Climate Contrarianism

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From Peter J. Wallison and Benjamin Zycher.

There has been no upward trend in the number of “hot” days between 1895 and 2017; 11 of the 12 years with the highest number of such days occurred before 1960. Since 2005, NOAA has maintained the U.S. Climate Reference Network, comprising 114 meticulously maintained temperature stations spaced more or less uniformly across the lower 48 states, along with 21 stations in Alaska and two stations in Hawaii. They are placed to avoid heat-island effects and other such distortions as much as possible. The reported data show no increase in average temperatures over the available 2005-2020 period.

24 thoughts on “Climate Contrarianism”

  1. My climate prediction is a thousand responses arguing the toss, rapidly escalating to personal attacks on you.

  2. I have long been frustrated by climate science. It would seem to me that in a highly complex and dynamic system, the result of an unprecedented condition should be unpredictable. That isn’t to say that people shouldn’t make their best guesses and then do some expected value analysis, but the rising concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere seem to rarely be presented to the public in those terms.

  3. I mean it’s nice that they provide some links for some of the data. I just quickly clicked on a couple of their links that supposedly show no trends, but obviously do show trends.
    https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/societal-impacts/tornadoes/
    https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/~timo/diag/tempdiag.htm

    I really appreciate that there are sites like climate feedback and skeptical science where actual climatologists diligently spend their time batting down the endless barrage of this kind of crap despite the fact that there are obviously better-paying gigs for people with their quantitative skills, but this particular piece by a couple of right-wing scheisters seems to have escaped their notice so far. Maybe they’ll bother with it sooner or later.

    I wonder what it is about Austrian economics that causes one to embrace this sort of stuff.

    • Counting tornadoes and hurricanes trends up almost certainly because of the technology. In 1954 we weren’t using doppler radar to count tornadoes. In 1954, we weren’t using satellites to count hurricanes either. Why don’t you just stick with the USCRN instead?

    • The article clearly states the earth has been warming so I am afraid you and the authors are in violent agreement on that point. The authors are making specific points which have nothing to do with your linked charts. What is it about Thunbergites and basic reading skills? You can see carbon dioxide molecules and can state what the temperature will be fifty years in the future with perfect certainty, but you can’t read the simplest of articles without misconstruing the obvious.

      • I suppose I was asking for that last little jab, but I just thought that particular page was a nice compilation of charts showing clearly accelerating trends. Of course the consensus is that we’re approaching 1.5% percent average change (taking into account much larger local changes), and that this is not trivial, as the article seems to imply, and that the change is likely to continue.

          • The University of Alabama Huntsville keeps records of the satellite temperature readings. And they graph them. The most recent one shows a rather obvious increase over the last 43 years.

        • Well it all depends on perspective, picking a starting date, a reference period, and choice of data sets as coverage of most is spotty particularly in the mid latitudes. And how you estimate Little
          e Ice Age or Medieval Warm Period temperature will define your results. For example, we could just look at the satellite record, for example: https://www.drroyspencer.com/2021/09/uah-global-temperature-update-for-august-20210-17-deg-c/

          And say we have a money decline with a slowing rate of decline, not that that would be the best way to tell the story. But for crissakes a tenth of a degree change over a decade should not be causing children to have nightmares, especially since even the IPCC admits they don’t know the effect of multi decadal natural cycles and that the 8.5 terror inducing projection is unlikely despite being the go-to source for doom mongers.

    • The difference in the continental US since the inception of the USCRN network (2005) for the month of September to the current year is a grand total of 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit, or nothing discernable to our five senses. Historical data has been “adjusted” by NOAA, which reflects greater warming than the raw data indicates. It does not sound like normal science to me.

      https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/national-temperature-index/time-series/anom-tavg/3/9

  4. You have to believe in global warming and that the Wuhan virus was not released from a lab… or the opposite. Those are the rules.

      • It is nice though that we don’t really need an equivalent for cigarette-cancer-link denialism ever since the Heritage Foundation et al started directing their personnel and other resources elsewhere.

        Anyways I just dropped by because I felt a bit embarrassed in retrospect about mentioning this site elsewhere on the internet recently but I’ll sop trolling now. Carry on.

  6. The quote seems very U.S. focused, and the U.S. is a very small part of the world, perhaps just a few percent of the total area.

    I do agree with their point of view on extreme weather alarmism. Saying “look a hurricane, you have to panic about climate change now” is just as bad as saying “guys, it got super cold today, there’s no way global warming could be true.” Weather is not climate.

    You can quibble about the number of variables driving the change in global temperatures, but we do know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we’re continually emitting more of it into the atmosphere, atmospheric concentrations are rising, and global average temperatures are trending up as well.

    But there’s no reason to be alarmed.

    Solar power is getting better every year. Before too long, most auto manufacturers will be offering electric cars. Various other industries are finding ways to reduce carbon emissions. Some people are even getting optimistic about small fusion reactors being viable in the next decade or two. It seems entirely plausible to me that by mid-century, many nations will actually be removing CO2 on net from the atmosphere, and the world as a whole before the century is over.

    The worst case scenario seems to be that average temperatures rise a few degrees before CO2 levels peak, and that will potentially impose costs of maybe a percent or three of global GDP on a much richer world several generations from now. We also have to keep in mind that there could also be some (at least partially offsetting) benefits. Perhaps a warmer globe would see substantially greater agricultural yields from the vast swath of land concentrated in Canada and Russia.

    • I would think that the worst case scenario would be rising temperatures set off a positive feedback loop. The most likely scenario in which that happens is one in which permafrost melts, releasing lots of methane, raising air temperatures, melting more permafrost, etc. I have also read that snow and ice reflect a bit of solar radiation back up out of the atmosphere, such that the more that they melt, the more that water and land will absorb solar radiation and then slowly release it into the atmosphere.

      I have no idea how likely that is to happen.

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