Archives par mot-clé : Discussion

climate-debate

Reasons Why Regulating CO2 Emissions Needs to be Reconsidered

by Dr R. Spencer, Feb 26, 2025 in ClimateWarming

Today, the Washington Post is reporting the EPA Administrator is considering recommending to the White House that the EPA’s 2009 CO2 Endangerment Finding be rescinded. Let’s look at a few of the reasons why this might be a good thing to consider.

Today, the Washington Post is reporting the EPA Administrator is considering recommending to the White House that the EPA’s 2009 CO2 Endangerment Finding be rescinded. Let’s look at a few of the reasons why this might be a good thing to consider.

The Science

The science of human-caused climate change is much more uncertain that you have been led to believe. The globally-averaged surface temperature of Earth seems to have warmed by 1 deg. C or so in the last century. The magnitude of the warming remains uncertain with a 30% range in different thermometer-based datasets, and considerably weaker warming in global “reanalysis” datasets using all available data types. But whatever the level of warming, it might well be mostly human-caused.

But we don’t really know.

As I keep pointing out, the global energy imbalance caused by increasing human-caused CO2 emissions (yes, I believe we are the cause) is smaller than the accuracy with which we know natural energy flows in the climate system. This means recent warming could be mostly natural and we would never know it.

I’m not claiming that is the case, only that there are uncertainties in climate science that are seldom if ever discussed. The climate models that are the basis for future projections of climate change are adjusted (fudged?) so that increasing CO2 is the only cause of warming. The models themselves do not have all of the necessary physics (mostly due to cloud process uncertainties) to determine whether our climate system was in a state of equilibrium before CO2 was increasing. (And, no, I don’t believe the warming caused the oceans to outgas more CO2 — that effect is very small compared to the size of the human source).

As most readers here are aware, for many years I’ve been saying the science of “climate change” has been corrupted by big government science budgets, ideological worldview biases, and group-think. Even my career has depended upon Congress being convinced the issue is worthy of big budgets.

It is almost impossible for new science to be published in the peer-reviewed literature that in any way runs counter to the current narrative which states that humans are causing a “climate crisis” from our CO2 emissions, a natural consequence of fossil fuel burning. That “peer review” is now in the hands of climate scientists whose research careers depend upon continuing government funding. If the “problem” of global warming were to be much less than previously believed, funding for that research could dry up.

The most alarmist science papers are the ones that get all of the press, which then get exaggerated and misrepresented by the news media. As a result, the public has a very skewed perception of what scientists really know.

As Roger Pielke, Jr. has been pointing out for many years, even the IPCC’s official reports do not claim that our greenhouse gas emissions have caused changes in severe weather. Every severe weather event in the news is now dutifully tied in some inferential way to human causation, but with public opinion of mainstream news outlets at an all-time low, fewer and fewer people take those news reports seriously. Severe weather has always existed, and always will. Storm damages have increased only because of increasing infrastructure and everyone wanting to live on the coast.

And about the only, clear, long-term change I’m aware of is a 50% decline in strong to violent tornadoes since the 1950s.

But you would never know of any good climate news if your main source of information is Al Gore’s books, your favorite environmental think tank (that you contribute to so you can get their yearly calendar), or the mainstream media.

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climate-debate

NOAA’s Data Shows Rising Average Temps Driven By Growth And Measurement Flaws—Not Climate Change

by L. Hamlin, Oct 7, 2024 in ClimateChangeDispatch

NOAA’s U.S. contiguous U.S. summer measured minimum and maximum temperature trends (June through August) over the period 1895 through 2024 (shown below from NOAA’s Climate at a Glance Times series data website) show clear and distinct differing temperature trend increasing growth compared to the calculated average temperature trend outcome. [emphasis, links added]

The minimum temperature trend outcomes after 1985 climb significantly faster than the maximum measured temperature trend outcomes. U.S. population data shows an increase of about 100 million during the 1980 to 2023 period.

Since the average temperature is not a measured value but instead the calculated mathematical average of the minimum and maximum measured temperatures {(Tmax + Tmin)/2}, the average temperature-calculated trend outcome is controlled and dominated by the much larger increase occurring in the minimum-measured temperature trend versus the maximum measured temperature trend.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Restoring Scientific Debate on Climate

by Jim Steele, Oct 3, 2020 in WUWT

The political genius of Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to unify the country during America’s most divisive time has been attributed to assembling a “team of rivals”. Likewise, scientific research is published so rivals and supporters of a hypothesis can independently and critically examine it. The great benefits of a team of rivals is also the basis for convening red team/blue team debates.

In 2017, Dr Steve Koonin, a physicist who served as Obama’s Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy, urged convening red-team blue-team debates for climate science in his article A ‘Red Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science.  “The national-security community pioneered the “Red Team” methodology to test assumptions and analyses, identify risks, and reduce—or at least understand—uncertainties. The process is now considered a best practice in high-consequence situations”.

Unfortunately, the public climate science debate has been framed as “deniers” versus “alarmists”, or “honest saintly scientists” versus “corrupt perpetrators of a hoax”.  The media pushes exaggerated claims of a crisis while some scientists misleadingly shield their hypotheses claiming the “science is settled”.  But science is a process and never settled. However, all sides do agree carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and concentrations have increased. All sides agree the climate is changing. That science is indeed settled. But complex climate dynamics are not driven solely by CO2 and many unsettled questions remain.  Scientists still debate whether climate has a higher or lower sensitivity to rising CO2. Answering that question depends on the unsettled science regards competing contributions from natural variability and landscape changes. And because rising CO2 and warmth benefits photosynthesizing plants, scientists debate the beneficial contributions of rising CO2.

Climate models could not replicate recent warming when only natural climate change was considered. But models could simulate recent warming since 1970s after adding CO2. That was the only evidence that supported the notion that increasing CO2 caused observed warming. However, there’s a flaw in such reasoning. Models limited to just natural climate dynamics failed to explain recent changes simply because our understanding is still incomplete. For example the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a major driver of natural climate change was only recently characterized in 1997, but has been shown to account for 100 years of changing climate along the coasts of the north eastern Pacific.

 

Urban Heat Island profile Image from Lawrence Berkeley Labs

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