Ed Hoskins,
Introduction
The attitude of the Green Climate establishment means that they consider themselves entitled to use any Deception or Fraud to emphasise their “Virtuous and Righteous Cause”: to save the planet from Man-made Global warming.
To their minds their Cause is so important that it must take precedent over any other consideration of expenditures.
This is a fallacy.
Climate change activism involves winding back all the technical advances and improvements to human wellbeing that have been achieved by mankind over the last 200 years. In their view there is no higher priority for man-kind whatever the costs or gross damage for mankind.
However, in December 2023 COP28 president UAE’s Sultan Al Jaber said:
“There is no science out there that says that the phase-out of fossil fuels is going to be needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C. Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development unless you want to take the world back into caves”.
He let the cat out of the bag.
Supporting the adverse view, there is a huge unashamed Western government and academic misinformation effort that use all types of data manipulation. The propaganda support for the Man-made Climate catastrophe assertion is rife and continuous.
An early personal experience
Back in 1998 a very obvious lie and the irrational incensed reactions from official Green oriented activists got me started on my own 20+ year interest in the question of the fallacy of Man-made Climate Change.
In 1998 I was involved in writing a paper about Transport and Health in London with colleagues from Imperial College, University of London. It concluded that London had by then become particularly free of traffic pollution and that any actions to limit traffic would be irrelevant as far as the health of Londoners was concerned. In addition, it stated that the individuals / public sector organisations involved in reporting pollution in London were unjustifiably grossly over-emphasising for propaganda reasons the pollution levels they were reporting to support multiple traffic restrictions in London: including the then proposed congestion charge.
These public sector actors managed to report measured pollution of 1.7% of moderate readings but representing effect as 57% in their report: this amounted to a ~35 fold exaggeration of the pollution reported.
Even in 1998 “Noble Cause Corruption” was hard at work at the South East Institute of Public Health, (SEIPH).
When published, the Imperial College paper pointing out this massive misrepresentation, by about 33 fold, (fraud), received incensed reactions from “Green” activists with threats of physical violence and implied death threats.
If reporting genuine good news could result in such a negative and violent reaction, I concluded there must be something very awry with those mainly public sector, left thinking organisations that seemed to need to shut down any “adverse” discussion even in 1998 about a matter that did not meet their warped and erroneous view of life.
The offending paper is here.
Are published data on Global Temperature accurate?
Anthony Watts has maintained vigilance on the siting and performance of Weather stations across the USA since 2007: an up-to-date report on their status is here.
New Surface Stations Report Released – It’s ‘worse than we thought’
Dale Enterprise Virginia
As a single example of a correctly sited and continuously well-maintained, rural US weather station is situated at Dale Enterprise near over three miles from the centre of the nearest “urban” development near Harrisonburg, Virginia, a town of 44,000 population.
Its records are instructive. The Dale Enterprise un-adulterated temperature record showed modest cooling of 0.29°C per century, if all other later adjustments made by “climate scientists” are ignored.
However as is shown below the NASA GISS published “retrospectively value added modifying the past (prior to 1970)” temperatures for this same location. This shows a massive adjustment lowering of past temperatures prior to 1965 to give the impression of very substantial (+0.75ºC / century) warming at this station as opposed to the recorded cooling.
The Dale Enterprise example is particularly egregious in that there are clearly arbitrary step-wise, obviously artificial adjustments made from the distant past of the site in 1895 up until 1968. Sadly, it is reasonable to assume that such arbitrary but systematic data manipulation has been applied by the official guardians of the data throughout all the US rural data sets to show apparent artificially induced warming.
This seems to be a common occurrence within those organisations, (the official guardians of the data), and who should always have been above reproach for their scientific integrity. This seems to be a common occurrence within those organisations.
Cumulatively, the result has been to emphasise warming from the US rural data sets by some 0.47ºC / century. These results are always a one-way street to exaggerate the apparent amount of warming. The following table clearly shows the scale and impact of the overall adjustments to rural and Urban datasets in the USA
Global reduction of weather Stations
In addition, many rural and more northerly measuring stations were lost with the fall of the USSR. But since then, many other sites still in operation have been deliberately ignored by the UK Meteorological Office, the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University and NASA GISS when contributing to their global data sets.
The number of stations being considered have been radically reduced world-wide, for example by omitting information from Russia particularly from more northerly and rural stations. The impact of the deliberate loss of these many mainly rural stations since 1990 on measured temperatures can be seen below.
The graph below shows the divergence between well-sited rural US weather stations and weather stations that are increasingly susceptible to the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI). Phil Jones at East Anglia CRU has also published papers explicitly discounting the Urban Heat Island effect to support the narrative.
The adjustments made by the promoters of global warming have also been progressive as can be seen in the graphs of presentation of three different versions of global temperature produced by NASA GISS between 1980 and 2007.
The promoters of this data set are now proclaiming that 2010 will be the warmest year on record. This would be hardly surprising if they themselves have adjusted the past downwards and the present upwards.
If only well maintained and well and consistently sited rural stations were considered so as to avoid the Urban Heat Island Effect and if the adjustments made by climate scientists devoted to the Man-Made Global Warming assertion were ignored that reports of the warming of the earth from ground-based measurements would be much reduced.
But, the protagonists of the Man-made Global Warming assertion are also the official National and International custodians of the data.
The Western world adjustment phenomenon
Sadly, the re-adjustment of temperature history by the official custodians of the data seems to have become a worldwide phenomenon. Recently it has become clear that many unwarranted adjustments always showing additional warming have been consistently made to all the main sources of accredited global temperature records.
Some examples of such adjustments include:
- USA: NASA GISS, (previously lead by the extreme Warmist James Hansen), have admitted errors and revised their data set downwards. It appears that in being determined to announce that 2010 is/was the warmest year ever, they have ignored available data stations in the Canadian and Siberian Arctic using only fabricated data, extrapolated from warmer measurement stations further south. They have also reduced the levels in their historic records for last century thus enhancing the appearance of Global warming. It is now slowly becoming clear that the satellite data provided by NOAA has been comprehensively corrupted with over estimates and some quite ridiculous readings of temperature, (several hundred °F in the great lakes area), over a period of several years. This data has been distributed worldwide as the foundation of many climate models supporting the Man-made Global warming assertion. It should now be the subject of legal challenge.
- Russia: only 40% of the now limited available readings were used by the collators of temperature data always favouring warmer urban sites.
- Canada, many northern sites are now ignored in the collation of temperature data for the IPCC.
- UK: the evidence that both the UK Meteorological office and the East Anglia University Climatic Research Unit have made unwarranted upward adjustments to the data they publish to support the scientific case of the UN IPCC is clear from the release of data and e-mail correspondence in “Climategate”: eliminating data to “hide the decline”.
In flagrant contradiction of normal scientific method, the East Anglia University Climatic Research Unithave also destroyed the original records so their adjustment processes cannot be re-audited and reproduced in retrospect.
- Australia: another single example, one amongst many in Australia, from the data for Darwin in the Northern Territories makes the point about unwarranted adjustments made by NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network.
That shows how to turn records of -0.7°C cooling/century into 1.2°C warming/century with unexplained, and un-auditable adjustments. It is certainly now clear that the Australian Government central research facility, the CSIRO, is wholly committed to the “Warmist” doctrine and supports it on behalf of their Federal Government.
The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero
- New Zealand: the following table shows the unexplained differences between recorded data and data published by the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) for several locations
The following graph shows the extent of the downward adjustments of past readings over time made in New Zealand.
Uh, oh – raw data in New Zealand tells a different story than the "official" one.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/05/crisis-in-new-zealand-climatology
These results are now the subject of a challenge in the New Zealand High Court. As a result of the challenge the New Zealand government agency have now accepted that their records had been falsified deliberately as a result of the political pressure upon them. So, there is a chance that in future other National records may also be subject to legal challenge.
It seems to have become common practice for national Meteorological Services worldwide to make these sorts of upward adjustments in the present and downward adjustments in the past, always with the intention of showing increased warming of their regions of the planet.
A suspicious mind one would consider that these sorts of adjustments were as a result of a coordinated international intergovernmental programme or at least well co-ordinated “groupthink”. But isn’t that to think the unthinkable.
Do We Care if 2010 is the Warmist Year in History?
Having progressively adjusted upwards / “added value” to the basic ground-based data sets, the final assessment of global temperature is then combined from this information and additional data is fabricated for the blank areas by interpolating intermediate temperatures over a grid for the huge territories where measuring stations do not exist.
As a result, it is hardly surprising that the published record used by the UN IPCC authorities shows significant worldwide warming. Accordingly, the quality of the record becomes questionable and entirely unverifiable in retrospect. Sceptics would certainly think that this was entirely intentional outcome.
It is on these bases that claims are made and officially published of the “warmest year ever” and the “warmest decade ever”. But accounting for these effects global warming may well be substantially less than 0.3°C rise recorded since 1940.
More recent Satellite measurements
On the other hand, satellite measurements have taken a continuous whole worldview since 1979 and as they do not attempt to extrapolate temperatures across vast areas such as Russia, Northern Canada or to the poles from an increasingly limited and questionable set of ground-based weather stations. They are not linked to any ground-based measurements.
UAH global temperature anomaly, a bit cooler in April
Current measurements, including the more recent and reliable satellite data, (ie since 1979), and weather balloon sources, certainly show some warming but no warming this decade since the year 1999. This winter the figure is again already close to the norm.
Since about 1850, the end of the “little ice age”, there has certainly been some warming of the planet overall, perhaps as much as 0.5°C in the 90 years between 1850 and 1940. In the 70 years since 1940 the increase in temperature has been assessed at a maximum 0.3°C.Man-made CO2 in the atmosphere only became a possible issue after 1940 but the earlier rate of warming from 1850 to 1940 was about 30% faster in the earlier period before that.
UAH Global Temperature Update for November, 2023: +0.91 deg. C
What is interesting here is the way that reputable scientists report their recent findings where the satellite record shows an unanticipated current uptick in temperature. This is more likely to be caused by a massive injection of water vapour injected into the upper atmosphere from the Hunga Tonga eruption, superimposed on an active El Nino episode. Certainly, unlikely to be caused by massive pulse of Man-made CO2.
The important point being the at the scientists involved clearly report that apparently adverse finding. Rather than trying to disguise it as has happened so many times before to support the Climate Change cause.
Climate Noble Cause Corruption is endemic throughout establishment.
They are all at it.
An example, recently there appeared in the prestigious Lancet medical journal of March 2023 a graphic of Heat and Cold deaths registered for countries across Europe as below.
The scale of the Lancet published graphic is distorted with heat deaths in Europe is exaggerated by almost 6 fold as opposed to the deaths from arising cold. The above chart with the true values scaled correctly is shown below.
This is just a simple commonly occurring example of how the bias for deception in favour of the Noble cause of Man-made Global Warming has permeated and even penetrated the most prestigious parts of the Western medical establishment as the Noble Cause Corruption support for the Climate Change narrative has permeated.
A recent study has examined the way in which “nudge units’ inside government are set up to persuade the populace as towards certain policy lines supporting government policies for the Covid epidemic and are continually in place to support “Net Zero”.
https://www.coronababble.com/post/nudgers-nudgers-everywhere-the-ubiquity-of-behavioural-science
Conclusion
For the last few decades there has been a clear Socialist bias to promoting the idea of Catastrophic Man-made Global warming. This consistent promotion of Catastrophe has permeated the scientific and political establishments of the Western world. And it continued with ~90,000 attendees at the December 2023 COP28 meeting in Dubai. However, this COP meeting seemed to be heavy on platitudes but very light on likely destructive actions: as well as some truth telling from the 2023 COP28 president UAE’s Sultan Al Jaber said:
“There is no science out there that says that the phase-out of fossil fuels is going to be needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C. Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development unless you want to take the world back into caves”.
The cat is out of the bag.
Never forget:
Sun Tsu’s first art of war:
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” That is exactly what is happening as Western governments pursue self-harming Green Energy policies. There is no better way to damage Western societies than by rendering their power supplies unreliable and expensive. Cui bono Who Benefits ??
and
The late Professor Sir David MacKay:
“The dependence on Weather-Dependent “Renewable Energy” to power a developed economy is an “Appalling Delusion”.
There’s so much delusion and I think it’s so dangerous for humanity that people allow themselves to have these delusions that they’re willing to not think carefully about the numbers and the realities, and the laws of physics and the realities of engineering… humanity really does need to pay attention to arithmetic, and the laws of physics.”
Arithmetic? Laws of physics? Engineering? They are lost on politicians, to our incalculable cost.