At The Heartland Climate Conference: "What Is The Proof?", Extreme Weather Events Edition

I spent the past couple of days attending the International Conference on Climate Change, put on by the Heartland Institute in Washington. There was a good deal of material that will be of interest to readers.

A major issue addressed by multiple presenters goes under the heading “What is the proof?”, and in particular what is the proof that there is some kind of climate “crisis” coming our way. You will not be surprised to learn that for most every claim of the climate cabal, the proof is lacking.

The most interesting presentation on this subject came from John Clauser. For those who haven’t heard of him, Clauser was one of the co-winners of the Nobel Prize in physics in 2022. The specific subject of Clauser’s prize was something called “quantum entanglement,” which seems to be only peripherally related to climate change. However, Clauser’s presentation made it look like since winning the prize he has spent much of his time studying the literature on climate change, and particularly studying the data that are cited to support claims of impending climate crisis. Over that period, he has become a very outspoken climate skeptic. He is clearly a very smart guy, with a sharp critical eye. Also, he has taken a specific approach, which is to examine the data looking for gaps, alterations or manipulations that might render the data insufficient to support the claims being made. (See also, my series on The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.) I think that this approach is the essence of the scientific method, but sadly it is mostly absent from the climate “science” cult. Finally, Clauser has specifically focused on certain flaws or manipulations of the data that can be seen easily and understood by a layman without any need for specific scientific expertise.

Clauser titled his talk “Global warming, climate change, and scientific consensus have not been proven. There is no proven climate crisis.” The talk was accompanied by a Power Point deck of some 124 slides, which were way too numerous and detailed for him to cover everything or for an audience member to take thorough notes. However, I managed to get my hands on a copy of the deck. (Clauser’s full talk is available on the Heartland website, and I also understand that the deck will be available on the website within a few days.)

Today I will start with the part of Clauser’s presentation relating to the issue of what are called “extreme weather events” — e.g., floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, and the like. For this sub-topic, Clauser began with a 2012 article from Physics Today by Jane Lubchenco and Thomas Karl, titled “Predicting and managing extreme weather events.” (L&K) At the time of the article, which was during the presidency of Barack Obama, Lubchenco was the Administrator of NOAA, and Karl was Director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and Chair of the US Global Change Research Program. In other words, these were the people then in charge of collecting the U.S. weather data, including data on extreme weather events, on behalf of the government. As Clauser noted in his talk, if there were any people who would have access to the very best data to support a claim of increasing extreme weather, it would be these two.

The thesis of the L&K piece is that extreme weather events in the U.S. have been increasing, and can be expected to increase further as the climate warms. Here’s the introductory paragraph:

Earth’s climate is warming, and destructive weather is growing more prevalent. Coping with the changes will require collaborative science, forward-thinking policy, and an informed public.

Besides making their own statement to that effect, L&K also quote multiple similar statements from the IPCC:

“It is very likely that heat waves will increase in length, frequency, and/or intensity over most land areas. . . . It is likely that the average maximum wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase throughout the coming century. . . . It is likely that the frequency of heavy precipitation or the proportion of total rainfall from heavy falls will increase in the 21st century over many areas of the globe.”

L&K present a series of charts that they assert establish the proposition that extreme weather events in the U.S. have “grown steadily over the past several decades.” To measure the level of these extreme weather events within the U.S., L&K come up with something they call the “US Climate Extremes Index.” They describe the Index as having been calculated based on “the area percentage of the country experiencing extreme monthly temperature, drought severity, soil water surplus, days with and without precipitation, land-falling hurricane activity, and one-day heavy precipitation events in any given year.” However, beyond that description, there is nothing in the way of a technical description and backup of how the charts have been constructed quantitatively. A footnote with a link to a prior Karl article on the subject, presumably containing these details, returns a message “not found.”

My first comment on this “Climate Extremes Index” is that it is an extremely dubious metric, obviously subject to very easy manipulation. For example, who has decided how much land area was covered by a particular “land-falling hurricane”? Is it just the land area where the wind speeds exceeded 75 mph, or is it the entire area overswept by the hurricane storm system over its full life span of possibly several days, mostly with far lower windspeeds? Hidden decisions like that could easily be used to manipulate an index like this to produce a desired result.

However, Clauser does not go there, and instead he just takes the values of the index as presented by L&K and asks whether they actually increased over the period covered. Here is Figure 2a from L&K, showing the values of their U.S. Climate Extremes Index over the period 1910 to 2011:

If you look at that and don’t see any particular increase, let alone some dramatic surge in recent years, you won’t be the only one.

And it gets worse. Clauser took the values of the Index shown on the bar graph, and re-plotted them as dots on a scatter diagram. Then he did another plot where he reversed the order of the observations, so that the newest observations were on the left and the older on the right. In other words, the two plots are mirror images of each other. Here they are:

The years on the x-axis both indicate that they run from oldest to newest, but Clauser states that he has left it that way intentionally to challenge the observer to figure out which chart is plotted backwards. Here is Clauser’s text from his slide 9:

The two graphs are identical, except that one is plotted left-to-right reversed, i.e. backwards, with time increasing to the left. (If you look carefully, you will see that they are mirror images of each other.) I assert that if you can’t tell which one of these graphs is correctly plotted and which one is time-backwards, then Lubchenco and Karl’s claimed recent increase in extreme weather-event frequency is not obviously indicated by their data. One of these graphs is claimed by Lubchenko and Karl to forecast an impending climate apocalypse! Are you really confidently willing to bet trillions of dollars that you can tell which one makes that forecast?

Clauser concluded this segment of his presentation by calling L&K’s conclusion “fraudulent pseudoscience.” It is an odd sort of fraudulent pseudoscience — baldly asserting that a collection of data supports a conclusion that the data obviously do not support, and expecting everyone to just nod along. It’s hard to believe that with all the data at their disposal, this is the best that L&K could come up with to prove the case of increasing extreme weather events. But that’s a lot of how “climate science” works.

> I have no doubt the climate is changing.
Because the climate has always been changing.
And the climate will always be changing.<

“Climate Change” is just the new name for the same con.

“The Coming Ice Age” didn’t pan out under scrutiny, so they renamed it “Global Warming”. That didn’t hold up either to scrutiny.

“I know”, they said. “We will call it Climate Change since the climate is always changing.” Sure as the tides change, so does the climate.

Never give up the con when trillions of dollars are at stake.

...Sonny Eliot (Marvin Schlossberg) American meteorologist, actor and comedian, who was known for making jokes during his weather broadcasts (metro Detroit)

Sounds kinda like a sideshow barker; they were entertaining back in the day. Meanwhile, the magic act was being played out backstage.

https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/nsb/publications/1965/nsb1265.pdf page 108 (PDF pg 116) is interesting.

The following is from my non-commercial website. The few links in the following paragraphs are active there.

https://www.bucksafa11.org/2014/02/14/making-weather-pay/

Weather has been a trade-able commodity since 1997 when the first OTC weather trade was made. Two years later the Chicago Mercantile Exchange got in the game and investopedia.com includes weather trading in its search engines.

According to the investopedia website: Energy companies can enter into weather derivatives to eliminate risks of varying temperatures leading to uncertain demand and supply for their power, utility, and energy business.

The weather derivative market has grown globally, with big investment coming from a variety of participants. Weather instruments are a useful medium to mitigate risks for weather specific conditions. Depending upon the needs, specific weather derivatives or a balanced combination of weather and traditional commodity derivatives can be utilized for hedging.

Weather modification may not yet be perfected to the point agricultural firms can blame their failed GMO crops on ‘climate change’ but you can bet all the connected players will still be raking in the dough when it comes about. This weather play is one of their most savory angles. There’s little doubt they’ll work it hard, but quietly, right up to the end.

Maybe the next time you get a reach around email from your congressional representatives expressing heartfelt concern, you might want to write back and ask her what are the chances that what you’re experiencing isn’t the result of weather modification meeting up with market manipulation.

An interested third party review on geoengineering ...

https://www.chathamhouse.org/2022/02/geoengineering-reining-weather-warriors

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