Watts Up With That?

I would not recommend reading realclimate.org without also reading climate audit and watts up with that: http://climateaudit.org/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/

Thank you for your considered response. MBH98 was 20 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_graph goes into details about the various analyzes of MBH98 and later, including criticisms and counter-criticisms. The Moberg 2005 analysis I referenced above is one of them, which used wavelet transforms instead of PCA. It found similar conclusions as MBH99, the extension of MBH98. > A 2010 opinion piece by David Frank, Jan Esper, Eduardo Zorita and Rob Wilson (Frank et al. 2010) noted that by then over two dozen large-scale climate reconstructions had been published, showing a broad consensus that there had been exceptional 20th century warming after earlier climatic phases, notably the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age It then adds that more reconstructions have been done since then, again following the broad consensus. they should be read and considered rather than being rejected out of hand. This goes back to my original objection, which is that the g'g' etc. poster didn't point to something to read, other than "Willis Eschenbach's work over on https://wattsupwiththat.com/ ". I can certainly reject out of hand the undirected suggestion to read hundreds if not thousands of blog posts without having some solid reason to believe it's worthwhile, especially given that several of the poster's other comments on the topic seemed to be wrong, and internally inconsistent.

The IPCC is supposed to summarize the state of the existing literature, but it was born political, tends to attracts eco-activists of all sorts and relies more than it should on "grey literature" - unrefereed "reports" written by ecological organizations. The IPCC also to some degree generates the consensus it is supposed to be merely reporting on, in that the lead authors have been known to push specific articles into print supporting "their side" of things and delay articles supporting "the other side" with IPCC deadlines in mind so that their side gets the last word. That's one part of the process where excess alarmism gets to creep in. On the other side, your sources are correct that the result then gets massaged into acceptability. The "summary for policymakers" in particular is the result of political compromises - various country's representatives argue about it and then the rest of the document in some cases gets rewritten to reflect what the summary says, leaving nobody happy. Nonetheless, the IPCC documents aren't terrible and do tend to be worth reading if you really want to know what's going on. On being "past skepticism": The most credible skeptics tend to be "lukewarmers". They believe reality is a bit more complicated and uncertain than has been portrayed, they tend to suspect climate sensitivity is a lot lower than the models predict and they tend to be suspicious of doomsday claims generally. But almost nobody at this point doubts "CO2 is a greenhouse gas"…

Yes, I’ve heard the Obama ocean front mansion story a thousands times. How high above sea level has been debated. Could be totally under water by 2100? https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/28/sea-level-rise-dooms-obamas-new… I’d say maybe he was assuming we’d address climate change or he’d simply move by 2061 when he turns 100. Miami is only 6 feet above sea level so it will be gone before his house. Once Miami floods climate change deniers will have a more difficult time convincing people they are right. But I’m betting the limits of denial are boundless. In the meantime, sounds like a great house.

Surprise! The Great Barrier Reef is Not Dying from Global Warming https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/16/surprise-great-barrier-reef-is-… Coral expert debunks Great Barrier Reef myths https://www.oversixty.com.au/news/news/coral-expert-debunks-great-barr…

There are changes in the geological record that are still unexplained, these could be signs of an older civilization.ld "The Younger Dryas was a period of rapid cooling in the late Pleistocene 12,800 to 11,500 calendar years ago. It followed closely on the heels of a dramatically abrupt warming that brought the last Ice Age to a close (17,500 calendar years ago), lasted for about 1,300 years, then ended as abruptly as it started. The cause of these remarkably sudden climate changes has puzzled geologists and climatologists for decades and despite much effort to find the answer, can still only be considered enigmatic." https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/19/the-intriguing-problem-of-the-y…

I may regret this, but the gold standard of intellectual coherent denialism is https://wattsupwiththat.com/ ; I see they're still obsessed with Michael Mann and the hockey stick.

The following says that methane is not an important greenhouse gas: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/methane-the-irrelevant-greenhous… Can someone who knows better tell me if that's good science or not?

Dead simple? An eminent atmospheric physicist - Lindzen begs to differ: "Former senator and Secretary of State John F. Kerry is typical when he stated, with reference to greenhouse warming, ‘I know sometimes I can remember from when I was in high school and college, some aspects of chemistry or physics can be tough. But this is not tough. This is simple. Kids at the earliest age can understand this’. As you have seen, the greenhouse effect is not all that simple. Only remarkably brilliant kids would understand it. Given Kerry’s subsequent description of climate and its underlying physics, it was clear that he was not up to the task.". https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/09/richard-lindzen-lecture-at-gwpf…

Scientists only figured out in the last decades what religions knew for millenia: people love to be told "the world is ending, give us money". Back when I was a teen, the coming ice age / famine of 2000 predicted by the Club of Rome was a serious problem for my educated (adult) friends. So was nuclear war. Lists like [1] remind me of my extremely scary youth :) [1] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/19/great-moments-in-failed-predicti…

This is a really scummy climate change denial website. One great example is their coverage of ClimateGate, which is all about the negative: http://wattsupwiththat.com/climategate/ But completely avoids mentioning that all investigates cleared the original subjects and found no wrong doing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy

I found this quite interesting for the insight on how much natural phenomena can confound the best-laid plans; having a third of all taxable land (ie private property) wiped out by rainfall was enough to bankrupt California, and makes a mockery of conventional budget arguments. Arguably, the relative dryness of recent decades may be the exception rather than the rule, with long-term statistics suggesting reversion to a historical mean: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/10/07/california-climate-pdo-lod-and-s… I registered a few domains like californiaflood.org and similar last year - I can't even remember exactly which ones now, because I didn't really anticipate using them. That was around February, and it's rather surprising to see evacuations already taking place this early in the winter. Who knows, they might serve some purpose after all.

The article is worth studying as a masterpiece of political rhetorics. A salesman truly shows his skills when selling a bad product. He explains that some side issues in the debate (IPCC claims about disappearing Himalaya glaciers,FOIA violations) are mistakes and he conveniently ignores the big elephant in the room: tampering with temperature records, corruption of the peer review process, lack of evidence for AGW. And this is all coming from the same Al Gore who used to make false claims about melting polar ice caps, increases in sea level rise, ... in his movie "An Inconvenient Truth". To cite [1]: "You can bet he’d be making the same claim if we had a below normal snowfall records too." [1] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/23/the-goracle-forecast-agwmore-sno…

Here is the most recent example of someone looking into the GISS data. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/11/giss-adjustments-in-australia/ The models have obvious warming biased 'adjustments' built into them and there is no model, which when given the correct inputs at a point in time would successfully predict the climate for a following period of time. The 'Hockey Stick' graph, which eliminates the Midieval Warm period and the Little Ice Age is the most obvious sign of how bad the models are.

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…

We drilled down to 12km of true vertical depth in 1989 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole) as a scientific project, and since then there’s been a handful of commercial oil drilling projects that have hit similar lengths (but crucially not true vertical depth, they go shallower and then go sideways), and some oil extraction projects do drill deep holes looking for oil and then don’t actually extract it because there’s other easier targets. The best indicator for whether we can harness this water might be something like “what is the deepest true vertical depth that we actually operate commercial-scale extraction projects at”. A quick scan didn’t provide any easy answers, but https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/04/17/the-worlds-deepest-oil-well-how… sounds knowledgeable (at least, aware of TVD vs length) and claims actual extraction at true vertical depths of 20k to 28k feet in the Gulf. So commercial extraction tops out at ~9km and the limits of scientific exploration top out at ~12km. Ringwoodite is found 50x deeper than that, at 450km. Safe to say it’s well outside our reach. The other issue is that oil is extremely amenable to extraction: it’s a big high pressure balloon of liquid deep under the earth, we essentially just poke a hole in it and it pumps itself to the surface. Ringwoodite is a solid material, we would have to transport it up that 450km ourselves, and once we have it’s still only a few percent water…

Not to mention that (retail) electricity prices went up like crazy and are now at up to 50 cents/kWh if you sign new contracts. 35 cents/kWh are pretty amazing already… The depiction has a breakdown of taxes also and the trend is what I remember. I must admit I’m not 1000% sure whether the page that links it is great though: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/01/13/german-household-electricity-pr… That did the industry in Germany a real solid: https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Schlaglichter-der-Wirtschaftspolitik/… Compared to 2015, it is down by 10% or so: https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Schlaglichter-der-Wirtschaftspolitik/… Now, I certainly advise caution how to interpret these figures and how inflation is factored in, etc. are big factors. Having several family members across Germany working in industrial production, there is a common theme that “production is shifted abroad at scale” though… Also keep in mind: the industry didn’t pay these 35 cents/kWh prices, those were what consumers paid… The past 17+ years of political failure did the German working class a real solid. When the head of a state advises people to “use a sponge and not shower so often to preserve hot water” it’s almost surreal that a government charging 45+% of tax of a countries GDP is unable to ensure people have…

I'm going to be a nonconformist myself and oppose the near-univeral approval of Sowell in this discussion. His book Basic Economics was the first book on econ that I read, and I was very impressed by it. It reaffirmed the rather right-wing political views that I'd inherited from my parents. However, after taking a few introductory econ classes at university and doing further reading on my own, Sowell starts to appear very ideologically driven. Sowell is a free-market fundamentalist, in that he opposes most government intervention in markets, and universally trusts laissez-faire capitalism to provide the optimal social & economic good for practically any situation. The problem with this position is that there's simply a ton of evidence that targeted government intervention provides far better outcomes in many situations. Another classic example is environmental pollution, a classic case of tragedy of the commons. On the topic of global warming, Sowell doesn't even try to address the issue. He belives climate change is a hoax perpetuated by Democrats. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/01/27/sowell-the-catchwords-climate-c… Sowell writes in a conversational style, which is great for accessibility for non-economics. However, he is rightly criticized as failing to cite rigorous studies to back up his opinions. For a more balanced view of basic economics, I'd highly recommend Principles of Economics by Greg Mankiw.

No, quite a lot of scientists have made such claims about coral reefs over time. Not all and some have refuted those claims too, so the media is certainly to blame for presenting a false consensus. But for example: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/03/expert-scientists-exaggerated-c… (original is paywalled) Activist scientists and lobby groups have distorted surveys, maps and data to misrepresent the extent and impact of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, ­according to the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Russell Reichelt. A former head of Greenpeace Canada famously turned on his old employers and started arguing that coral bleaching predictions related to climate change (ocean acidification, back then) were wrong: https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20Ocean%20Aci… Many papers on ocean acidification, said to be caused by rising man-made CO2 levels in the atmosphere, predict that it will result in the mass extinction of marine species that employ calcification, including corals, shellfish and many species of plankton, and that this, in turn, will result in the extinction of many other marine species. It cites some examples: Even scientists one might expect would be more moderate in their tone employ alarmist language. An example from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution: The anthropogenic rise in atmospheric CO2 is driving fundamental and unprecedented changes in…

The variations in surface temperature we have seen in the modern era are nothing compared to what we've seen in the recent geological record. Moreover, insects are very sturdy throughout the geological record, so it's very difficult to believe that less than 1C change in a century could cause this (the end of the last glacial period saw a 7C swing in just a few hundred years). It's pretty clear that climate change is not the stressor causing this. EDIT: Allow me to expand. As to climate, it's an extremely complex system about we have shockingly little information in the grand scheme of things (30 years' worth of satellite data!), lots of models whose predictions have been atrocious, and besides, Earth's climate has a number of negative feedback loops, like the water cycle. We also know that CO2 and temperature in the geological record are linked, with CO2 changes lagging temperature changes, which rules out CO2 as a cause of past temperature changes. Just a very small change in cloud cover along the equator can cool down an overheating Earth, or warm a cooling Earth (depending on the direction of the change). (Readers who are curious about that should read Willis Eschenbach's work over on https://wattsupwiththat.com/.) But insects? We have a very plausible cause: our use and overuse of chemicals in farming, from fertilizers, to insecticides, to herbicides (which nowadays are used to kill the crops themselves as part of the process of ripening and picking them). We…

It doesn't work like that. The null hypothesis is that natural processes fully account for observed temperature data. In order to generate enough thrust to escape the gravity of the null hypothesis, you must do the following, according to Karl Popper (cribbed from here [1]): 1) Describe a difficulty or gap in scientific knowledge, a "general problem", clearly defined, and show that the problem needs to be addressed. 2) Formulate a hypothesis, a "tentative theory", addressing the general problem, stated as clearly as possible in the language of science, which is mathematics. 3) Try to invalidate the tentative theory, and apply a certain scientific ethic described by Richard Feynman in his famous essay "Cargo Cult Science"[2] I'm not sure the "general problem" has even been established. From 1880 to 2015 the Earth's temperature has gone from 288 K to 288.8 K, a 0.3% increase. So first of all you need to prove that the Earth system is not able to keep the climate stable. Then you need to prove that recent increases in temperature are fundamentally different from past increases in the same system, i.e. the current interglacial period of the last 10,000 years. Again, this is not conclusive at all. Then you need to prove that CO2 plays a huge part in the recent temperature changes. Correlation does not imply causation. Two independent variables can both increase and you have not proven that they are causally linked (beyond the first-order effects of course). All we have so…

The calculation seems a bit dubious. They apparently assume a linear relationship between carbon emitted and temperature change. "Following the National Academy of Sciences (2011), we take 1.75°C per 1,000 GtC emitted as the central best estimate." However doubling CO2 does not double the amount of radiation it absorbs. CO2 absorbs at certain particular wavelengths and even if you make the atmosphere 100% CO2 it can only absorb all the light at those wavelengths and remain clear at others. In fact replacing everything in the atmosphere, including water vapour with CO2 would probably make the Earth cooler as the biggest green house effect is from water vapour. There's some discussion here, admittedly from a skeptical source without full citations suggesting far lower warming from increases in CO2. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-effectiveness-of-co2-as-a-gr…

This project was the subject of a WWDC lunch session in 2009 I believe. One of the best I have seen. There was so much more content in the WWDC presentation, I wished they had filmed lunch sessions at the time: - It was not only moon orbiter pictures but also stuff from the apollo missions - The analog pictures were actually transmitted over radio with an analog process (converting black and white in frequencies) - This signal was then digitized and used to recreate images on the ground - What they use (at least what they showed 4 yers ago) is the raw sound files that were recorded. Of course this is much better than the recreated on the ground images because you are one step closer to the source. - They first had to find a way to read those files on tapes. They actually called this presentation "data archeology" because of this. Had to find tape readers, get them back to work, etc. - Using DSP processing they were able to significantly improve the quality of the reconstruction process, dealing with mechanical problems on the space side (like the film were moving on a roll which speed was not perfectly constant) - One of the most interesting result was an image reconstructed in 2000s compared to the original image. Turned out to be one of the first picture of earth poles (and ice cap). Extremely useful today. For more info: - http://lunarscience.nasa.gov/articles/nimbus-ii-and-lunar-orbiter-1-im… -…

Take a bunch of data. Go through this data by hand and select which data to use and which to throw away. Use proprietary models to adjust some of the data. Use proprietary models to merge data series from different sources, some of which conflict with each other, into a unified whole. When asked, refuse to divulge your models, your adjustments, or the raw data, delete data if necessary to avoid anyone else, especially critics, getting hold of it. Given such methods one could provide support for just about any hypothesis using just about any sufficiently large set of data. Unfortunately, this appears to be the modus operandi of the CRU. Which is a tad bit disconcerting if one wants to hold any confidence in the CRU's findings, to put it mildly. The theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is dependent upon having reliable climate models (specifically those that show that CO2 is such a predominant driver of climate that the increases in CO2 emissions due to human activity throughout the 21st century will not only be the overwhelming force shaping climate but will force a dramatic shift to a much warmer climate). The proof of reliable climate models is dependent upon accurate historic climate data. Over the last 2 decades or so it appeared that climate researchers, most of them associated with the CRU, had not only constructed accurate climate models, but had produced reconstructions of historical climate which showed a dramatic uptick in global average…

For a counterpoint, I thought wattsupwiththat's analysis was alright. But I'm not qualified enough to make a definitive judgment. Can somebody better informed tell me if this article is complete bull? https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/03/15/climate-crisis-what-climate-cri…

"Easily solvable" is highly dubious. The guy behind the 100% renewables no nuclear allowed push sued his scientific critics for publishing a critique of his work and was eventually forced to pay their legal fees. [1] But that aside, just looking at the sheer magnitude of capacity mentioned in his papers, one can see that it's not even remotely easy or trivial. See eye-watering Table 2 in [2] [1] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/07/11/stanford-prof-ordered-to-pay-le… [2] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pd…

Enjoy paying for storage. At least in the US, even if we get storage down from $438/kWh (Jan 2022 grid-scale storage costs) to $200/kWh, consumer electricity prices are expected to rise somewhere between 1400% and 2200% per kWh, and total cost estimates to switch the entire US's power generation + distribution to pure renewables + storage, while maintaining current production and availability levels, are over $430tn, which is >20x the US GDP, according to: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/01/12/the-cost-of-net-zero-electrific…

Your comment reminds me of the article written in 2000 that said that by 2010 kids won’t even know what snow is. That article was online until about 2015 until it was so widely mocked it was finally deleted. Here’s a screenshot for you. https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/snowfalls-are-n…

Actually, it looks like the damage goes even further back than I stated in the other response: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_ima… It seems like nuclear power genertion started going down for real around 2006. This corresponds roughly with the time electricity prices for households were nearly doubled: https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Electricity-pri…