monthly, is available in spreadsheet and text forms.

But the land and seas surface data from which the above is derived suffers serious flaws as far as indicating “global” warming. First of all, it is not, as implied, indicative of global surface temperatures. The NOAA website contains in the upper-left-hand corner a small and easily overlooked but important map denoting the location of land-based temperature measurement stations around the world and years of coverage, reproduced below. Not surprisingly, data for more than about 110 years exist only for the United States; Japan; southeastern Australia; and some areas in Europe, Asia, and India. Nearly all of Africa, South America, Antarctica, Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and Asia contain only a few decades of weather data, from widely dispersed stations.

Call it Climate McCarthyism.

The question, “Do you believe in climate change?” is the new, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?” Since Donald Trump’s election, climate activists, Democratic politicians, and the media have led a collective inquisition into administration officials, creating a blacklist of those who stray from the ideological groupthink on human-caused climate change.. These demagogues aim to make climate “denial” an offense that should prevent anyone from getting a job or receiving disaster relief. Even the Pope this week suggested political leaders who are climate deniers will face consequences.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was repeatedly subjected to climate interrogations during his confirmation process. CIA Director Mike Pompeo was grilled about his views on climate change by Senator Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) during his confirmation hearing. Harris blamed climate change for rising instability in the world, and demanded to know where Pompeo stood on the issue.

Two major hurricanes have emboldened the climate inquisitors. During a White House briefing Monday about Hurricane Irma, Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert was asked by CNN’s Jim Acosta about the connection between climate change and national security. After Acosta falsely claimed that storms are more frequent and intense (no science supports this; the U.S. has just enjoyed twelve years without a major hurricane), he asked Bossert, “When you see three Category 4 hurricanes all on the same map at the same time, does the thought occur to you, ‘Jeez you know, maybe there is something to this climate change thing and its connection to powerful hurricanes?’” This is your average grade-school understanding of science.

Two new Trump appointees are now before the climate kangaroo court. Representative Jim Bridenstine (R., Okla.), the president’s pick to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), is being branded a climate denier as activists attempt to build opposition to his pending Senate confirmation. His offense? During a House speech in 2014, Bridenstine dared to blame natural forces — not human activity — for global warming and correctly said global temperatures had not risen in the past ten years.

Although Bridenstine is a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, a decorated naval aviator, and staunch supporter of space exploration, that’s not enough to satisfy the climate enforcers. Climate Hawks Vote, a PAC that has former Obama adviser Van Jones and environmental activist Bill McKibben on its advisory board, launched a petition campaign to stop Bridenstine’s Senate confirmation: “NASA needs to be run by someone who respects science. Not climate denier Jim Bridenstine.”

Vox’s David Roberts wrote (with zero self-awareness) that “it is difficult to appreciate just how deeply and ceaselessly bizarre US climate politics has become. Several bits of recent news — for instance, Trump’s nomination of a climate denier with no scientific credentials to lead NASA — serve to illustrate the point.” A Newsweek headline read, “Who is Jim Bridenstine, the climate-change denier Trump picked to head NASA?” The piece scoffs that Bridenstine is a “critic of climate science” for saying the scientifically accurate claim that “the climate has always changed.” Now, even repeating an historical, scientific fact amounts to misconduct in the eyes of the climate witch-hunters.

Sam Clovis, Trump’s nominee for a top scientific post at the Department of Agriculture, has been branded both a climate denier and “an unacceptable and illegal choice” by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a liberal activist group. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Senator Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii) urged Trump to withdraw Clovis’s nomination “because he is a proud ‘skeptic’ of climate change and wildly unqualified for the position of USDA Chief Scientist.” (Both Clovis and Bridenstine are under scrutiny for not having specific scientific degrees because of course scientists make the best managers.)

Climate change has been blamed for a dizzying array of absurd woes, from the dwindling number of customers at Bulgarian brothels to the death of the Loch Ness monster. Most of us can see through these silly headlines, but it’s far harder to parse the more serious claims when they’re repeated in good faith by well-meaning campaigners.

Consider the recent assertion by Unicef’s Bangladesh head of mission that climate change leads to an increase in child marriages. Between 2011 and 2020 globally, more than 140 million girls under the age of 18 will become brides, leading to curtailed education and reduced lifetime earnings, more domestic violence, more deaths from complications due to pregnancy and increased mortality for the young brides’ children. By all accounts, child marriage must be taken seriously.

In Bangladesh, nearly 75% of women between the ages of 20 and 49 reported that they were married before they turned 18, giving the country the second-highest rate of child marriage in the world. As the Unicef head tells it, climate change has been a major cause, as warmer weather has worsened the flooding, pushing people to the cities, leading to more child marriages.

This entire string of logic is wrong. The frequency of extreme floods in Bangladesh has increased, it’s true, but studies show their magnitude and duration have in fact decreased. And Bangladesh is far better at adapting today than it was a generation ago. In 1974, a flood killed 29,000 people and cost 7.5% of the country’s gross domestic product. A slightly larger flood in 2004 killed 761 people and cost 3.3% of GDP.

Nor is Unicef right to claim a connection between flooding and urbanization. A study published in the Journal of Biosocial Science found that living in cities doesn’t increase the likelihood of child marriages in Bangladesh. Rather, it was “significantly higher among rural women.” According to another study, published in the Chinese Journal of Population Resources and Environment, the average age of marriage in cities is 16.15 years, compared to 15.08 years in rural areas.

This isn’t surprising. Across the world, there’s a convergence between low urbanization rates and higher child-marriage rates. In Africa, the three worst countries for child marriage—Chad, Mali and Niger—also have the lowest levels of urbanization.

Given the weak links between warming, flooding, urbanization and the contrary link between urbanization and child marriage, climate policies would be the least effective in addressing the problem. Copenhagen Consensus research shows that we need to focus instead on nutrition and education, political opportunities for girls and women, and improving women’s rights to inherit and start a business.

A program in southern Bangladesh run by Save the Children, for example, has demonstrated the significant effects of even a modest financial incentive: The program regularly gave cooking oil to parents of unmarried girls between the ages of 15 and 17, conditional upon confirmation that the girls remained unmarried. The program found that these girls were up to 30% less likely to marry before the age of 16 and up to 22% more likely to remain in school. Each dollar spent on such conditional transfer programs does about $4 of social good.

I never want to be disrespectful of Catholics and the Vatican, but this meddling is sheer Papal bull….rsk

Pope Francis warned Monday that history will judge the actions of leaders on climate change, saying the science is clear on the matter.

“These aren’t opinions pulled out of thin air. They are very clear. Then [world leaders] decide and history will judge those decisions,” Francis told reporters while on a trip to the South American country of Colombia.

The pope urged “those who deny this” to “go to the scientists and ask them” because “they speak very clearly.”

He brought up the topic of climate change as several major hurricanes hit the United States and the Caribbean. Climate scientists and environmental groups have used Hurricanes Harvey and Irma to point out that although global warming is not directly the cause of the storms, it is a factor making them much more devastating.

But bringing up climate change so quickly after the storms is misplaced and insensitive to the victims, according to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. He told CNN last week that the country’s focus should be on the immediate effects of the storms, not wading into a political debate over climate change.

“Here’s the issue. To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm, versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm, is misplaced,” Pruitt said. “All I’m saying to you is, to use time and effort to address it at this point is very, very insensitive to the people in Florida.”

Francis has given a copy of his 2015 encyclical on climate change to President Trump. The papal document determined that climate change was a being caused by manmade activities and that world leaders were not moving fast enough to address it.

As the nation continues to debate the critical, constitutional question of who can be punched and who cannot be punched (I vote for permitting the punching of slow drivers in the left lane and anyone who drinks Riesling), it appears the “peaceful” Left has a much more expansive list of acceptable human-punching bags. Liberals encourage their mob to assault not only Nazis, white supremacists and conservative speakers on college campuses, they are now advocating violence against people who dare to challenge the reigning dogma on manmade climate change.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/07/weathering-the-punches/

Two destructive hurricanes in the span of one week have emboldened the climate bullies. One of the most unhinged is actor Mark Ruffalo, best known for his role as Bruce Banner/the Hulk in Marvel’s multi-billion-dollar-earning Avengers movie series. Ruffalo must think that playing a scientist on the silver screen imbues him with some special scientific powers and moral authority, much like Martin Sheen started to think he was the president because he played one on The West Wing. Ruffalo is an outspoken—albeit ignorant and misinformed—climate activist who continues to cling to the thoroughly debunked idea that the country can be fully powered by renewable energy sources. He is also a Trump-hater and progressive rabble-rouser.

On Wednesday morning, as Hurricane Irma began pounding Caribbean islands on its alarming path towards Florida, Ruffalo was less Bruce Banner and more Hulk:
Mark Ruffalo

✔ @MarkRuffalo

I know not all people in the GOP are deniers. But their leadership is and they are in part responsible for these disasters going forward. https://twitter.com/markruffalo/status/905408275734245377 …

(Ruffalo was subtweeting another noted climate expert, Star Trek actor George Takei.)

One could write this off as just another emotional rant from an uneducated Hollywood celebrity. But Ruffalo has quite a following, including 3.4 million Twitter followers and the media’s admiration. So it is not without consequence when the actor invites his minions to attack a Trump Administration cabinet official and anyone deemed a climate change denier. Considering one of Ruffalo’s fellow Bernie Bros tried to assassinate several Republican congressmen earlier this summer, nearly killing one of them, it’s outrageous for a top celebrity activist to fan the flames in this kind of political environment.

It’s also a bit ironic, since he routinely tweets about love, compassion, and tolerance. But Ruffalo’s hypocrisies don’t stop there. Ruffalo claims to be a feminist champion except for conservative women (you can read about that here.) He regularly protests the use of fossil fuels, blasts corporations like Exxon, and demands states such as New York stop fracking, but he works in the entertainment business, one of the most energy-intensive industries. He is also an ardent foe of genetically engineered crops, which have numerous environmental benefits including retaining carbon in the soil and withstanding climate impacts.

His movie character isn’t the only thing about him with a split personality.

Well, it’s a start…

Lucy Smith reports for the Townsville (Queensland), Australia Bulletin:

A RENOWNED climate scientist has been jailed for fraudulently claiming half a million dollars in reimbursements from his employer.

Over seven years, Australian Institute of Marine Science senior researcher Daniel Michael Alongi lodged 129 claims for fictitious purchases totalling $553,420.

When police caught up with him in 2015, he told them he had spent the money on rare and antique books.

One book, about Captain James Cook’s journeys, cost $15,000.

Alongi, 60, pleaded guilty in Townsville District Court yesterday to defrauding the Federal Government agency.

Commonwealth prosecutor Chris Moore detailed Alongi’s “carefully executed” offending, which saw him earn far more than his $4000 a fortnight salary.

“To support the claims he created or modified invoices, receipts and credit card statements, along with drafting fake analysis reports and email trails,” he said.

Climate scientist Dr Daniel Alongi, who worked for the Australian Institute of Marine Science, leaves the Townsville Magistrates Court. (Photo: Townsville Bulletin.)

Compared to the gross fraud of anthropogenic global warming alarmism (that already has cost Australia dearly), this is small beer, even though the total is over half a million bucks (Australian dollars). Compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars squandered on crony green energy schemes, this is not even a rounding error.

Alongi is not some minor figure in the Warmist research establishment.

Eric Worrall comments:

According to Research Gate, Alongi has helped author 140 publications, and has been cited 5,861 times. All in the last few months has been bad for the image of mainstream climate science. First we had the Shukla 20 scandal, and now we have the Alongi fraud case. I’m not saying climate scientists are just in it for the money. I think there is substantial evidence that many of them truly believe. But clearly there is an awful lot of money on the table, which predominantly seems to go to scientists who support the position favoured by politicians. More than enough money to tempt the unscrupulous.

Shortly before Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, meteorologist and climate writer Eric Holthaus unleashed a Twitter torrent confessing his depression about the new president. Holthaus admitted he was seeing a counselor due to his “climate despair” and whimpered that it was difficult to work or do much of anything.

“We don’t deserve this planet,” Holthaus tweeted. “There are (many) days when I think it would be better off without us.”

But Hurricane Harvey has apparently boosted Holthaus’ spirits. He is working at a feverish pace now, churning out a number of “I-told-you-so” articles and interviews. By Monday, Holthaus had already penned an overwrought article for Politico, where he wags a literary finger at us:

We knew this would happen, decades ago. We knew this would happen, and we didn’t care. Now is the time to say it as loudly as possible: Harvey is what climate change looks like. More specifically, Harvey is what climate change looks like in a world that has decided, over and over, that it doesn’t want to take climate change seriously.

There was more back-patting: “If we don’t talk about the climate context of Harvey, we won’t be able to prevent future disasters and get to work on that better future. Those of us who know this need to say it loudly.”

Nothing like a devastating Category 4 hurricane to cure those climate blues!

Of course, Holthaus is not alone. Before the first raindrops started to fall in Houston, climate activists and their propagandists in the media were already blaming Harvey on man-made global warming. But that wasn’t enough. President Trump, his voters, and the Republican Congress are also culpable. Oliver Willis, a writer for the anti-Trump website Shareblue, suggested via several tweets Sunday morning that the hurricane could have been avoided had we listened to Al Gore, honored the Paris Climate Accord, and elected Hillary Clinton:

Even though some cooler heads in the scientific community cautioned against politicizing the hurricane while people were losing their lives, homes, and every possession, activists and the media would hear nothing of it. They persisted. Pope Francis even got in on the action, calling for a world day of prayer for the care of creation: “We appeal to those who have influential roles to listen to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor, who suffer the most from ecological imbalance.”

It’s impossible to catalog all the ridiculous comments and accusations made over the past week, so a few highlights will have to suffice. In a CNN.com article, Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University professor and regular climate scold, demanded the resignation of Texas Governor Greg Abbott over the hurricane: “Once the immediate crisis ends, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, should resign with an apology to his state and his country. Then the Texas delegation in Congress should make a public confession. They have lied to their constituents for too long, expecting the rest of America to keep bailing them out.” Sachs called Texas a “moral hazard state” (he must have missed all the amazing videos of Texans helping each other regardless of color or political persuasion) because “Houston is an oil town, and the American oil industry has been enemy No. 1 of climate truth and climate preparedness.” Despicable.

Some cheered the devastation. George Monbiot, a particularly noxious climate writer for The Guardian, implied Houston deserved what it got:

The storm ripped through the oil fields, forcing rigs and refineries to shut down, including those owned by some of the 25 companies that have produced more than half the greenhouse gas emissions humans have released since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Hurricane Harvey has devastated a place in which climate breakdown is generated, and in which the policies that prevent it from being addressed are formulated.

Cenk Uyger, co-host of a YouTube news roundtable called “The Young Turks” (he’s not so young, as it happens), best represented the unintellectual and unscientific view of the climate cult when he said this on Monday:

So, if you’re one of those snowflakes who is going to get triggered when I say this has to do with climate change, go ahead and cry right now. If you’re gonna say it’s too say it’s too soon, I’m gonna say it’s too late. It’s not too soon to talk about climate change, we should have talked about it a long time ago so these storms wouldn’t be this severe. If you are a knucklehead who doesn’t understand science, and you say, oh well we used to have storms like this before, that doesn’t answer anything.

Chris Cuomo, the amateur climatologist and brother of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, discussed Hurricane Harvey on his CNN show this week. Cuomo suggested that human emissions of carbon dioxide may be “why these storms happen.”

We know cable news suffers from a short attention span, so we’d like to suggest Cuomo take time over the long weekend to read up on hurricanes that occurred even before the Industrial Revolution.

But Cuomo also clearly needs to read some of the scientific literature on weather and climate. He suggested that if the White House focussed on climate policy, “we could figure out a way to reduce the number of these storms.”

No serious person believes that climate policy could bring us into a brave new world of fewer hurricanes. And if the number of large hurricanes we get is determined by policy, Trump ought to do whatever George W. Bush did in 2006 that put the brakes on powerful hurricanes for a decade.

Cuomo, packaging his faux science and total lack of historical context together with an ideological smugness, is typical of left-leaning politicians and journalists in the media these days.

Liberals have been crying wolf on this issue for more than a decade. “A link between climate change and more destructive hurricanes hints at the real-world impacts of this administration’s refusal to get serious about tackling the threat of global warming,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in October 2006. “It’s hard to think of a louder wake-up call than the destruction left in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.”

Former Vice President Al Gore used a satellite photograph of Hurricane Katrina to illustrate the poster for his 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and the movie all but asserted that global warming would produce more Katrinas.

Who says progressives don’t believe in religion? They may not believe in Jehovah or Jesus, but they certainly believe in Old Testament-style wrath against sinners. Real Noah and the Ark stuff. Witness the emerging theme on the media left that Texas, and especially Houston, are at fault for the devastation of Hurricane Harvey.

This has happened even faster than usual, perhaps because the Katrina II scenario of emergency mismanagement didn’t pan out. The state, local and federal governments have done a competent job under terrible conditions, and stories about neighborly charity, racial goodwill, the heroism of rescuers, and Big Business donating money and goods don’t fit into any agenda. Whinging over Melania’s heels also lacks political legs.

So our friends on the left have had to look elsewhere to score ideological points, and they believe they’ve found the right target in the political economy of those greedy Texans. Specifically, Houston is a global hub of the oil and gas industry, and it has allowed “laissez-faire” development without zoning laws. This has brought the righteous wrath of Harvey down on their own heads.

***

“Harvey, the Storm That Humans Helped Cause,” said a headline in one progressive bellwether as the storm raged. An overseas columnist was less subtle if more clichéd: “Houston, you have a problem, and some of it of your own making.” In this telling, Houston is the Sodom and Gomorrah of fossil fuels, which cause global warming, which is producing more hurricanes.

The problem is that this argument is fact-free. As Roger Pielke Jr. has noted, the link between global warming and recent hurricanes and extreme weather events is “unsupportable based on research and evidence.” Mr. Pielke, who is no climate-change denier, has shown with data that hurricanes hitting the U.S. have not increased in frequency or intensity since 1900, there is no notable trend up or down in global tropical cyclone landfalls since 1970, and floods have not increased in frequency or intensity in the U.S. since 1950.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently said that “it is premature to conclude that human activities—and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming—have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.”

No less than the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it lacks evidence to show that global warming is making storms and flooding worse. But climate scolds still blame Harvey on climate change because, well, this is what the climate models say should happen as the climate warms.

In other words, Houstonians, you’d better go to climate confession, mend your sinful ways, and give up all of those high-paying oil-and-gas jobs. Maybe all those drillers and refiners can work for Google or Facebook .