Real Climate Science

>A reference would increase confidence in these assertions. The one and only Tony Heller: https://realclimatescience.com/2021/06/yes-climate-change-made-it-wors… >Solar activity hasn’t been increasing massively over the last century, whilst average temperatures did. Not really. The earth has been gently cooling down since the 1930s. The US has the best temperature records which is why it's the most useful to study.

There's a strong political bias here, but the data is compelling: https://realclimatescience.com/ he compares a lot of raw data to "adjusted" data. He claims that the reported temperatures are fraudulent: https://realclimatescience.com/understanding-noaa-us-temperature-fraud… I'm not an expert, but what I see there is pretty compelling, I've never really found a good refutation anywhere.

Unfortunately one of the things that makes this sort of debate hard is that climatologists lie pathologically, and do so as a group over long periods of time. The moment you start citing information or arguments from them (eg. from Wikipedia) you're going to end up citing false claims without realizing it. I realize that may seem like a bold claim, and I too once struggled to accept what was happening. But it is the case. For example, you're quoting climatologists' own opinions of their accuracy but I already said that they don't follow proper scientific practices, so their claims about their own accuracy are useless. The error bars are enormous. If the measurements were really so accurate we would not have events like this: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 in which they released a new version of temperature history that changed it so drastically the 21st century went from "no trend" to "strong warming", or https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest-month-on-… in which they reveal they can't even decide how hot it was in 2016, and routinely reannounce old temperatures in ways that invalidate world records! If you compare old datasets to new datasets (and I mean for the same years, not in the sense of newly added data) then climatologists just changing their mind about the past has doubled reported warming over time: https://realclimatescience.com/alterations-to-climate-data/#gsc.tab=0 Scientifically this is…

News stories aren't evidence. They are written to make you click and then subscribe. The doomer perspective is simply wrong. There is no increase in extreme weather, just reporting of it. This document goes through all the data for the UK and shows this to be true using the government's own numbers and charts: https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2023/06/UK-weather-2022.pdf e.g. "Since the naming of storms began in 2015, they have gained more attention in the media and amongst the public, with the consequent misapprehension that they are becoming more common. In reality, wind storms have been declining in both frequency and intensity since the 1990s" This page presents charts for number of heatwaves, forest burn area, hurricane frequency and energy and tornados in the USA over time. They all show no problems and in some cases declines in extreme weather. https://realclimatescience.com/extreme-weather/ But reporting this sort of thing is left to non-profit bloggers because the news industry wants you to be scared, all the time, because scared people read the news a lot. This can result in insane outcomes, like the Washington Post telling you that a lack of hurricanes is "terrifying" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/08/04… Weather events: terrifying when they're there, terrifying when they aren't. There's a theme here.

This isn't "weaponized back at you" but often lies, cheating, and misrepresentation, Some of those doomsday events were averted by prohibiting certain kinds of pollution, after these doomsday scenarios were understood. "Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life" didn't happen because CFC emissions were mostly banned internationally. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Public_policy "Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes" didn't happen because of laws passed to reduce SO2 and NOx emissions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain#In_the_United_States Kinda makes me think that prohibiting CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions might work too. Then there are ones which seem to shoot itself in the foot. "1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) in 1990s" points to https://realclimatescience.com/2019/05/hansen-got-everything-wrong-ala… , which in turn cites a Gannett News Service article about what Hansen reported to Congress. That's a really round-about report - why not link directly to Hansen's published statements? And the rebuttal on that realclimatescience page is weak. It gives a chart for Lincoln, VA, as "in the DC area". But, Lincoln is 45 or so miles away and at 475 ft elevation - why not give the numbers for DC? Perhaps because those numbers are different? Realclimatescience says "The number of hot days in the DC area peaked in 1911, and have been declining ever since", which appears to be true for Lincoln in the graph given. But…

I'll use direct NASA/NOAA data so there's no attacking my sources this time. Here is a report published in 1999 by NOAA and NASA showing temperatures much higher in the 1930's with cooling through the end of the century. Temperature data outside the US wasn't very reliable in the 20th century, so it's best to focus on the US. Skip to page 37 and look at figure 6. Make a mental note the high point of 1.5 degrees C in the 30's from 1999 data. Warning, PDF file: https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1999/1999_Hansen_ha03200f.pdf Compare this with the same data today and you'll miraculously see the 1930's as much cooler with a warming trend (again, NASA direct data - note the new high point from the 30's is 1.2 degrees C, not 1.5): https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/graph_data/U.S._Temperatu… Here is an article summarizing the alterations in case you do not want to read the NASA/NOAA report, but I published the direct data from NASA so there would be no attacking the source: https://realclimatescience.com/2020/10/alterations-to-the-us-temperatu… My point is that the "climate science" we're bombarded with in the mainstream media isn't hard science. It's a political narrative fueled by financial conflicts of interest and grant money. That bothers me because 1) I like to understand reality, and 2) it is leading to massive misallocations of capital, just like with COVID over the last 1.5 years. I think we should be concerned with climate, but we need to…

All that's fine, and if you keep clicking through some of the links I posted you'll find that the sorts of analyses you're asking for have been done, because indeed, it's not enough to merely see smoke. You need to find the fire too. I can't sum up every possible argument in a HN post, only show that there are problematic signs worthy of further and deeper inspection. That is, skepticism isn't some weird cranky idea. At least some of it is based, at heart, in the question of whether there are mistakes in algorithms or software. That's a totally normal question to ask about any data analysis. For instance, let's take your audit point. You audit the data going back. In the USA this is somewhat possible. For the HadCRUT dataset it's not, because they lost/destroyed the original raw data, and their computations to clean it up are not reproducible, as the notes about "Harry's" attempts showed quite clearly. That is already a major problem; in effect we're being asked to take the correctness of CRU's data adjustments on faith. So let's focus on the NOAA dataset. A large amount of it is synthetic, more and more over time. You say we can't just scream "fake data" and remove it, and I agree we can't because that would at this point erase most of the official US temperature record. But ... seriously? You don't find it at all concerning that in the past humanity was apparently capable of measuring temperature with thousands of weather stations across the USA, and now we've…

This is a great example of misleading "science". I don't believe that the data here is being misrepresented. But the conclusions are not valid. The gist of the article is: 1. Arctic ice thickness and extent are cyclical and uncorrelated with atmospheric CO2 levels. 2. NOAA sea ice graphs start at a cyclical peak (1979), which incorrectly leads people to believe that Arctic sea ice thickness and extent are on a consistent downward trend, rather than the low end of a multi-decade cycle. 3. Therefore, global warming does not exist (????) I'm not exaggerating the third point: Eastern Arctic temperatures closely track the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and show no correlation with atmospheric CO2. This wrecks global warming theory which is climate scientists’ bread and butter, so NASA simply erases the prior warmth NOAA and NASA should rightly be taken to task for misrepresenting Arctic ice data. However to dismiss the entire global warming premise on this basis is a maliciously illogical conclusion. Spent some more time poking around through this website, and the best conclusion I could draw was: scientists like to make bold predictions on tenuous grounds, and the media likes to make hysterical reports based on those predictions. Therefore we shouldn't believe in global warming because there is a lot of both bold over-prediction and hysterical over-reporting associated with it. Meanwhile the blog does plenty of disingenuous over-reporting of its own, flagging…

There’s a graph going around the internet from Steve Goddard a.k.a. Tony Heller, claiming to show that temperature in the U.S. has been declining, using only high temperatures, using only summertime temperatures, using only data since 1918, based on a simple average without taking into account new stations coming online or old stations retiring or area-weighting or any of that “expert” stuff I like that this piece makes clear how conscious choices of which data to present (and which not to present) can make an argument more convincing without actually lying. I don't like that it makes accusations about a particular person doing so without the courtesy of linking to the person being accused. If your argument is strong, it's usually better to let the reader judge for themselves whether your accusation is accurate. Failing to do so can undermine an otherwise strong argument. I'm not familiar with Goddard/Heller. Searching for Tony Heller, I find https://realclimatescience.com. It includes a lot of graphs very similar to the ones Tamino dissects. The ones I saw were going day by day, looking at average temperatures for that day over the last 100 years. It's good to know that the start date might have been cherry picked to make the graph look better, and that this is based on raw unadjusted data, but it doesn't seem inherently unfair to use a particular day rather than the average for the entire year. Is there a better "smoking gun" where he makes the more grandiose…

It's always the same story, but it's always incorrect. https://realclimatescience.com/2019/12/warming-twice-as-fast

It's crazy you have to put the disclaimer. We know the climate has been a lot hotter and we know it's been a lot cooler. Take a look at Tony Heller's take on it: https://realclimatescience.com/2023/07/hottest-day-ever/, I think we should be looking at all sides of the argument and not treat climate science as if it's a religion. I also think we should come down on the side of doing more to limit the burning of fossil fuels, but there are a lot of downsides to wind, solar, lithium, etc.

lol - heatwaves are NOT a new phenomenon - and current ones are no where near past record setters https://realclimatescience.com/1500-years-of-heatwaves/

Perhaps true, but this has already become the typical behavior of YouTube (and most other mainstream social media/media). My comment is focused on this now typical behavior and not the immediate situation. They are indistinguishable anyway. I will cite a few examples: Wuhan lab leak theory that was fake news until it wasn't. Any content that questions the integrity of the 2020 election, but not content that questions the integrity of the 2016 election. Any mention of possible alternatives to the mRNA vaccines for treating CoViD-19 -- including studies undertaken by reputable organizations. E.g.: This now removed tweet regarding the now removed YouTube video: https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Image-2769.p…

There’s not much to understand— some crank thinks he found the dark secret of climate scientists. His blog is the typical nutter mishmash of mindless conspiracy theories from “putting mRNA In the food supply” (https://realclimatescience.com/2022/01/putting-mrna-in-the-food-supply… to antivaxxer garbage (https://realclimatescience.com/2022/01/study-shows-covid-vaccines-make… to big pharma conspiracies (https://realclimatescience.com/2022/01/herding-the-sheeple-for-big-pha… to all manner of climate conspiracy theories. He and everything he touches can be safely ignored.

The guradian was obviously alwayst filled with assholes who were only interessted in scaring the shit out of people.[1][2] [1] https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NewIceAge_sh… [2] https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/2018-09-1105…

Yes please see Stephen Schneider’s book talked about in The NY Times in 1976. He worked at NASA at one point: https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2018-05-2711…

So much confirmation bias. I haven't looked into Germany, but the French heatwave -- which is mentioned in the article -- has almost the same record temperatures as were recorded in 1930, 1870, 1773 and 1718, when, presumably, there was much less CO2. [1] The other day's record-setting France temperature of 115F was recorded in Toulouse, where the temperature rose for one hour above the record set in 1923. Hardly conclusive proof of anything. [2] In Paris, the heatwave's hottest day was 96F. Paris has had 164 days since the year 1900 hotter than that, including seven days over 100F. These extremes are hardly new. Weather is not climate. Stop giving power and money to scaremongering media and politicians. [1] https://realclimatescience.com/2019/06/50c-in-france/ [2] https://realclimatescience.com/2019/06/the-footprint-of-global-warming…

It's not so much that the surface temperature record isn't accurate, it's that it's been systematically tampered with / adjusted. https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/2018_03_20_0… Older data has been adjusted to be cooler and newer data has been adjusted to be warmer. You can debate why it's been adjusted all you want, but the fact that the adjustments are there and they are adjusted to make newer data appear hotter is indisputable. Here's an animated gif comparing the exact same data from NASA 2001 vs 2016 https://i1.wp.com/realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/NA… 1880 is adjusted to .2 lower and 2000 is adjusted to .2 higher, along with everything in between.

Here is the link for an article that cites all the relevant sources: https://realclimatescience.com/2019/03/latest-shameless-fraud-from-cli… ps: please ignore the inflamed content. The sources are good

The West Antarctic has been collapsing for centuries. This is nothing new, and it has nothing to do with atmospheric carbon dioxide. [1] It will take 800 years for the sea level to rise six feet at the rate it is and has been rising over the past 120 years. The news media likes to scare you with drummed up tales about the end times due to global warming. Like all end times apocalyptic forecasts, the dates this apocalypse is foretold to occur on come and go, and just get revised to a future date each time nothing happens. [2] Noah and Kevin Costner will flood the Earth before volcanoes and carbon dioxide do. [1] https://realclimatescience.com/west-antarctic-collapse-scam/ [2] https://realclimatescience.com/ice-free-arctic-forecasts/

Funny, today on the Drudge Report, I read that we've had record cooling in the past 8 months. http://realclimatescience.com/2016/11/record-global-cooling-over-the-l… There's a large online anti-global warming movement that needs to be addressed. Actually, there's an anti-everyhing movement (e.g vaccines). The general public is not going to know who to believe. Do more people read Drudge or Scientific American?

The actual answer is that that page is a joke and full of lies They even still are talking about Obama being Kenyan http://realclimatescience.com/2016/09/who-was-the-first-birther/ Really?

Climatologists have influence and funding because of their claims about temperature trends. But the records from individual weather stations are aggregated into regional and global timeseries by climatologists themselves, giving them intense conflicts of interest. If the graphs they computed wandered up and down in ways not linked to human activity they'd be no more important to the world than the people who classify beetles. So they have a strong incentive to edit the data as they aggregate it, and they do. Climatology didn't really exist before WW2. From the end of the war to about 1975 the world was cooling. The then-new field discussed it extensively and projected the trend forward to predict a new ice age. See it by doing a historical Google Scholar search. Watch out that in the beginning they called it "climatic change" not "climate change". https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=1… Here's an example paper from 1973, shown in the first page of results for me but you can pick any, there are thousands and they all say the same thing: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1974.tb00957.x CLIMATIC CHANGE SINCE 1950 Published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers ABSTRACT The mean temperature for the Northern Hemisphere had a warming trend from 1890 to 1950 and a cooling trend since 1950. The eastern and central United States had colder temperatures in 1961–1970…

It's interesting to speculate what Attenborough would say if he realized the lecture he saw was built on a lie. The article makes it clear that what converted Attenborough was the NASA GISTEMP graph. It would never have occurred to him to ask whether this data was being manipulated. The graph he saw is this one: https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/attenborough-gl… Go to the NASA GISTEMP website (https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/) and look at the same graph as it is today. There are differences between the two. For example in the graph he saw, the temperature anomaly in 1981 is about 0.21 degree C. In the current graph it's 0.32 degree C. It's a little known fact that the organizations producing graphs of global temperatures continually rewrite the historical record and often do so silently. These rewrites create warming trends in the data where in the past no such trends were visible. This article proves the case beyond doubt: https://realclimatescience.com/rewriting-the-climate-at-nasa/ It shows two different graphs claiming to be the same version of the same temperature dataset, both on the NASA website. One is no longer linked from anywhere and can only be reached because the blog author preserved the link in his records. They have different data in them - the newer one shows more warming during the 20th century than the older one. The head of climatology at NASA was challenged on Twitter to explain why historical…

The 50s and 60s were also full of reports on global cooling. Temperatures started dropping from the 1940s by the data they used back then (these days that fall has been edited out). But there's a deeper problem with the point you're trying to make here. You claim the reports didn't reflect the scientific consensus. Really? Go read those reports. They do claim they were reporting the consensus. To the extent they admitted the existence of uncertainty it was uncertainty of the form, we don't know why temperatures are falling, we don't know how bad it'll get but it'll probably be bad, etc. So how do you know that reports back then were lying about the existence of a consensus, but today's reports aren't? Who gets to declare a "general scientific consensus" anyway? Can we meet these people and ask how they determined that? What about virology, where they claim there's an absolute consensus that SARS-CoV-2 couldn't have escaped from a lab even though it's obvious it could? Here's some quotes from articles published in the 60s and 70s [1] New York Times, 1961: "Scientists agree world is colder. After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder" Washington Post, 1970: "Get a good grip on your long johns cold weather haters, the worst may be yet to come. That's the long long range forecast being given out by climatologists". New York…

I only know one guy who's written in depth about this, Tony Heller. Here's one example article but click through the titles at the top and there are others. At some point I downloaded the raw data tables from a NASA (or was it NOAA? I forget) FTP site and re-ran one of his analyses, which was valid, so that increased my confidence in the graphs he presents. https://realclimatescience.com/alterations-to-the-us-temperature-recor… He shows the data has been heavily altered in various ways. Sometimes he shows it by finding and downloading "raw" data tables and graphing them over the top of the publicly released graphs. Sometimes by searching newspaper or web archives for old temperature graphs and showing that the historical data in modern graphs has been altered vs what was once being published. Very occasionally other people notice this too. Retraction Watch is a blog that normally just writes about retracted scientific papers but here they noticed that July was reported as the hottest on record, but that the same government agency had previously reported another record breaking temperature that was higher than July's: https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest-month-on-… How is it possible for a temperature to "break records" when it is lower than previously reported temperatures? NOAA explains: "NOAAGlobalTempv5 is a reconstructed dataset, meaning that the entire period of record is recalculated each month with new data. Based…

This page goes into it some more and does some recalculations to control for TOBS: https://realclimatescience.com/no-excuse-for-data-tampering/ In this article he makes substantially similar points but goes into the interpolation process: https://realclimatescience.com/understanding-noaa-us-temperature-fraud… After I read this article, I downloaded the NOAA datasets to check that the claims were correct. It's easy to write a small Python script to select the measurements with "E" after them (meaning estimated) and check the proportions. They matched his graphs so I don't believe there are factual accuracy issues. In this article he posts old news stories overlayed with recent temperature timeseries versions, showing how much they differ. It has a bunch of examples of old stories from the archives talking about global cooling, and shows why they thought that given the thermometer readings of the time: https://realclimatescience.com/climate-scientists-rewriting-the-past/ The second article shows with the moniker of "climate change skeptic" is problematic. Virtually nobody criticising climatologists believes the climate doesn't change. Tony Heller is an arch-sceptic, on the far end and willing to make strong accusations of fraud etc, but even his position is that the raw data shows the world getting warmer. As you can see if you read the second link, he argues the "real" data shows warming of 1 degree, rather than the 3 degrees reported by NOAA. So he isn't really a…

> You're not the arbiter of what's reasonable doubt. You are attacking a strawman, and boy, you are attacking it hard. I never said that I'm the arbiter of what's reasonable doubt is. I said that this is scientific concensus. > You should spend some of your own time researching both sides of the argument [..] At one point in time, there actually was a debate and I did research both 'sides'. But there are no two sides to the argument anymore. There is the scientific fact of climate change, that's it. There's nothing to debate about it. Let me put it that way; do you think you have to seriously argue with someone who says that the earth is flat? Because that's where you're currently standing, from a scientific view; denial of antropogenic climate change has about as much standing as a flat-earther. It might work as a hobby or a party-gag, but certainly not as an informed basis for policy decisions. > To me, it comes down to some basic scrutiny. It doesn't really look like that, to me. Because all of your points are either irrelevant or disproven. They instead sound like the typical sound-bites of deniers of antropogenic climate change. > 1) Earth has been hotter in the past. Yeah, so what? At some point in time, Earth did not exists. How are any of those two things relevant to antrophogenic climate change? > 2) CO2 levels were much higher in the past. See above. > 3) There is evidence that CO2 lags temperature increase, thus isn't causative. This is an old one,…

It's not about climate it's about political control. It's a political boogeyman. Left wing politicians have successfully brainwashed a generation to believe they’re gonna die in 12 years unless socialists and communists control our planet and the lives of everyone on it. I was a huge believer in Climate Change as a youth. I wanted to save the environment. Then I caught one lie. Then two. Then three. Then I read the current data. Then I realized they’ve been exaggerating & fear-mongering headlines for decades. No climate apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true to date. Nature retracted their very alarmist paper, 10 months after publishing https://retractionwatch.com/category/by-journal/nature-retractions/ Whenever there is an extreme weather event, such as a flood or drought, people ask whether that event was caused by global warming. Unfortunately, there is no straightforward answer to this question. Weather is highly variable and extreme weather events have always happened. I’ve worked with global temperature data, and know that you can produce any shaped global temperature graph you want by picking the right set of stations. There are grossly inadequate amounts of both historical and current data to produce a meaningful long term temperature graph for the earth. Much of the data is fake – by their own admission. https://realclimatescience.com/overwhelming-evidence-of-collusion/ Climate scientists openly discussed getting rid of the 1940s…

>> I'm on the side of "Question authority" and you seem to be on the side of "Accept authority". That's fine, but I'm not interested in taking conclusions as gospel simply because NASA says so, no matter how many models nor lines of code were used. > I never said that. You did quote bloomberg "ModelE2 contains something on the order of 500,000 lines of code, and is run on a supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation in Greenbelt, Maryland." that line. If you don't think it was important, why quote it to me? Maybe I was misinterpreting you, but.. > What I've said was: >> Everybody who has enough knowledge to be able to check the formulas and who has enough integrity to admit what he didn't know, and who doesn't have some hidden agenda would have to come to the same conclusion. Read the pages on his site. Everybody with enough knowledge has to come to the same conclusion, huh? That's a lot of hubris. > If you can't understand this: > http://www.barrettbellamyclimate.com/page20.htm http://www.barrettbellamyclimate.com/page21.htm > and this: > http://www.barrettbellamyclimate.com/page8.htm > just don't ask me anymore for the proofs, I read through these, and I do understand them. Basically "http://www.barrettbellamyclimate.com/page8.htm" is modeling a outside radiation source penetrating an outer atmosphere layer which allows 100% of it go through it. Then the earth radiates back to the layer which absorbs and reemits it, half back to earth, and half…