Here we go again. Not, this isn't the "Hottest Year Ever"

They keep saying this every year, and I keep saying what I say every year.  First, what they say:

July was “a wild weather month,” setting a record as the warmest month ever for the contiguous United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday.

Temperatures last month averaged 76.9 degrees Fahrenheit as above-average warmth blanketed the U.S., and several locations in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Montana saw all-time high temperature records since NOAA started keeping track in 1895.

Last month was 0.1 to 0.2 degrees warmer than July 1936 and July 2012, according to the agency. July also broke the record for the average low temperature, at 64.2 degrees, surpassing July 2022 by 0.7 degrees. 

 Notice how slippery this report is: several locations in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Montana saw all-time high temperature records.  So what about the State high temperature records for those locations?  And this is where I say what I've been saying for like a decade or more:

You want to see a real heat wave?  Look at July 1936.  Eleven States set high temperature records that stand to this day.  That Wikipedia page is a little shifty on this, trying to hide the decline in record temperatures.  You'll see an asterisk next to South Dakota, which the Wiki page says means Also on earlier date or dates in that state.  So what was that earlier date for South Dakota?  July 1936.

Oh, and three more States set high temperature records the next month, August 1936.  That makes 14 out of the 50 States suffered record high temperatures in the summer of 1936.  That's almost 30% of the States.

Everyone is shifty on climate data.  So what gives?  It's the old expression from Statistics: if you torture the data enough, it will confess to anything.  Here's how they torture the data:

The reported warming trend appears to be driven mainly by rising nighttime low temperatures. Because climate “averages” combine daytime highs and nighttime lows, warmer nights can make the overall average look higher even when daytime high temperatures do not show the same increase.

...

NOAA adjusts older weather-station records to account for non-climate changes, such as stations moving, equipment changing, or observers recording temperatures at different times of day. Its Pairwise Homogenization Algorithm (PHA) compares a station with nearby stations to identify and correct apparent breaks in the record. 

Remember, they adjust the measured ("raw") temperatures, but they don't adjust the record temperatures (because that would be way too shifty).  So (as I've been posting for years), how much of the 20th Century's warming is from adjustments?  It's 80%: 

An interesting question is how much of the 20th Century's warming came from adjustments, rather than from raw data? A picture is worth a thousand words:
What you're looking at is the annual adjustment made to the raw temperature, for each year in the 20th Century. You'll notice that almost no adjustments are made to years up to 1960, and then a very interesting shape appears in the graph.

A hockey Stick.

And what Science®-denying Tea-Bagging place did I get that?  From the Fed.Gov's weathermen, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

So the data are fiddled to the point that over 80% of the reported warming cannot be found in the data as recorded.  Its in the adjustments to the data after the fact.

And so we're left with three observations:

1. The reported data are fiddled and are untrustworthy.
2. The record data are not fiddled and are trustworthy.
3. It's summer.  It's hot, hot, hot ...

Hey, Bustah!

No, the Climate Change Establishment has not changed their approach

Friend Burt emails me to say that the U.N. Climate Panel Quietly admits Its Doomsday Climate Scenarios were completely "Implausible".

They've been admitting this for years and years.  Here's a post from the archives from 2019:

Climate scientist Judy Curry testified before Congress, and this is really interesting:

Some people (including one of the Members) took issue with the following statement in my testimony:

“Based upon our current assessment of the science, the threat does not seem to be an existential one on the time scale of the 21st century, even in its most alarming incarnation.”

I referred to AR5 WGII:

“Every single catastrophic scenario considered by the IPCC AR5 (WGII, Table 12.4) has a rating of very unlikely or exceptionally unlikely and/or has low confidence. The only tipping point that the IPCC considers likely in the 21stcentury is disappearance of Arctic summer sea ice (which is fairly reversible, since sea ice freezes every winter).”

The IPCC is the same "U.N. Climate Panel" getting headlines today.  The IPCC Assessment Reports are the "State of the Science" reports they release every five years.  They are considered the Gold Standard for establishment science, and they've been very quietly burying exactly this point for a long, long time.

The only thing they've given up is keeping these scenarios for the screaming headlines.

The only thing interesting here is why they are doing this now?  I think it's the mad dash to AI, with AI datacenters springing up everywhere.  Each of these has a ravenous power appetite, and the (very wealthy) folks behind AI have told the IPCC to tone down the climate alarmism.

Money talks, so the mainstream climate science establishment walks. 

Made up climate data - Update

Last November I posted about a revelation that the UK weather bureau (the Meteorologic Office) had 113 weather stations in Britain that were reporting daily temperature data, but which actually didn't exist at all:

I've posted many times about how the temperature data is modified after its initial collection, but this takes the cake.  One third of UK weather stations simply do not exist

 A full third of the database is imaginary.  Except not so fast, said the "experts".  Those 113 weather stations don't exist, but the data is based on nearby, well-sited (i.e. high quality) different stations.

Hmmmm.  So can we get a list of those stations?  Well, not really:

Last year the UK Met Office was shown to be inventing long-term temperature data at 103 non-existent weather stations. It was claimed in a later risible ‘fact check’ that the data were estimated from nearby well-correlated neighbouring stations. Citizen super sleuth Ray Sanders issued a number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to learn the identity of these correlating sites but has been told that the information is not held by the Met Office. So the invented figures for the non-existent sites are supposedly provided by stations that the Met Office claims it cannot identify and are presumably not recorded in its copious computer storage and archive.  [Bold by me - Borepatch]

I think we've heard something like this before.

Err, the dog ate their homework?  Man, and you wonder why people don't trust climate scientists?  And remember - most people don't know a tenth of the shenanigans that climate scientists are up to, and they still don't trust them.  Quite frankly, the are 100% correct not to trust them.

As I posted last November, this post is tagged "Junk Science" and "Climate Bullshit" because, well, you know.

A Modest Proposal on how the Trump Administration can solve the Global Warming problem

All they have to do is forbid the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from publishing temperature data that has been changed from the original value recorded on the date of recording.

That's it.  Overnight, five sixths of the reported warming in the US over the twentieth century will simply disappear.

Of course, the Usual Suspects will scream and holler about this, but that will simply focus more attention on the subject.  Quite frankly, the public will very likely be shocked when they find out that scientists simply change the data after it was recorded.  There will be a collapse of trust in the climate scientists.  Quite frankly, that collapse of trust will have been earned many times over.

Climate data is just made up

I've posted many times about how the temperature data is modified after its initial collection, but this takes the cake.  One third of UK weather stations simply do not exist:

Shocking evidence has emerged that points to the U.K. Met Office inventing temperature data from over 100 non-existent weather stations. The explosive allegations have been made by citizen journalist Ray Sanders and sent to the new Labour Science Minister Peter Kyle MP. Following a number of Freedom of Information requests to the Met Office and diligent field work visiting individuals stations, Sanders has discovered that 103 stations out of 302 sites supplying temperature averages do not exist.

Now this happens here as well, for example the decommissioned weather station at Ripogenus Dam in Maine was providing data for over a decade.  But what is going on in the UK is on an industrial scale.

So if the "Climate Crisis" is such a big deal, why is a third of the temperature data in the UK fabricated?  It's fake, just like the "Global Warming" crisis.

Tagged "Junk Science" and "Climate Bullshit" because, well, it's pretty obvious.

"Climate Change" is a manufactured crisis

I've said repeatedly that the temperature data is a mess.  Long time readers will remember how the Surface Stations project documented poorly sited weather stations (like ones in the middle of baking parking lot asphalt), where 89% of the weather stations did not meet the Government's acceptable siting requirements.  They all read too hot, sometimes by as much as 2 degrees.

Long term readers may remember how NOAA (the US Government's weather bureau) established a "Climate Reference Network" of only well-sited weather stations.  The Reference Network shows that the poorly-sited stations overstate warming by at least half a degree.  Remember, we are told that temperature increased by 0.6 degrees over the course of the entire 20th Century.  Take away that half a degree and you have no warming at all over 100 years.

Yeah, that's quite a crisis.

But never let a crisis go to waste, even if you have to manufacture one.  What have governments been doing to get more warming?  Well, the UK.Gov is installing brand new weather stations, 80% of which not only are not acceptably sited, but are in Class 4 or 5 - the worst of the worst: 

Over eight in 10 of the 113 temperature measuring stations opened in the last 30 years by the U.K. Met Office have been deliberately or carelessly sited in junk Class 4 and 5 locations where unnatural heating errors of 2°C and 5°C respectively are possible. This shock revelation, obtained by a recent Freedom of Information request, must cast serious doubt on the ability of the Met Office to provide a true measurement of the U.K. air temperature, a statistic that is the bedrock of support for Net Zero. Over time, increasing urban encroachment has corrupted almost the entire network of 384 stations with 77.9% of the stations rated Class 4 and 5, but it beggars belief that new stations are being sited in such locations.

Remember, these aren't 80 year old stations that used to be in a pasture and are now in a parking lot.  These are brand spanking new ones.  Sitting in parking lots.

Tagged Climate Bullshit because, well, you know.

How do you find "Global Warming" when there's no actual warming?

You change the data.  The world's oldest continuous temperature database is the Central England Temperature record which dates to 1659 (!).  The CET has been recently updated to version 2.  And along the way, something really interesting happened:

This is the year-by-year change that was introduced in V2.  You can see kind of random up/down adjustments for hundreds of years right up until 1970.  Then you see massive adjustments.  The upward warming trend from 1970 to the present day is not due to the data as read, but rather to the (made up) adjustments to the data.

Conclusion: Man-made Global Warming is confirmed!*  But it's not observable in real life, but only in computer print outs ...

I'm well past the point of giving the benefit of the doubt to the "Scientists" who do this (and have done this for ages, all over the world).  Now the only explanation that makes sense is that Government wants to scare everyone with "Climate Change" and Scientists are giving governments what they paid for.

Back in the real world, we're still not seeing new high temperature records being set, even with each year as "one of the 10 hottest in the last 1000 years".  The highest temperature ever recorded in these United States was in 1913, 111 years ago.  That's some righteous warming that we're seeing right here.

Go read the very first link at the top of this post, which also delves into just how dodgy the data inputs are (poorly sited weather stations recording heat from RAF jets).  Just like the US Surface Stations Project, he shows that the weather stations in Blighty are not fit for purpose.  So bad in fact that the stations are trying to detect a warming signal of 0.1 degree/decade when the margin of error of the station is 4 or 5 degrees.

There's a reason that I have a post tag here called Climate Bullshit.  And there's a reason that I don't post much anymore about Climate "Science" - it makes me grumpy.

Hat tip to Perry de Havilland at Samizdata.

* The chart there from the US Government weather bureau NOAA is essentially identical to the one shown above for CET.  This game is being played everywhere.

Youtube Shadowbans Climate: The Movie

The Feral Irishman emails to saw that my post about the climate movie looked weird from his Windows computer.  He could watch the movie but there was nothing displayed about Youtube.  Everything looked normal from Safari on his iPhone.

Well, it turns out that Youtube has shadowbanned the film.  This almost certainly made the post look wonky.  If they disappear it I will update the embed to Rumble or something.

You know that you're over the target when you're taking flak.

WATCH. THIS. NOW!

Yeah, I'm shouting.  This is a fabulous film about the whole Global Warming scam.  It's all there - all the stuff I've been blathering on about for 15 years is in it.  Without all the Borepatchian prose overload, of course.

Well, my ClimateGate Clippy isn't there:

Go watch it.  This is great stuff.

A short introduction to climate science

I recently posted about the 100 year old record high temperatures from Australia.  This led me to an old post of mine that covers the most important issues that people need to know about climate science.  I'm reporting it here because it has aged particularly well and condenses a great deal of information on the subject. 

Some things bear repeating.

(originally posted 2 November 2021)

Glossing the Climate Scientists

Back in the Middle Ages, books weren't printed (the printing press hadn't yet been invented).  Instead, they were laboriously copied by hand.  Monasteries were the chief place that this took place, and you can get a great overview of this in the very enjoyable How The Irish Saved Civilization.

One thing that the Monks would often do, especially on more complex books on theology or philosophy was to add short notes in the margins explaining the more impenetrable passages.  These little blurbs were called "glosses" and were essentially a reader's helper.  If you didn't have a teacher - if all you had was the book - then the gloss would provide a welcome overview to guide the reader to the point of the original book.

Reader Lou emailed:

Hi Borepatch,

I am a longtime reader, this is my first reach out.

Great blog, I learn a lot and it is on my daily read list.

Regarding AGW, I am a definite skeptic.  Though only semi-literate on the subject matter. I try to apply my generic engineer-trained, data-driven analytical approach to issues. 

I have read your posts on it (especially the ones from 2010 and 2017) and appreciate you taking these folks on.

I recently came across this article:

https://theconversation.com/the-science-everyone-needs-to-know-about-climate-change-in-6-charts-170556

My lack of command of the subject leaves me ill-equipped to critique or rebut. Would you be willing to look at it and unpack/rebut from your perspective?  I know you have already covered the fundamentals, it’s just these people never quit. And they misuse data to deceive folks.

Either way, thank you for all you are doing, please keep it up you have more positive impact than you may realize!

Thanks for the kind words, Lou.  I haven't posted on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) in quite some time because I think I've written everything I have to say on it.  And so while I won't do a line-by-line fisking of Dr. Weatherhead's article, I will gloss some of my older posts as to how they relate to her article.

We should start with the post that has a permanent sidebar in the upper right hand side of this blog: A Layman's Guide to the Science of Global Warming.  The discussion that is most pertinent to Dr. Weatherman's article is the bit on Carbon Dioxide and how weak a greenhouse gas it is.  Dr. Weatherman repeatedly refers to increasing carbon dioxide but completely skates by the fact that CO2 is saturated in Earth's atmosphere, at least as far as its heat capturing capacity.  The key passage from my old post is this:

The scientific consensus is that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in warming of around 1°C.  We've gone from around 280 parts per million (ppm) atmospheric  CO₂ to around 400 ppm an increase of about 50% over the last 100 years or so, so there should have been an increase of around half a degree.  So why do we hear all of this about how we are destroying the planet?  I mean, half a degree doesn't sound like much.

The next post of mine that is pertinent to Dr. Weatherman's article is How to create a consensus on Global Warming.  She points out in her article that climate data show that all continents are warming.  However, she does not address the very serious problems with adjustments to the data that inject a warming signal where none exists.  This is quite frankly the key problem in climate science: the raw temperature data (temperature readings as originally collected by the scientist many years ago) do not show warming, but the adjusted data (what is reported by scientists like Dr. Weatherman) shows considerable warming.  My post is very difficult to gloss because the information is so, well, shocking but this is the summary:

Let me say this explicitly: I used to believe that the planet was warming, and that this was likely due to natural (as opposed to man made) causes. Now I'm not sure that the planet is warming. The data do not show warming over the last 70 years, maybe longer.

If you only read one of my posts on global warming, this is the one.  It is information-dense and has a bunch of links to scientists who dissent from Dr. Weatherman's "consensus science" view.

A related post about non-adjusted temperature data is relevant.  Understanding Climate Data Made Easy discusses how record temperatures (you can't adjust them, amirite?) do not jive at all with the every-year-is-hotter message from Dr. Weatherman.  Here are the key bits:

So we see [only] 9 states (18% of the total) setting high records in the last 50 years. 41 states (82% of the total) haven't seen record high temperatures in the period we've been told is an accelerating and hotter climate.  You would expect to see a lot more states - another 15 or so setting recent high temperature records.  Weird, huh?  It's almost like if you remove the adjustments to the temperature data, you don't see accelerating warming.

In fact, we may be seeing the opposite.  If you look at record low temperatures you see a lot going on in the most recent years.  15 states have set record low temperatures in the last 50 years (once again ignoring dates listed with an asterisk which tells us the year that the previous low record was tied).  This is only 30% of the total, but that's basically twice as many as set record high temperatures.

July and August 1936 saw 14 States set record high temperatures that have not been surpassed in the subsequent 85 years.  This despite the repeated statements that last year was the hottest ever.  This post suggests a fundamental breakdown in the "Carbon Dioxide is killing us" throry:

Now the establishment science story is that average TMin has been increasing over time, while average TMax has not been increasing much (looking at adjusted data).  Left unexplained is how increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases average low temperatures while not increasing average high temperatures.  Also left unexplained is how increasing average low temperatures (without increasing average high temperatures) will lead to ecological disaster.  Maybe it could, but it's not at all obvious how this would happen.

It's also not explained why Urban Heat Island (UHI) doesn't explain the higher average low temperatures (TMin).  UHI is where a weather station that used to be in a nice grassy field is now in the middle of an airport, surrounded by tarmac and blasted with jetwash.  It's surprising just how many weather stations are not sited to accurate data collection norms - only 8% of GCHN stations are accurate withing 1°C.

The data are a mess - you might even say they are a hot mess.

And now we come to the most pointed argument against Dr. Weatherman's article - Science As Practiced Today Is Very Sick.  The scientists themselves have repeatedly shown themselves to be less than trustworthy.  Dr. Weatherman really needs to deal with the Climategate scandal but is unlikely to touch the subject.  The Layman's Guide post above gives an overview of the scandal:

In November 2009,  someone posted 61 MB of emails, computer program code, and climate data from Hadley servers to an FTP server on the Internet.  One of the most notorious of the emails in this release was from Dr. Jones, and contained the following:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
 to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from
 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

Let's unpack this so you understand each piece.  "Mike" refers to Dr. Michael Mann (of the Hockey Stick graph fame).  "Nature" refers to Nature Magazine, one of (perhaps the) most  prestigious scientific journals.  More specifically, it refers to an article that they published, written by Dr. Mann in which he had a temperature reconstruction.  There is a huge amount of dispute over what "trick" means - skeptics allege sleight of hand while Mann said it just referred to a mathematical technique.  So what was the trick?

Dr. Mann's data sets contained many different proxy series.  This is actually a good thing, because you want confirmation of results from different places and types of proxies (say, including ice cores, tree rings, and corals will probably be more reliable than just using tree rings).  Mann's "trick" (call it a mathematical technique if you want) was to remove all proxy data later than 1960 and replace it with measured temperature data.  The result was a hockey stick shaped temperature graph.  This is what Dr. Jones did in the paper referred to in his email.

The $100,000 question is: why go to the trouble to do this if you have proxy data from 1960 up to the present?  Why replace 50 years of perfectly good data?

Hide the decline.

There is an youtube lecture where Dr. Richard Mueller from Berkeley covers what Jones did and why Mueller won't read any more of Jones' scientific papers.  Dr. Weatherman contributes to the IPCC Assessment Reports so she almost certainly knows Jones personally.  She will know Mueller at least by reputation.  But she is a beneficiary of Government funding, running a department at the University of Colorado.  Which leads us directly to the next - and last - post of mine to gloss: "It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist."

Perhaps the single dumbest argument presented in support of Global Warming is that "the scientific consensus is that it's true".  Translation: all the cool kids do it.  Translation [2]: my scientist is red hot; your scientist ain't doodly-squat.  Oooooh kaaaay.

Of course it's as untrue as it is stupid. And so we get the "you're not qualified"/"we only look at peer-reviewed scientists" expulsion of the Heretics, as the Establishment desperately tries to keep control of the debate.

That's breaking down.  Hal Lewis is one of the Senior Statesmen of American Physics.  He's been a member of the American Physical Society for 67 years (!).

...

Hal Lewis thinks that Global Warming is an anti-scientific, money-grabbing scam by scientists, and says so in a brutal resignation letter sent to the president of the APS:

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

Lewis' letter is utterly damning, and cannot be dismissed as coming from a crank, or an amateur.  And in it he directly addresses the then President of the APS in a passage that must fit Dr. Weatherman's department like a glove:

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I would be much more impressed with climate scientists like Dr. Weatherman if they would address the (it must be said) stink of corruption at the heart of their field.  Or clean up their data.  Of course, as Lewis pointed out there are millions of dollars at stake.

So there you have it, Lou.  There's a lot of reading, but unlike Dr. Weatherman I show my work.  And unlike Dr. Weatherman, I don't say "trust me, I'm a scientist" when so many of her colleagues so clearly are not trustworthy.

Weather, not Climate - special Halloween edition

This is a scary Halloween post - scary for people who believe in Global Warming, anyway.  I've posted for years and years about how the temperature data is adjusted to show warming that is not seen in the recorded data.  I've also posted about how temperature records cannot be adjusted, and are an uncomfortable topic for global warmers to explain - for example, if world climate is getting hotter, why is the highest recorded temperature in the USA from 1913?

Well here is another example of that, from Halloween 100 years ago.  From the Wikipedia article about the town of Marble Bar, Australia:

The town set a world record of most consecutive days of 100 °F (37.8 °C) or above, during a period of 160 days from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924.

That's almost half a year over 100 °F.  you'd think that if the world were warming you would see a longer consecutive hot streak, but you don't.  So this must be an example of weather, not climate.  You remember the difference, don't you?

Weather: a local condition unrelated to global climate.

Climate: anything that proves Global Warming.

Ferde Grofé - Grand Canyon Suite: I Sunrise

The Silicon Graybeard posts good news about the current solar cycle:

Back on my Wandering Around Monday, I noted that solar cycle 25 had just posted the highest sunspot number since cycle 23 back in 2002; the highest sunspot number in 21 years.

So why is this good news?  Because we've known for centuries that the price of grain is inversely correlated with the number of sunspots:

And so to sun spots and climate.  We have quite good records of sunspot activity going back to 1700 A.D.  We have decent records of the price of wheat going back much further - pretty good ones to 1500 A.D., and sporadic records all the way back to 1250 A.D. (!).  The reason is that bread is the staff of life - no bread, and people starved.

In short, grain prices are a pretty good proxy for climate, in the days before thermometers.  Certainly better than, say, bristle cone pine tree rings.  This is important for two reasons, and the combination is very bad news indeed for people who cling to the "Carbon Dioxide is killing Mother Gaia" theory.

First, the price of grain and the number of sunspots have been known to be very closely correlated for hundreds of years.  William Herschel (who discovered the planet Uranus) first published this, back around 1800.  When there are a lot of sun spots, he said, the price of grain is low - harvests are good.  When there are few sun spots, harvests fail and the price of grain soars.

Remember, we have records on this that are so old that this has been known for literally hundreds of years.  You might say that, err, the Science is Settled.

So yay for sun spots.  To celebrate, here is some music from back when Disney made good films (the music here was the soundtrack to the 1959 Academy Award winning Disney short Grand Canyon.

What does the actual science say about climate change?

Chris Lynch points out that NOAA (the US Government's weather bureau) says that April 2023 was colder than 1895.  He has data and everything.

It's been a while since I've posted much about climate because I've pretty much said everything I have to say on the matter.  But I'm reposting this from 2017 because it adds some depth to Chris' post.  About the only thing I didn't put into this post is the way that data is adjusted to change it.

(originally posted March 20, 2017)

A layman's guide to the science of global warming

I haven't posted much on global warming for the last few years, feeling like I'd said most of that I had to say.  I mean, after a hundred or more posts, what's left to say?  What I haven't done is put together a high level overview for the non-scientist who wants to understand what's going on.  Sort of a nutshell guide, if you will.  And so, if you don't care about the current global warming brouhaha, you can skip this post.  If you want to understand what's behind the science, then read on.

The Starting Point: Climate over the last 1000 years

Probably the most famous image from this whole debate is the "Hockey Stick" graph, showing what was said to be the climate over the last 1000 years:

This was from a 1999 paper by Michael Mann (and co authors Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes; this paper is often referred to as MBH99 after the author's initials and publication date).  When I first saw this, I was pretty skeptical.  It showed a stable climate (notice how flat the blue line is over most of the time?) until very recently followed by a sudden spike in temperature - a long flat line with a sudden right-hand hook looks like a hockey stick (hence the name of the graph).

We didn't hear much about an impending heat death of the globe until fairly recently.  Before the late 1990s, the current scientific consensus was that climate fluctuated, sometimes hotter and sometimes cooler.  The current climate was not seen as being particularly warm - certainly less warm that the Medieval period (called the "Medieval Warm Period", or MWP) or the Roman era (called the "Roman Climate Optimum").  This was all written up in the first Assessment Report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which periodically published the latest and best scientific understanding on the issue.  Page 202 of that report showed the scientific consensus of climate history over the last thousand years.

You can see the MWP of the left, the "Little Ice Age" where famine ruled Europe in the middle, and then a temperature recovery to the current era on the right.  No hockey stick to be seen anywhere.  Remember, this was the scientific establishment view in 1990.

As it turns out, there's plenty of history to support this establishment view, and which disputes the MBH99 hockey stick.  The Domesday Book was a tax survey compiled by William the Conquerer after he invaded England in 1066.  It detailed everything in his kingdom that was worth taxing, and so it was assembled with care.  It documented wine vineyards in the north of England, far to the north of where wine is produced today, implying that the climate was warmer in 1066 than it is in 2017.  There is excellent documentary history that the MWP was followed by a catastrophic cooling - the Little Ice Age: as todays's glaciers retreat, archaeologists have discovered the remains of alpine villages that were overrun by glaciers.  And recently, the Vatican announced changes to centuries-old prayers to stop the advance of the glaciers.

The important point here is that there is quite a lot of recorded history from the period that does not square with the climate reconstruction from the Hockey Stick paper.  As it turns out, the MBH99 paper has been conclusively debunked: the data sets used were inappropriate and the statistical algorithms were "novel" (the produced hockey stick shaped output even on completely random data; for example, if you ran the numbers from the telephone directory through the algorithm it would give you a hockey stick).

How do we know what the temperature was 1000 years ago?

The thermometer was invented in the early 1600s.  The oldest regularly maintained series of readings are from the Central England Temperature (CET) series that dates to 1659.  So how do we know what the temperature was before that?  Proxies.

A proxy is a measurement that isn't directly a temperature measurement but which maps to what we think the temperature was.  The most famous of these are tree ring widths: rings will be wider in warmer years when growth is faster, and narrower in cold years when growth is slower.  There are a lot of other types of proxies: rings showing growth in coral reefs, layers of sediment from ponds, and most interestingly, layers of ice deposited on glaciers.  Drilling into the glacier results in ice cores which have annual accretions - colder years will have thicker layers and warmer years will have thinner ones.

Proxies reflect temperature and some of these records go back a very, very long time.  The Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) ice cores date back thousands of years:

Current climate is on the far right.  Moving leftwards we see first the MWP, then a cool period, then the Roman Climate Optimum, and then a generally warmer climate for thousands of years.  There is corroborating archaeologic evidence to support this data: retreating glacier uncovers pre-viking tunic,  retreating glacier uncovers 4000 year old forest (german newspaper translations).

The Vostok ice cores from Antarctica go much further back, hundreds of thousands of years:

You can see the alteration between ice ages (populated by Woolley Mammoths and other cold weather fauna) and warm inter-glacial periods.  We are currently in one of those interglacials.  It's unclear what caused the ice ages, and what caused the warmer inter-glacials.  However, man-made carbon dioxide is not one of the plausible theories for the interglacials.

The Greenhouse Effect

OK, so we know that climate has been up and down for pretty much as long as we can piece together records.  Rather than history, what's going on right now?

We now need to shift from history to Chemistry. We've heard of the "Greenhouse Effect", where sunlight passes through the atmosphere to the ground, the energy is absorbed and re-emitted as heat, and the heat is trapped by the atmosphere. In more precise scientific terms, certain gases are transparent to visible light, but obaque (blocking) to heat (infrared) radiation.

Carbon Dioxide (CO₂ is one of a set of greenhouse gases, including methane and water vapor. One justification for the Hockey Stick that proponents of AGW theory used was that the Industrial Revolution began to produce large amounts of CO₂ around 1850, which is when we saw the spike in temperature. There are a couple problems with this:

1. Correlation does not imply causation. Just because something happens at the same time as something else, doesn't mean that it's caused by it. If we see a big increase in, say, the number of lemons imported from Mexico, and simultaneously see a big reduction in the number of traffic fatalities, we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that Mexican lemons reduce traffic deaths. This seems obvious, but is really at the heart of the proposed policy mitigations like Kyoto, Cap and Trade, and Copenhagen.

2. More importantly, CO₂ is a very - even surprisingly - weak greenhouse gas. (chart from ICPP AR 1)
What this means is that as you put more CO₂ into the atmosphere, it has less and less of a greenhouse effect. This isn't really surprising, because this sort of "exponential decay curve" is the norm in nature - things tend to rapidly achieve equilibrium because this "negative feedback" keeps things from running away out of control. Chemistry (actually spectroscopy) tells us that CO₂ is not really opaque to infrared except at a very narrow frequency band, and therefore "leaks" heat back into outer space at the edges of the bands.

The scientific consensus is that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in warming of around 1°C.  We've gone from around 280 parts per million (ppm) atmospheric  CO₂ to around 400 ppm an increase of about 50% over the last 100 years or so, so there should have been an increase of around half a degree.  So why do we hear all of this about how we are destroying the planet?  I mean, half a degree doesn't sound like much.

Shaky scientific grounds: "Positive Forcings"

Proponents of catastrophic warming know this, and have proposed a theory of "Positive feedback", where CO₂'s greenhouse power is multiplied, or "forced", sort of like Popeye after he opens a can of spinach. This forcing is reached after a particular CO₂ concentration, and causes a "runaway greenhouse effect". There is a fatal problem with this: we simply don't see this much in nature.  In fact, the universe is stable because of negative feedback, where an increase in one thing results in a decrease in others.

There is, of course, a theoretical justification for positive feedback from the AGW proponents - the details are complex, and I don't particularly want to get into them. Instead, is there a way that we can test the theory? There is indeed. We have measurements of both temperature levels as well as CO₂  concentrations for at least the 20th Century. How do they match?

Poorly:

Rather than lots of science and math and stuff, he looks at what the proponents of AGW say and he finds a lot to be desired:

5. The claimed “proof” of positive feedback is a model prediction of a hot spot in the tropics at mid troposphere levels. However all the experimental evidence from many, many measurements has failed to find any evidence of such a hot spot. In science, a clear prediction that is falsified experimentally means the underlying hypothesis on which the prediction is based is wrong.

...

8. If I adopt this 10:1 ratio by looking at the last 100 years worth of data I find 1910-1940 temperatures rising while CO2 was not. 1940 to 1975 temperatures falling while CO2 rising, 1975 to 1998 temperatures rising while CO2 rising and 1998 to 2009 temperatures falling while CO2 rising. Three quarters of the period shows no correlation or negative correlation with CO2 and only one quarter shows positive correlation. I do not understand how one can claim a hypothesis proven when ¾ of the data set disagrees with it. To me it is the clearest proof that the hypothesis is wrong.

What I would add is that we don't just get temperature proxy data from ice cores, we also get CO₂ levels from gas bubbles that were trapped in each layer.  CO₂ maps very neatly to temperature, so the question is why we didn't see positive forcing during, say, the Roman Climate Optimum?

This is the biggest problem that climate scientists have today, and is actually the center of the whole debate: are there positive forcings, if so how big are they, and how are they measured?  There's actually no consensus at all here among climate scientists.  You can get a good overview of this issue here.

Climate Models seem hopelessly broken

Prediction is hard, especially about the future.

- Yogi Bera

The history is decently clear from proxy evidence, so where do scientists think that the climate is going?  There are a bunch of computer models (enormous, complicated computer programs) that predict what climate will be like in the future.  A lot of the most dire predictions that you hear - that temperatures will rise 4 or 5 degrees, devastating the planet - come from these models.

The problem is that models are not climate - they are programs that contain a bunch of algorithms that produce a set of numbers.  Whether these algorithms are valid predictors is the real question.  As we all know, the proof of the pudding is in the eating of it.  So how accurate have the models been?

Not very:

The latest IPCC report (as of 2017) is Assessment Report 5 (AR5) which includes 102 climate model predictions from CMIP-5.  All but a couple of the models run "hot", meaning that the predicted temperatures are higher than what is observed.  The blue and green data points are from measured temperatures from weather balloons and satellites, but we could as easily add in the surface temperature data set used in AR5 (the CRUTEM series) which would show the same divergence between measured temperature and predicted temperature.  You can get more details on models vs. measured temperature at this post.

Something seems very fishy in Climate Science

This is where we stand regarding the historical record, the theory, the chemistry, and the predictive models.  There is really quite a lot of evidence that climate science as currently practiced doesn't have as solid a grasp on the climate as they say.  Indeed, at each stage we see quite a lot of hard evidence that contradicts what the so called "consensus view" of science is.  If the theory were as strong as claimed, you'd expect to see the opposite - data everywhere confirming the theory.

For example, the highest temperature ever recorded in the United States was in 1913.  After a century of positive forcing and year after year reported as "the hottest year ever", we find that the hottest day on record was over a century ago.  Does this prove that the climate isn't warming?  Of course not.  However, if the science were as incontrovertible as we are told, you would expect a more recent record.

But let's look at what's going on in the "consensus climate establishment", because there are some very odd things that you see when you turn over some rocks.  We will talk about some of these now.

ClimateGate and "Hide the Decline"

The University of East Anglia (UK) hosts the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, one of the three most influential climate research organizations in the UK. The Hadley Centre is part of the UK Met (Meteorological) Office, the UK's national weather office. Hadley develops computer climate models and provides one of the most influential temperature data sets (CRUTEM3). In 2009, the Hadley Centre controversially refused a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request for the CRUTEM3 raw (uncorrected) data.

Phil Jones is the current director of the Hadley Centre.

In November 2009,  someone posted 61 MB of emails, computer program code, and climate data from Hadley servers to an FTP server on the Internet.  One of the most notorious of the emails in this release was from Dr. Jones, and contained the following:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
 to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from
 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

Let's unpack this so you understand each piece.  "Mike" refers to Dr. Michael Mann (of the Hockey Stick graph fame).  "Nature" refers to Nature Magazine, one of (perhaps the) most  prestigious scientific journals.  More specifically, it refers to an article that they published, written by Dr. Mann in which he had a temperature reconstruction.  There is a huge amount of dispute over what "trick" means - skeptics allege sleight of hand while Mann said it just referred to a mathematical technique.  So what was the trick?

Dr. Mann's data sets contained many different proxy series.  This is actually a good thing, because you want confirmation of results from different places and types of proxies (say, including ice cores, tree rings, and corals will probably be more reliable than just using tree rings).  Mann's "trick" (call it a mathematical technique if you want) was to remove all proxy data later than 1960 and replace it with measured temperature data.  The result was a hockey stick shaped temperature graph.  This is what Dr. Jones did in the paper referred to in his email.

The $100,000 question is: why go to the trouble to do this if you have proxy data from 1960 up to the present?  Why replace 50 years of perfectly good data?

Hide the decline.

This is a great, detailed video about ClimateGate and hide the decline by Dr. Richard Muller, head of climate science at the University of California at Berkeley.  He is a high profile climate scientist and he has quite pungent things to say about Dr. Jones and company.  The relevant part about Dr. Jones and the CRU starts around 29 minutes into the lecture.

There's more that I won't go into here (particularly the repeated modification of previously recorded temperature data with little or no justification) but this post is plenty long enough as it is and you have a solid grounding in the key points (with links to original sources so you can check my work).