Guest essay by Michel de Rougemont

Heretic? You’re welcome!

Hysteric? Please cool down!

We hear that global warming is highly dependent on the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, this gas that is required to sustain life on Earth and that is also emitted when burning flammable stuff, such as wood, coal, mineral and organic oils, or methane.

If you are told “this depends on that”, you are invited to examine available data observed over time to draw a representation of this on the y-axis vs. that on the x-axis.

So, in all logic, you should be interested in a representation of the temperature evolution in dependence of the atmospheric CO₂ concentration.

Yes, you should, but, looking hard into the latest IPCC Report (the fifth of Working Group I, to be precise), no diagram of that sort can be found among its 1535 pages.

So, asks the judge: what is the evidence that the victim was attacked by the suspect? And the expert is not able, or willing, to provide any evidence. Is he actually an expert, or an incompetent prosecutor?

Among the available observed climate data are the so-called temperature anomalies (Ta), summarized as global monthly means, and the atmospheric CO₂ concentrations ([CO₂]) over the same time span. But time line diagrams show us only that, since the beginning of the industrial era, the global mean temperature went up by 0.8 to 1 °C, and [CO₂] increased from 280 ppm to 405 ppm.

So, what? The suspect was there while the victim developed fever, is it enough evidence of culpability? As for any circumstantial fact, the answer must obviously be no. Presence is required, but is not sufficient to prove anything.

The next question is then: how fast was warming going on when [CO₂] was low, and when it is now high? If a correlation can be shown, then a stronger case against the alleged culprit could be opened.

Using a simple spreadsheet to calculate these changes, and smoothing them over a 7-year filter[1] so that a cloud of data points can be seen as a trend line, the following diagram is obtained:

Zero on the y-axis means that neither warming nor cooling takes place.
At high [CO₂] some cooling was observed, at lower [CO₂] high warming rates were observed.
Honestly, no statistically valid correlation tying warming rate to [CO₂] can be derived from it.
Sorry, no statistical significance, no hint of a proof!

Why do the IPCC experts avoid looking at such simple relationship? I can only guess, and my guess is that they are either blinded by their greenhouse assumption, thus faithfully ignoring any other indices, or they deliberately hide what would prevent them to obtain a capital punishment sentence. In any case they behave away from any scientific honesty.
Mainstream yes, but a highly polluted stream.

This is all the available observational data; any other relationships are conjectures, however plausible they might be, no evidence. Therefore, all possible heretical interpretations must be made, for example that one: from all possible known and unknown causes of the observed global warming, the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions may have, or not, a contributing role. No scepticism, no advocacy, no unsustainable allegation, plain factual view.

I have only one questions to ask to all mainstream climate-experts, and their gullible followers in the public, the media, and in the political world:
What observational evidence can you provide to sustain the allegation that temperature is “very likely” and mostly driven by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions?

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Notes:

Originally published here: http://ift.tt/2sRM2Wy
Contrary to almost all mainstream climate scientists whose sustained professional life depends on an on-going climate alarmism, including peer reviewers, I have no conflict of interest in relation with this subject.
My sources are all publicly available data series.
I can provide my spreadsheets to anyone who asks politely via the contact page of this blog.

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[1] Why seven years?
Because it’s uneven, large enough but not too long, and it is already documented in a famous book.

Guest post by David Middleton

Whether dismissing global warming as a hoax, questioning humanity’s role in it, exaggerating the unknowns, playing down the urgency of action, or playing up the costs, President Donald Trump and his team have served up every flavor of climate denial.

Although the arguments varied—as if they were different shades or stages of denial—they all served the same purpose: to create an exaggerated sense of dispute in order to bolster a case against decisive climate action. The latest gambit is to avoid the subject entirely.

In his announcement last week that he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump didn’t bother addressing… [blah, blah, blah]…

[…]

In Trump’s retelling, the negotiators of the Paris deal were not grappling with a planetary crisis… [they weren’t]…

[…]

To help understand the arguments, we have developed a guide to what the science says about the five types of climate denial we’ve heard from Trump, his team, and their supporters, and how each served as a stepping stone on the path of a retreat from Paris.

‘It’s Not Real’

The deepest shade of denial—outright rejection of global warming—is embodied by Trump’s infamous 2012 tweet that called global warming a Chinese plot to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

[…]

To the hard-core unbelievers, climate scientists are conspirators in it for the grant money. They are not to be trusted, deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland suggested last month by giving Trump a print-out of a purported 1970s TIME magazine cover predicting a coming ice age. (The cover is an internet fake that has been circulating for years. It was cited last year by White House strategist Stephen Bannon in a radio interview he did while running the conservative media outlet Breitbart.)

[…]

Inside Climate News

[Bracketed, bold, red = my comments]

Debunking Shade #1

Technically, as a “luke warmer,” I won’t address the totality of Shade #1.  I will just debunk Ms. Lavelle’s smarmy psuedo-intellectual handling of the 1970’s global cooling scare.

Well, I suppose that Ms. Lavelle is correct that a 1970’s TIME magazine cover did not predict “another ice age.” The prediction (sort of a prediction) was from a 1974 TIME magazine article…

The full text of the article can be accessed through Steve Goddard’s Real Science.

TIME, like most of the mainstream-ish media, has acted like a climate weathervane over the years…

Dan Gainor compiled a great timeline of media alarmism (both warming and cooling) in his Fire and Ice essay.

Then there was Newsweek…

And who could ever forget Leonard Nimoy’s 1977 narration of In Search of The Coming Ice Age?

VIDEO

While the 1977 TIME cover was a fake, this 1975 magazine cover and article were very real:

Energy and Climate: Studies in Geophysics was a 1977 National Academies publication. It featured what appears to be the same temperature graph, clearly demonstrating a mid-20th century cooling trend…

The mid-20th Century cooling trend is clearly present in the instrumental record, at least in the northern hemisphere…

So, why are people like Ms. Lavelle so obsessed with denying this? Is the mid-20th century cooling period so “inconvenient” that it has to be erased from history like the Medieval Warm Period?

So, in accusing K. T. McFarland of Shade #1 of Climate Denial, Ms. Lavelle engaged in climate denial… Irony is so ironic!

The Other Shades of Climate Denial

Debunking Shade #2 “It’s Not Our Fault”

It’s not all our fault.  The mythical 97% consensus only asserts that it’s at least half our fault.  We certainly could be responsible for some of the warming that has occurred over the past 150 years.  The point is that the warming observed in the instrumental temperature record doesn’t significantly deviate from the pre-exiting Holocene pattern of climate change…

Over the past 2,000 years, the average temperature of the northern hemisphere has exceeded natural variability (+/-2 std dev) 3 times: The Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the modern warming. Humans didn’t cause at least two of the three and the current one only exceeds natural variability by about 0.2 C. And this is a maximum, because the instrumental data have much higher resolution than the proxy data.

Debunking Shade #3 “It’s Too Uncertain”

Uhmmmm… It *is* too uncertain.

Debunking Shade #4 “It’s Not Urgent”

Melting icebergs are NOT beheading Christians in the Middle East.  For that matter, all icebergs eventually melt… While no Christians ever get beheaded without else doing the beheading, except in very rare and bizarre accidents.

Not only is it not urgent.  It is steadily becoming less urgent:

“It’s About Jobs”

It’s not just about jobs.  This is what Vice President Pence actually said in context:

The White House
Office of the Vice President
For Immediate Release June 01, 2017

Remarks by the Vice President Introducing President Trump’s Statement on the Paris Accord

The Rose Garden

3:29 P.M. EDT

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Secretary Mnuchin, Secretary Ross, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, members of Congress, distinguished guests, on behalf of the First Family, welcome to the White House. (Applause.)

It’s the greatest privilege of my life to serve as Vice President to a President who is fighting every day to make America great again.

Since the first day of this administration, President Donald Trump has been working tirelessly to keep the promises that he made to the American people. President Trump has been reforming healthcare, enforcing our laws, ending illegal immigration, rebuilding our military. And this President has been rolling back excessive regulations and unfair trade practices that were stifling American jobs.

Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, American businesses are growing again; investing in America again; and they’re creating jobs in this country instead of shipping jobs overseas. Thanks to President Donald Trump, America is back. (Applause.)

And just last week we all witnessed the bold leadership of an American President on the world stage, putting America first. From the Middle East, to Europe, as leader of the free world, President Trump reaffirmed historic alliances, forged new relationships, and called on the wider world to confront the threat of terrorism in new and renewed ways.

And by the action, the President will announce today, the American people and the wider world will see once again our President is choosing to put American jobs and American consumers first. Our President is choosing to put American energy and American industry first. And by his action today, President Donald Trump is choosing to put the forgotten men and women of America first.

So with gratitude for his leadership — (applause) — and admiration for his unwavering commitment to the American people, it is now my high honor and distinct privilege to introduce to all of you, the President of the United States of America, President Donald Trump. (Applause.)

END
3:31 P.M. EDT

President Donald Trump is the President of these United States of America.  He took the following oath of office:

“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Since the Paris climate agreement was effectively a treaty and the prior occupant of the Office of President of the United States failed to submit it to the Senate for ratification, the only way President Trump could uphold his oath of office was to either withdraw from the agreement or submit it to the Senate where is would not be ratified.

That said, President Trump campaigned on the promise to put America, including American industry and energy, first.