Dr Susan Pockett: Obliterating the climate crisis

QUESTION: WHY WON'T JAMES SHAW SHOW US HIS EVIDENCE THAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS CAUSED BY HUMAN CO2 EMISSIONS ?

ANSWER: Because he doesn't have any.

Climate change has been going on for millions of years. The current warming is nothing out of the ordinary.





Measured increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration do not precede measured episodes of global warming – they FOLLOW them. In the graph below (from [1]) the time axis runs from 1980 to 2012. Green is atmospheric CO2. Blue is sea surface temperature. The measurements show that when the sea warms up, it expels CO2 (simply because CO2 doesn't dissolve so well in warm water).




QUESTION: So why is everyone so convinced that CO2 causes global warming? ANSWER: It's a long story ....

... which starts in 1972, when the Club of Rome launched a book called "Limits to Growth". This put forward the neo-Malthusian theory that the population of Earth was increasing so rapidly that we would soon eat ourselves out of house and home. Since this view was always based on mathematical models that were built on completely inaccurate assumptions, all of the predictions of Malthus – and his followers in this book – have failed utterly to come true. For example Limits to Growth says :

• the battle to feed the population is over;
• four billion people....will perish from famine in the 1980s;
• In ten years (eg ~1980) all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.

Nevertheless, the basic idea remained very attractive to a group of people who openly wanted – and still want – to replace all democratic, industrialised nation states with an unelected World Government run by them – namely, the current incarnation of the United Nations and the outfit now called the World Economic Forum, (founded in 1971, nominally by Klaus Schwab, but behind the scenes by Henry Kissinger and other members of the US Council on Foreign Relations). So twenty years later, in 1991, Alexander King and Bernard Schneider published a book called "The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome", in which they say, on p. 75 "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill." In the 1993 edition, they added "In their totality and their interactions, these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” (emphases added). In other words, it's all your fault and humanity must be controlled (by us).

But of course having said this, they needed to show that human intervention in natural processes does cause global warming. Since the only mechanism anyone could think of by which humanity MIGHT be able to cause global warming was to spew lots of CO2 into the air, they needed to show that global temperatures increased dramatically after the First Industrial Revolution.

And this posed a bit of a problem. The trouble was that the First Assessment Report put out by the United Nations IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in 1990 accepted unequivocally that global temperatures during the Medieval Period (from approx. AD 1000 to AD 1300) were significantly warmer than they are today. Figure 7.1(c) on page 202 of that first IPCC report showed this :




Which made it too clear that (1) temperatures today are nothing out of the ordinary in historical terms – and (2) today's temperature is probably NOT significantly affected by the industrial release of CO2 , because there was no industrial release of CO2 during the medieval period – and yet the climate then was about 3 degrees C warmer than it is now.

They couldn't just scrub this graph from the internet, because there were a lot of hard copies out there. So then began what can reasonably be considered to be the perversion of science that has characterised the "climate crisis" narrative ever since. The deliberate nature of the fraud is revealed by Deming's report a decade later [2], that after he had published a short 1995 article in the prestigious journal Science , he "... gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. So one of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period"."

Well all right then! So "get rid of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)" is exactly what a new cabal of well-paid 'climate scientists', peer reviewers and journal editors obediently did. In 1998, Michael Mann and colleagues published a paper in Nature saying that temperatures in the late 20th century were warmer than at any time since 1400 [3]. But then, a year later, the same authors extended their analysis back to the year 1000 [4] – and poof – the Medieval Warm Period was gone. A well-known summary of the graph published in [4] is:

Medieval Warm Period? What Medieval Warm Period?

The above graph was front and centre in the 2001 Third Assessment Report of the IPCC – and was subsequently sent by the Canadian government to all schools in Canada, with the catchy sobriquet "hockey stick".

But how was this miraculous disappearance of the MWP engineered? Well, by the judicious manipulation of mathematical modelling – in other words, by the use of "lies, damned lies and statistics". Mann's refusal to make public either his data or the detail of his methodology became legendary [5] and the issue soon blew up into an affair known as 'Climategate'. Eventually Mann was forced to release his data; but he has continued to point-blank refuse to share the computer code he used to analyse them. Finally, it became clear that he had manipulated the underlying statistics to the extent that when random numbers were input into the methodology he had published, a hockey-stick shape was produced 99% of the time [6, 7]. The whole saga is presented in terms more or less comprehensible to the interested lay person here (https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/mckitrick-hockeystick.pdf).

In summary, it can reasonably be said that this episode helped to

(a) reduce public faith in the scientific objectivity of the IPCC (for futher evidence on how the IPCC routinely first publishes an alarmist Summary for Policy Makers, then edits their Scientific Report to fit the Summary, see here (https://www.science-climat-energie.be/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Letter-15-febr-21.pdf).

and

(b) convince people that there is no "climate emergency" – and that Earth's climate, though constantly changing, is not significantly affected by anthropogenic CO2. For a Declaration to this effect signed by 1,200 global climate scientists, see here (https://clintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/WCD-version-0831224413.pdf).

But of course, politicians are not usually bothered about science. Their sphere of interest is politics. So for reasons they choose not to disclose, they continue (while they can) to impose draconian taxes and policies advantageous to only a few, all justified by firm statements that CO2 is causing catastrophic global warming, which will fry us all unless we do what they tell us. This narrative is greatly assisted by a news media interested only in horror stories (partly because the politicians reward such behaviour financially and partly because the boring old truth is just not click-bait).

And that, gentle reader, is the answer to the question at the beginning of this essay.

References

[1] Humlum O., Stordahl K. & Solheim J-E. (2013) The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature. Global and Planetary Change 100: 51–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2012.08.008

[2] Deming D (2005) Global warming, the politicization of science and Michael Crichton's State of Fear. Journal of Scientific Exploration 19(2) 247-256.

[3] Mann, M.E. Bradley R.S. and Hughes M.K. (1998) Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries. Nature 392 23 April 779- 787

[4] Mann, M. E., Bradley, R. S., & Hughes, M. K. (1999). Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: Inferences, uncertainties, and limitations. Geophysical Research Letters 26: 759-762.

[5] Ball T (2014) The deliberate corruption of climate science. Stairway Press, Seattle 291pp.

[6] McIntyre S and McKitrick R (2005) The M&M critique of the MBH98 northern hemisphere climate index: update and implications. Energy and Environment 16(1): 69-100.

[7] McIntyre S and McKitrick R (2005) Hockey sticks, principal components and spurious significance. Geophysical Research Letters 32, L03710, doi:10.1029/2004GL021750

Dr Susan Pockett is a retired scientist, who between 1980 and 2022 serially inhabited the Departments of Physiology, Psychiatry, Physics and finally Psychology at the University of Auckland.