Real Climate Science

I'll use direct NASA/NOAA data so there's no attacking my sources this time.

Here is a report published in 1999 by NOAA and NASA showing temperatures much higher in the 1930's with cooling through the end of the century. Temperature data outside the US wasn't very reliable in the 20th century, so it's best to focus on the US. Skip to page 37 and look at figure 6. Make a mental note the high point of 1.5 degrees C in the 30's from 1999 data.

Warning, PDF file: https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1999/1999_Hansen_ha03200f.pdf

Compare this with the same data today and you'll miraculously see the 1930's as much cooler with a warming trend (again, NASA direct data - note the new high point from the 30's is 1.2 degrees C, not 1.5): https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/graph_data/U.S._Temperature/graph.png

Here is an article summarizing the alterations in case you do not want to read the NASA/NOAA report, but I published the direct data from NASA so there would be no attacking the source: https://realclimatescience.com/2020/10/alterations-to-the-us-temperature-record/

My point is that the "climate science" we're bombarded with in the mainstream media isn't hard science. It's a political narrative fueled by financial conflicts of interest and grant money. That bothers me because 1) I like to understand reality, and 2) it is leading to massive misallocations of capital, just like with COVID over the last 1.5 years. I think we should be concerned with climate, but we need to…

The 50s and 60s were also full of reports on global cooling. Temperatures started dropping from the 1940s by the data they used back then (these days that fall has been edited out).

But there's a deeper problem with the point you're trying to make here. You claim the reports didn't reflect the scientific consensus. Really? Go read those reports. They do claim they were reporting the consensus. To the extent they admitted the existence of uncertainty it was uncertainty of the form, we don't know why temperatures are falling, we don't know how bad it'll get but it'll probably be bad, etc.

So how do you know that reports back then were lying about the existence of a consensus, but today's reports aren't? Who gets to declare a "general scientific consensus" anyway? Can we meet these people and ask how they determined that? What about virology, where they claim there's an absolute consensus that SARS-CoV-2 couldn't have escaped from a lab even though it's obvious it could?

Here's some quotes from articles published in the 60s and 70s [1]

New York Times, 1961: "Scientists agree world is colder. After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder"

Washington Post, 1970: "Get a good grip on your long johns cold weather haters, the worst may be yet to come. That's the long long range forecast being given out by climatologists".

New York…

I only know one guy who's written in depth about this, Tony Heller. Here's one example article but click through the titles at the top and there are others. At some point I downloaded the raw data tables from a NASA (or was it NOAA? I forget) FTP site and re-ran one of his analyses, which was valid, so that increased my confidence in the graphs he presents.

https://realclimatescience.com/alterations-to-the-us-temperature-record/

He shows the data has been heavily altered in various ways. Sometimes he shows it by finding and downloading "raw" data tables and graphing them over the top of the publicly released graphs. Sometimes by searching newspaper or web archives for old temperature graphs and showing that the historical data in modern graphs has been altered vs what was once being published.

Very occasionally other people notice this too. Retraction Watch is a blog that normally just writes about retracted scientific papers but here they noticed that July was reported as the hottest on record, but that the same government agency had previously reported another record breaking temperature that was higher than July's:

https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest-month-on-record-please-stand-up/

How is it possible for a temperature to "break records" when it is lower than previously reported temperatures? NOAA explains:

"NOAAGlobalTempv5 is a reconstructed dataset, meaning that the entire period of record is recalculated each month with new data. Based…

Climatologists have influence and funding because of their claims about temperature trends. But the records from individual weather stations are aggregated into regional and global timeseries by climatologists themselves, giving them intense conflicts of interest. If the graphs they computed wandered up and down in ways not linked to human activity they'd be no more important to the world than the people who classify beetles. So they have a strong incentive to edit the data as they aggregate it, and they do.

Climatology didn't really exist before WW2. From the end of the war to about 1975 the world was cooling. The then-new field discussed it extensively and projected the trend forward to predict a new ice age. See it by doing a historical Google Scholar search. Watch out that in the beginning they called it "climatic change" not "climate change".

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=1960&as_yhi=1975&q=climatic+change+cooling&btnG=

Here's an example paper from 1973, shown in the first page of results for me but you can pick any, there are thousands and they all say the same thing: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1974.tb00957.x

CLIMATIC CHANGE SINCE 1950

Published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers

ABSTRACT

The mean temperature for the Northern Hemisphere had a warming trend from 1890 to 1950 and a cooling trend since 1950. The eastern and central United States had colder temperatures in 1961–1970…

It's interesting to speculate what Attenborough would say if he realized the lecture he saw was built on a lie. The article makes it clear that what converted Attenborough was the NASA GISTEMP graph. It would never have occurred to him to ask whether this data was being manipulated.

The graph he saw is this one:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/attenborough-global-temp-graph.jpg

Go to the NASA GISTEMP website (https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/) and look at the same graph as it is today. There are differences between the two. For example in the graph he saw, the temperature anomaly in 1981 is about 0.21 degree C. In the current graph it's 0.32 degree C.

It's a little known fact that the organizations producing graphs of global temperatures continually rewrite the historical record and often do so silently. These rewrites create warming trends in the data where in the past no such trends were visible. This article proves the case beyond doubt:

https://realclimatescience.com/rewriting-the-climate-at-nasa/

It shows two different graphs claiming to be the same version of the same temperature dataset, both on the NASA website. One is no longer linked from anywhere and can only be reached because the blog author preserved the link in his records. They have different data in them - the newer one shows more warming during the 20th century than the older one.

The head of climatology at NASA was challenged on Twitter to explain why historical…

This is a great example of misleading "science".

I don't believe that the data here is being misrepresented. But the conclusions are not valid.

The gist of the article is:

1. Arctic ice thickness and extent are cyclical and uncorrelated with atmospheric CO2 levels.

2. NOAA sea ice graphs start at a cyclical peak (1979), which incorrectly leads people to believe that Arctic sea ice thickness and extent are on a consistent downward trend, rather than the low end of a multi-decade cycle.

3. Therefore, global warming does not exist (????)

I'm not exaggerating the third point:

Eastern Arctic temperatures closely track the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and show no correlation with atmospheric CO2.

This wrecks global warming theory which is climate scientists’ bread and butter, so NASA simply erases the prior warmth

NOAA and NASA should rightly be taken to task for misrepresenting Arctic ice data.

However to dismiss the entire global warming premise on this basis is a maliciously illogical conclusion.

Spent some more time poking around through this website, and the best conclusion I could draw was: scientists like to make bold predictions on tenuous grounds, and the media likes to make hysterical reports based on those predictions. Therefore we shouldn't believe in global warming because there is a lot of both bold over-prediction and hysterical over-reporting associated with it.

Meanwhile the blog does plenty of disingenuous over-reporting of its own, flagging…