I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work

  1. Background
  2. The Two Degree Limit
  3. Climate Emergency
  4. 2022 Broke No Records for Extreme Weather or Temperatures
  5. More Bad News For The Eco-Radicals
  6. Despite Apocalyptic Predictions, It’s a Quiet “Peak Hurricane” Season
  7. Tornadoes, Climate Change, and the Media
  8. What the IPCC Actually Says About Extreme Weather
  9. Scaring People is The Point

Background

It’s fair to say that there’s much less fighting over the science of climate change now than twenty or thirty years ago.

The people pushing it will say that’s because the evidence has become overwhelming – despite the continuous failure of predictions like the one above.

I’d argue that it’s more because the practical efforts to combat global warming, including the now infamous Net Zero and the rapidly rising costs and destruction of industry in Western nations, are instead the focus of people’s attentions.

Which is a shame really because the science of global warming has been taking quite a battering in recent years, as well as the scientists involved, starting with Michael Mann. A few days ago a Superior Court Judge issued a stunning reversal of the punitive damages awarded to Mann in his defamation case against Mark Steyn, which had been going for a decade. The punitive damages were slashed from $1 million to just $5,000, a more proportional figure given the $1 actual compensatory judgment:

This case, like Mann’s broader legal campaign, embodied a SLAPP, a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. These lawsuits are designed not to win but to exhaust, intimidate, and silence. And in the world of climate science, where the political and the empirical are often inseparable, they have been used to devastating effect.

Mann had already suffered another defeat earlier in May when a court demanded he pay one million dollars in legal fees, including $530,000 to National Review in his defamation trial against them.

The kicker in the earlier case was that Mann got smashed because he and his lawyers, in an effort to gin up the award, intentionally misled the court about research grant data and other “losses” he’d suffered. If he’s willing to fake that data then why wouldn’t have faked other data? The judge was outraged, effectively reversing the decision:

We are entering a new phase in the debate over climate change and its scientific underpinnings. For years, critics were painted as conspiracy theorists or shills.  But the Mann-Steyn trial pulled back the curtain on the tactics used to enforce climate orthodoxy. The courtroom was not a cathedral of truth but a theater stage, and in the end, the audience wasn’t buying it.

We certainly are, but the counter-revolution has been building for a while now. It should have moved much faster after this news arrived way back in 2013:

The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report concedes for the first time that global temperatures have not risen since 1998, despite a 7 percent rise in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions….The IPCC also admits that the “hockey stick” it used to feature in past reports wasn’t accurate. Penn State professor Michael Mann has been dining out for years on [it]…A third major admission by the IPCC: No increases in droughts, hurricanes, typhoons and other extreme weather

The headline about such facts heralding the end of climate alarmism was premature, mainly because the MSM and screaming headlines were still a factor back then. But between people being numbed by fearful headlines about Covid-19, Trump and just about everything else, the tide does seem to have started turning since 2021. Just a sample below, with a key quote from each.

The Two Degree Limit

The article asks why this is a limit? The history of temperature changes has seen movements of 2°C and more before, both colder and warmer, within the history of human civilisation. It’s a political, not scientific target.

The father of the two-degree limit was Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Schellnhuber tells them that he estimated average global temperatures since the rise of Homo sapiens and decided from proxy data that over the past 130,000 years global average surface temperatures were never more than two degrees higher than before the beginning of the industrial revolution. This became the two-degree limit.
…
Jeroen van der Sluijs, et al. argue that artificially constructed political goals, like climate sensitivity or the two-degree limit, are political “anchors.” ...In a 2014 comment in Nature, David Victor and Charles Kennel tell us that there is little scientific basis for the 2°C figure, but it was a simple focal point and it “sounded bold and perhaps feasible.” (Victor & Kennel, 2014). Then they admit the goal is “effectively unachievable.”
…
Recently the IPCC lowered this limit to 1.5°C…

Climate Emergency

We are warming, but….
The only data that can be trusted, that makes a genuine apples-to-apples comparison, are the measurements from satellites. All other temperature reconstructions require faith in subjective readings of often poorly placed primitive instruments, and compromised tree ring signals.
…
So, then what do the satellite data tell us? That we just went through “the coolest monthly anomaly in over 10 years, the coolest June in 22 years, and the ninth coolest June in the 44 year satellite record,” says University of Alabama at Huntsville climate scientist Roy Spencer….“The linear warming trend since January 1979” is a mere 0.13 of a degree Celsius per decade, says Spencer. June 2022 was also cooler than a number of months on Spencer’s chart, quite a few of them going back more than 20 years.

2022 Broke No Records for Extreme Weather or Temperatures

From extreme winter weather, to hurricanes, to wildfires, to flooding, to drought, and beyond, the corrupt legacy media asserted particular instances of extreme weather were indicative of worsening trends driven by climate change. Yet, data from the State Climate Extreme Committee (SCEC) at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that not a single record was set for high or low temperatures, rainfall, snowfall, or hail in 2022.
…
In fact, the SCEC’s data show that nearly double the number of state high-temperature records were set or tied from 1900 to 1940 than were set or tied from 1980 to 2022,

More Bad News For The Eco-Radicals

For the first time in more than 80 years, the Atlantic Ocean hasn’t produced a named storm between July 3 and Aug. 31….The Atlantic’s failure to form a tempest is a rarity. It “has had no #hurricanes yet this year,” Colorado State University meteorologist Philip Klotzbach tweeted Thursday. 2022’s calm spell happens to be only the seventh time since 1950 that the Atlantic “has gone through August without a . Other years are: 1967, 1984, 1988, 2001, 2002, 2013.”

Despite Apocalyptic Predictions, It’s a Quiet “Peak Hurricane” Season

The same thing happened again in 2024. The link includes an extensive list of screaming MSM headlines starting early in 2024, and it includes That Name again:

Michael Mann, the famed “climate expert” of hockey-stick fame, went even further, predicting a whopping 33 named tropical storms this year.
…
It was a scientific fact according to the most celebrated “climate experts” that we were in grave peril from hurricanes in 2024 due to “record warm Atlantic Ocean waters.” I’m repeating this because as it turned out, the Atlantic Ocean water temperatures have plunged this summer, in spite of the brilliance of the climate scientists who claim the ability to precisely predict air and ocean temperatures out decades in the future.

The article also quotes the Daily Sceptic with its take on these particular models:

In fact, scientists have little idea how a great deal of weather suddenly changes and how the sea and atmosphere warms and cools. Over 100 super-computer models are simply not up to the job of explaining natural variation in a chaotic, non-linear atmosphere. The fact that some scientists are perplexed when temperatures go down, but full of fear-mongering explanations when they go up, says it all.

I also liked the comparison of named storms in 1933 and 2005:

In 1933 there were 21 named storms, none of which were in the Eastern Atlantic. In 2005, there were 7 storms that formed in the Eastern Atlantic and never moved into the Western Atlantic. They would have never been identified as named storms in prior eras.

Tornadoes, Climate Change, and the Media

An article pointing out much the same thing about the MSM and Climate Change scare tactics, this time with smaller weather patterns called tonadoes.

Salon, Axios, and the Washington Post among others ran articles suggesting climate change is expanding the length of tornado season and area over which tornadoes commonly form, as well as adding ingredients to the atmosphere to make more and bigger tornadoes.
…
“Tornadoes typically form when very cold, dry air clashes with warm, humid air. Climate change warms the Arctic more than the tropics and subtropics, resulting in less of a clash between cold Arctic air masses and warm Gulf of Mexico air masses. As a result, fewer and less violent tornadoes are occurring today than in previous periods, despite media claims that tornadoes are getting more frequent, stronger, or both.”…. two record-low years for tornado strikes in the United States occurred, in 2014 and 2018.

I’ve often thought that these idiots could have made a stronger case for Climate Change by pointing out that a reduction in cold Polar air versus warm Tropic air would mean fewer and less dangerous hurricanes and tornadoes. But that would have required the non-scientists to understand the science and for scientists (like Michael Mann) to hold back on the political activist screaming route.

Despite modest warming of the climate over the past 50 years, data show no trend in increasing tornadoes linked to climate change. Indeed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its most recent report, “There is low confidence in observed trends in small spatial-scale phenomena such as tornadoes.”

What the IPCC Actually Says About Extreme Weather

Which brings us to the IPCC itself on the matter with their AR6 report, in a repeat of what they said in 2013 as they talk about what they call the climate change signal:

  • An increase in heat extremes has emerged or will emerge in the coming three decades in most land regions (high confidence) 
  • There is low confidence in the emergence of heavy precipitation and pluvial and river flood frequency in observations, despite trends that have been found in a few regions
  • There is low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions.
  • Observed mean surface wind speed trends are present in many areas, but the emergence of these trends from the interannual natural variability and their attribution to human-induced climate change remains of low confidence.

You’d think that the tornado and hurricane nutters in the previous link would have noted this, but it’s worth the scare. That’s really the point of many of these scientists, let alone the political and ideological activists piggy-backing their way to more government control over society via this nonsense.

Scaring People is The Point

For example, in 2023 there was this incredibly detailed analysis of the history of extreme weather events like hurricanes, tornadoes, rainfall, floods, droughts and so forth in the The European Physical Journal, which concluded much the same as the IPCC:

None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events. In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet. It would be nevertheless extremely important to define mitigation and adaptation strategies that take into account current trends.

Did you click on the link? You should have, RETRACTED ARTICLE: A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming

In light of these concerns and based on the outcome of the post publication review, the Editors-in-Chief no longer have confidence in the results and conclusions reported in this article. The authors disagree with this retraction.

The authors being scientists of equal or superior calibre to the editors.

As such the story that emerged later in 2023 came as no surprise, except that it was a scientist spilling the beans:

A climate scientist has admitted overhyping the impact of global warming on wildfires to ensure his work was published in the prestigious science journal Nature…. The Nature study has been accessed more than 3,000 times online and was cited by 109 news outlets across the globe. But in a blog and series of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, Dr Brown admitted that there were other factors influencing wildfires that he had purposefully omitted – such as poor forestry management and an increase in people starting fires deliberately or accidentally

But Dr Brown went even further, in detail on his blog with the post, The Not-so-Secret Formula for Publishing a High-Profile Climate Change Research Paper, and in summary in The Free Press as to why he had done this, I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published:

I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell. This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives — even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.

Great! When you’ve got scientists like this guy, Michael Mann and others, you almost don’t need the activists:

I’m not willing to be marched to my death by the fossil fuel companies and their government puppets,” said one activist. “It is immoral for cultural institutions to stand by and watch whilst our society descends into collapse. Galleries should close. Directors of art institutions should be calling on the government to stop all new oil and gas projects immediately. We are either in resistance or we are complicit.”

And while people are tiring of militant tactics there’s always going to be a climate event to scream about, because such things are the statistical flip side to the years of few hurricanes, tornadoes, and so forth – like Cyclone Giselle and the Greens in early 2023, as described by Not PC:

Sub-tropical Cyclone Gabrielle, claims James Shaw, Green leader and minister of cyclone’s devastation, is proof that global warming “is real … is clearly here now, and if we do not act, it will get worse.”...Meanwhile, his fellow Green MP Julie Anne Genter took the opportunity of the devastation around the North Island to … not to get out there and help, but to take the opportunity to jump on Twitter to lambast the Act Party, whose “extreme ideology,” she says, “has never been less relevant.”

Peter chose to show two examples of what rubbish this screaming is, first with a history of Climate Death, and an explanation of why this has happened (hint: it’s wealth)…

Second, by showing that the same thing had happened to Auckland in 1935.

BTW, while people talk about 100-year floods, it’s important to understand the statistics of that as well in beating back the scare tactics, and here’s a Texas meteorologist to explain:

You may have … heard the phrase “a 100-year flood,” especially around hurricane season. Perhaps you heard this phrase two years in a row or even two months in a row! What does this mean? In the weather world, it’s about probability of the event happening, not the timing. It does NOT mean that a 100-year flood should only happen once in a hundred years. As with “once in a hundred years,” it’s a statistical way of describing a weather event has a 1% chance of happening in any given year.