Back in February, Pat Michaels dropped something of a bombshell. It was an exposé of the Achilles heel of alarmist climate science. He did it in a lecture, just posted to YouTube on June 11, at a joint meeting of the Independent Institute and the National Association of Scholars. What he showed was that practically all the climate models on which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and lots of national governments rely are wrong---hopelessly, egregiously, starkly wrong. And all (but … [Read more...]
Are We “Lukewarmers”?
A friend of the Cornwall Alliance wrote us recently, saying: I've just read Roy Spencer's Global Warming Skepticism Busy People, and I am a little surprised at how much he concedes to the alarmists, e.g., there is warming, it is partially anthropogenic, a majority of scientists do believe in anthropogenic warming, a rise of 5 degrees Centigrade would be a problem, etc. Are these all positions with which Cornwall Alliance agrees? Roy describes himself early in the book as a "lukewarmer." Is … [Read more...]
History 1, Hansen 0
In 1988, James Hansen confidently predicted that the world would be about 1 degree Celsius warmer today than it was then. Actually, he offered three scenarios: A, "business as usual," with rapidly rising carbon dioxide emissions, which would bring that 1 degree; B, "most plausible," with emissions remaining constant at 1988 levels, which would make the world 0.7 degree warmer today; and C, with emissions rising from 1988 to 2000 and then stabilizing, which would make the world about 0.3 … [Read more...]
What’s a “Climate Skeptic”?
In his recent article “Four Reasons Alarmists Are Wrong on Climate Change,” Cornwall Alliance Research Associate for Developing Countries Vijay Jayaraj distinguished what, following widespread usage, he called climate-change alarmists, deniers, and skeptics. The “alarmists” generally think that human emissions of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) are driving global warming so rapid and eventually of such great magnitude as to be dangerous or even catastrophic and that the appropriate … [Read more...]
A Mere Couple of Degrees, a Mere Single Thermometer–and a Matter of Integrity
Climatologist Patrick Michaels detected an error in the temperature record at Reagan National Airport recently, and reported it to the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang, which confirmed the error and duly reported it to the National Weather Service, which acknowledged the error and replaced the instrument (which for the last year and a half has been reading 1.7 degrees F too high). So far so good. But then, as Michaels reports and comments: ... the National Weather Service told the Capital … [Read more...]
NOAA Study Takes World by Storm: No Global Warming Pause!
That's how most of the media are treating a new study, anyway. Even the Wall Street Journal ran a news piece titled "Study Finds No Pause in Global Warming." The source? "Possible artifacts of data bias in the recent global surface warming hiatus," published this week in Science, by long-time global warming alarmist Tom Karl et al. Abstract: Much study has been devoted to the possible causes of an apparent decrease in the upward trend of global surface temperatures since 1998, a phenomenon … [Read more...]