I am restoring this seminal article from 27 March 2023 in which I processed my transition from being a believer in Abrupt Climate Change to being more open-minded and sceptical about what we are being told about climate change.
****
“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.”
—Goebbels
Seemorerocks
INTRODUCTION
I first heard of the Greenhouse Effect back in 1988 from an article in the Bangkok Post when I was there. I read Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance and became part of discussions back in New Zealand with those involved in this subject and ended up becoming a member of the Green Party.
Fast forward to about 11 years ago and I discovered Guy McPherson and was convinced by his arguments.
This was because I was never convinced about all the discussions around “solutions”. I was sceptical about the world getting together to “solve” what I instinctively felt (perhaps unconsciously) until I listened to Guy McPherson was a predicament - in other words, did not have a solution.
Guy’s was the right message at the right time.
Climate change, (I prefer the older term, global warning), was irreversible because of numerous feedback loops he identified.
Humanity was headed for extinction.
During the el-Nino around 2018 I started noticing strange skies that I had never seen in my over 60 years on the planet, neither here in Wellington, nor in Canterbury where I grew up.
I put out feelers. What was this about? My questions went unanswered and I realised that there was only one possible explanation for all this - geoengineering.
For this I was cold-shouldered by Guy McPherson and literally thrown out of the NTHE community - for asking questions!
So, left to my own resources and I started doing my own research. I started looking, in particular, at the state of Arctic Ice and joined with Margo’s daily monitoring.
I learned a lot through that. I uncovered, with Margo’s help, many lies, including manipulation of data, including satellite photos and a complete distortion of data to hide the fact that the state of the ice was way, way worse than we were being told.
I had to reconcile this and came to my own conclusion that the official IPCC version of events was meant to provide the justification for what they call Agenda-21 or, now, the Great Reset.
A rapidly declining ice coverage associated with rising temperatures and increasing CO2 and methane levels was not in the interests of the Powers-that-be who require a slower-moving situation to exercise their dictatorial power over the masses who had to make all the sacrifices while the elite flew around in private jets to discuss “solutions”.
I could never embrace any arguments of the sceptics and the denialists. They were ludicrous -saying things like the sea ice in the Arctic was increasing when I knew the opposite was true.
They certainly were not going to persuade me of anything.
Despite my mind being far more open I could not find anything to convince me despite a growing realisation that most of what we were being told were barefaced lies.
Then, at the beginning of 2020 came covid-19, which I quickly realised was mostly a scam and the campaign to get us all “vaccinated” with an experimental gene-therapy product was entirely based on lies and a large degree of force and the cruel treatment of those that did not want to partake of this experiment.
Now, with an unknown number of deaths (“adult death syndrome”) and injuries we now know that a genocide is taking place under our noses.
In short, the last 3 years has turned my entire world upside down and upset many assumptions I had been living with for at least 30 years. I realised that just about everything we are told by government and media was a LIE.
All my previously-heard assumptions had to be reassessed.
And that included climate change.
I had already realised that much of what we were being told by government, media, IPCC and establishment scientists was a distortion of the truth.
I had come across the works of Ian Wishart who could best be described as ‘right wing, conservative Christian’.
How about scholar?
I had already read his book on the lead-up to New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi…. which I found was full of suppressed documents that contradicted the official narrative - not selected quotes selected to bolster a predetermined thesis like many polished, professional historians but the whole thing so readers could make up their own minds.
After the catastrophic floods in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand in February, he challenged claims by NIWA (New Zealand’s equivalent of NOAA) that these were the worst floods in the country’s history, by checking the historical record (unlike the officials).
He found that there were worse floods (expressed by air pressure) in the mid-19th century, a time when temperatures were lower and greenhouse gas levels were lower.
https://twitter.com/investigatemag/status/1632682331835359234
I was generally impressed by his scholarship and, especially, by ability to unearth documents that were embarrassing to the authorities, so I decided to read his book Air Con and found his scholarship, once again, impressive.
He came up with documents and papers that I was completely unaware of that put a dent in the assumptions that I was still left with. I am not ready to entirely embrace all his conclusions but it has been enough to make me think deeply and be far more sceptical and questioning of what we are being told.
What follows is what I have gathered from reading his book.
The climate change agenda and Wokeism
As I was in the final stages of putting this article together I came across this comment from Konstantin Kisin, the Russian-British comedian and commentator on the Woke agenda.
It is interesting how the climate change agenda intersects with Wokeism.
Back in the day, when I was part of Guy McPherson's Nature Bats Last adopting wokeism and the LGBTQ agenda was a prerequisite for being a member of the Facebook group.
At the time, an exception was made for me, presumably because I was "useful to the cause".
I've never understood how one has anything to do with the other but there we are.
The Greenhouse Effect and the planet Venus
One of the important planks in my understanding of the greenhouse effect has been the planet Venus ,which has a temperature of 480C, hot enough to melt lead and an atmosphere comprised almost entirely of CO2.
This is of course due to CO2's quality of trapping heat. But not entirely. What I didn't realise until pointed out by Wishart is that a day on Venus lasts 243 Earth days, whereas a year on Venus lasts 225 Earth days
That's enough reason for a planet close to the sun to fry.
Sources of CO2 emissions
According to the official narrative of global warming it’s carbon dioxide that is responsible for our plight this century and we need to bring emissions down to "net zero".
However, Wishart and others point out that
"CO2 makes up only 385 parts per million in the atmosphere or, expressed another way, only 0.038% of the concoction we call “air”.
Put another way
"What one sees coming out of factory chimneys, in ubiquitous media photographs, is not CO2. It is mostly water vapour, plus nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, methane, water vapour and various forms of particulates, with noxious CO2 forming less than 5% of these emissions"
Greenhouse gases are crucial for life on earth to exist because of their ability to dissipate and transfer heat, as well as their insulative effects at night. But the greenhouse gases have other benefits too
Water vapour
There is no doubt that there has been a noticable increase in water vapour in the atmosphere. It is said that for every degree of warming there is a 7% increase in water vapour.
Wishart says:
“In global warming theory, water vapour is the elephant in the room that no global warming believers really want to talk about. And when they do, they talk around it and deflect back to carbon”
He quotes this:
“By far the biggest player in global warming is, however, water vapour. Up to 4.0% of air is water vapour, steam, call it what you like. Not only is water vapour vastly more prevalent than CO2, it is also directly responsible for 90 to 95% of Earth’s greenhouse effect.
“The remaining portion [5 to 10% influence] comes from carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, ozone and miscellaneous other minor greenhouse gases.” .
junkscience.com/Greenhouse/. (Note: this link does not work any more).
“As an example of the relative importance of water, it should be noted that changes in the relative humidity on the order of 1.3-4% are equivalent to the effect of doubling CO2.”
CO2 emissions (both human and natural) are responsible for between 5 and 10% of global warming.
The rest is water vapour.
And yet the climate scientists dismiss this 90% contribution to global warming in this way.
“There is some truth in this, insofar as water vapour is a greenhouse gas, but … you will discover it is important to understand the difference between a forcing and a feedback. Carbon dioxide and methane are forcings – they cause the planet to warm. Water vapour is a feedback. The amount of water in the air is a consequence of temperature, and it in turns results in more warming. There’s nothing we can do about feedbacks, but we can control anthropogenic forcings.”
---James Hrynystyn, “Island of Doubt”
Wishart says; the sun has been the primary “forcer” up until now, and increased solar radiation can and does result in increased evaporation from oceans, lakes and rivers, thus creating more water vapour which then cloaks the planet in warm humidity. Carbon dioxide doesn’t have to be a significant ignition factor in that equation at all, and in fact might well be a by-product, a feedback, itself, rather than a “forcer”..
Photosynthesis
One thing that remains with me from school biology is photosynthesis - how plants process sunlight to synthesise nutrients from carbon dioxide and water and produce oxygen.
One of the things climate change deniers latch on to is how CO2 " is crucial for all life, and crucial for humanity’s survival in particular".
The denialists point out that climate change propagandists say CO2 is a pollutant. I really couldn't believe that this was possible until I found this article from the site Skeptical Science a few years ago.
They actually do say it is a pollutant, while it is true that it is essential part of life.
A counter-argument, however, may be that it is as the sceptics point out, a trace gas ("0.038% of the concoction we call “air”).
You can't have it both ways.
The sun as a forcer of climate change
Wishart says; the sun has been the primary “forcer” up until now, and increased solar radiation can and does result in increased evaporation from oceans, lakes and rivers, thus creating more water vapour which then cloaks the planet in warm humidity. Carbon dioxide doesn’t have to be a significant ignition factor in that equation at all, and in fact might well be a by-product, a feedback, itself, rather than a “forcer”.
In addition to this there is the influence of changes in the Earth's orbit
This is from Ian Wishart:
“Estimates vary, but somewhere around 15% seems to be the common number cited for the increase in global food crop yields due to aerial fertilisation with increased carbon dioxide since 1950."
This increase has both helped avoid a Malthusian disaster and preserved or returned enormous tracts of marginal land as wildlife habitat, land that would otherwise have had to be put under the plough in an attempt to feed the growing global population.
“Commercial growers deliberately generate CO2 and increase its levels in agricultural greenhouses to between 700ppm (parts per million) and 1,000ppm to increase productivity and improve the water efficiency of food crops far beyond those in the somewhat carbon-starved open atmosphere.
CO2 feeds the forests, grows more usable lumber in timber lots meaning there is less pressure to cut old growth or push into ‘natural’ wildlife habitat, makes plants more water efficient helping to beat back
See this:
Wishart goes on to say that CO2 is not so much a forcing as a by-product, a feedback
Milankovich cycles
In addition, there is the influence of changes in the Earth's orbit, called Milankovich cycles.
"At the centre of their claim are changes in the earth’s orbital path around the sun, earth’s axial tilt, and the sun’s orbital path around the centre of the solar system. All of these factors change from time to time, and have a big impact on climate change. Geologists have matched past ice ages with regular cyclical changes in the Earth’s orbit, known as “Milankovitch cycles”.
The temperature swings they documented showed Earth’s average temperature could increase or decrease by as much as 10pC within just a few decades"
Once again that is in direct opposition to modern climate scientists who admit the reality of Milankovich cycles but dismisses their influence as "minimal", but what is the evidence
A 2003 study by scientists from Germany’s Max Planck Institute estimates that the sun could have been responsible for as much as 50% of global warming since 1970, although they estimate the more likely figure to be just under 30%.
“A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes. “Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said:
‘The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures. The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently – in the last 100 to 150 years’.”
This is what NASA has to say on the matter
Evidence from the paleo record
Ian Wishart talks about evidence from the Paleozoic era from about 600 million years ago. Paleo science really isn't my thing so I will just report what he says.
Evidence indicate that ancient temperatures did not appear to be linked with CO2 levels.
CO2 emissions went up while temperatures went down
Despite leaping from 5000 ppm to 7000 ppm, there was no corresponding jump in temperature. It remained at a tropical 22pC.
Wishart goes on:
"Some 480 million years ago, coming up to the border between the Ordovician and Silurian periods, CO2 had dropped from 7000 down to a more manageable 4000 ppm. Not suddenly, but gradually over the previous 100 million years. The temperature stayed steady at 22pC. Then something strange happened. CO2 levels rose sharply from 4000ppm to 4500ppm, yet suddenly, world temperatures plummeted to an average matching today’s: 12pC. In plain English, carbon dioxide levels went up but the temperature went down.
He concludes that
"Even if carbon emissions double in the next hundred years and push atmospheric concentration to nearly 800ppm, they will still only be less than a fifth of the 4500ppm CO2 level that existed when global temperatures dropped by nearly half to 12 degrees"
Wishart points to the late Ordovician period when a drop to a planetary average of 12 degrees was a global Ice Age, even though CO2 levels were around 12 times higher than they are now.
The only period where both CO2 and temperature records were simultaneously the same as modern Earth was 315 million years.
Before that, according to Wishart' research the CO2 levels and temperature went in different directions.
His conclusion is that: "Earth appears capable of regulating its temperatures and greenhouse gas absorption at levels far higher than humans are able to generate".
Compare that with Al Gore:
“When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the sun inside,” he intones on screen, pointing to an ice core graph. “Carbon dioxide having never gone above 300 PPM [my emphasis], here is where CO2 is now [380]. We give off where it has never been as far back as this record will measure.”
Al Gore cites an 650,000 year old ice core sample whereas temperature indications from the past 600 million years indicate CO2 levels have been between 4 and 18 times higher than they are today, yet Earth, and life, survived (even if the dinosaurs didn't.
Wishart's conclusion:
"Here’s the real inconvenient truth: For most of known history, CO2 levels have been between four and 18 times higher than they are today, yet Earth, and life, survived. Clearly then, when all the historic data and not just selected portions are analysed, carbon cannot be the cause of runaway global warming that the United Nations and politicians courting the Green vote claim it to be."
Scientific debate - cooling vs. heating
Wishart provides a long quote from an article in Newsweek’s Peter Gwynne from 1975 that predicted a “Little Ice Age”. .
To quote from the article:
"There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now."
You cannot find the article anywhere on the internet but mostly they are ones such as 'Cooling World' Story Doesn't Make Today's Climate Scientists Wrong by the original author. And then there is this:
It seems to me that they are interpreting past ideas through the lens of present ideology.
Wishart asks whether Earth’s temperature really rising and falling and rising and falling across the globe over the course of a century, like some kind of planetary deep breathing cycle?
Warming and cooling cycles in the last century
At the very least the science, represented by the press has gone backwards and forwards over the last century.
“Since the late 1800s, journalists and scientists looking for research funding have been belting out warnings about climate change. Only, back then, they feared a looming ice age.”.
Here is a compilation of headlines from the last century:
New York Times, February 24, 1895:
“Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again”
Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1912:
“Fifth ice age is on the way. Human race will have to fight for its existence against cold.”
New York Times, October 7, 1912:
“Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age”
Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1923: “The possibility of another Ice Age already having started ... is admitted by men of first rank in the scientific world, men specially qualified to speak.”
Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1923:
“Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada.” Time Magazine, September 10, 1923: “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age.”
New York Times, September 18, 1924:
“MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age” In the 1930s, a warming period got people’s hopes up, and the headlines changed:
GLOBAL WARMING: 1930s-1950s
New York Times, March 27, 1933:
“America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise”
Time Magazine, January 2, 1939:
“Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right.... weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.”
New York Times, September 18, 1924:
“MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age”
In the 1930s, a warming period got people’s hopes up, and the headlines changed:
GLOBAL WARMING: 1930s-1950s
New York Times, March 27, 1933:
“America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise”
Time Magazine, January 2, 1939:
“Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right.... weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.”
Chicago Daily Tribune, November 6, 1939:
“Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities [throughout] the world permafrost which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades.”
Time Magazine, 1951:
Noted that in Russia was receding northward at 100 yards per year.
New York Times, 1952:
Reported global warming studies citing the “trump card” as melting glaciers. All the great ice sheets stated to be in retreat.
U.S. News and World Report, January 18, 1954:
[W]inters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing.”
New York Times, February 15, 1959:
“Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures.”
But then, suddenly, we were lurching back into an ice age, according to the pundits:
GLOBAL COOLING:1970s
Washington Post, January 11, 1970:
“Colder Winters Herald Dawn of New Ice Age.”
Time Magazine, June 24, 1974:
“Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.”
Christian Science Monitor, August 27, 1974:
“Warning: Earth’s Climate is Changing Faster than Even Experts Expect”, Reported that “glaciers have begun to advance”; “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter”; and “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool”.
New York Times, December 29, 1974: “[P]resent climate change [will result in] mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence.”
Science News, March 1, 1975:
“The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed, and we are unlikely to quickly regain the ‘very extraordinary period of warmth’ that preceded it.”
Newsweek, April 28, 1975: “The Cooling World”: “There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now.”
International Wildlife, July-August, 1975:
“But the sense of the discoveries is that there is no reason why the ice age should not start in earnest in our lifetime.”In this article, New Scientist magazine’s former editor Nigel Calder intoned: “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”
New York Times, May 21, 1975:
“Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable”
The existence of temperature swings and climatic cycles is bit of a theme in Wishart's book
"The temperature swings they documented showed Earth’s average temperature could increase or decrease by as much as 10pC within just a few decades. Those are monster climate changes, on a scale modern humans can only stare at in wonder, yet they fit the same massive changes that took place in the dinosaur era, regardless of CO2 levels."
—Nature, 1998
As I said before, it's very easy to dismiss "old" articles and science on the basis that we did not have supercomputers.
But now "the science is settled"?
Humanity has survived previous warming cycles
Key in Ian Wishart’s argument is that there have been previous warming periods that are circular in nature. Indeed, he contends previous periods have been warmer than today (at least at the time he was writing).
Somehow, in Michael Mann’s hands that became this:
What has happened is that what were significant cycles of heating and cooling were flatlined and made to look minor until the 20th century when change became exponential.
A linear process for 1000 years followed by exponential in the 20th Century?
According to Wishart this is based on selective and incomplete use of data.
The Medieval Warm Period (600- 1400)
“There is a 95 to 99% certainty that 1998 was the hottest year in the last one thousand years.”
—Michael Mann
Data correctly displaying the true size of the Medieval Warm Period was manipulated to hide its strength, thus allowing climate scientists and tame media organisations to claim that the 20th century is the warmest period in human history.
Data shows that between AD 900 and 1000, summer temperature anomalies were as much as 1.5°C warmer than the 1961-1990 base period
This extends to sea surface temperatures:
“The MWP was identified as occurring between AD 550 and 1300, during which time interval mean sea surface temperatures were between 1.5 and 2°C higher than the mean value of the past century, while peak MWP warmth was about 0.9°C greater than late 20th-century peak warmth.” Greenland may be thawing slightly, but temperatures there now are still a full one degree below where they were in the Medieval Warm Period, according to an ice core sample from the summit of the Greenland ice cap."
At the time he was writing the North Atlantic was a full one degree warmer than it currently is.
In Antarctica, the poster child for global warming believers, sediment samples from the Antarctic Peninsula reveal the MWP temperature was substantially higher than the current warm period, even allowing for recent warm spells there.
“The scientific data suggests the warming comes first, not rising CO2.”
A compilation of articles on the Medieval Warming Period can be found HERE.
The "Little Ice Age" (1300- 1900)
The Medieval warming period was followed by the “little Ice Age.
"By making 1850 their “ground zero”, they’re painting a misleading picture about the significance of recent warming. Why? Because the late 1800s were the end of a centuries-long cool spell, the peak of which was known as “The Little Ice Age”. The planet became very cold and it has only just ended that cycle an eyeblink ago in geological time. Naturally, if you come out of a cold spell, the temperature goes up. The 20th century might well be warm in comparison with the 19th century, but it is not the warmest on record in human history not by a longshot."
It triggered climate feedbacks and sent the civilised world reeling.
“The cold began on January 6, 1709, and lasted in all its rigour until the twenty-fourth,” wrote one French priest in his journal. “The crops that had been sewn [sic] were all completely destroyed.... Most of the hens had died of cold, as had the beasts in the stables. When any poultry did survive the cold, their combs were seen to freeze and fall off. Many birds, ducks, partridges, woodcock, and blackbirds died and were found on the roads and on the thick ice and frequent snow. Oaks, ashes, and other valley trees split with cold. Two thirds of the vines died.... No grape harvest was gathered at all in Anjou.... I myself did not get enough wine from my vineyard to fill a nutshell.”
During the 1600s, France was hit by repeated famines caused by crop failures, which in turn led to disease outbreaks because of poor nutrition and the cold;
The Thames froze over 26 times;
Some of humanity’s darkest literature dates from these times of endless winter
That’s the last time the Thames has ever frozen over at London, although it was reportedly solid enough on that occasion that an elephant was led over it.
Literature from the era, such as the Grimm’s Fairy Tales frequently talk of ravenous wolves and hard times. Humans were facing more predation from wolves because the climate was hurting everyone.
The imagery in this tale from Hans Christian Andersen speaks volumes about life in the Little Ice Age:
“In the winter, when the fields were covered with snow, and the water filled with large blocks of ice which I had blown up to the coast,” continued the Wind, “great flocks of crows and ravens, dark and black as they usually are, came and alighted on the lonely, deserted ship. Then they croaked in harsh accents of the forest that now existed no more, of the many pretty birds’ nests destroyed and the little ones left without a home; and all for the sake of that great bit of lumber, that proud ship, that never sailed forth. I made the snowflakes whirl till the snow lay like a great lake round the ship, and drifted over it. I let it hear my voice, that it might know what the storm has to say…”
A compilation of articles on the Little Ice Age can be found HERE
Contemporary warming
The warming that we have seen in the 20th Century, according to Wishart, is a balancing of the world climate after 700 years of major cooling.
“The natural warming phase that pulled Earth out of the Little Ice Age a hundred years ago began to melt Arctic ice (we know this from news reports from that era) and tundra, and of course other sensitive regions on the planet. This thawing has unlocked other greenhouse gasses stored in the oceans, soil and frozen ground, leading to the big increases in atmospheric methane and CO2 since 1850."....
This process was set in train at some stage from the late 1700s onward, as the Little Ice Age began to loosen its grip, and had accelerated enough by the early 20th century to cause climatologists and journalists to remark on how warm it was becoming”
Michael Mann and the hockey stick
Key in the arguments of official climate science is the idea that temperatures went in a linear manner before going exponential in the 20th Century.
This is Michael Mann's hockeystick.
When Michael Mann released his hockey stick graph in 1989 he refused to release the details for scrutiny of his methodology.
Mann and his co author state that they “relied on three sets of 1,000-year-long tree-ring records from North America, plus tree rings from northern Scandinavia, northern Russia, Tasmania, Argentina, Morocco, and France.”
Additionally, they studied ice cores from Greenland and the Andes mountains. Three trees in the US, plus presumably a tree each in the other locations, and the two ice cores.
That way, according to sceptics, he was able to flatten the temperature over the 500 year period from 1000-1500 and “made the Medieval warm period just go poof.” and demonstrate that the 20th century was the “warmest for 1,000 years.”
There is evidence that this was the intention, as in this email:
Getting rid of the Medieval Warming Period - "Climategate"
To: Keith Briffa , t.osborn@uea.ac.uk
Subject: the new “warm period myths” box
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 21:45:38 -0700
Cc: Eystein Jansen , Valerie Masson-Delmotte
Hi Keith and Tim – since you’re off the 6.2.2 hook until Eystein hangs you back up on it, you have more time to focus on that new Box. In reading Valerie’s Holocene section, I get the sense that I’m not the only one who would like to deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths in the literature. The sceptics and uninformed love to cite these periods as natural analogs for current warming too – pure rubbish.
So, pls DO try hard to follow up on my advice provided in previous email. No need to go into details on any but the MWP, but good to mention the others in the same dismissive effort. “Holocene Thermal Maximum” is another one that should only be used with care, and with the explicit knowledge that it was a time-transgressive event totally unlike the recent global warming.
Thanks for doing this on – if you have a cool figure idea, include it.
Best, peck
“Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.” (unsourced)
"Both Esper et al. (2002) and Moburg et al. (2005) indicate that current global temperatures are not warmer than the Medieval Warm period"
" In mid 2006, Mann’s hockey-stick got pulped and shredded by a committee of experts (the Wegman Panel) appointed to review whether he’d done his homework properly."
This is also described in this video from 13 years ago
At the time Mann was accused of academic misconduct but of course he was absolved of all culpability by his peers.
Here is Michael Mann in his own words.
Looking back in 2023 the responses to the controversy looks very much like the 'top-down' responses from some scientists to anything that challenges their covid-19 narrative.
Climategate
Here is another chink in the armour.
I was quite unfamiliar with what happened in Climategate until I read Wishart's book and learned what was behind the controversy.
In November, 2009 the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was hacked, or more likely an insider "stole" more than 160 megabytes of files relating to climate change research
"On November 17, hackers struck the RealClimate website, closely allied to the CRU scientists and partially funded by entities associated with George Soros uploading a zipped file of the emails and data. RealClimate discovered the hack within minutes, and shut the link down."
By none other than Ian Wishart himself was responsible for confirming the veracity of the emails by contacting CRU director Phil Jones, something no one from mainstream media bothered to do.
One of the early articles was from James Delingpole:
If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
They may have a different narrative ten years later (as in the BBC video below), but the Guardian's George Monbiot recognised just how serious this was for their cause.
Here is his article from the time. I have reproduced appropriate quotes in detail.
“The university knew what was coming three days before the story broke. As far as I can tell, it sat like a rabbit in the headlights, waiting for disaster to strike. When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU’s opponents landed blow upon blow on it. “When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped “no comment” and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean “guilty as charged”. When I got hold of him on Saturday, his answer was to send me a pdf called “WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 1999”. Had I a couple of hours to spare I might have been able to work out what the heck this had to do with the current crisis, but he offered no explanation.”
“It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow.The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them. “Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
“Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.”
Phil Jones, when questioned by Ian Wishart claimed he did not know what "hide the decline" meant, that he could not remember what he wrote in an email 10 years earlier, that he was not trying to mislead but this related to proxy data
"The proxy data that Jones referred to as “Mike’s Naturetrick” was in fact temperatures as determined by tree rings. The “decline” turned out to be the inconvenient fact that tree-ring data after 1960 showed a fall in temperatures, which strongly conflicted with the already-discussed and highly-suspect surface temperature station records. Those surface records taken by weather stations were showing a strong uptick in temperatures, and Mann and co had a problem – how to combine both sets of data in a graph to show global warming."
The “trick” involved burying the proxy downtrend line on the graph, underneath a blur of ink showing numerous upward swinging surface temperatures. Technically, the downtrend was there in the graph; you just couldn’t see it
Here is an article from the sceptic site, Watts Up With That
There are many other emails that Wishart discusses that I do not have the space or time to discuss, but here is one:
From: Phil Jones To: ray bradley ,mann@[snipped], mhughes@[snipped] Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000 Cc: k.briffa@[snipped],t.osborn@[snipped] Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers, Phil
Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit
In any case the accusation that the climate change deniers took stuff out of context to mislead places is, as far as I can see, disingenuous.
This is what the BBC said about the affair ten years later.
How climate sceptics tricked the public - BBC Newsnight
Here are some quotes summing it up - more accurate, I would say, than the BBC reporting!
“Climategate showed us how deeply the peer review process had been corrupted, with UN climate scientists sending emails behind the scenes offering to volunteer themselves as ‘anonymous’ peer reviewers of studies done by their friends and colleagues.”
James Delingpole
“The scientists involved seem to have been captured by the idea that the ends justify the means – that they are on a noble quest to save the planet and they are entitled to cut corners or manipulate the scientific process to support that quest. In this sense, they are no longer scientists but global warming evangelists who have joined hands with a more cynical and corrupt political and big business lobby who’ve realised they can greatly increase control over the public and make a lot of money in the process.”
HERE is a compilation of more recent articles on Climategate
The effects of el-Nino and la-Nina
Much of the period when I was actively looking into climate change was dominated by an el-Nino pattern when in this part of the world we saw very high temperatures and drought. By comparison, the last 3 years has seen a largely cooling la-Nina pattern.
Now, it seems we are heading back info an el-Nino.
Guy McPherson is telling us once more that the el-Nino will be the end of us.
Mind you, if my memory serves me right, if Guy's previous predictions were right we'd already be extinct as a species.
According to Ian Wishart, the el-Nino and la-Nina patterns have a more dramatic effect on global warming than carbon emissions do.
Writing over 10 years ago, he talks of the 1997 el-Nino, which I remember well. He said set it the scene for a decade of global warming.
"The 1997/98 El Niño reportedly takes the blame for a 16% die-off of the world’s coral reefs, and ongoing problems with bleaching on coral reefs. Repeats of El Niño through the early 2000s helped keep those years among the warmest on record – although TV news reports were mostly attributing these record years to “global warming”.
"El Niños have a more dramatic effect on global warming than carbon emissions do."
That sounds familiar to me as we heard about what was a bigger die-off in the Great Barrier Reef prior to 2018.
Wishart argues that Western Antarctic ice is quite vulnerable to el-Nino's grasp and has been for some time.
"Ice cores reveal that West Antarctica's climate is influenced by atmospheric and oceanic changes thousands of miles to the north"
NCAR's David Schneider
Antarctica
I have been a keen observer of Arctic sea ice but what is happening in the Antarctica seems a bit murkier
If we are to believe the more hard-core believers in climate change there is a linear process of warming in Antarctica and the entire Antarctic is in the process of melting.
Wishart of course disputes this and points out that temperature changes are regional.
West Antarctica is, he says, more prone to quite extreme melt periodically, in large measure due to warm waters from el-Nino's thousands of miles away.
East Antarctic, by contrast is colder and less susceptible to warming. It may warm on the edges as is being reported now but with average temperatures of minus 50C that makes little difference.
Wishart was writing over a decade ago. More recent headlines talk of warming in East Antarctica, for example -
Whatever the case, it does appear that West Antarctica has been subject to more warming than East Antarctica.
As in the Arctic the reason for warming may be "a slightly warmer ocean assaulting the ice from underneath, carving out huge cavities and channels that thin and weaken the shelf".
With the collapse of the glaciers in West Antarctica, Wishart posits (writing a decade ago) that it has been the result of "an ice age in distress for decades previously".
A string of scientific studies show the West Antarctic is naturally vulnerable to warm ocean currents caused mostly by the tropical el- Niño Southern Oscillation to the north, which dictates much of the planet’s weather. Those warm currents have helped weaken sea ice and raise temperatures, but they are localised effects. The far larger East Antarctic region remains substantially colder and, according to the satellite measurements, may be adding more ice volume than West Antarctica is losing. Certainly Antarctica overall has added sufficient ice to compensate for losses at the North Pole. East Antarctica is not vulnerable to the warm ocean currents affecting the west, and in fact extra moisture caused by oceanic evaporation is re-dumping itself as snow on Antarctica and adding to ice volume and extent.
It appears the much larger East Antarctic sheet has remained stable, although there may be melting on the edges, and will continue to do so.
This is from a New Zealand glaciologist, Tim Naish
“It may be nibbled away at the edges but a number of other lines of evidence make it unlikely that we will lose half the East Antarctic ice sheet.”
Key point? Massive melt in the West Antarctic is not new, has always been natural, and the Antarctic ice sheets began receding not last century but around 7,000 years ago, so human-caused CO2 levels are unlikely to be a major factor.
Here are some more recent mainstream articles
From the Climate change sceptic site, Watts Up With That
The Arctic
I am somewhat more sure of my ground. Every year I have observed that with every year the ice is becoming thinner and turning to mush every melt season and we are even seeing some melt during times when that should not be happening.
In addition we are seeing a constant increase (I would not call it expential) in methane release from the Arctic Ocean and the permafrost.
Interestingly, in addition to the denialists some of whom make the ludicrous claim that the ice is getting thicker, it has been mainstream climate science that has poured scorn on the work of Peter Wadhams and others who point to the existence of a methane "clathrate gun"
However, increasingly I have been asking myself whether there might be another explanation for this other than greenhouse gasses, although the correlation with increasing greenhouse gases is undeniable.
This may be confirmed by some inconvenient historical evidence dug up by Ian Wishart.
For example, the Northwest passage where the melt has been cited as evidence of the melt of the sea ice.
The Arctic NW Passage
There is a lot of drama about the melt in the Arctic and, in particular, the opening of the North West Passage.
Wishart details stories from the past where the NW Passage has been open in the not-so-distant past.
He sees this as more evidence of cycles.
He quotes polar explorer Roald Amundsen in 1903:
“The North West Passage was done. My boyhood dream – at that moment it was accomplished. A strange feeling welled up in my throat; I was somewhat over-strained and worn – it was weakness in me – but I felt tears in my eyes. ‘Vessel in sight’ ... Vessel in sight.”
He cites a Royal Canadian Mounted Police ketch assigned to Arctic patrol duties made regular trips through the Northwest Passage in the 1940s:
“Between 1940 and 1942 St. Roch navigated the Northwest Passage, arriving in Halifax harbour on October 11, 1942. St. Roch was the second ship to make the passage, and the first to travel the passage from west to east. In 1944, St. Roch returned to Vancouver via the more northerly route of the Northwest Passage, making her run in 86 days.” The St. Roch IIhas crossed through the Northwest Passage in just three weeks! … There was so little ice that most of the trip was smooth sailing except for the occasional iceberg floating by.”
Polar bears
Similarly, Wishart cites some inconvenient research on polar bears that counters the dominant narrative.
“The fluctuating sea-ice condition in regions like the Beaufort Sea or Baffin Bay, however, may require modifications of foraging strategy from month to month or even day to day during break-up, freeze-up, or periods of strong winds Polar bears are adaptable enough to modify their foraging patterns for the extreme range of sea-ice scenarios"
Ferguson et al. 2001) (Ferguson).” --- ed. I cannot locate this source.
One polar bear expert who doesn’t believe for a second the creatures are endangered is Canadian scientist Mitch Taylor, who’s spent more than 20 years studying Canada’s polar bears up close. “There aren’t just a few more bears,” he told the Telegraph. “There are a hell of a lot more bears.”
Mind you, that is from over 10 years ago?
Has the situation changed?
Logic dictates that the polar bear populations MUST have suffered. However, I have decided I don't have the ability to confirm either way.
This is the contrarian view from 2019.
Temperature measurements and the urban heat island effect
I remember last year that when there were reports of an "unprecedented" heatwave in England last year it turned out that temperatures were measured at London's Heathrow airport where it is known that temperatures are significantly higher than say, in the countryside.
This is known as the urban heat island effect. This has to be significant both in terms of accuracy of reports of extreme weather events (making them seem worse than what the really are) and in comparing today's temperatures with those in the past, measured in towns that were villages by comparison with today.
"Much of the modern surface temperature data is taken from airports, making the temperature readings suspect right from the outset.
“News stories about “record temperatures” are based on raw temperature readings from city weather stations on the day. No attempt is made to calculate or factor out the UHIE, which as you’ve seen may be as high as 10°C in some cities at some times. The margin of error on modern city temperature readings is therefore so high that any claim about “record temperatures” is meaningless.”
"Weather stations in America’s “northernmost settlement”, the small town of Barrow, Alaska,installing 54 temperature sensors in 2001, half within the urban area and the remainder scattered over 150km2 of tundra outside of town. They found the effect of buildings and 4600 residents enabled an average temperature difference in winter of 3.2pC between town (warmer) and tundra (colder). But under the right conditions the difference could be as high as 9pC"
Mexico’s largest cities are now, on average, nearly 6pC hotter than they were a hundred years ago, thanks to UHIE
Another aspect I can attest to is that average temperatures can appear quite different according to the number of weather stations used to collect data. That has happened in New Zealand where temperature results collected by climate scientist, Jim Salinger using a great number of weather stations differed significantly from those collected by his ex-employer, NIWA.
Wishart reports that in 1990 of two thirds of the world’s temperature stations (mostly in Russia), diappeared from the global database. This skews any temperature data.
"When the switches were flicked on for the remainder of the weather stations in 1990, average temperatures mysteriously soared, eclipsing the slight cooling of the previous decades."
Difficulty in average temperatures
Global figures simply cannot be trusted because there is no proper correction for the urban heat island effect.
“Temperature measurement of the entire climate is inherently difficult,” writes Paul Rogers in response to a New Scientist claim of rising average temperatures.
Another quote:
“It is claimed that average temperatures increased by 0.7pC in one hundred years. I have been in Texas where the temperature dropped 20pC in 5 minutes. There is so much natural variation in weather that it is an immensely difficult task to measure and compute the global average temperature. Indeed, it is immensely difficult even to define what is meant by global average temperature. Air temperature, sea temperature, soil temperature. They all vary by season, and other known and unknown cyclical factors by location and above all by random fluctuation.”
It's all just commonsense, isn't it?
Ecofascism
In many ways, the treatment of contrarian scientists resonates with the treatment of anyone who, these days, counters the demonstrably false narrative about the covid-19 pandemic and mass vaccination. These were not the first to fall prey to 'cancel culture'. One shameful example was the treatment by the Establishment (especially, the BBC) of the late David Bellamy, the great naturalist whose wonderful programmes I watched avidly in my youth.
Now, it has reached a whole new level with recent calls, supported by Sam Carana of Arctic News, to institutionalise climate change deniers and to bring dissenting politicians before the International Criminal Court.
Isn't the definition in the eyes of the beholder?
Here is a comment by Sam Carana on Facebook:
Comment from Facebook, 24 March, 2022:
“Let me repeat what I said before, since climate denial can indeed take many forms. The idea is that a denier, through institutionalization, gets rehabilitated. The second part of the sentence describes that such institutionalization could occur under national acts such as the U.S. RICO Act and Sherman Antitrust Act. In other words, this applies to cases where a denier obstructs progress for better products. What is better for the climate is best decided locally, with cases to be referred to Local People's Courts to ensure that implementation is based on the best-available scientific analysis.”
CONCLUSION
I have presented much of what Ian Wishart has presented in his book Air Con.
I do not, obviously agree with all of his conclusions but he has dug up an amazing array of inconvenient material that should lead us, at the very least, to ask questions about what we are being told.
Wishart does not, like the more extreme denialists, say the ocean levels are sinking or Arctic ice is getting thicker. He acknowledges that there is warming and that greenhouse gas levels are rising although he disputes the Establishment reason why.
He does question the reason for this and says quite categorically that increases in temperatures precede rising CO2 levels.
Given the sheer amount of evidence one cannot credibly put it all down to just cherry picking or taking quotes out of context.
It does worry me, to put it mildly, that science that is incomplete or misleading is being used to bring about a WEF agenda and herd those of who are not put into 15 minutes to drive electric cars and to make the masses eat insects.
Konstantin Kisin said its like going to the doctor and saying "I have a problem with your legs" and he responds, "let's chop your head off". Quite.
We are living in an era of fascism or communism and the climate change, to whatever extent it is, or isn't true, is being used as the stick.
Posts
