Climate Denial 101

This just keeps getting better and better.

As for the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation), the "political" scientists at the IPCC didn't consider significant because it isn't. As we saw earlier, the climate system routinely shuffles energy from one component to another, El Nino events being a case in point. The PDO is another such oscillation that redistributes what the system has already absorbed (there’s a North Atlantic Oscillation as well). These redistributions are short-term events—the excitable kid shifting his weight on daddy’s shoulders. They have nothing whatsoever to do with long-term climate change.

But what about all that "cooling" that we’re told has happened since 2000…?

Let’s return to the lower graph in Figure 1. The black curve is sumo-wrestler Daddy, and the jagged orange one is the excitable kid. See that big spike at around 1998 or so—the 3rd highest one to the left of the right-hand side of the figure? That was the Mother of all El Nino's... the screaming kid flew off daddy's shoulders and took out the chandelier with his head. Compare that chandelier-breaker not only to the underlying black curve, but to the orange curve in 2011 as well. Notice how far it deviates from both, and how quickly it returned to long-term trend.

Figures 5 and 6 below show the 10 and 30-year trends Easterbrook (2012) bases his “cooling” claims on. Both were taken from a presentation he gave at the Heartland Institute’s 7th International Conference on Climate Change, or ICCC³ (linked from the 3rd paragraph of Ferrara’s editorial).

Figure 5 – Surface Temperature Anomalies for 2000-2012 (as reported by the Heartland Institute)

Figure 6 – Multiple Dataset Temperature Anomalies for 1979-2013 (as reported by the Heartland Institute)

Compare Easterbrook’s curves to the same period in Figure 3. Different data averaging and reporting methods are used by each of these curves so their numbers and shapes may not line up exactly. But apart from that, the similarities are obvious. Figure 7 gives an even clearer picture.

Figure 7 – Long and Short-Term Surface Temperature Trends

This figure is taken from an article by Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (Swanson, 2009) in which he discusses at length how climate deniers have distorted (or more properly butchered) his own research in support of their claims of global cooling. The blue curve is the same surface temperature dataset presented by Easterbrook (Figure 5, and in the green curve in Figure 6) which was taken from the U.K. Met Office’s HadCRUT3 dataset. Here that data is set against a 1979 to 1997 averaged fit (the green curve) for context. The red line labeled Return to warming is the portion Ferrara and Easterbrook want you to dwell on.

Take moment to ponder this figure… It may be the clearest example you’ll ever see of how nearly all skeptic spin works.

What’s happening of course, is that climate deniers treat the red curve (or one drawn from the top of the El Nino peak it starts from to the bottom of whatever is current today) as though it were the blue or green one. According to them trends between one of Junior's chandelier-breaking bounces and some carefully chosen low point 10 to 20 years later are conclusive proof that a long-term anthropogenic warming trend doesn’t exist. The fallacy is obvious, yet this sort of thing turns up again and again in their arguments.

Error #3)   Skeptics cherry-pick their arguments, often deliberately.

This should come as no surprise--we’ve seen how selective they can be with temperature datasets. But it doesn’t end there. Climate deniers routinely spin context and history as well. In a few cases, they’ve even been caught deliberately falsifying records. Let’s review three particularly egregious examples.

1)   Satellite-measured atmospheric temperatures

Ferrara may have mangled the surface temperature record, but not to worry. There’s a better source of data, he tells us, and it doesn’t show much warming either!

"The incorruptible satellite measured global atmospheric temperatures show less warming during this period than the heavily manipulated land surface temperatures..." (Ferrara, 2012)

The "incorruptible" satellite record he refers to is the one collected by the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) and Advanced MSU (AMSU) packages that have flown on NASA's Television Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS-N) series of spacecraft since 1979. These packages detect microwave radiation emitted by the lower and upper atmosphere from which average temperatures for each are calculated. The lion's share of research on these records is maintained in two trended products--one generated by the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH), and the other by Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA (RSS). At the time the former team, then led by two well-known climate skeptics (one of whom has since retired), was getting significantly lower numbers and trends than the latter—enough that they disagreed with the predictions of the best extant climate models. Needless to say, this was (and to this day still is) the only product being quoted by skeptics.

In 2005, with gracious assistance and peer-review from the IPCC I produced two research papers on this record (Church, 2005; 2005b). Among other things, I discussed how climate models have always predicted less atmospheric warming than the allegedly "heavily manipulated" land surface record (a fact Ferrara appears to be completely ignorant of). I also analyzed both satellite products in depth and showed why they were neither incorruptible, nor in disagreement with the surface record. It ended up being passed around the IPCC, the U.S. Climate Change Commission, and a few universities as well. Eventually someone gave copies of both to the leader of the UAH team. He reached out to me with an extended and thoughtful response, and even provided me with more data and a preprint copy of a paper his team was preparing on the relationship of the tropospheric record to the stratospheric one before it was published (with the understanding that I would, of course, keep quiet about it until it was... which I did). But when he saw a comment I made in the second paper about a statement he’d made before Congress (which was highly misleading) he was infuriated and responded with a diatribe that bordered on outright hysteria (it seems I hit a nerve...).⁴

All that aside, many of the issues I raised in my paper got some folks thinking (or at least pushing harder in directions they were already headed). Six months later the RSS team published a paper (Mears & Wentz, 2005) that uncovered the reason for those surprisingly low trends (it's probably wishful thinking or grandiosity on my part, but I like to think that I contributed something to that). The TIROS-N satellites that collect this data are operated in polar orbits that allow them to cover the entire earth in a few passes as it rotates beneath them (this isn’t possible with an equatorial orbit as the earth is rotating about the same axis as the satellite’s orbit, so the equator is all it will ever see). A consistent temperature record can only be maintained if these satellites overfly each point on earth at the same time every day (it’s a lot warmer in Albuquerque at high noon than it is as 9am). However, a satellite in polar orbit about the earth doesn’t know about its journey around the sun. Its plane will remain fixed with respect to the background space instead, as depicted by the red orbit in the upper left corner of Figure 8 below.

Figure 8 – Normal and Sun-Synchronous Polar Orbits