Global Warming is a Scam

Mike Doutt on February 15, 2015 at 4:08 pm

I’m just an old mechanical engineer and the whole idea that some scientists have the global climate system accurately modelled just pegged my XX meter even before I read about the the hockey stick and climategate.

I also question the assumption that warming is bad. I kinda think it can be a good thing as I love hot weather!

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JC on February 15, 2015 at 4:49 pm
Up until 1995 I generally had a positive view of AGW, especially because as a forest manager in NZ it meant more tree planting and hence more income for me. My background was University Entrance exams in the 60s at school however I went for the inhouse qualifications of the Forest Service which included a lot on silviculture, geology, botany and even a short course on climatology.

In 1995 I was involved with the old newsgroups and in the course of discussing climate someone mentioned a big disconnect between the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers and the actual science. I was a bit intrigued and went to look at the actual science and was amazed at the very cautious conclusions of the scientists compared to the Summary.. I smelt a very dead rat.

Thats what started my skepticism but it wasn’t till about 2002 that I actually found out about blogs and finally had access to the tremendous body of skepticism about AGW there was around the world. I devoured dozens of climate sites and within a few years I visited never less than six sites a day (plus links). These days I have my old favourites of WUWT, Climate Audit, Bishop Hill, The HockeySchtick, Climate etc, JoNova that I mostly read everyday plus some floaters like Matt Ridley, C3, Climate Skeptic and A Chemist in Langley.

If I had to pick a handful of topics that deepen my skepticism every year it would be Climategate, The Pause, the “Its Worse Than We Thought” brigade, the 97% Consensus and the unrelenting barrage of insults that flow from the AGW “scientists” and media.

Overhanging all this is my growing belief that we are dealing with a huge monoculture on climate change.. a rigid conformity in a belief system that looks distressingly like a totalitarian state or an intolerant religion that can’t possibly be right because its atrophied but still incredibly dangerous.

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eclipsenow said:

To believe climate science is wrong requires you to hold to some truly mind-blowing international conspiracy.

Denialists are the ones that have orchestrated an anti-science conspiracy.

Dude. Don't look now, but chances are that your opinions were paid for by the Koch brothers.

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Peter Hartley on February 15, 2015 at 6:00 pm

My skepticism about “official” climate science started in the early 1990’s when I attended seminars discussing official measurements of average global temperatures. It struck me as very odd that the ground thermometer readings would continue to be preferred when the satellite measurements became available. There seemed to be so many obvious problems with the ground measurements. They had very poor geographic coverage, the instruments would surely be poorly calibrated, station moves and site changes appeared to be ignored or discounted, unconvincing arguments about corrections for urban heat island effects were offered and so forth. Looking further, the balloon measurements seemed more scientifically defensible than the ground measurements and appeared to confirm the satellite measurements. How could that be if this was a legitimate scientific enterprise?

The second event that increased my skepticism was the “discernible human fingerprint” scandal in 1995. This was when lead author Santer changed the IPCC report after scientists had signed off on it saying there was now evidence of a “discernible human fingerprint” in atmospheric temperatures. Not only was this added after the fact. It relied on one of Santer’s own papers that was later shown to have “cherry picked” data in an outrageous manner. The silence from the scientific experts was deafening.

The third event was a conference on climate change that I helped organize at the end of the 1990s. The event that included prominent establishment scientists and some of their critics (for example James Hansen, Judith Lean, Pat Michaels and Willie Soon all gave presentations along with biologists, economists and political scientists). At a pre-conference dinner, I was shocked when James Hansen said something to the effect that it doesn’t matter whether the science on CO2 and climate is right or wrong because we have to get rid of fossil fuels anyway.

I was also struck in the same conference by the repeated dismissal of the MWP as only a North Atlantic phenomenon while at the same time, and often in the same talk, the melting of Greenland ice was touted as the major threat of CO2-induced climate change. This has the obvious problem that if it is accepted that Greenland was warmer than now in the MWP why wasn’t ice melting from Greenland a problem back then? How could serious scientists make such obvious mistakes unless they were driven by an agenda as Hansen had indicated?

The Mann et al hockey stick paper came out right around the time the co-organizers (including me) sat down to write up the conference. Great pressure was applied to tout this paper as conclusively proving the case for strong global warming from CO2 emissions. The easy dismissal of a mountain of prior evidence for the MWP from many fields of study based on just one newly published and barely examined study struck me as extremely unscientific. My skepticism was later proven correct when the paper by McIntyre and McKitrick was published. The name-calling and childish treatment of their work basically finished the journey to full-fledged skepticism of main-stream climate science for me.

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“The reason it was a record in January was wind patterns in the time between December and January but Antarctic sea ice has been very high – record breaking high – for much of the last two years, and that’s more of a mystery.U

We can talk about wind patterns pushing things around and making things more extensive, but there’s a broader underlying question and that is these wind patterns we are seeing are not necessarily record breaking or extreme, yet sea ice is record breaking and extreme – so why are we seeing high levels of sea ice now when for the past 30 years we’ve seen climate patterns come and go, and ice has stayed within a certain range of extent?

And that’s more of a mystery. I don’t want to claim it’s something that we understand completely. Many folks – John Turner for example, at the British Antarctic Survey – say this is within the realm of natural variability.

I don’t particularly agree with that. I think there must be some other factor going on, and there’s a couple of ideas for what that might be.

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oz4caster on February 15, 2015 at 11:51 pm


I’m a meteorologist and environmental engineer with a long-time interest in all earth sciences and astronomy. I have a Bachelors Degree in Engineering Science (1974) and Masters Degree in Engineering (1979) from the University of Texas at Austin with a major in meteorology and minor in environmental health engineering. I have close to 40 years of work experience in air quality and weather forecasting, analysis, monitoring, quality assurance, and data validation.

I initially accepted the human-caused global warming propaganda up until 2008 when I decided to look into the science in more detail.

I quickly found that the evidence was shaky at best and largely dependent on speculative positive feedbacks and unvalidated models.

I have used weather model output extensively for forecasting weather and air quality and it is amazing how well our modern weather models can forecast the weather for several days compared to what I saw in college days in the early 1970’s. However, these models obviously have severe limitations for longer time periods and that leads me to be very skeptical that unvalidated climate models can tell us much about the future climate.

The more I read about the complexity of global climate, the more I am convinced that our infant climate modeling may take decades or even centuries of trial and error to reach a point of reasonable reliability for periods of decades to a century.

I greatly dislike the way “man-made global warming” has been renamed “climate change” because the two are not the same.

I believe that global climate is constantly changing but human influence is likely to be small and greatly overwhelmed by a wide variety of complicated natural forcings.

My experience in working extensively with temperature measurements and temperature forecasting leads me to believe that our best estimates of global temperature anomalies based on surface measurements have a much larger degree of uncertainty than has been implied by most users of these estimates.

My feeling is that in recent years the uncertainty of ground-based annual global temperature anomaly estimates could easily be on the order of 0.3C to 0.5C and prior to 1900 perhaps as much as 1-2C. In my view these large uncertainties make it difficult to reliably determine small temperature trends on a global basis. I believe the USCRN is a baby step in the right direction, but we really need a GCRN including fixed ocean stations.

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RealityCheck01 said:

Are you continuing to display your ignorance about climate science by citing the ignorance in a comment in a blog, Heissonear?
Yes - this is the "models are inaccurate" myth
How reliable are climate models?

While there are uncertainties with climate models, they successfully reproduce the past and have made predictions that have been subsequently confirmed by observations.

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