Nothing like debate to destroy a consensus

The Americans on 29 March may quietly have set in train the process that will finally derail the climate change juggernaut. The US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held a hearing on Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method.

Activists try to paint climate change as humanity’s greatest challenge, but most mainstream climate scientists have for years refused invitations to actually debate this hypothesis in public, preferring to keep to scientific conferences where they can pretend no debate exists. This hearing was another attempt to allow climate science to be compared with normal scientific practice but it presented the warmsters with a stiff challenge. Discovering misleading practices, missing evidence, faulty theories and oppressive treatment of colleagues would threaten to ruin their flimsy consensus.

It has only been by distorting or obscuring the scientific method that the warmsters have been able to keep the climate change charade going for 40 years. Because in that time there’s been little warming: some in the first 20 years and almost none since then, on top of a lack of evidence at vital points in the warmistry narrative.

When the House Science Committee added the scientific method to the topic of this hearing, they allowed for an examination of everything the warmsters have said and done and it’s terrifying them.

The committee heard testimony from three sceptical climate scientists (Dr Judith Curry, Dr John Christy and Dr. Roger Pielke Jr) and one warmster climate scientist (Professor Michael Mann).

There is a video of the hearing (two hours twenty minutes — I had to ignore big chunks of it to get what I needed for this). I cannot now find a link to the whole video, but searching for Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method at YouTube reveals a large number of video extracts that are fun to browse through. This next link was intended to provide the whole hearing, and it does, but it begins at 2:01:45 and you must drag it back to the beginning by mouse.

The hearing was sensational in two respects. First, the once-honoured Dr Michael Mann lied four times; then (though it took a week or so to emerge) the Hockey Team, leaders of the climate scam, seeing their methods come under official criticism, sent Kevin Trenberth to repair some of the damage Mann had done to their case.

Dellers describes the four untruths uttered by Mann.

1. First, Michael Mann told the Congressional hearing he had no association or affiliation with the Climate Accountability Institute, yet his own CV states that he sits on their advisory board and has done since 2014.
2. He denied having called his fellow climate scientist and special witness, former Georgia Tech Judith Curry, a “denier”. “A number of statements have been attributed to me,” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve called anybody a denier.” So Judith Curry, sitting alongside, leaned toward her microphone and said emphatically: “It’s in your written testimony. Go read it again.” The chairman produced the evidence a few minutes later, confirming that Mann’s written testimony referred to her as ‘climate science denier, Judith Curry.’ Confronted with this evidence of his falsehood, Mann petulantly quibbled that he hadn’t called her a climate CHANGE denier, which brought peals of laughter from Curry.
3. He was asked whether he’d ever dismissed another of the expert witnesses on the panel, Roger Pielke Jr, with the phrase ‘carnival barker’. “You’d have to provide me with the context. I don’t remember everything I have said or done,” said Mann. But he has used the belittling phrase on both Pielke Jr and Curry.
4. Mann, trying to present himself as persecuted by anti-science Republicans, claimed that Joe Barton – chairman of the House Energy Committee – had demanded all his “personal emails and correspondence with other scientists.” This was a lie. Barton asked for Mann’s funding sources, but not for his personal emails.

Earlier, Roger Pielke Jr was asked whether Mann had ever attacked him personally. Roger was too good merely to whinge about Mann’s abuse and actually gave him a jolly good serve:

I hope everyone takes a look at the Youtube (video) of this testimony and sees Dr Mann speaking and listens carefully. He’s a respected scientist, he’s the leader of the climate change movement in the United States, and I think everyone deserves to see his behaviour at this hearing.

Makes your toes curl with shame, doesn’t it?

Mann sounded defensive and petty and seemed unworthy of a senior academic position. When there were opportunities to discuss the science, he instead resorted to unedifying personal abuse. As he ranted on at his colleagues they stuck to the science and came across as level-headed, objective and interesting, while Mann was simply rude to them. His performance was appalling.

Scientific method

A week after the hearing, Kevin Trenberth published an article in defence of mainstream climate science. The swift backup makes it clear the hockey team is deeply afraid of this parliamentary challenge to their warmster climate science.

They naturally want to be seen as solemn, learned scientists following good scientific practice. But they have been drawn into a public debate moderated by the parliamentary system (which to sceptics around the world is an outstanding result), and the reputations they’ve built upon the apocalyptic scenarios painted by their unverified climate models could be destroyed.

Whatever the extent of the science committee’s reach into national research funding, which is surely massive, climate scientists across the nation will be scrambling to satisfy the committee that their science can be trusted.

I don’t know whether these hearings subpoena witnesses, but in being invited to testify to mainstream climate science, Mann and his team of warmsters are being forced to debate it, and in examining the methodology, assumptions and hypotheses, their conclusions can be exposed as unfounded.

Hurrah.

In Trenberth’s latest article in defence of climate science, he stresses the skill of the climate models and therefore their significance. But he ignores the manifest large uncertainties of the model calculations, including cloud cover, the magnitude and sign of cloud feedback, the magnitude and sign of atmosphere-ocean radiative heat transfer and climate sensitivity to CO2. Trenberth says:

In the case of climate science, there is a great deal of data because of the millions of daily observations made mostly for the purposes of weather forecasting. Climate scientists assemble all of the observations, including those made from satellites.

He goes on at length, painting a picture of voluminous data and great precision, which is true of observations of rainfall, temperature, winds and so on. But then he fudges it to claim the models are as precise and knowledgeable as our rainfall graphs, which is complete bunkum, especially as time ranges out further than about a fortnight. He says:

While the data are of mixed quality and length, they encompass many variables that can be related physically – temperatures, winds, humidity, rainfall, etc. – and together they tell a very compelling story.

One form of model may be statistical and empirical in nature, such as how often to restock supermarket shelves. This is not the case for climate science. Because we don’t have a physical system to experiment with, climate scientists build a virtual planet Earth in a computer. Computer models are based upon the physical laws of nature represented by mathematical equations that are solved using numerical methods applied to a three-dimensional grid over the globe.

Modeling the atmosphere and oceans as fluid dynamical systems has become very sophisticated and can be used to simulate the motions and evolution of weather systems. This is done on a daily basis for weather forecasting, which has seen major successes and improved forecasts, as observations have become better and global while computers have become much faster. As models, they may represent imperfect simplified depictions of the real world, but as tools they are extremely valuable.

The first highlighted passage above marks Trenberth’s shift from describing observations to describing climate models. It tries to transfer the impression of precise measurement of the real world onto the understanding of models. But the models don’t include the greenhouse theory, since we don’t understand it in sufficient detail. Models have few representations of physical laws. The second highlighted passage admits the truth: models are unskilled.

Nor do the models know anything about sensitivity and they cannot tell us what temperature rise to expect in a certain period or from a certain pulse of carbon dioxide—all they can do is guess at a stupidly broad range of possible future temperature rise.

On top of all this, now that the huge El Nino has finally died away, the pause is back. Global temperature hasn’t gone up significantly for over 20 years and doesn’t look like changing. How long must we wait?

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