RUTHFULLY YOURS

The 2017 North Atlantic hurricane season has the climate change alarmists out in full force.

These activists claim that man-made global warming has made the Gulf of Mexico warmer and the air more humid, thereby making tropical cyclones — called hurricanes in the North Atlantic — more frequent and more intense. They demand we reduce our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to lessen the “increasing” hurricane threat.

Even scientists who should know better are promoting the hurricane/global warming connection. Dr. Gregory Flato — a Canadian government scientist who is vice chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group that reports on the causes of climate change — maintains:

There’s also an expectation that as the sea surface temperatures increase, that the intensity of very intense hurricanes will become larger.

Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University has made similar claims, asserting that the potential intensity of hurricanes and other large storms has risen as a result of climate change.

But basic observations and meteorological science do not support their claims.

Meteorologist Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and an expert on tropical cyclones, explains:

[M]ajor hurricanes don’t really care whether the Gulf [of Mexico] is above average or below average in temperature.

Similarly, in a research paper published in March 2017, M. Mohapatra and V. Vijay Kumar, both of the India Meteorological Department, state:

[T]here is a decreasing trend in the tropical cyclone number over the North Indian Ocean in recent years, though there is an increasing trend in the sea surface temperature.

That ocean temperature rise in the Gulf of Mexico will not increase hurricane frequency has been part of fundamental meteorology since the 1970s. America’s “hurricane guru,” the late Dr. Bill Gray — emeritus professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University (CSU) and the head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences — showed in peer-reviewed research that the seasonal hurricane frequency is determined by six climatological factors:

1. The rotational tendency, or vorticity, already present in the atmosphere. Low vorticity lessens the likelihood of a hurricane forming.

2. Pressure gradients determined by latitude. Low pressure gradients lessen the likelihood of a hurricane forming. Within 4 to 5 degrees of the equator, pressure gradients are too weak for hurricanes to form.

3. Wind shear, the changes in wind speed and direction that occur between layers in the atmosphere. Low wind shear allows the whole system in a growing hurricane, from sea level up to around 15,000 meters, to turn together. This helps to keep the storm intact and strengthening. High wind shear essentially cuts the top off a cyclone before it can become a hurricane.

4. Ocean thermal energy as indicated by temperatures to a depth of 60 meters. Temperatures in the Gulf and other hurricane formation regions are always above the critical value of 26.7 degrees Celsius necessary to spawn hurricanes at this time of year. Therefore, like trying to put more water into a full bucket, higher ocean temperatures have relatively little effect on the frequency or intensity of hurricanes.

5. The rate of change of temperature with altitude. High rates of change encourage hurricane formation.

6. Relative humidity in the mid-troposphere, a layer centered at about 5 km above the surface.

Of these six factors, only wind shear has been exceptional this year in the Gulf of Mexico.

It was very low wind shear, not temperature, vorticity, humidity, or anything else, that is therefore the main cause of the high activity in this year’s hurricane season. And wind shear is a natural phenomenon that varies across the globe and is determined by a host of meteorological factors, none of which are under human control.

The global warming/hurricane connection completely falls apart when one looks at the observational data.

For example, during the 1945-1977 cooling period, when ocean temperatures worldwide were undoubtedly lower than today, we witnessed stronger hurricanes than now. Hurricane Camille, the second-most intense tropical cyclone to strike the U.S. on record, slammed into Mississippi as a category 5 (the strongest) hurricane on August 18, 1969, producing a storm surge of 7.3 meters. Hurricane Flora struck in September 1963, killing over 6,000 people. This was the highest number of fatalities for a tropical cyclone in the Atlantic Basin since the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, which may have claimed as many as 12,000 lives.

The strongest tropical cyclone on record worldwide was not recent, either. It was the 2,200 km-wide “Super Typhoon” Tip which made landfall in southern Japan on October 19, 1979, immediately following the global cooling period (by contrast, Irma was about 680 km in diameter; Harvey about 400 km).

The biggest storm surges worldwide were 14.5 meters in Australia in 1899 and 13.6 meters in Bangladesh in 1876. During the warmer 21st century, no tropical cyclone was strong enough to generate a surge greater than 10 meters.

The fact that hurricanes and other tropical cyclones are not caused by — or even significantly enhanced by — man does not give us an excuse to do nothing about them, however. CONTINUE AT SITE

The recent wave of hurricanes that lashed the US had no sooner done their worst than all the paid-up and grant-fed members of Climate Catastrophe Inc., were crying ‘We told you so!’ Yes, they have told us, repeatedly. And just as often they have been wrong, as they are now and once again.

Don’t know why. There’s no sun up in the sky. Stormy weather. Ah! Gaia is very, very, angry.

Windmills providing expensive, intermittent and unreliable power — the idols of our age — must be built to appease Gaia. Deplorables are dispensable. Those without base-load power in developing countries, plus coal miners, the old, the infirm, the poor must all be sacrificed. Only then will Gaia smile on us again.

I told some ‘warmist’ friends about a Category 4 hurricane hitting Galveston in Texas, generating a fifteen-foot tidal surge, and killing an estimated 8000 people. The deadliest natural disaster in US history. I let it stew for a moment or two before revealing the time: September 1900. I don’t think it made an impression. The climate change ethos has etched itself so deeply into the minds of disciples that it is impervious to clashing information.

Effectively, climate change has become an idolatry masquerading as science. Destructive climate events, however commonplace historically, cause much wailing, finger-pointing and scapegoating. High priests in the guise of climate gurus, like Gore, Flannery, Mann and Suzuki, come into their own. Reason succumbs to superstition.

Take hurricanes.

The latest information, sourced from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), indicates that hurricane activity has not increased by either frequency or scale during recent decades – so far as can be determined. The data going back is patchy and unreliable; as, in fact, is all climate-related data.

I looked at the hurricane data from the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA for the Atlantic Basin for the period from 1851 to 2016. In the ten years to 2016, there were 28 “major” hurricanes recorded. In the previous ten years 39 were recorded. This is relatively high when compared with the whole period from 1851. However, 39 major hurricanes were recorded for the ten years to 1956 and 32 for the ten years to 1966, before dropping to 17 and 16 in the next two succeeding decades. So, what to say? Hurricanes come and go.

There is nothing markedly unusual happening. But, you wouldn’t think that if you suffer the unfortunate experience of tuning into widespread alarmist commentaries and news bulletins. Those who claim to believe in science are quick to dispense with it when it doesn’t suit their storyline. They point to the latest hurricanes as yet more evidence of climate change. And you can bet your life that every storm, drought and heat wave from now on will draw the same response.

They suffer no embarrassment in making such outlandish claims. They are impervious to any factual rebuttals. They have a higher calling.

I understand that the current scientific theory is that warmer water tends to engender more airborne turbulence. Maybe it does. I don’t know. I am not a climate scientist, just an ordinary Joe. But what I do know is that warmer water is not necessarily man-made. Maybe the climate is just warming as it has in early periods of time; and, in any event, maybe it is not warming as much as the high priests tell us. This brings me to a recent climatologist recantation.

A recent article in the Washington Post details five nutrition “facts” we used to be believe. It ends by saying something that you rarely read but is entirely accurate: “In fact, we don’t have a lot of answers about nutrition, which is considered a relatively new science.” But to listen to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and popular food activists, you would think the only issue is that Americans just aren’t listening.

The real problems don’t start with consumers, they start with scientific and economic shortcuts. The consequences of bad policies are dire: poor nutrition is linked to chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Unfortunately, one out of every two adults suffer from one or more preventable chronic diseases.

But the federal officials who are charged with making nutrition policies continue to make poorly informed decisions. In 2009, the USDA instituted a program that excluded white potatoes from the Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), presumably to address obesity. They did this despite the fact that many Americans have shortfalls in potassium and potatoes are a great source of this nutrient. Five years later, they finally asked the Institute of Medicine whether this was a good move.

Predictably, one of the Institute’s findings was that “Intakes of … potassium … among low-income women, fall short of current nutrient intake recommendations.” The program may have slightly affected obesity in children, although it is not clear that it has anything to do with potatoes.

The FDA, meanwhile, just finalized its regulations to put calorie labeling in restaurants, theaters, and grocery stores. The rule was initially finalized in 2014 but put on hold by the current administration. Studies are mixed as to whether or not posting calories will do just a little bit or no good whatsoever. But science is not the reason this rule is going forward.

The National Restaurant Association supported the rule, originally as part of the Affordable Care Act, because there was a growing “patchwork” of local and state laws requiring it. This is a perfect example of how not to make scientifically based health policies. In letting the rule go, the Commissioner announced that the rule would institute “predictable, uniform federal standards,” precisely what industry needed. Again, the real problem was with that we did not pay attention to the first adopters, who demonstrated that the information wouldn’t help with obesity.

At least the five nutrition facts cited earlier were originally based on some science. One myth in the article was that “All fat is bad.” But it was only in 2010 when the Dietary Guidelines committee stopped recommending limits on total fats, although they still recommended reducing saturated fat. The original myth was about total fat, but recently multiple studies have found that polyunsaturated fats (and possibly monounsaturated fats) found in foods such as walnuts, salmon, and soybean oil are now considered good for you.

Even more recently, a 2014 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine was unable to conclude that even saturated fats caused heart disease. Moreover, it remains unclear whether unsaturated fats are good for you. These are still controversial findings, and, without clear scientific backing, policymakers should proceed with caution.

More specifically, public health policy must always be preceded by both sound science and cost-benefit analysis.

Sound scientific evidence must be present for a positive public health benefit to be amply demonstrated. Had there been more research to indicate what manufacturers might do to replace animal fats in the 1980s, activists might not have campaigned so hard against trans fats. As for cost-benefit analysis: “Trying” out public policies, such as nutrition labeling, without credible analysis showing that benefits exceed costs, removes public resources that can be better spent addressing public policies that do pass such a test.

These problems are exacerbated in the case of the new science of nutrition. For diet and disease relationships, dietary guidance and nutrition policy based on memory-based recall data have been shown by professor Edward Archer to be “pseudoscience and inadmissible.” These data, which underpin most of the advice from the Dietary Guidelines, ask consumers to remember what and how much they ate in the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, well over half of consumers do not report eating enough to stay alive. If the data that go into diet-disease relationships are flawed, then the correlations between dietary choices and disease may be wrong. This means that much of the current advice and policies may be wrong.

Call it another dispute about the “settled science” of climate change.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/23/more-unsettled-science-on-climate-change/

According to a report published in Nature Geosciences last week, we have more time than we thought to stop the predicted meltdown of the planet. Not only are climate models way off—“running hot” by overestimating temperature increases—but the warming we were supposed to experience this century hasn’t happened as most climate models anticipated. What’s even more alarming to the climate tribe is that this study, “Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 [degrees Celsius],” is authored by several prominent climate scientists,, many of whom have warned of planetary doom if we don’t cap global warming within the 1.5 C range.

First, some background: Most climate agencies report the world has warmed by about 0.9 C since the late-1800s; climate scientists insist we need dramatic decreases in carbon dioxide emissions to keep the overall temperature increase to 1.5 C (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. This means Mother Earth has about 0.6 C left in her global warming thermometer before we break the glass. The entire raison d’etre for the Paris Climate Accord is to oblige nations immediately to cut carbon emissions so we can keep warming “well below” a 2 C rise over pre-industrial levels.

There have been varying, desperate pleas about how much time we have left to stop global warming. Some scientists lament that we are already past the point of no return. Others, including the former United Nations climate chief, warned in a paper published in June that we only have three years left to stop human-caused global warming and if “emissions continue to rise beyond 2020, or even remain level, the temperature goals set in Paris become almost unattainable.”

But this new paper suggests we have about 20 years until we will need a mass conversion to using solar panels and Teslas in order to bring total CO2 emissions to zero (a wholly punitive, unnecessary, and impossible goal.) The conclusion is based on a complicated calculation of how much of a “carbon budget” (total CO2) we have left to burn before we get into the danger zone; according to an editorial that accompanied the paper, “the amount of carbon that humans could emit before Earth warms to that 1.5 C threshold is larger than previously estimated.” Despite howls from the media, Democrats, and climate pimps like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who last week said it was already too late to recover from man-made climate change, the key goal of the Paris Climate Accord is “not yet a geophysical impossibility . . . we have more breathing space than previously thought.”

This is the inescapable conclusion of a landmark paper, published in Nature Geoscience, which finally admits that the computer models have overstated the impact of carbon dioxide on climate and that the planet is warming more slowly than predicted.

The paper – titled Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C – concedes that it is now almost impossible that the doomsday predictions made in the last IPCC Assessment Report of 1.5 degrees C warming above pre-industrial levels by 2022 will come true.

In order for that to happen, temperatures would have to rise by a massive 0.5 degrees C in five years.

Since global mean temperatures rarely rise by even as much as 0.25 degrees C in a decade, that would mean the planet would have to do 20 years’ worth of extreme warming in the space of the next five years.

This, the scientists admit, is next to impossible. Which means their “carbon budget” – the amount of CO2 they say is needed to increase global warming by a certain degree – is wrong. This in turn means that the computer models they’ve been using to scare the world with tales of man-made climate doom are wrong too.

One researcher – from the alarmist side of the argument, not the skeptical one – has described the paper’s conclusion as “breathtaking” in its implications.

He’s right. The scientists who’ve written this paper aren’t climate skeptics. They’re longstanding warmists, implacable foes of climate skeptics, and they’re also actually the people responsible for producing the IPCC’s carbon budget.

In other words, this represents the most massive climbdown from the alarmist camp.

But you certainly wouldn’t guess this from the way the scientists are trying to spin their report.

According to the London Times:

Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate change at University College London and one of the study’s authors, admitted that his previous prediction had been wrong.

He stated during the climate summit in Paris in December 2015: “All the evidence from the past 15 years leads me to conclude that actually delivering 1.5C is simply incompatible with democracy.”

Speaking to The Times, he said: “When the facts change, I change my mind, as Keynes said.

“It’s still likely to be very difficult to achieve these kind of changes quickly enough but we are in a better place than I thought.”

and

Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and another author of the paper, said: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”

He said that the group of about a dozen computer models, produced by government research institutes and universities around the world, had been assembled a decade ago “so it’s not that surprising that it’s starting to divert a little bit from observations”.

He said that too many of the models used “were on the hot side”, meaning they forecast too much warming.

Note the disingenuousness here.

Grubb is claiming that the facts have changed. Which they haven’t. Climate skeptics have been saying for years that the IPCC climate models have been running “too hot.” Indeed, the Global Warming Policy Foundation produced a paper stating this three years ago. Naturally, it was ignored by alarmists who have always sought to marginalize the GWPF as a denialist institution which they claim – erroneously – is in the pay of sinister fossil fuel interests.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has been doing the leftist media interview circuit recently, pressing his peculiar thesis that professional (i.e., paid) scientists are a superior class of humans whose conclusions are intrinsically beyond reproach and must therefore be accepted blindly by unscientific lunks like you.

In each of these interviews, a non-climate scientist asks a series of predetermined questions designed to elicit rehearsed responses from the non-climate scientist Tyson, the upshot of which is that (a) people who question man-made global warming are anti-scientific fools driven by irrational agendas; (b) scientific consensus is not the product of the social and political pressures of academic life working on the minds of the career-motivated, publication-obsessed majority of scholarly mediocrities, but rather consensus is the very definition of Objective Truth; and (c) anyone who questions a scientific consensus poses a threat to the survival of democracy.

For an example of (a), here is Tyson’s explanation of why some people continue to question the alleged scientific consensus on global warming:

What’s happening here is that there are people who have cultural, political, religious, economic philosophies that they then invoke when they want to cherry pick one scientific result or another.

In other words, non-scientists who have the audacity to cite scientific results falling outside the consensus as grounds for questioning global warming are just people with agendas who are refusing to accept the settled science, for anti-scientific reasons. This doesn’t account for the actual scientists who produced those dissenting results or hypotheses. Are they also to be dismissed as mere “deniers,” since their views do not match the consensus?

Tyson’s answer appears to be yes, as he offers this interesting definition of “objective truth,” answering to talking point (b), above:

For an emergent scientific truth to become an objective truth – a truth that is true whether or not you believe in it – it requires more than one scientific paper. It requires a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences. That’s what we have with climate change as induced by human conduct. This is a known correspondence. If you want to find the three percent of the papers or the one percent of the papers that conflicted with this, and build policy on that – that is simply irresponsible.

So according to Tyson, science is ultimately defined not by superior individual minds defying accepted views – i.e., standing against a consensus. No, science is rather defined by consensus itself, for consensus alone establishes objective truth, which “is true whether or not you believe in it.” (Funny – I always thought Nature or God established objective truth, but apparently, in our nihilistic progressive age, that task has devolved to the collective of university professors.)

And what is a scholarly consensus? It is “a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences.” Tyson conveniently leaves out the most important factor: “all beginning from the same underlying premises.”

The left’s response to the natural disasters in Florida was to raise again the bogeyman of man-made global warming. The left blames every natural disaster or significant change in weather on man-made global warming. So if the weather is unseasonably hot, man-made global warming is the culprit, but if the weather is unseasonably cold, the man-made global warming is to blame as well. The “science” of the left simply plugs in man-made global warming to every natural disaster or significant change in the weather.

This is anti-science in its purest form. Totalitarianism – and the left is utterly totalitarian – always claims to base its actions upon “science.” So the Nazis insisted and persuaded many scientists involved in genetics, psychology, biology, and so forth to agree with Nazi racial policies as “scientific,” and almost everything that happened was accounted for by the Nazis as part of racial “science.” So the Soviets coerced all scientists to accept as an overarching “science” Marxism, and so geneticists and physicists were sent to the Gulag or worse if their scientific discoveries conflicted with Marxist “science.”

The settled “science,” which is to say anti-science, is screeched by the left despite the fact that more than 4,000 scientists, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from more than 100 nations signed the Heidelberg Appeal, which explicitly challenged politically correct science and warned against “irrational ideology” and “pseudoscientific arguments of false and nonrelevant data.”

Even more interesting is the Oregon Petition from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which explicitly stated that there was “no convincing scientific evidence” of global warming and noted that rising carbon dioxide is beneficial to plants and animals. This petition has been signed by more than 30,000 scientists in America.

The left assumes global warming when a truly scientific analysis of the data could mean a stable climate, a cooling climate (which is what the great scientist Sir Fred Hoyle believed was the case at the end of the last century), or global warming. The left not only prostitutes science into insisting upon man-made global warming, but ignores any explanation for climate change, assuming that climate change is real, which conflicts with its politically correct theory of man-made global warming.

So the left ignores dramatic changes in global climate about which we have abundant evidence, scientific and documentary, based upon people living in these periods. During the Roman Warm Period, the climate was 2℃ to 6℃ hotter than it is today. The Dark Age Cold Period saw a significantly cooler climate than today. The Medieval Warming Period, which lasted centuries, saw the climate 3℃ warmer than it is today, and the Little Ice Age, which ended shortly before the American Civil War, saw temperatures 2℃ lower than today.

None of these climatic changes in temperature can be explained by human activity, and all of them produced changes greater than what the Chicken Little leftists claim will produce the end of civilization.

The left also ignores explanations for any global warming that do not involve human activity. Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research in Denmark, proposes a new theory for possible global warming and a new discipline, cosmoclimatology. Svensmark shows how cosmic rays have affected the climate on Earth over thousands of years. Perhaps even more persuasive, Svensmark notes that the climate changes of Mars track very closely the climate changes on Earth and that these changes fit closely into his theory that climate change is caused by cosmic rays and other forces of nature operating outside Earth. This does not preclude global warming; rather, it finds that natural forces, cosmic forces, in this case, account for global warming and not human activity.

UNITED NATIONS—U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May said the Paris climate agreement is a key part of promoting global security and prosperity in what appeared to be a rebuke of President Donald Trump’s pledge to leave the accord.

Mrs. May, in her remarks to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, said global commitment to a rules-based system is critical as nations face threats such as North Korea’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons programs and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people.

“It is this rules-based system which we have developed, including the institutions, the international frameworks of free and fair trade, agreements such as the Paris Climate Change accord and laws and conventions like the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which enables the global cooperation through which we can protect those values,” she said.

The Trump administration had sent signals over the weekend that it was exploring ways to remain in the 2015 pact, but the White House said Monday that the U.S. will leave the deal “unless we can re-engage on terms more favorable to the United States.”

In her address to the U.N. on Wednesday, Mrs. May said that the U.K. is committed to being a global player but didn’t specifically mention its planned exit from the European Union.

“Both globally but also in our own continent of Europe, the U.K. will remain steadfast in our commitment and responsibility to ensure the security and stability of our allies as we have done for generations,” she said.

Mr. Maue, a research meteorologist, is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

“The historical record books contain dozens of devastating hurricane landfalls over the past century, any of which, if repeated, would be catastrophic regardless of additional climate-change effects. To prepare for the next hurricane, the U.S. needs the best weather forecasts, evacuation plans and leadership. These plans should be built on sound science, not speculation, overselling or exaggeration. Hurricane science in this political climate already has enough spin.”

As soon as Hurricanes Harvey and Irma made landfall in the U.S., scientists, politicians and journalists began to discuss the role of climate change in natural disasters. Although a clear scientific consensus has emerged over the past decade that climate change influences hurricanes in the long run, its effect upon any individual storm is unclear. Anyone trying to score political points after a natural disaster should take a deep breath and review the science first.

As a meteorologist with access to the best weather-forecast model data available, I watched each hurricane’s landfall with particular interest. Harvey and Irma broke the record 12-year major hurricane landfall drought on the U.S. coastline. Since Wilma in October 2005, 31 major hurricanes had swirled in the North Atlantic but all failed to reach the U.S. with a Category 3 or higher intensity.

Even as we worked to divine exactly where the hurricanes would land, a media narrative began to form linking the devastating storms to climate change. Some found it ironic that states represented by “climate deniers” were being pummeled by hurricanes. Alarmists reveled in the irony that Houston, home to petrochemical plants, was flooded by Harvey, while others gleefully reported that President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago might be inundated by Irma.

How to put these two hurricanes into proper context? An informative website from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, synthesizes reams of research literature on the links between hurricanes and global warming. Over the next century, climate models generally indicate fewer but stronger storms—between 2% and 11% greater average storm intensity—with substantially increased rain rates. Against the background of slow sea-level rise, explosive coastal population growth will overwhelmingly exacerbate any hurricane’s damages. In the aggregate, the global-warming signal may just now be emerging out of our noisy observational records, and we may not know certainly for several decades. These conclusions are hardly controversial in the climate-science community.

My own research, cited in a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, found that during the past half-century tropical storms and hurricanes have not shown an upward trend in frequency or accumulated energy. Instead they remain naturally variable from year-to-year. The global prevalence of the most intense storms (Category 4 and 5) has not shown a significant upward trend either. Historical observations of extreme cyclones in the 1980s, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, are in sore need of reanalysis.

By focusing on whether climate change caused a hurricane, journalists fail to appreciate the complexity of extreme weather events. While most details are still hazy with the best climate modeling tools, the bigger issue than global warming is that more people are choosing to live in coastal areas, where hurricanes certainly will be most destructive.

CONTINUE AT SITE

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.