“Check out my DeSmog page here,” is what Tom Nelson writes in the ‘About’ section of his Substack publication, to link his profile on a publication called DeSmog. Calling itself “the world’s number one source for accurate, fact-based information regarding global warming misinformation campaigns”, DeSmog is a well-known platform to try and debunk – or smear – the so-called climate sceptics. The publication was founded in January 2006 by Canadian PR-expert James Hoggan. Hoggan has said that his interest in climate issues began in 2003 when he was invited to join the board of the David Suzuki Foundation, a Canadian environmental organisation that unconditionally backs the theory of a man-made climate crisis. Interaction with pro-climate crisis scientists and political activists such as Al Gore led Hoggan to take the climate issues presented to him very seriously, and this led to the founding of DeSmog – “to raise awareness and help people become savvy about the global problem of climate change disinformation”.
Climate crisis PR and the ‘disinformation database’
Indirectly, the origin story itself shows that the purpose of the publication is not to provide unbiased scientific information on the arguments of all parties to the climate debate, but to present only one side of the science to the public so as to support the founders’ chosen and unchallengeable basic claim that humans are changing the climate and a catastrophe lies ahead. In essence, the website can also be seen as a PR-publication for one side, which ironically was acknowledged by Richard Littlemore, one of DeSmog‘s key authors back in the day, as early as 2009. In November 2009, emails from scientists on the computer server of the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit were made public by a whistleblower or perhaps hackers. The whole affair became known as Climategate. These emails contained 15 years of communications between the most prominent climate scientists in the world. And they were embarrassing. The emails provided insight into the practices that ranged from bad professionalism to fraudulent science. Bias, data manipulation, dodging freedom of information requests and trying to subvert the peer-review process were uncovered. In the midst of this scandal, DeSmog author Littlemore informed Michael Mann, author of the flawed ‘hockey stick’ graph of rising temperatures in the 20th century and a prominent climate scientist who played a major role in Climategate and mainstream climate science in general, that DeSmog‘s role in reporting on the issue was “all about PR here, not much about science”.
While such bias should make one sceptical of the publication, DeSmog is used by both the mainstream press and fact-checkers of all kinds as a source of essentially unchallengeable truth today. And despite the errors – which can happen with any of us – there is in fact a great deal of truth to be found there. For example, it factually describes that John F. Clauser, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022, has said he does not believe there is a climate crisis. Similarly, it reviews the lives and work of many other scientists of the same calibre, and shows where and in what words they have denied a man-made climate crisis. But if everything is as said, what is the problem? The point is that the heading under which information about these renowned scientists and other ‘sceptics’ is listed to the public is called ‘Climate Disinformation Database’.
Nelson’s profile, which he refers to on his Substack, is also on the same database. Why is he giving a link to it? “It’s quoting what I have actually said. Somebody spent a lot of time on it, and I wouldn’t have spent that much time myself to write up this kind of ‘about me’ page. So it’s a pretty good ‘about me’ page and if people want to take a look at it, they can get a reference to my work over the last few years,” Nelson explains. DeSmog‘s Editor, for example, has read through all of his posts on social media platform X and highlighted the most important ones. It also outlines which prominent scientists he has interviewed on his climate podcast. And there’s also a section explaining that Nelson is the producer of Climate: The Movie, a recent documentary by British documentary filmmaker Martin Durkin, which critically examines the climate catastrophe claims. Nelson says he is not at all bothered by the coverage of his work alongside world-renowned scientists at such a ‘disinformation database’. “Whenever somebody in the climate cult talks about ‘disinformation’ or ‘misinformation’, I replace that with ‘information’ and that’s what it is – it’s information,” he says.
How a woodpecker led to climate realism
Nelson is an electronic engineer with a Master’s degree and has worked in tech and software for many years. He became interested in climate issues in the second half of the 2000s, and this is linked to his hobby of birdwatching. In 2004, claims were made of the rediscovery in the United States of a species of bird that was declared extinct in the 1980s, the ivory-billed woodpecker. Nelson recalls it was reported on the radio and some people were moved to tears that a species thought to no longer exist had been rediscovered. It was also the subject of an in-depth, peer-reviewed paper by 17 authors published in a scientific journal. But when Nelson delved deeper, he discovered something he was not expecting to find – no evidence of the supposed rediscovery. According to him the whole story was based on a particularly blurry video and an even blurrier photo as evidence of the species’ rediscovery. “It was completely crazy. It was just groupthink. They didn’t see it and they never did get a picture of it. It was all a complete crock,” Nelson says.
Around the same time, a friend told him to take a similar look at the debate about climate and global warming. Until then, he hadn’t paid much attention to the issue and believed that if that’s what the scientists were saying, then humans were probably causing global warming with their CO2 emissions, and possibly a catastrophe would eventually follow. “When I looked at the evidence for myself I was surprised to find that there was nothing, no evidence that there’s a climate crisis,” he says. According to Nelson, anyone can search and look for themselves and see for themselves whether the heat is really too warm now, or were the heatwaves of the 1930s worse? Are polar bears really going extinct? Have yields dropped dramatically? Are droughts in the U.S. state of California worse than 200 years ago? Is the stormy weather becoming more frequent and storms more powerful? Are there really more wildfires?
“You don’t have to be a climatologist. You don’t have to have a degree. Just an ordinary person who can read data and use Google and look at graphs – you can check all these alarming things yourself,” he says. “It’s a complete crock. All of it. Every single bit of anything alarming you’ve heard about the climate and CO2 causing bad weather, it’s all a complete baloney. Not true and no evidence supports it,” Nelson says.
Since about 2006, he has been researching, publishing and arguing about climate issues on a daily basis. According to Nelson, the whole climate emergency is a scam for power and money. There is a lot of money in the energy transition movement, while all sorts of ‘climate restrictions’, be they carbon credits or nudges to change our diets from beef to insects, or possible travelling instructions, are part of this power play, he argues.
Podcast interview led to producing the film
Nelson started his climate podcast series in 2022, where he critically discusses climate science with renowned scientists and other researchers interested in the topic. One of his first guests was documentary filmmaker Martin Durkin. Nelson was already a fan of Durkin’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which was released back in 2007. This film as well critically examined the climate catastrophe predictions.
Speaking about the film, Durkin said at one point that he could actually make a much more meaningful film now. This led to the plan to make a new film and Nelson joined the project as the producer. The new film was released in March this year. Nelson says all the credit for making the film goes to Durkin. “He did all the interviews. He wrote the script, he did the narration and I give him 100% of the credit, to him and his team, for producing such a great movie,” he says, adding that the film didn’t cost much to make financially. “Martin is very good at spending small amounts of money well, and it did not cost that much to make this movie. Largely travel and a lot of people volunteered their time,” Nelson says.
The declaration of a man-made climate crisis is criticised in the film by a number of respected scientists: the aforementioned Nobel Laureate in Physics Dr. Clauser, Professor Steven Koonin, who is the author of Unsettled and a former Provost and Vice-President of Caltech, Professor Richard Lindzen, who is a former Professor of Meteorology at Harvard and MIT, Princeton Physics Professor William Happer, Professor Nir Shaviv from Racah Institute of Physics in Israel, Professor Ross McKitrick from the University of Guelph and several others.
Nelson points out that many people may even be surprised to learn that these scientists, who are also called ‘climate deniers’, do not actually say that the climate is not changing, but on the contrary, they say that the climate is changing all the time. It is simply a question of the cause of climate change, or in other words, of why the change is happening. The climate is a complex system, and we obviously do not even know all the drivers. But the world-renowned physicists Clauser, Koonin, Lindzen and other scientists who speak in the film are given the title of ‘climate deniers’ simply because they oppose, for example, the claim that climate change is caused solely or mainly by anthropogenic CO2.
Since people are constantly presented with CO2 as the main cause, it becomes ingrained in their consciousness, even though they may not have any idea how much of CO2 there actually is in the atmosphere. “People don’t know that it’s about 0.04%. They’re guessing numbers like 5% or more. People are worried that the atmosphere is going to fill with CO2. They think CO2 maybe looks like black gas, black soot or something,” Nelson notes, adding that this ignorance is kind of baffling.
There is no business model behind the film
Nelson points out that they didn’t make the climate film to make money. “We just want a lot of people to see it, because it’s just so important to fight back against this scam. It is kind of the fight of our lifetimes. Because if we let the bad guys win, they’re going to reduce our freedom. And it’s going to be a much worse world if we let them impose all this crazy stuff on us to try to prevent bad weather,” Nelson says. “And as I keep saying, we could spend $50 trillion. We could never have an internal combustion car again. Never eat any meat and go live in caves. And still, there would be no measurable weather or climate benefit ever,” Nelson says.
There has been a major media push to block the film. Facebook, for example, has declared it ‘misinformation’ on the basis of the opinions of fact-checking portals it funds, and these fact-checks also form the basis of what the mainstream press thinks. However, Nelson says that this has not significantly disrupted the distribution of the film, as it has been widely shared, including on platforms that do not engage in censorship – such as X or Rumble. “It’s going to be very hard for anyone to take it down just because it’s up everywhere now,” Nelson says, adding that it’s a little surprising that the film is still available on YouTube.
When will the climate crisis be over?
There are a number of factors, apart from the press and the attitude of the social media companies, that are hindering the spread of critical assessments of the climate crisis. For example, many young scientists, who are also critical of the issue, are reluctant to express their criticism publicly. “They don’t dare to speak out because they’re not going to get published then. They might lose their job. Their family might get some blowback,” Nelson says. If a researcher can no longer publish his or her work in the scientific press, it essentially puts a damper on his or her entire career. “It’s so much easier to just sit back and pretend it’s true,” Nelson says.
However, he believes that this is all changing as more and more people start to look critically at the whole issue. One of the reasons for this ‘awakening’, according to Nelson, is the Covid crisis – a fact that has been acknowledged to him by a number of people recently. “They say they found out that we were not being told the truth about Covid and that the Government and the press were lying to us. And then they started asking themselves, what else are they lying to us about?” he says.
The mainstream press, of course, is still in the business of avoiding these questions and all too often labelling them as misinformation, but Nelson notes that by now one might well be asking, what is the mainstream really? For example, Joe Rogan’s well-known podcast has 14.5 million followers, which makes publications like CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post look like dwarfs in comparison. For instance, CNN’s prime time ratings have dropped constantly and are now below 500,000. Rogan and other podcast producers with large audiences, however, are already ridiculing climate alarmism. What this means, according to Nelson, is that more and more people are becoming climate realists. Nelson ultimately believes that the whole climate catastrophe movement will crumble faster than we would think. “I think people are just going to stop talking about it. I think that’s how this is going to end. There’s not going to be a big revelation where people say, hey, we were wrong completely. Sorry about that. They’re just going to stop talking about it. That’s my prediction,” Nelson says.
This article was published in Korean on the Epoch Times Korea, May 6, 2024
Seok Soon Park, Ph.D. Former President of Korea National Institute of Environmental Research, Professor of Environmental Science & Engineering, Ewha Womans University, Seoul Korea
On March 8, 2007, the British TV Channel 4 aired a documentary titled “The Great Global Warming Swindle.” This film was the complete opposite of the fourth report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in February of the same year. It also directly challenged the documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” by the 45th Vice President of the United States, Al Gore, released in 2006. At that time, fear of man made global warming was sweeping across the world due to the IPCC report and Al Gore’s film.
Under these circumstances, British brave director Martin Durkin produced and aired a documentary on TV denying man made global warming, based on interviews with world-class scientists and the Earth’s climate history. This film featured compelling interviews with several prominent scientists, including Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, and Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT in US. Even now, 17 years later, director Durkin’s outstanding screenplay and interviews with scientists are enough to argue that “global warming is a large-scale fraud.”
On the other hand, big lies were hidden in the IPCC’s fourth report and Al Gore’s film. Notable examples include the ‘Himalayan glacier gate’ and the ‘Antarctic Vostok Ice Core fraud.’ However, these lies passed scrutiny by the Nobel Peace Prize committee, and Al Gore and the IPCC were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2007. The Nobel Committee stated that their awarding was for their efforts in raising awareness of the seriousness of global warming and urging action to address the issue. Furthermore, the Committee linked their efforts to maintaining world peace, stating that “excessive competition for the Earth’s resources leads to global warming and, as a result, increases the risk of violent conflicts and wars.“
The ‘Himalayan Glacier Gate,’ which came to light after the award, is a lie that the huge Himalayan ice cap will melt by 2035. Taking advantage of this lie, Rajendra Pachauri, then chairman of the IPCC, received research funds of 2.5 million and 310,000 pounds from the European Union and the Carnegie Foundation, respectively, to his Indian research institute TERI(The Energy and Resource Institute). The justification was that the melting of all Himalayan glaciers would cause serious problems in drinking water supply for nearly 2 billion Asians. However, sceptics continued to raise suspicions, and in 2010, the IPCC admitted that it was a lie. The IPCC’s excuse was that the number of years 2350 described in a Russian paper was written as 2035 in typos. Misleading the world into climate panic and receiving large amounts of research funds due to the number typo is the absurdity level of the UN IPCC report.
Al Gore’s Vostok Ice Core fraud is even more ludicrous. In his film, Al Gore showed data from ice core in the Vostok station of Antarctica, as if CO2 had raised the Earth’s temperature, proclaiming, “The increasing CO2 will turn the Earth into a furnace in the future.” However, this was a blatant lie. It had already been proved by the peer reviewed papers in 1999 and 2003 published in the famous ‘Science’ journal, that the Earth’s temperature rose first, followed by a subsequent increase in CO2 levels several hundred years later. These papers also explain the reason with the perfect scientific theories. He reversed the cause and the result to deceive the world. Furthermore, during the Eemian interglacial period 120,000 years ago, the CO2 concentration did not reach 300ppm which is much lower than today, but the temperature was 8 degree Celsius higher than today. This is solid proof that CO2 doesn’t drive the Earth temperature increase. Yet, Al Gore ignored this solid proof to deceive the world.
Martin’s 2007 film was sufficient to expose to the world the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize, given without scientific validation, was nothing more than a shabby and shameful emblem. Not only that, but the film also wielded another remarkable power. A London truck driver who watched the film filed a lawsuit against the British government for attempting to screen Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in schools, arguing that “the decision to show a politically one-sided film in schools is wrong.” He didn’t want his two children, who were attending school, to be exposed to “An Inconvenient Truth.“
The London High Court, which took charge of the ruling, examined the scientific truths behind Al Gore’s claims in “An Inconvenient Truth.” Ironically, the court released its judgment outlining nine scientific errors on October 10, one day before the announcement of Nobel Peace Prize. These errors included assertions made by Al Gore himself in the film, such as predictions of a 6-meter sea level rise and the submergence of Pacific atolls in near future due to global warming. The court pointed out that the film was produced in the context of “alarmism and exaggeration,” and that science had been manipulated for political advocacy purposes by politicians and publicity experts. In particular, some of the nine errors were deemed closer to falsehoods than exaggerations. While allowing the use of “An Inconvenient Truth” as a teaching resource in schools, the court also emphasized the importance of presenting opposing viewpoints to prevent one-sided arguments. The government received an order from the court to send 77-page guidelines for correction containing these contents to all schools.
In March of this year, after 17 years, Director Durkin released “Climate the Movie: the Cold Truth”, the Sequel to the 2007 “The Great Global Warming Swindle.” Collaborating with American producer Tom Nelson, they crafted a more meticulous and solid script using scientific data released since then. It features interviews with world-renowned scientists such as the 2022 Nobel Prize laureate in physics Dr. John Clauser, along with William Harper, Steve Koonin, Willie Soon, Roy Spencer, and others. The film has been uploaded on YouTube, Rumble, Odysee, and Bitchute, with subtitles in 29 languages, including Korean and Japanese, so that people around the world can watch it.
The film begins by explaining scientific facts such as the Earth’s climate history, the role of carbon dioxide, the true causes of climate change such as sun and cloud, and the trends in extreme weather events. In the latter part, it exposes the deceitful agreements, the climate bandwagon, and hidden politics behind the emergence of the ‘climate crisis’ narrative. It highlights how individuals’ freedoms and impoverished nations are severely affected. The film concludes in the final remark by stating, “There is a suspicion, or perhaps realisation, that climate change is an invented scare, driven by self-interest and snobbery, cynically promoted by a parasitic, publicly-funded establishment, hungry for ever more money and power. An assault on the freedom and prosperity of the rest of us.”
The film also reveals the basic truth that the climate scam was initiated by the environmental movement that regarded the free-market economy and industrial capitalism, which have brought prosperity to humanity, as it’s sworn enemy. The climate alarmists have been pouring increasingly apocalyptic narratives over the past 30 years, claiming that the catastrophes are imminent. However, none of the catastrophes has occurred, and casualties from climate disasters have rapidly decreased. They put people around the world under mass hypnosis called the ‘climate crisis’ with blatant lies. There is a Korean proverb that says, “Even the hard bank of a large reservoir can be easily collapsed by a small ant hole, if there is a flaw inside.“ The tremendous impact of this film, now accessible to audiences worldwide, is eagerly anticipated.
※Professor Seok Soon Park translated the subtitles of “Climate the Movie: The Cold Truth” into Korean. He currently serves as the South Korean ambassador for the World Climate Declaration by the Climate Intelligence Foundation (www.clintel.org) and a member of the CO2 Coalition (www.co2coalition.org). In 2021, he translated “Inconvenient Facts” by Gregory Wrightstone and “Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom” by Patrick Moore into Korean. In 2023, he co-authored “Climate Apocalypse: the Greatest Scam in Human History,“ with British non-fiction writer David Craig, and wrote “[Fact Check] The Climate Crisis Myths” in Korean. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Environmental Science from Rutgers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey USA) in 1983 and 1985, after his B.S. from Seoul National University (Seoul, Korea) in 1980.
The climate is up the spout and we’re to blame. The planet is boiling like a pan of porridge. We face the possible extinction of all life on earth. ‘Science’ says so. Anyone who questions it is a demonic scoundrel. The climate catastrophe is a 100% solid-gold, slam-dunk irrefutable fact.
Hmm. And yet, it is clear to anyone who has paid the slightest attention, that the tired, hysterical predictions of the climate alarmists (made repeatedly over four decades and based on their hypothetical computer-models) have proved to be spectacularly wrong, again and again and again. It does not take much digging (we have the internet these days) to discover that the outlandish claims of climate alarmists are flatly contradicted by lots and lots of perfectly good scientific evidence and data. We’re not talking here about fringe science put about by whackos. We’re talking about official data – mainstream science, published in respected journals. (Some of it is featured in my ‘climate-denier’ film, Climate: The Movie, available for free online).
The world is not boiling. We are, as any geologist will tell you, in an ice age – one of the coldest periods in the last 500 million years. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere is not unnaturally or frighteningly high. Compared to the last half billion years of earth’s history it is extremely low. And there is no evidence that changing levels of atmospheric CO2 (it has changed radically many times in the past) has ever ‘driven climate change’. If there had been, Al Gore would have said so in his silly film, but he didn’t. Hurricane activity is not increasing, nor are the number of wildfires, nor are the number of droughts, and so on and so on. This is what the official data say. You can look it up.
Of course this is all a bit embarrassing for the science establishment. The climate alarm is worth billions to them in climate-related funding. A lot of jobs depend on it. A lot of reputations are at stake. And it’s deeply awkward for the renewables industry, which turns over around a trillion dollars a year.
The climate alarm is not supported by scientific evidence. It is supported by bullying, intimidation and the censorship of anyone who dares to question it. Climate catastrophism is politics, shamelessly dressed up as science.
The climate scare was the invention of the environmentalist movement, which stands opposed to vulgar, dirty, free-market capitalism. They say there are too many people, consuming too much. We must be restrained and contained, for the sake of Gaia. The solution to the global, existential climate problem is higher taxes and more regulation.
At any social gathering, you can pretty confidently predict who will think what about climate, by asking them about taxes and regulation. People who love the Big State can’t get enough of climate chaos. People who want lower taxes and less regulation will roll their eyes and say rude things about little Greta.
Across the Western world, the state has grown enormously over the last century, vastly increasing the number of people whose livelihoods depend on state-spending, and whose jobs are related, directly or indirectly, to government control. In the U.K. and U.S. both, more than twice as many people now work in government as work in manufacturing. And this does not include all those (in the third sector etc.) who rely indirectly on government largesse.
These people depend on government. They are paid for out of taxation. In such circles to proclaim the joys of a small state, lower taxes and less government is a breach of social etiquette. You have crossed a moral line. You will be suspected of liking Donald Trump, of voting Brexit, of hating lockdown and compulsory vaccination, of defending the Second Amendment, of being a climate denier.
And indeed all this may well be true. These views tend to hang together. As do the views of those on the other side. To repeat, the climate alarm is in fact politics dressed up as science. We are, as more people are beginning to realise, engaged in a class war. On one side, the tax-consuming regulating class that feeds from taxation and bosses us about. On the other, the rest of us in the private sector, who rather resent paying taxes and being told what to do and how to live our lives.
This is the real basis for the consensus on climate change. The consensus exists among our sprawling, tax-consuming establishment. This is not a small group of people. It is an entire class. It is, if you will, the ruling class. It controls our civil service, our schools and universities, large parts of our arts and science establishments and much of the media. It is an intolerant class, deeply aware of its own interests. The taboo that surrounds climate scepticism is a reflection of its power.
It would be nice to think that politely pointing to the actual scientific data might put an end to all the climate chaos nonsense. Sadly it won’t. Because this ain’t about science.
In Climate: The Movie, William Happer, the former physics professor at Princeton, describes the Central England Temperature (CET) record as a “world treasure” since it provides continuous recordings from 1659 – over 350 years. It shows a rise just over 1°C from the depths of the Little Ice Age to the present day. These days, the CET is under the control of the politicised Met Office, keen to catastrophise weather and climate in the interest of promoting Net Zero. Recent revisions have retrospectively cooled the near past and boosted readings from the last 20 years. In addition, the Daily Sceptic can reveal that two of the three measuring stations currently used to add to this scientific treasure are taken from near-junk class 4 sites that come with official ‘uncertainties’ of up to 2°C.
Class 4 site Pershore College was added in 2006 and joined Stonyhurst, also class 4. The other site Rothamsted is a pristine class 1 site and is deemed to provide an accurate reading of the surrounding air temperature away from natural and artificial heat corruptions. Classification and ‘uncertainties’ by class are set by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Quite why the Met Office can’t find three class 1 sites in the whole central England area is a bit of a mystery, although a clue might be provided by the recent freedom of information request the Daily Sceptic made to the organisation. We discovered that nearly eight out of 10 Met Office measuring stations across the United Kingdom were sited in near-junk class 4 and junk class 5. The latter class comes with WMO prescribed ‘uncertainties’ up to 5°C. Class 1 sites number just 24 and make up only 6.3% of the total.
At the very least, given the scientific importance of the CET, the Met Office could at least move the stations to more suitable nearby locations away from the disqualifying heat corruptions.
But if adding near-junk figures to the collection is not bad enough, the investigative science writer Paul Homewood last year discovered considerable tampering in 2022 with the recent CET record. He initially found that in version one, the summer of 1995 had been 0.1°C warmer than 2018. In version 2, the two years swapped places with 1995 cooled by 0.07°C and 2018 warmed by 0.13°C. Alerted to these changes, Homewood then analysed the full record from version 1 to 2, and the graph below shows what he found.
As can be seen, the adjustments up to 1970 are small with ups and downs offsetting each other. Homewood then found that the years from 1970 to 2003 had been cooled markedly, followed by significant rises to 2022. Homewood concludes that “unfortunately it is part of a much wider tampering with temperature globally – and the tampering is always one way, cooling the past and heating the present”. Given that we now know that the Met Office has been using class 4 statistics for two thirds of its database since 2006, the recent higher adjustments would seem to call for clarifying explanations from the state-funded Met Office.
But explanations from the Met Office are thin on the ground. It continues to promote a 60 second spike to 40.3°C at RAF Coningsby at 3.12pm on July 19 in 2022 as a U.K. temperature record, despite the known presence of three typhoon jets attempting to land around the same time. The record has become a national joke, even more so after the Daily Sceptic revealed that Coningsby is a class 3 site with an ‘uncertainty’ of 1°C. All that can be said is that at least Coningsby replaced the previous class 5 record set at Cambridge Botanic Gardens in 2019.
Last month, the Daily Sceptic analysed all the heat records declared by the Met Office since 2000 and found that all bar two should be disqualified. Many of them had been set in junk class 5 and most of the rest were in class 4. Using its highly compromised data with massive ‘uncertainties’ rife throughout the database, the Met Office publicises precision down to one hundredth of a degree, declaring, for instance, that last year was only 0.06°C cooler than the ‘record’ year of 2022. Paul Homewood suggests that if the Met Office wants to continue using its existing station measurements, it should show a warning that the margin of error is so great, “that they have no statistical significance at all”.
The Met Office refuses to return all calls from the Daily Sceptic. We would be more than happy to report any explanations it might have, and discuss its work, if required, in public. Alas, to date, communication has been brief and, frankly, a bit childish. Last December, we reported on a Met Office proposal to ditch a 30-year temperature trend in favour of a Net Zero-supporting merger of 10 years’ past data with 10 years’ future model predictions. Thus, it would be easier to spot when the 1.5°C threshold was crossed, it was argued. Noting that we had taken three weeks to report the plan, Professor Richard Betts, lead author and head of climate impacts, tweeted: “I suppose our paper does use big words like ‘temperature’ so maybe they had to get a grown-up to help”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Many viewers of Climate: The Movie have asked for more information on the topics discussed. In response, I selected the following 70 key statements from the movie and provide references and context for the statements here. Sometimes the statements are slightly paraphrased from what was said for brevity. The statements are listed in the same order as they appear in the movie. The references, illustrations, and links below are my attempt to clarify the statements, provide context, and support the idea behind the phrase or sentence.
I received help from Dr. Willie Soon and Marty Cornell in building this bibliography. My thanks to both.
These “27 estimates are a thin basis for drawing definitive conclusions about the total welfare impacts of climate change. Moreover, the 11 estimates for warming of 2.5 C indicate that researchers disagree on the sign of the net impact: 3 estimates are positive and 8 are negative. Thus it is unclear whether climate change will lead to a net welfare gain or loss.”Tol, 2018
Lomborg, B. (2020, July). Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies,. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 156. doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2020.119981
Tol, R. (2023). Costs and benefits of the Paris Climate Targets. Climate Change Economics, 14(4). doi:10.1142/S2010007823400031
Tol, R. S. (2018). The Economic Impacts of Climate Change. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 12(1), 4-25. doi:10.1093/reep/rex027
Skepticism is career suicide and might be criminalized.
Unsettled, What Climate Science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters, by Steven Koonin.
Climate proxies
A good overview of climate proxies:
Patalano, R., & Roberts, P. (2021). Climate proxies. In D. T. Potts, & E. Harkness, The Encyclopedia of Ancient History. John Wiley & Sons. doi:10.1002/9781119399919.eahaa00609
For a discussion of many of the best global temperature proxies that cover the past 12,000 years see Climate Catastrophe! Science or Science Fiction?, 2018, pp. 95-107.
May, A. (2018). Climate Catastrophe! Science or Science Fiction? American Freedom Publications LLC.
Temperature for the past 500 million years
Scotese, C., Song, H., Mills, B. J., & Meer, D. v. (2021, January ). Invited Review: Phanerozoic Paleotemperatures: The Earth’s Changing Climate during the Last 540 Million Years. Earth-Science Reviews.
Figure 1. Scotese’s reconstruction of the past 125 million years. Major climatic changes are identified, as well as the IPCC projected anthropogenic global warming (PAW). (Scotese, Song, Mills, & Meer, 2021). Notice the PAW has recently (geologically speaking) been exceeded, it is not unusual.
When was the Earth as cold as now?
As can be seen in figure 2, temperatures have not been as cold as today for over 250 million years. Figure 2 is by the Smithsonian and from NOAA’s climate.gov website.
Figure 2. A reconstruction of Phanerozoic (past 540 million years) temperatures by Scott Wing, Brian Huber, and Chris Scotese at the Smithsonian.
Late Cenozoic Ice Age
Figure 3. The most recent 420,000 years of the 2.5 million year Late Cenozoic Ice Age as seen in Antarctic ice core data collected by Petit, et al, 1999. The CO2 is in parts per million atmospheric concentration and the temperatures are anomalies from the present. Plot from Watts and Pacnik, 2012.
The Late Cenozoic Ice Age (the past 2.6 million years) is characterized by a series of glacial advances (colder periods) and glacial retreats (warmer periods) that are about 100,000 years apart. We are currently in a period of glacial retreat, also called an “interglacial.” Our interglacial is named the “Holocene” and is the most recent 12,000 years. Notice the changes in CO2 (in red) tend to follow the changes the temperature (in blue), suggesting that CO2 did not cause the temperature change.
Holocene warm period or the “Holocene Climatic Optimum.”
Figure 4. The Holocene, with its major periods identified.
The two temperature proxies shown are from the Indonesian Makassar Strait and from Greenland. While the Makassar Strait is technically in the Southern Hemisphere, the 500-meter water there flows from the Northern Hemisphere and represents sea-surface temperatures in the North Pacific. Thus, the proxies represent the Northern Hemisphere, but they are 9,500 miles apart. The Northern Hemisphere is where the largest temperature changes occur. The Holocene Climatic Optimum is about 3.6°C warmer at these two locations than the Little Ice Age, also known as the “pre-industrial.” The source of the figure and more explanation is here.
There has been an attempt to claim that the Holocene Climatic Optimum was actually colder than today by Bova, et al. (2021), but the paper has drawn two serious criticisms (see Laepple, et al., 2022 and Zhang & Chen, 2021) and undergone a major revision.
Bova, S., Rosenthal, Y., & Liu, Z. (2021). Seasonal origin of the thermal maxima at the Holocene and the last interglacial. Nature, 589, 548-553. doi:10.1038/s41586-020-03155-x
Laepple, T., Shakun, J., He, F., & Marcott, S. (2022). Concerns of assuming linearity in the reconstruction of thermal maxima. Nature, 607. doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04831-w
Zhang, X., & Chen, F. (2021). Non-trivial role of internal climate feedback on interglacial temperature evolution. Nature, 600. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03930-4
Holocene Climatic Optimum and the beginning of civilization
Figure 5. An overview of the development of human civilization over the past 18,000 years and its relationship to major climate changes. To download the full resolution version click here. Major events in the development of human civilization are noted, both Greenland and Antarctic ice core temperatures are plotted. Source.
Also see these interesting articles on the Little Ice Age/pre-industrial by Paul Homewood, Geoffrey Parker, and Soon et al.
Soon, W., Baliunas, S., Idso, C., Idso, S., & Legates, D. (2003b). Reconstructing Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 years: A Reappraisal. Energy and Environment, 14(2&3).
Roman Warm Period
A brief overview of the evidence for the Roman Warm Period in Europe, with a bibliography, can be seen at CO2science.org here. More information and references are given here. The topic is also covered by Soon, et al.:
Soon, W., Baliunas, S., Idso, C., Idso, S., & Legates, D. (2003b). Reconstructing Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 years: A Reappraisal. Energy and Environment, 14(2&3). Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1260/095830503765184619
Central England Temperature Record
The Central England Temperature record is now maintained by the Hadley Centre. It can be viewed and downloaded here. A discussion of the climatic significance of the record is given in Baliunas, et al.
Baliunas, S., Frick, P., Sokoloff, D., & Soon, W. (1997). Time scales and trends in the central England temperature data (1659–1990): A wavelet analysis. Geophysical Research Letters, 24(11), 1351-1354. doi:10.1029/97GL01184
New York Central Park temperature record
The New York Central Park temperature record can be seen and downloaded here.
1.5°C of warming will not lead to the end of man.
The potential impact of the mild rate of warming we are experiencing has been exaggerated.
Tol, R. (2023). Costs and benefits of the Paris Climate Targets. Climate Change Economics, 14(4). doi:10.1142/S2010007823400031
Nordhaus, W. (2018). Climate change: The Ultimate Challenge for Economics. Nobel Prize Lecture.
Tol, R. S. (2018). The Economic Impacts of Climate Change. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 12(1), 4-25. doi:10.1093/reep/rex027
The 1.5 and 2°C warming limits are arbitrary as discussed here.
Urban Heat Island Effect and Urban vs. Rural weather stations
The best and most authoritative source for the Urban Heat Island Effect is Soon, et al., 2023, here.
Soon, W., Connolly, R., Connolly, M., Akasofu, S. I., Baliunas, S., Berglund, J., . . . al., e. (2023). The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850–2018) in Terms of Human and Natural Factors: Challenges of Inadequate Data. Climate, 11(9). doi:10.3390/cli11090179
Scafetta, N. (2021, January 17). Detection of non‐climatic biases in land surface temperature records by comparing climatic data and their model simulations. Climate Dynamics. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-05626-x
Land vs. Ocean temperatures.
Reid, 1991 and Connolly, et al., 2021 have noted that while surface air temperatures do not correlate very well with solar activity, sea surface temperatures do.
Connolly et al., R. (2021). How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 21(6). doi:10.1088/1674-4527/21/6/131
Connolly et al., R. (2023). Challenges in Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends since 1850 Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 23(10). doi: 10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e
Reid, G. (1991). Solar Total Irradiance Variations and the Global Sea Surface record. J Geophysical Research, 96(D2), 2835-2844.
Tree Ring temperatures
Tree ring proxy temperatures have advantages and disadvantages. They are well-dated at an annual resolution, but they are also sensitive to CO2 concentration, precipitation, and growing season length. This limits their accuracy as a proxy thermometer since they have to be calibrated to the instrumental record during the industrial revolution and a period of global warming.
The sensitivity to CO2 concentration can be a problem. When CO2 is relatively high, as it is today, trees use less water per pound of growth and are more tolerant of drought than in the past which causes a divergence in the tree ring to temperature relationship in the second half of the twentieth century. This divergence corrupts the temperature/tree ring correlation function used for the past (Briffa, Jones, Schweingruber, & Osborn, 1998).
Briffa, K., Schweingruber, F., Jones, P., Osborn, T., & Vaganov, E. (1998b). Reduced Sensitivity of recent tree-growth to temperature at high latitudes. Nature, 678-682. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/35596
Other problems with tree rings as temperature proxies, especially combining them into one temperature record are discussed by Stephen McIntyre here.
The notorious “Hockey Stick” tree ring reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures by Michael Mann, et al. is thoroughly discussed in the Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford and in several blog posts and papers by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick:
Mann, M. E., Bradley, R. S., & Hughes, M. K. (1998). Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries. Nature, 392, 779-787. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/33859
McIntyre, S., & McKitrick, R. (2003, November 1). Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series. Energy and Environment. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1260/095830503322793632
Montford, A. (2010). The Hockey Stick Illusion. Stacey International Publishing.
Satellite temperatures
Measuring atmospheric temperature from satellite microwave measurements was invented by a team of scientists and engineers led by Roy Spencer and John Christy. It was first reported in detail in a now classic paper (Spencer & Christy, 1990):
The global satellite temperature data can be downloaded here.
Global average surface temperatures are too high.
It has long been known that modern global average surface temperature datasets show too much warming, although the reasons for the problem are often debated. We know the exaggerated rate of surface warming exists by comparing satellite estimates, ocean temperature estimates, and rural only temperatures to the standard land & ocean datasets. All independent rates of warming are less than the standard land & ocean rates.
Soon, W., Connolly, R., Connolly, M., Akasofu, S. I., Baliunas, S., Berglund, J., . . . al., e. (2023). The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850–2018) in Terms of Human and Natural Factors: Challenges of Inadequate Data. Climate, 11(9). doi:10.3390/cli11090179
Christy, J. R., Herman, B., Sr., R. P., Klotzbach, P., McNider, R. T., Hnilo, J. J., . . . Douglass, D. (2010). What Do Observational Datasets Say about Modeled Tropospheric Temperature Trends since 1979? Remote Sensing, 9, 2148-2169. doi:10.3390/rs2092148
Rae, J. W., Zhang, Y. G., Liu, X., Foster, G. L., Stoll, H. M., & Whiteford, R. D. (2021). Atmospheric CO2 over the Past 66 Million Years from Marine Archive. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 49(1), 609-641. doi:10.1146/annurev-earth-082420-063026
Figure 6. Atmospheric CO2 concentration from proxies for the past 66 million years. Source (Rae, et al., 2021).
CO2 is plant food, more means more plants.
More CO2 fertilizes plants, and they grow faster in the presence of CO2, which is why CO2 is pumped into greenhouses. More CO2 also makes plants more drought resistant. More details here.
Chen, X., Chen, T., He, B., Liu, S., Zhou, S., & Shi, T. (2024). The global greening continues despite increased drought stress since 2000. Global Ecology and Conservation, 49. doi:10.1016/j.gecco.2023.e02791
CO2 dropped to 180 ppm 20,000 years ago and some plants died of CO2 starvation.
At CO2 partial pressures of 15 Pa or lower (roughly 150 ppm at sea level), most plants will either die or lose their ability to reproduce. In some areas in the last glacial maximum these conditions were possible.
Neftel, A., Moor, E., & Oeschger, H. (1985). Evidence from polar ice cores for the increase in atmospheric CO2 in the past two centuries. Nature, 315. doi:10.1038/315045a0
Soon, W. (2007). Implications of the Secondary Role of Carbon Dioxide and Methane Forcing in Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future. Physical Geography, 2, 97-125. doi:10.2747/0272-3646.28.2.97
Renee Hannon discusses problems with ice core CO2 estimates here.
CO2 has never driven temperature, it’s the opposite.
See figure 3 and the discussion around it.
Koutsoyiannis, D., Onof, C., Kundzewicz, Z. W., & Christofides, A. (2023). On Hens, Eggs, Temperatures and CO2: Causal Links in Earth’s Atmosphere. Sci, 5(3). doi:10.3390/sci5030035
Soon, W. (2007). Implications of the Secondary Role of Carbon Dioxide and Methane Forcing in Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future. Physical Geography, 2, 97-125. doi:10.2747/0272-3646.28.2.97
The 1930s were very warm.
The most pronounced warming in the historical global climate record, prior to the warming from 1980 to 2000, occurred in the first half of the 20th century. It peaked in the late 1930s.
Hegerl, G. C., Brönnimann, S., Schurer, A., & Cowan, T. (2018). The early 20th century warming: Anomalies, causes, and consequences. WIREs Climate Change, 9(4). doi:10.1002/wcc.522
Climate models do not capture this period of warming very well because they rely too much on CO2. In all likelihood, CO2 played a very small role in the early 20th century warming.
From 1945 to 1976 the world cooled
Guy Callendar published a major paper introducing his collection of past CO2 concentration measurements and global temperatures in 1938. The study tried to show that they correlated in the fashion predicted by Svante Arrhenius thirty years earlier and that CO2 controlled Earth’s temperature. Unfortunately, just after he published the paper the world began to cool as CO2 concentration increased rapidly during the post war industrial boom. The following plot of global temperatures is from HadCRUT4.
Figure 7. Plot of the HadCRUT4 global surface temperature average and the NOAA/NASA CO2 dataset in light gray. The CO2 concentration is shown as the logarithm to the base two so it can be compared directly to temperature. Notice the correlation is good after 1980, but poor before then.
In figure 7 we see that CO2 increases from about 1945 to 1980 while global average temperature falls.
Callendar, G. S. (1938). The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature. Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc., 64, 223-240. doi:10.1002/qj.49706427503
Climate models overestimated observed temperature increases.
From the IPCC AR6 WGI report:
“Hence, we assess with medium confidence that CMIP5 and CMIP6 models continue to overestimate observed warming in the upper tropical troposphere over the 1979–2014 period by at least 0.1°C per decade, in part because of an overestimate of the tropical SST trend pattern over this period.“(AR6 WGI, page 444).
McKitrick, R., & Christy, J. (2018, July 6). A Test of the Tropical 200- to 300-hPa Warming Rate in Climate Models, Earth and Space Science. Earth and Space Science, 5(9), 529-536. doi:10.1029/2018EA000401
McKitrick, R., & Christy, J. (2020). Pervasive Warming Bias in CMIP6 Tropospheric Layers. Earth and Space Science, 7. doi:10.1029/2020EA001281
IPCC. (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. In V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, . . . B. Zhou (Ed.)., WG1. Retrieved from https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
Climate models do not reproduce the ocean cycles properly.
From Eade, 2022:
“This suggests that current climate models do not fully represent important aspects of the mechanism for low frequency variability of the NAO.”Eade, et al. 2022
Eade, R., Stephenson, D., & Scaife, A. (2022). Quantifying the rarity of extreme multi‑decadal trends: how unusual was the late twentieth century trend in the North Atlantic Oscillation? Climate Dynamics, 58, 1555–1568 . doi:10.1007/s00382-021-05978-4
The NAO, the North Atlantic Oscillation, is an important ocean oscillation.
One of the best indicators of the weakness of the CMIP climate models is the fact that they do not reproduce or include as input, these vital climate indicators. For example, see the discussion on the “AMV” (AMV is what AR6 calls the AMO) in AR6 WGI page 504. The “AMV-like” signal in the climate models is too weak, following is a quote from AR6:
“On average, the duration of modelled AMV episodes is too short, the magnitude of AMV is too weak and its basin-wide SST spatial structure is limited by the poor representation of the link between the tropical North Atlantic and the subpolar North Atlantic/Nordic seas. Such mismatches between observed and simulated AMV have been associated with intrinsic model biases in both mean state and variability in the ocean and overlying atmosphere. For instance, compared to available observational data CMIP5 models underestimate the ratio of decadal to interannual variability of the main drivers of AMV, namely the AMOC, NAO and related North Atlantic jet variations … which has strong implications for the simulated temporal statistics of AMV, AMV-induced teleconnections and AMV predictability.”AR6, page 504
If they can’t model these important oscillations correctly, their models are wrong.
There is no relationship between CO2 concentration and climate.
Besides the lack of a correlation in figure 7, there is also no correlation between CO2 and climate over the entire Holocene as shown in Figure 4 here. This lack of correlation has been called the Holocene Temperature Conundrum.
Kaufman, D., & Broadman, E. (2023, February 15). Revisiting the Holocene global temperature conundrum. Nature, 614, 425-435. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05536-w
Liu, Z., Zhu, J., Rosenthal, Y., Zhang, X., Otto-Bliesner, B. L., Timmermann, A., . . . Timm, O. E. (2014). The Holocene temperature conundrum. PNAS, 111. Retrieved from http://www.pnas.org/content/111/34/E3501.short
There is no evidence that the Earth is warmer today than in the past.
See figures 2 and 4 and the references.
There is no evidence that CO2 is now dangerously high.
The CO2 concentration has been many times higher than today in the past, and the only thing that happened was the Earth became greener.
Chen, X., Chen, T., He, B., Liu, S., Zhou, S., & Shi, T. (2024). The global greening continues despite increased drought stress since 2000. Global Ecology and Conservation, 49. doi:10.1016/j.gecco.2023.e02791
Also see this essay on the very warm PETM, 56 million years ago.
Clouds are important in climate change.
Clouds are the largest source of uncertainty in the IPCC calculation of the impact of CO2 concentration on climate according to AR6 WGI page 979. The net impact of changes in average cloud cover ranges from a positive feedback (warming) to a negative or cooling feedback, so even the direction of cloud-caused changes is unknown. Clouds cannot be modeled so their effect must be “parameterized,” which means they are varied in the model according to complex assumptions.
IPCC. (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. In V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, . . . B. Zhou (Ed.)., WG1. Retrieved from https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
Ceppi, P., Brient, F., Zelinka, M., & Hartmann, D. (2017, July). Cloud feedback mechanisms and their representation in global climate models. WIRES Climate Change, 8(4). Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcc.465
Galactic cosmic rays can contribute to creating clouds.
Galactic cosmic rays may help nucleate cloud formation.
Svensmark, H., Svensmark, J., Enghoff, M., & Shaviv, N. (2021). Atmospheric ionization and cloud radiative forcing. Sci Rep, 11. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-99033-1
Nir Shaviv’s spiral arm hypothesis
It is quite possible that Earth’s Ice Ages are related to the solar system’s path through the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy as proposed by Nir Shaviv.
Solar wind and its effect on galactic cosmic rays.
Dumbović, M., Vršnak, B., Čalogović, J., & Karlica, M. (2011). Cosmic ray modulation by solar wind disturbances. Astronomy and Astrophysics. doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201016006
Does solar activity correlate with climate changes?
Solar activity correlates with many features of Earth’s climate, including surface temperature, La Nina frequency, and polar vortex strength. For an overview see here.
Connolly et al., R. (2021). How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 21(6). doi:10.1088/1674-4527/21/6/131
Soon, W., Connolly, R., & Connolly, M. (2015). Re-evaluating the role of solar variability on Northern Hemisphere temperature trends since the 19th century. Earth Science Reviews, 150, 409-452. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825215300349
Soon, W., Connolly, R., Connolly, M., Akasofu, S. I., Baliunas, S., Berglund, J., . . . al., e. (2023). The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850–2018) in Terms of Human and Natural Factors: Challenges of Inadequate Data. Climate, 11(9). doi:10.3390/cli11090179
Connolly et al., R. (2023). Challenges in Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends since 1850 Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 23(10). doi: 10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e
IPCC AR6 cannot attribute extreme weather to humans, but they try.
“… both thermodynamic and dynamic processes are involved in the changes of extremes in response to warming. Anthropogenic forcing (e.g., increases in greenhouse gas concentrations) directly affects thermodynamic variables, including overall increases in high temperatures and atmospheric evaporative demand, and regional changes in atmospheric moisture, which intensify heatwaves, droughts and heavy precipitation events when they occur (high confidence). Dynamic processes are often indirect responses to thermodynamic changes, are strongly affected by internal climate variability, and are also less well understood. As such, there is low confidence in how dynamic changes affect the location and magnitude of extreme events in a warming climate.”AR6 WGI, page 1527
While AR6 says that it is hard to explain changes in severe weather without anthropogenic forcing, it is “extremely difficult to detect and attribute changes” in precipitation/cyclones/drought/etc. to human activities (AR6 WGI, Chapter 11). They also note that “it remains uncertain whether past changes in Atlantic TC [tropical cyclone] activity are outside the range of natural variability.” AR6 WGI page 1588.
1930s in the U.S. were warmer than today.
This is a complicated issue and no definitive answer can be given either way. The surface temperature data quality and coverage in the U.S. varies a lot since 1930 and the data processing algorithms are often questioned. Further, the differences between the warmest years in the 1930s and today are small and well below the accuracy of the measurements.
James Hansen and a large group of co-authors concluded in 2001 that the U.S. mean temperature had just reached a level comparable to that of the 1930s. He concludes: “The U.S. was warm in 2000 but cooler than the warmest years in the 1930s…”
Hansen, J., Ruedy, R., Sato, M., Imhoff, M., Lawrence, W., Easterling, D., . . . Karl, T. (2001). A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 106(D20), 23947-23963. doi:10.1029/2001JD000354
The U.S. surface temperature data (called USHCN or the U.S. Historical Climatology Network) are ambiguous, and the trend is highly dependent upon the corrections applied to it. Figure 8 compares the final processed CONUS (Contiguous U.S. states) temperature anomaly in blue to the raw temperature anomaly in orange. The important point to notice is that the raw data from the 1930s is nearly as high as raw modern temperatures because the “corrected” data in the 1930s is corrected down and the modern temperatures are “corrected” up. The reasons given for this pattern are controversial. The other unusual thing about the plot is the corrections to the modern data, which is presumably more accurate, are larger than the corrections in the 1930s.
The final temperatures, shown in figure 8 in blue, are highly processed and missing stations are filled in with data from nearby stations. The raw data shown in figure 8 are only the data from real stations, so how many functioning stations exist in any given year matters. Figure 9 shows the number of stations reporting each year in orange. The final station count is forced to be constant by the infilling algorithm.
Figure 8. Comparison of the continental U.S. (“CONUS”) USHCN v 2.5.5 weather station
The actual number of reporting weather stations in the 1930s and the 1990s is fairly high and only a few stations had to be infilled with the processing algorithm. Yet while the peak years in the 1930s and in the 1990s have similar raw data temperature anomalies, the final temperatures are different. This is the context behind the statement.
Figure 9. The number of weather stations reporting in each year is shown in orange. Only stations reporting in each of the 12 months of the year are counted to avoid seasonal anomalies. The number of values in the final dataset (some are infilled with the algorithm) are shown in blue. The apparent loss of “accuracy” in figure 8, after 2000 is at least partially due to the loss of reporting weather stations.
More on the U.S. temperature record, including additional references and datasets that indicate the 1930s is warmer than 2000, can be seen here. The post also provides the official explanation for the “corrections.”
James Hansen and co-authors also wrote the following in 1999, link:
“What’s happening to our climate? Was the heat wave and drought in the Eastern United States in 1999 a sign of global warming?
Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s “Dust Bowl” that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.” (James Hansen, 1999)
Winter temperatures are rising and summer temperatures have hardly changed.
This is a common assumption, but the real story of winter versus summer warming rates is more complex. Models predict that winters and nights will warm faster than summers and days, but this trend only happens in some regions of the Earth. In other areas it is opposite and no one really understands why (Balling, Michaels, & Knappenberger, 1998).
Balling, R., Michaels, P., & Knappenberger, P. (1998). Analysis of winter and summer warming rates in gridded temperature time series. Climate Research, 9. doi:10.3354/cr009175
Wildfires were worse in the 1930s.
Figure 10. U.S. forest area burned since 1926, from the National Interagency Fire Center.
No change in U.S. hurricanes.
There is no trend or a slight decline in continental U.S. landfalling hurricanes over the past 120 years.
Klotzbach, P. J., Bowen, S. G., Pielke, R., & Bell, M. (2018). Continental U.S. Hurricane Landfall Frequency and Associated Damage: Observations and Future Risks. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc, 99, 1359-1376. doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0184.1
No change in global cyclones
Figure 11. Global major hurricane frequency, from Ryan Maue.
Figure 12. Global tropical cyclone frequency, from Ryan Maue.
Schneider, D. P. (2006). Antarctic temperatures over the past two centuries from ice cores. Geophysical Research Letters, 33(16). doi:10.1029/2006GL027057
“Beyond the Antarctic Peninsula there has been little significant change in temperature.”Turner, et al., 2019
Turner, J., Marshall, G. J., Clem, K., Colwell, S., Phillips, T., & Lu, H. (2019). Antarctic temperature variability and change from station data. International Journal of Climatology, 2986-3007. doi:10.1002/joc.6378
Figure 13. Antarctic temperatures.
Global drought has not changed.
Meteorological drought has not increased in at least the past 120 years.
Vicente-Serrano, S. M., Peña-Angulo, D., Beguería, S., Domínguez-Castro, F., Tomás-Burguera, M., Noguera, I., . . . Ahmed, E. K. (2022). Global drought trends and future projections. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 380. doi:10.1098/rsta.2021.0285
Polar bear population is growing.
As of 2021 the world polar bear population was growing according to polar bear expert Susan Crockford.
Crockford, S. (2022). The State of the Polar Bear 2021. Global Warmig Policy Foundation.
Great barrier reef is growing and reached record levels.
Figure 14. Great Barrier Reef growth record, After Peter Ridd using data from the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
Climate change can kill maple trees?
This is highly speculative, but claimed, see here.
Climate change and prostitution.
Farley, M. (2022). Making the connections: resource extraction, prostitution, poverty, climate change, and human rights. The International Journal of Human Rights, 26(6), 1032-1055. doi:10.1080/13642987.2021.1997999
Climate change affects beer quality.
Mozny, M., Trnka, M., & Vlach, V. (2023). Climate-induced decline in the quality and quantity of European hops calls for immediate adaptation measures. Nature. doi:10.1038/s41467-023-41474-5
Climate change in video games.
Yes, there are climate change video games, see here and here.
If you don’t find climate change is a problem your money dries up.
“On March 7, 2019, Senator Schumer (together with Senators Carper, Reed, Van Hollen, White-house, Markey, Schatz, Smith, Blumenthal, Shaheen, Booker, Stabenow, Klobuchar, Hassan, Merkley, and Feinstein) introduced Senate bill S.729:”
“ . . . to prohibit the use of funds to Federal agencies to establish a panel, task force, advisory committee, or other effort to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change, and for other purposes.”Koonin, 2021, p 202
Incredibly shocking, the U.S. Senate attempting to legislate scientific research outcomes, it doesn’t get worse than this. Fortunately, the bill failed to pass, but the political pressure to find human’s caused recent climate changes is overwhelming.
Filing reports on how climate change affects businesses.
The U.S. SEC have tried to implement a new climate change impact filing requirement, see here. However the rule has been temporarily halted by the courts (see here).
It has been criticized as unnecessarily punitive and expensive.
Renewable energy is a trillion-dollar business.
A recent McKinsey report expects $9.2 trillion to be spent on reaching net zero by 2050.
Scafetta, N., & Willson, R. (2014). ACRIM total solar irradiance satellite composite validation versus TSI proxy models. Astrophysics and Space Science, 350(2), 421-442. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10509-013-1775-9
Soon, W., Connolly, R., & Connolly, M. (2015). Re-evaluating the role of solar variability on Northern Hemisphere temperature trends since the 19th century. Earth Science Reviews, 150, 409-452. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825215300349
Connolly et al., R. (2023). Challenges in Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends since 1850 Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 23(10). doi: 10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e
We are looking for the range of natural variability.
“… a significant part of the 20th century warming may be interpreted as the result of natural climatic variations…”Humlum, 2011
Humlum, O., Solheim, J.-E., & Stordahl, K. (2011). Identifying natural contributions to late Holocene climate change. Global and Planetary Change, 79(1), 145-156. doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2011.09.005
Here is a discussion of natural variability in the Arctic by Judith Curry.
“These results support the notion that the enhanced wintertime warming over high northern latitudes from 1965 to 2000 was mainly a reflection of unforced variability of the coupled climate system.”(Wallace, Qiang, Smoliak, & Johanson, 2012)
Wallace, J., Q. F., Smoliak, B. V., & Johanson, C. M. (2012). Simulated versus observed patterns of warming over the extratropical Northern Hemisphere continents during the cold season. Earth, Atmospheric, And Planetary Sciences, 109(36). doi:10.1073/pnas.1204875109
More government control.
“The politician’s power increases because exercising power increases it and people will give up their freedoms in exchange for security, whether the danger is real or not.”(May, Politics and Climate Change: A History, 2020c, p. 15)
May, A. (2020c). Politics and Climate Change: A History. Springfield, Missouri: American Freedom Publications.
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, speaking to the editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald in 1998.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”Christiana Figueres, February 4th, 2015
None of the countries participating in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol had any idea what the treaty would cost them, either in jobs or standard of living. They also had no idea what the benefits would be. William Nordhaus, the famous Yale economist and Nobel laureate, called the Kyoto Protocol a:
“conceptual disaster; it has no coherence politically or economically or environmentally.”William Nordhaus, (Yale University, 2007, pp. 131-132).
Kyoto had little to do with climate change, it was mainly an enormous transfer of money from wealthy countries to poor countries. (May, Politics and Climate Change: A History, 2020c, pp. 236-237)
Burning wood and dung for heat or to cook is deadly.
“Traditional biofuels” are the burning of wood and dung in houses or businesses for heat, light, or cooking. This is not desirable because it produces toxic air pollution. The indoor air pollution caused by traditional biofuels, causes 4% of global deaths. A major study, published in The Lancet, estimates that more than two million deaths can be attributed to indoor air pollution in 2019 (Christopher Murray, 2020). The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that four million deaths, every year, are caused by indoor air pollution. Domestic wood burning is not just a problem in the developing world, the European Environment Agency, WHO, and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research suggest that over 40% of toxic emissions are from residential biomass burning. The UK Department for Environment, Food, and Rural affairs (DEFRA) estimates that 38% of UK air pollution is due to wood-burning stove emissions.”
“The energy-intensiveness of industrial agriculture is well-documented”
“The energy basis of industrial food production has a rich tradition, but quantitative analysis of changes in energy use in agriculture has been limited by the lack of consistent data. This analysis used a new methodology for calculating the direct and indirect use of fossil fuels in agriculture. The procedure was used to quantify energy use in USA agriculture from 1910 to 1990. The results showed a substantial overall increase in energy use from 1910 through the 1970s, and a shift from gasoline to diesel fuel and electricity. The use of all fuels declined in the 1980s.”
“Energy productivity rose in the 1980s due to a diminution in the rate of energy use, a reduction in the number of harvested acres, and larger farms. The results showed a clear response of farmers to higher energy prices that resulted in technical and managerial changes that improved energy productivity.”(Cleveland, 1995)
In essence the higher energy prices in the 1980s led to small farmers selling out to larger more efficient farmers, improving overall productivity. Small farmers being forced to sell out to larger farmers was epidemic in the 1980s and mostly due to the high cost of gasoline and diesel.
Cleveland, C. (1995, September). The direct and indirect use of fossil fuels and electricity in USA agriculture, 1910-1990. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, 111-121. doi:10.1016/0167-8809(95)00615-Y
Fossil fuels built western civilization.
The 20th century has been called the “Age of Oil” and with good reason. It was a century when life expectancy doubled and extreme poverty dropped from 80% to less than 10%. The drop in poverty is closely correlated (R2= 0.99) to fossil fuels consumed.
Yergin, D. (1991). The Prize. New York: Touchstone.
“In recent years, the overused word ‘sustainability’ has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and ‘degrowth’. The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years. Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies and live like Renaissance potentates.”See Joel Kotkin, Spiked, here for more.
China builds two coal powerplants a week.
In 2022 China granted permits for 106 coal power plants across 82 sites.
China uses more coal than the rest of the world combined.
Figure 15. Coal consumption for the whole world compared to China from ourworldindata.org.
Anti-environmentalism is rampant.
Polish farmers protest EU environmental regulations.
Belgian farmers protest excessive environmental rules.
A potentially game-changing film on the fraudulent climate change narrative and the collectivist Net Zero project hits global social media screens today. “Climate change is an invented scare of self-interest and snobbery, cynically promoted by a parasitic, publicly-funded establishment hungry for power and money,” says writer Martin Durkin. The attitude of middle class environmentalists can be summed up as “how can we stop people buying cheap things in shops”, observes Baroness Claire Fox. On the science side, the 2022 Nobel Physics laureate Dr. John Clauser asserts: “There is no correlation between temperature change and carbon dioxide – it is all a crock of crap.”
The new film is a long-awaited sequel to Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle film shown on Channel 4 in 2007. The outcry from activists at the time led to the banning of sceptical climate science views across most mainstream media, bans that continue to this day. The new film is called Climate: The Movie and features many top sceptical climate scientists. It lays out the politically-supressed views surrounding natural climate variation in riveting and persuasive detail. As Durkin notes at the beginning, his new film is the story of how an eccentric environmental scare grew into a powerful global industry. “When I hear people pontificating about a rise of one and a half degrees, I think what have they been smoking,” says Emeritus Professor William Happer of Princeton.
“There is no climate emergency. There is no evidence of one,” comments Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the original founders of Greenpeace. Around 20,000 years ago, CO2 was at the lowest level it has ever been in the history of the Earth. The gas is currently 420 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere and has recovered from 180 ppm. “If it had gone down another 30 ppm, we would all be dead,” observes Moore. The film quotes other scientists noting that CO2 levels were much higher in the past at times of very high biodiversity levels on the planet. One of the numerous ‘scams’ identified in the film is that there is little correlation between CO2 and temperatures across the 500 million year record. In fact, recent ice core evidence shows periods when temperatures rose ahead of increases in CO2. The opinions and hypotheses surrounding unproven anthropogenic climate change simply do not stand up to past scientific observations.
“We should be very grateful that CO2 levels are beginning to go back up – there is not enough fossil fuel to get to historical levels, but at least we can make a start,” observes a mischievous Professor Happer. “CO2 is quite unimportant in controlling Earth’s climate,” says Dr. Clauser. For him, the behaviour of clouds is “hundreds of times more powerful than the trivial effect of CO2”.
The science of climate features heavily in the film and clear explanations are provided throughout. “Compared to the last 500 million years the Earth is exceptionally cold,” explains Durkin. The reason there is ice at the poles is that we are in an ice age, observes Moore. “We are at the tail end of a 50 million year cooling period, and they say it is too hot,” he adds. As regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will be aware, recent surface measurement have been badly corrupted by growing urban heat. Former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer, who has studied the urban heat effect in great detail, calculates that most of the measured urban warming since 1880 is due to the urban heat effect.
Many of the issues discussed in the film will be familiar to Daily Sceptic readers – from the biased UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change only considering human involvement in the climate (it would be out of a job if it found humans were not that important) to the trillions of dollars spent on Government-mandated inferior green technologies.
The corruption of ‘settled’ science is widely discussed with click-bait, well-funded scientists feeding doomsday climate predictions into the public space via the unquestioning mainstream media. Few corruptions are more blatant than attaching bad weather events to long-term changes in the climate. Science writer Tony Heller calls it “absurd”, adding, “there is no basis to it, it is biased propaganda”. The capture of scientific journals is almost complete with any scientist questioning the ‘settled’ narrative unlikely to be published. Starting out in their careers, academics from numerous disciplines are more or less advised to keep their mouths shut about the narrative or lose students, grant funding, the ability to publish work and ultimately their jobs.
Universities and science bodies around the world have lost their hard-won reputations for the unbiased pursuit of truth through the scientific process. In its place is a grubby rush for cash in the interest of promoting an ideological fad. The Durkin film shows in clear detail that the science attributing all climate change to humans using hydrocarbons is far from settled, and is disputed by many distinguished academics of considerable scientific standing. Net Zero and the stories about the climate that accompany it is a political project. “If you are a climate activist, you are actually facilitating a huge validation of the Government running our lives,” says Claire Fox. Net Zero demands on governments mean they can “interfere in every nook and cranny”, she argues.
But it is towards the end of his excellent film that Durkin shows the true wickedness of the Net Zero agenda. In Africa, diseases and early deaths are widespread as developed countries refuse to sanction investment in hydrocarbon energy. Women still cook on dung fires causing lung disease and blindness. Agriculture suffers from a lack of tractor power and fertiliser. Meanwhile, diarrhoea is endemic and billionaires send pills to mask the symptoms. But Western banks will not lend money to provide hydrocarbon-powered refrigeration and clean water infrastructure. The greens think that Africans should not use hydrocarbon resources, and this sums up the “ruthlessness and depravity” of the agenda, says Dr. Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Climate: The Movie is available on YouTube, Vimeo, X, Rumble, BitChute and other social media sites from today. It is written and directed by Martin Durkin and produced by Tom Nelson.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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