Climate Denial 101

But if the satellite can be induced to orbit in a polar plane that rotates at a rate of once annually (the green orbit in the lower right) it will preserve its angle with the earth-sun axis throughout the year and overfly Albuquerque (or wherever) at the same time daily throughout its service life. This is known as a sun-synchronous orbit, and all TIROS-N satellites have flown in one for daily consistency of data.

Now as it happens, one of the satellites in the series that operated between 1986 and 1993 (NOAA-9) had a particularly bad diurnal drift, and I'd spent some time addressing it in my papers. Well, what the RSS team discovered was that the climate deniers’ beloved UAH team had inadvertently gotten a minus sign out of place in their correction for this error. As a result, they ended up adjusting their temperature trends by subtracting from them what they thought was a spurious warming. What they needed to do was <1>add to them what was in fact a spurious cooling. Correcting the error resulted in a 40% increase in their figures resulting in trends that were still low compared to RSS trends and those of other analysis products, but well within the range of the best climate model predictions (Mears & Wentz, 2005).

In other words, the only reason Ferrara’s "incorruptible" satellite record showed "less warming during this period" was because... [wait for it...] the skeptic-led team screwed up their arithmetic! Ooops...!

The skeptic team leader I corresponded with ended up having to publicly retract more than 8 years of his team's analysis products, and the climate skeptic community was dealt what may be their worst narcissistic injury to date. They scrambled for months to cover their butts, and are still licking their wounds to this day. One or two of the more outspoken climate skeptics at the time (most notably Ron Bailey of the Cato Institute) even reversed their positions on global warming.

That was 17 years ago... and apparently, Ferrara and many other skeptics still think this little detail isn’t worth mentioning.

To this day, climate skeptics continue to tout UAH analysis products because even after correction, they are still artificially low. Enough so, that when compared to a suitably cherry-picked subset of climate models (for which details of the forcing scenarios are carefully suppressed, of course) they’re still useful for some spin—provided, of course, that no one looks too closely. Since their inception, UAH products use a different analysis method to merge the overlapping records of satellites as they reach the end of their service lives and are replaced with newer ones. Specifically, they leave out those they deem to be outliers in the series (needless to say, the “outliers” tend to be those with higher trends). In addition to UAH, there are at least four independent lower and mid troposphere analysis products covering all, or part of the period from 1979 to 2017 using varying methodologies (Mears & Wentz, 2017; Prabhakara et. al., 2000; Vinnikov et. al., 2006; Zou et. al., 2006; Housfather, 2017). For comparable periods and products, these all agree with each other to within measurement noise, and show anywhere from 1.5 times to twice the corresponding UAH trends, and they are in full agreement with the best climate models under the most realistic forcing scenarios—so much so that by 2007, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report concluded that,

"New analyses of balloon-borne and satellite measurements of lower- and mid-tropospheric temperature show warming rates that are similar to those of the surface temperature record and are consistent within their respective uncertainties, largely reconciling a discrepancy noted in the TAR." (Wigley et. al., 2006)

Don’t expect to hear about any of this from astroturf lobbyists though. Their industry and Far-Right benefactors aren't paying for that kind of publicity.

The second paper dates to the mid-'70s when the National Academy of Sciences published a study on the impact of Milankovitch cycles on past ice ages and the prospects for another one in the future (Hays et al., 1976). Milankovitch cycles are changes in global climate resulting from gravitationally induced perturbations to the earth's orbit and/or axis of rotation caused by near-misses with large asteroids and the like. They occur over millennial timescales and have nothing whatsoever to do with climate change on a decadal/century scale, man-made or otherwise. The myth survives because climate deniers rarely bother to read the papers they cite, and they tend to assume their readers won’t either. One of the guys who collaborated with me on my 2005 papers has a nice write-up about this issue including links to other resources.

2)   The coming “ice age”

But wait...! According to Ferrara and other skeptics it gets even worse. Not only is the earth not warming, not long ago those global warming alarmists were even predicting a catastrophic ice age!

"For example, temperatures dropped steadily from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. The popular press was even talking about a coming ice age. Ice ages have cyclically occurred roughly every 10,000 years, with a new one actually due around now..." (Ferrara, 2012)

This is an urban legend that's been rattling around Far-Right forums for decades, and just won't die. Its origin has two parts, one of which is anachronistic, and the other is based on a non-sequitur that even an honest two minutes’ worth of due diligence would uncover. Both can be traced back to the early 70's. That’s right, six decades ago. I literally have co-workers whose parents weren’t born when the events Ferrara is referring to took place. Yet somehow, we’re supposed to believe they’re still relevant to climate science today.

The first was an early ‘70s modeling study that examined various forcing scenarios involving greenhouse gas emissions and aerosols (Rasool & Schneider, 1971). At the time, climate modeling was in its infancy and there wasn't much data yet on greenhouse gas or aerosol levels in the atmosphere. It wasn’t known whether industrial pollution was producing more of one or the other. The dominant climate forcing then was solar and the sun had been in a waning phase since WWII so naturally, the earth had been cooling since then—a fact that was well-known at the time and to be expected from the prevailing oceanic and atmospheric physics (see Error #1 and Figure 4 above). Everyone knew that eventually the greenhouse forcing “spring” would start to tighten, but it hadn’t done so yet to a noticeable degree yet, and in the absence of better greenhouse gas concentration data we couldn’t tell with any confidence when that was going to happen, or when the sun was going to enter a waxing phase. Climate scientists couldn’t say with any confidence exactly when the cooling trend of the period was going to reverse—only that if business as usual continued, it eventually would.

Against this backdrop, the authors (one of whom was a PhD student) conducted some crude model runs using various hypothetical scenarios intended to test a wide range of emissions scenarios, some of them extreme, see what would happen under each. One of the extreme scenarios they tested involved flooding the entire atmosphere with a thick uniform cover of particulate aerosols not unlike a nuclear winter. As it happened, that one led to a global 3–5-degree cooling and a potential ice age. Neither the authors nor anyone else believed this was likely to happen. It was just one of the more extreme “kick the tires” runs among several. It was not a serious prediction of expected near-term climate change, and the study was never intended to be released as a consensus stance. But unfortunately, someone carelessly misrepresented it as such and leaked news of it to journalists before a conference in Stockholm, and the authors found themselves in the awkward position of having to discuss it publicly and explain their work to a reactionary press with little grasp of how development of climate models or science work.

Again, this was 60 years ago. And to this day, climate deniers still insist not only that scientists were predicting an ice age then, but that science has made virtually no progress of any kind since. They literally expect us to believe that climate scientists today don’t know one single thing about the earth’s climate that wasn’t known then and have no way of telling whether the coming century is more likely to bring warming or an ice age.

The second paper dates to the mid '70s when the National Academy of Sciences published a study on the impact of Milankovitch cycles on past ice ages and the prospects for another one in the future (Hays et al., 1976). Milankovitch cycles are changes in global climate resulting from gravitationally induced perturbations to the earth's orbit and/or axis of rotation caused by near-misses with large asteroids and the like. They occur over millennial timescales and have nothing whatsoever to do with climate change on a decadal/century scale, man-made or otherwise. The myth survives because climate deniers rarely bother to read the papers they cite, and they tend to assume their readers won’t either. One of the guys who collaborated with me on my 2005 papers has a nice write-up about this issue including links to other resources.

Apparently, the difference between millennial scale astronomical events that might happen in coming ages and greenhouse gas-induced warming over the coming century is also not worth mentioning.

3)   “Over-predictions” of global warming in 1988

Giving skeptics the benefit of a doubt, omissions and distortions we’ve seen so far might be attributed to careless oversight. Particularly those like Ferrara who have little if any science training, and as such, a limited awareness of the errors they propagate. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. A few skeptics have been caught deliberately falsifying data. One of the most notorious incidents was committed by Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and former professor of environmental studies at the University of Virginia. For years Michaels has been a bread and butter consultant for industry-funded Astroturf lobbies, and a favorite of ultra-conservative climate deniers in Congress. In 1998, he was called on by some of his industry friends there to testify on global warming before the House Committee on Small Business. During his testimony, he made the following statement,

"Ten years ago, on June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the House of Representatives that there was a strong “cause and effect relationship” between observed temperatures and human emissions into the atmosphere...

At that time, Hansen also produced a model of the future behavior of the globe’s temperature, which he had turned into a video movie that was heavily shopped in Congress. That model was one of many similar calculations that were used in the First Scientific Assessment of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”, 1990), which stated that 'when the latest atmospheric models are run with the present concentrations of greenhouse gases, their simulation of climate is generally realistic on large scales.'

That model predicted that global temperature between 1988 and 1997 would rise by 0.45°C... Ground-based temperatures from the IPCC show a rise of 0.11°C, or more than four times less than Hansen predicted...

The forecast made in 1988 was an astounding failure, and IPCC’s 1990 statement about the realistic nature of these projections was simply wrong." (Michaels, 1998)

Figures 9 and 10 respectively show the slide Michaels used to illustrate the 1988 to 1997 warming prediction he attributed to Hansen’s team, and the original its temperature curve was borrowed from (Hansen et al., 1988, Figure 3) superimposed with the observed temperature record at the time of his testimony (the black curve).

Figure 9 – Patrick Michael’s Slide Showing Hansen’s 1988 Model Predictions