The Fake Science of Global Warming

Francis Menton sticks it to the global warming lobby, good and hard:

If you follow closely the subject of hypothesized human-caused global warming, you probably regularly experience, as I do, a strong sense of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, you read dozens of pieces from seemingly authoritative media sources, as well as from important political officeholders, declaring that the causal relationship between human CO2 emissions and rapidly rising global temperatures is definitive….

On the other hand, you studied the scientific method back in high school, and you can’t help asking yourself the basic questions that that method entails:

* What is the falsifiable hypothesis that is claimed to have been empirically validated? You can’t find it!

* What was the null hypothesis, and what about the data caused the null hypothesis to be rejected? You can’t find that either!

* Where can you get access to the methodology (computer code) and the full data set that was used in the hypothesis validation process; and are those sufficient to fully replicate the results? You can’t find these things either!

* You learn that there have been major after-the-fact adjustments to the principal data sets that are used to claim rapidly warming global temperatures and to justify press releases claiming that a given year or month was the “hottest ever.” You look to see if you can find details supporting the data alterations, and you learn that such details are not available, as if they are some kind of top secret from the Soviet Union.

This is not science, obviously. There is much more at the link, but I will close with this:

Since about 2007, there has been a notable counter-theory to the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. The counter-theory is that fluctuations in world temperatures over the past several decades have been caused more by fluctuations in the cloud cover of the earth than by increases in greenhouse gases like CO2. This counter-theory is often called the “Svensmark hypothesis,” after Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, who proposed it.
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I have no position on whether this hypothesis is “right.” However, prior to the collection of data, it is a plausible hypothesis — equally as plausible as the hypothesis that increasing temperatures are mainly caused by human-emitted greenhouse gases. Accepting the human-caused warming hypothesis as proved requires rejecting the alternative Svensmark hypothesis (as well as all other plausible null hypotheses; but let’s stick with Svensmark for now).

Which brings us to the Povrovsky and Kauppinen, et al., papers. Povrovsky did something that somebody should have long since done by now, which is to collect month-by-month satellite cloud-cover data for the earth for the period 1983-2009, and plot it on a graph, and then compare that graph to the month-by-month temperature graphs. What is the correlation of the two?

It turns out to be exceptionally close:

This is from the article by Povlovsky and Kauppinen:

The IPCC climate sensitivity is about one order of magnitude too high, because a strong negative feedback of the clouds is missing in climate models. If we pay attention to the fact that only a small part of the increased CO2 concentration is anthropogenic, we have to recognize that the anthropogenic climate change does not exist in practice. The major part of the extra CO2 is emitted from oceans [6], according to Henry‘s law. The low clouds practically control the global average temperature. During the last hundred years the temperature is increased about 0.1°C because of CO2. The human contribution was about 0.01°C. We have proven that the GCM-models used in IPCC report AR5 cannot compute correctly the natural component included in the observed global temperature.

The debate over global temperature trends rages on numerous levels, and the alarmists are getting the worst of it pretty much everywhere. Actual science is winning over “climate science.”

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