Ian Bradford: Is any of the material we are fed by the climate alarmists’ reliable?

More and more people are coming to the realisation that Carbon Dioxide and Methane and therefore humans are not responsible for climate change.  The climate alarmists’ cause is not helped by the continuing finding of false data. Here are but a few examples.

Data from non-existent temperature stations.

“Earth’s issuing a distress call,” said UN Secretary General  Antonio Guterres on March 19^th 2024. “The latest state of the global report shows a planet on the brink.” 

(Actually it’s been on the brink for at least 30 years now!)

President Joe Biden called the climate “an existential threat,” in his 2023 state of the nation address.

(Yes I’ve been wondering for a very long time when we are all going to die!)

Mr Guterres and President Biden rely in part, on temperature readings from the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN).

The problem is about 30% of the USHCN stations don’t exist anymore.  They are physically gone.  So that’s OK you might say, but it’s not OK. Why? Because NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) fabricates data from these non-existent stations.  What they do is take the temperature from surrounding stations and record their average for the ghost station followed by an “E,” for estimate.  In some cases the surrounding station may be 200km away.

The addition of the ghost stations means NOAA’s monthly and yearly reports are not representative of reality.  If this kind of process was used in a court of law, then the evidence would be thrown out as being polluted.

NOAA’s complete record of USHCN data is available in its website making it a vital tool for scientists examining temperature trends since before the Industrial Revolution. Professor Jamal Munshi of California’s Sonoma University said that because many of the stations in the USHCN and their data date back to the 1800’s they have been widely used in the study of global warming. “In these days of apparent ‘climate crisis,’ you would think that maintaining actual reporting stations would be a top priority-but instead they manufacture data for hundreds of nonexistent stations. This is a bizarre way of monitoring climate claimed to be an existential threat.”

Data falsified to dupe the world leaders on climate change.

Warmists have long had a problem: the last 20 years of stable or even declining temperatures, a phenomenon making a mockery of their computer models and doomsday predictions. Their answer was the “Pausebuster” paper esoterically titled “ Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus”, and strategically released via the influential journal – Science - just 6 months before the Paris conference in 2015.

But whistleblower Dr John Bates who had futilely resisted NOAA’s  book-cooking and was until 2016 one of the agency’s two principal climate-issue scientists stated that the data was false. He outlines how former NOAA director Thomas Karl breached their rules of scientific integrity when he published a sensational, but flawed report that maximised warming and minimised documentation in order to make the biggest possible impact on world leaders at the Paris climate conference in 2015.

The paper made a sensational claim reported the Daily Mail.  “Contrary to what scientists have been saying for years there has been no pause or slowdown in global warming in the early 21^st century. In fact, this ‘Pausebuster’ paper claimed the rate of warming was even higher than before, making ‘urgent action’ imperative.      

But NOAA’s urgent action, says Dr Bates, was to manipulate what is known as the “version 4 dataset.” The agency took reliable reading from buoys but then adjusted them upwards –using readings from seawater intakes on ships that act as weather stations writes the Daily Mail. “They did this even though readings from ships have long been known to be too hot.” 

Shockingly, ignoring Dr Bates protestations, the agency delayed publication of the “version 4 dataset” several months after it was ready, to intensify the impact of the ‘Pausebuster’ paper at the Paris conference.   

Dr Bates said that the data used in the Karl study was unverified and not subjected to NOAA’s rigorous internal evaluation processes.  It was not made available to other scientists. New computer software used in the analysis was found to be error ridden. 

When Dr Bates strongly objected to the publication at the time, he was overridden by his superiors.

After the paper was published in 2015, the US House of Representatives Science Committee launched an enquiry, but NOAA refused to comply with their subpoenas. Dr Bates’ revelations raise additional questions as to whether the science at NOAA is objective and free from political interference.

Has sea level data been faked?

A stable current sea level record has apparently been ‘corrected’ to show an accelerated rise since the 1990’s.

A few years ago Australian scientists exposed an assumption based assessment approach in estimating trends in global sea level change. According to long-term tide gauge data from 100 tidal gauges with more than 80 years of continuous data sea levels have been very gradually rising at rates of about 0.25mm per year (That’s a quarter of a millimetre), with NO perceptible acceleration since the early 20^th century. (That’s since 1900).

When satellite altimeters were originally employed in the 1990’s and early 2000’s they consistently did not show any sea level rise.

So instead of reporting on what the actual satellite observations showed, arbitrary, subjective assumptions were employed to “correct” the data to show sea levels had been rising at rates of 3.2mm per year instead. 

The GMSL satellite data showed NO rising trend for the first five years of the record.  The first five years were then “corrected” to show 2.3mm per year sea level rise.

The GRACE satellite data showed there was a 0.12 mm year sea level fall trend. After “correction” this was changed to a 1.9mm per year sea level rising  trend.  

The untampered results not showing the desired sea level rise were replaced by “corrected” results.  Until august 2011, the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite was showing less than 0.976 mm per year sea level rise since 2004. A few months later thanks entirely  to further ‘corrections,’ the same data set showed a 2.97mm per year sea level rise.

Despite the “accelerating sea level rise” claims, the 1984-2019 satellite data show coastlines have been expanding by a net 0.26 metres per year. A global scale analysis of 709 islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans revealed that 89% were either stable or growing in size. (Duvat 2019).

 The globe’s beaches have been growing at 0.33m per year since 1984. (Luijendijk et al 2018).

Claims of dangerously accelerating sea level rise posing an imminent threat to coasts in the satellite altimetry era, may not just be inaccurate, they may be fake.   

A scientist manipulated climate data.

Climate scientist Patrick Brown ignited controversy in 2023 when he claimed that he withheld  key details of his wildfire research to fit “preapproved narratives” on climate risks in order to be published in one of the world’s most esteemed science publications. 

He said he omitted the “full truth”  about non-climate causes of wildfire such as insufficient forest management, because he suspected that editors of the journal Nature, would have rejected his research if he failed to exclusively blame human caused greenhouse gases for intensifying blazes.

Brown was hailed as a whistleblower by some conservative media outlets that sometimes promote falsehoods around climate change. His accusations were covered by Fox news and the New York Post with headlines that indicated Brown’s claims were evidence of corruption in climate science.

Brown has a doctoral degree in earth and climate science from Duke University. He is the Director of the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute.  

Marissa Streit the CEO of Prager U, wrote on X, formerly twitter, that Brown was another example of a scientist who is brave enough to speak out against his colleagues.  “We’ve been attacked for giving a voice to scientists who have been bullied and marginalised for not following the climate change catastrophe narrative” she wrote. “We will continue to give them a voice.” 

Scientists caught inflating Antarctic ice losses 3000% more than observations.   

A new study utilising satellite observations determines Antarctic wide ice shelves gained 661 Gt (Giga tonnes) of mass from 2009 to 2019. An approach relying on assumptions of an unrealistic steady state or fixed calving flux  (instead of real-world time  variable observations) estimates a net Antarctic ice shelf loss of 20,028 Gt over this same 11 year period - more than a 30 fold distortion of observed ice loss.

New research by Andreasen et al (2023), uses observational evidence from satellite MODIS to assess net ice losses/gains for 34 ice shelves across Antarctica from 2009 to 2019. These observed data show the mass gains from East Antarctica and the Ross and Ronne-Filchner ice shelves were larger on net than the losses in West Antarctica and the Peninsula. Consequently, Antarctica has been gaining ice since 2009.    

Overall, the Antarctic ice shelf area has grown by 5305 sq km since 2009, with 18 ice shelves retreating and 16 larger shelves growing in area.

Most studies utilise an alarmism-friendly “steady-state assumption” approach to estimate ice losses, “in the absence of observations.” This allows the agenda-driven facilitators of ice loss estimates to overestimate ice loss on ice shelves that are advancing. 

These assumption-based ice losses are artificially inflated over 3000% more than observations, flagrantly misrepresenting ice shelf behaviour over Antarctica.

Findings of a German professor.     

Professor Dr Friedrich Karl Ewert is a retired geologist and data compilation expert.  He painstakingly examined and tabulated all NASA, GISS temperature data series, taken from 1153 stations and going back to 1881. Ewert discovered that between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming.

Using the data from 2010 before the changes were made, Ewert found that since 2000 the Earth’s temperature has fallen 0.42 Deg C.  This cooling affected every continent except Australia, which showed a small warming. But the activists at NASA began systematically adjusting the data to show a warming not cooling according to Dr Ewert. Dr Ewert has also thrown doubt on temperature changes since 1940.

Ewert’s findings seem to echo those of US meteorologists Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts who examined 6000 NASA weather stations and found a host of irregularities both with the way they were sited and how the raw data had been adjusted to reflect such influences as the Urban Heat Island effect. Britain’s Paul Homewood is also on the NASA, GISS case. He pointed out how adjustments were made to temperature records in Brazil, altered to show a warming where the actual measurements showed a cooling.

Has NOAA falsified sea level data for Florida and other states along the Atlantic coast?

Below is a photo of Nth Miami Beach.

In the 1920’s salt water intrusion killed all the plants along the third road in parallel to the shoreline. This photo is recent and you can see the salt water intrusion is way to the right. Just look at the trees along the second road in, plus the arms of trees and vegetation going right down to the sea. Plants do not like sea water - it kills them. Bearing in mind that the whole region is very low, 250mm (1 foot) of sea level rise would cause the intrusion of salt water 1000 metres inland. But NOAA claims the sea level has risen 3 feet (900mm) over the past three decades. This is clearly false. The plants do not lie.

For the record, Miami ocean levels averaged about 6 inches (150mm) higher than today in the 1920’s. This can be seen from old photos. The reality is that the earth’s surface is constantly on the move either up or down. 

This is but a small sample. Some things related to climate are in fact about common sense.  For example, if a lot of ice was supposed to be melting and had been doing so for a number of years then we would expect a substantial sea level rise.  In fact, in my lifetime I have not noticed a sea level rise. I have mentioned previously that I know of three beaches that are actually building out.

We have had to put up with predictions from computer modelling. In the end, there is nothing that will beat actual observations.  

Ian Bradford, a science graduate, is a former teacher, lawyer, farmer and keen sportsman, who is writing a book about the fraud of anthropogenic climate change.