From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

Massed Green forces are being mobilised and rushed to the American front to try to quell a disturbing outbreak of genuine climate science debate. Activist battalions under the command of Green Blob-funded Leo Hickman from Carbon Brief are engaged in a “crowdsourced” attempt to “fact check” a recent climate report from the US Department of Energy (DoE). This was published at the same time that it is proposed to remove carbon dioxide from 2009 endangerment findings, leading to inevitable major rollbacks of rules backing the Net Zero fantasy. The Guardian has already reported that the report is a “farce full of misinformation” and now the former Guardian writer Hickman is writing to scientists quoted in the report, seeking help in identifying any inaccuracies and what is termed “mischaracterisation”.

At first, his email was not sent to the scientist Dr Roger Pielke Jnr, despite his work being quoted 30 times from eight peer-reviewed articles that he authored or co-authored, along with three posts from his Substack. In his latest post, Pielke gives a detailed review of how his work was reported and concludes that, in each instance, it was cited accurately. As a scientist, he said he had some suggestions – he does not directly say so, but they are on the grounds that that is what genuine scientists do, even if they disagree with each other. Overall, he awarded the five science authors “a strong A”.

The official US Government report looked at the effect of greenhouses gases on the climate. Although written in a balanced and restrained style, it blew great lumps out of the ‘settled’ science narrative that has been used by hard-Left activists to roll out a command-and-control Net Zero project. By demonising the trace gas CO₂ and cancelling any discussion about natural climate variation, the Elite Left has attempted to seize control of the hydrocarbon-dependent economy. Taking out this vital resource by using four decades of bullying political techniques has left many economic and social functions under their control.

The official US Government report has been a major blow to these global aims. Net Zero is dead in the all-important territory of the United States, helped by the DoE report that states computer models offer “little guidance” on how much of the climate responds to higher CO₂ levels. In addition, it notes that most extreme weather events are not increasing, sea level rises in North America show no increasing trend, while weather attribution claims are challenged by natural climate variation along with an admission that they were originally designed with ‘lawfare’ in mind.

Toys are being flung out of the pram in all directions. You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the anguish expressed on X by this distressed soul. 

Dr Colose works for GISS, the climate alarm branch of NASA. The Federal agency has been told to get back to launching spacecraft, and climate activities at GISS are being run down by the Government. These cutbacks could include work on the often retrospectively adjusted GISS global temperature operation.

For his part, Leo Hickman does not seem to be a big fan of the scientific process where all opinions are allowed in the pursuit of better knowledge. The abhorrent idea of “false balance” in climate science has infected the body politic, science and the media for over a decade, with activists claiming infallible knowledge and making determined efforts to cancel any criticism and alternative views. Quoted in the Guardian in 2014, Hickman said: “It is crucial that the public – and policymakers – are accurately informed about the risks that climate change presents in the years and decades ahead… debate should be limited to the policy response rather than confuse this with a false debate about the science”.

In its recent article, the Guardian quotes Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard Professor said to be an expert in climate misinformation, who claimed the true purpose of the report was to “justify what is a scientifically unjustifiable failure to regulate fossil fuels”. Oreskes is at the forefront of the war on hydrocarbons. In 2021 she co-wrote a paper stating that the legal burden of proof for climate claims made by activists should be lowered to “more likely than not”. In her view, “the too narrow focus of climate science with extremely stringent levels of proof is damaging in a legal context, and can lead to confusion when communicating scientific findings more generally”. In other words, it gets in the way of convincing juries to crush oil and gas companies with huge financial penalties.

The DoE report correctly notes that computer models have spent 40 years trying to place a centigrade figure on the warming caused by a doubling of CO₂ in the atmosphere. The range of disagreement has not decreased over this period and it extends over a factor of three. The divergence within 37 major computer models is graphically indicated below, with estimates from 1.8°C to 5.7°C.

Despite this, the claim that humans have caused most of the atmospheric warming over the last 100 years is made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change citing the product of computer models. As the DoE report notes: “Climate models are the primary tool used to project future climate changes in response to increasing atmospheric levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.” The sceptical might ask if there is anything better to back up claims that humans must embark on the destructive path of ceasing to use hydrocarbons – a disaster long in the planning for those who seek elite collectivist control.

In the Guardian, Zeke Hausfather of Berkely Earth criticised the use of his 2019 paper to demonstrate that climate models “consistently overestimated observations”. He claimed the paper actually “confirmed” how well models had performed in the years after they were published. What was not mentioned was that the paper reviewed only a few early computer models going back to 1970 with data ending in 2017. It made retrospective adjustments to some of the original inputs and mathematicians have queried some of the calculations involved. To say the least, other interpretations are available, although the Guardian claims that the Hausfather report, “actually showed that climate models have performed well”. 

“Performed well” is not a term that immediately springs to mind when considering the block illustration above. This is contained in the DoE report and shows global surface trends from various CMIP6 climate models from 1979–2024. Most of the models display warming to the right of the blue bar which denotes actual temperature observations. The worst three show warming at around twice the observed level.

Is it too much to hope for a balanced debate on an authoritative report that is free from obvious bias and sets out what is known – and unknown – about the effect of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? Is it not possible for the pram toys to be collected and abuse kept to a minimum? Alas, the answer is probably no, with Leo Hickman and his Green Blob forces on the charge. What is pompously dismissed as a “false debate about the science” is the last thing they seem to want.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.

US Department of Energy: ‘A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate’. Authors – John Christy Ph.D, Judith Curry Ph.D, Steven Koonin Ph.D, Ross McKitrick Ph.D, Roy Spencer Ph.D.