The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXIV

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The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXIV

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the fraud committed by the keepers of official world temperature records, by which they intentionally adjust early year temperature records downward in order to support assertions that dangerous human-caused global warming is occurring and that the most recent year or month is the “hottest ever.” The assertions of dangerous human-caused global warming then form the necessary predicate for tens of billions of dollars of annual spending going to academic institutions; to the “climate science” industry; to wind, solar and other alternative energy projects; to electric cars; and on and on. In terms of real resources diverted from productive to unproductive activities based on falsehoods, this fraud dwarfs any other scientific fraud ever conceived in human history.

This is Part XXIV of my series on this topic. To read Parts I through XXIII, go to this link.

The previous posts in this series have mostly focused on particular weather stations, comparing the currently-reported temperature history for each station with previously-reported data. For example, the very first post in this series, from July 2013, looked at one of my favorite stations, the one located in Central Park in New York City. Somehow, the early-year temperatures reported for the month of July for that very prominent station had been substantially adjusted downward, thus notably enhancing a previously-slight warming trend: . . .

Go through the various posts in this series to find dozens more of such examples.

But how exactly are these downward adjustments accomplished? Just what are the games that they are playing? . . .

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Some "Climate" Humor For The Week

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Some "Climate" Humor For The Week

As you undoubtedly know, saving the planet from the scourge of climate change is the official religious cult of the progressive left. The planet (and all of our souls) shall be saved by eliminating the use of the evil fossil fuels, and replacing those with perfectly clean and free renewable energy from the sun and wind. The problem here is that we keep running into what I like to call the “Big Disconnect.” The Big Disconnect comes about because the sun and wind don’t work very much at all, aren’t available when you need them, cost way too much, and don’t provide the wealthy and powerful with sufficient opportunities to puff up their egos by showing off their wealth and power. Result: lots of good hilarity. Here’s a roundup from the past week or so. You get to vote on which is the funniest.

The Google Climate Summit

This one comes courtesy of Rex Murphy of Canada’s National Post on August 2. It seems that last week Google held a “climate summit,” or something like that, outside Palermo in Sicily. There were about 300 attendees. This being a top-level Google conference, the attendees were not nobody. It was a who’s who of the wealthiest and most powerful people who have sought to make themselves high priests and priestesses of the climate cult; people like Woody Harrelson, Diane von Furstenberg, David Geffen, Chris Martin, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sacha Baron Cohen, Orlando Bloom, Katy Perry, Prince Harry, etc., etc., etc. And how did they get to this exotic location? From Murphy:

How did this coven of illuminati get to Sicily? . . . Official count of the private jets wafting into Palermo air for the “great consult” stands at 114. This for a maximum 300 people attending — three persons per jet. . . .

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Are Any Of The Democratic Candidates For President Not Completely Crazy?

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Perhaps President Trump is not particularly your cup of tea, and you are thinking that you might consider as an alternative supporting one or another of the Democratic contenders for the presidency. If so, here is an important question to consider: Is any one of these people not completely crazy?

To start with, I’m willing to grant that the bar for selecting a candidate to support for President is of necessity a low one. A person matching your idea of the perfect candidate simply does not exist in the real world; and even if such a person did exist, he or she would not make it past the first week of the campaign. Working strongly against the potential for even any half-way decent candidate is the fact that everybody who throws a hat into this ring is almost by definition a self-centered ego-maniac. Plus, every one of them deeply believes that each word they utter, no matter how ridiculous, is a pearl of God’s wisdom. And then, by the time you get to the general election, you will only have two options left to choose from. It goes without saying that both will be very deeply flawed.

But “deeply flawed” is not nearly the same as “completely crazy.” Surely, we can find some among the Democratic candidates who can pass the “not completely crazy” test.

Well, good luck trying. To evaluate the question of whether any of these people are not completely crazy, I’m going to look today at what they have said recently — mostly in the debates — about the federal government’s appropriate role with respect to “climate.” . . .

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The Real Data On Energy Usage

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The Real Data On Energy Usage

Undoubtedly you read at least some organs of the mainstream media. Perhaps your go-to source is the New York Times, or maybe the Washington Post, or Bloomberg News, or The Economist, or maybe Reuters. And therefore you have the strong impression that the world is well on its way to a huge energy transition, away from the dirty fossil fuels of the past, and toward the low carbon and renewable energy of the future. Or maybe you steer clear of all of those propagandists, but you still have the same impression. Perhaps you are getting this impression from the politicians running places like New York, or California, or Germany, or Denmark, or South Australia, or Spain, or any of many other holier-than-thou jurisdictions that have announced the imminent end of their fossil fuel use. Anyway, with so many people so loudly proclaiming the approaching end of fossil fuels, surely by now fossil fuel use must have begun its rapid drop toward oblivion.

But where can you get actual information on world energy consumption of each type, and of how it is changing over time? One quite comprehensive source is the Statistical Review of World Energy, put out each year by the BP oil company. The 2019 version, covering statistics through 2018, just came out on June 11. It was covered at Watts Up With That by Larry Hamlin on July 23.

The following chart, covering 2018 world energy consumption by fuel type, really tells you all you need to know: . . .

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You Don't Need To Be A Scientist To Know That The Global Warming Alarm "Science" Is Fake

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If you follow the subject of global warming alarm, you will have read many times that there is a “consensus” of “97% of climate scientists” on — well, on something. I’ve actually never been able to find a precise statement of the proposition on which the 97% supposedly agree. But suppose you can find the statement. And suppose that it consists of some kind of definitive assertion that there has been significant atmospheric warming over the past century, and that most to all of such warming has been caused by human greenhouse gas emissions. Is this real science or fake science? How do you tell?

It seems that the most common approach of most people to this question is to trust the “scientists.” After all, science is complicated. You are not a scientist, so how are you ever going to understand this? And even if you are a scientist in some other field, and you have both the talent and the interest to delve into the details of how this conclusion was reached, you don’t have the time. You are told that 97% of “climate scientists” agree. Really, what choice do you have other than to trust the people who have done the work, and who call themselves the scientists and the experts on this subject? This approach apparently seems reasonable to a lot of people, including many, many seemingly intelligent people.

But not to me. The approach does not seem reasonable to me because the scientific method provides a very simple check for testing whether scientific claims are valid, and you don’t need to be a scientist to apply this check. (Another way of looking at it is that the people who apply this check are actually the real scientists, because they are the ones using the scientific method; and the people who call themselves “scientists” and work in “scientific” fields of endeavor and publish in scientific journals and wear scientist outfits, but don’t apply the actual scientific method, are not really scientists. But at this point in time the label “scientist” has been so captured by those who apply it to themselves whether or not they follow the scientific method that I think it is hopeless to get it back.)

Here is the very simple check. When confronted with a claim that a scientific proposition has been definitively proven, ask the question: What was the null hypothesis, and on what basis has it been rejected? . . .

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Why Are They All So Angry?

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It’s the defining characteristic of today’s progressive left: Anger. And it’s not just the rioters like Antifa, or the unspeakably rude people who confront administration figures in restaurants and gratuitously yell at them. Take a look at any of the new icons of the Democratic Party when they are speaking — for example Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Ilhan Omar — and you see them seething with barely controllable anger, if not outright fury. Same with essentially every left-wing commenter on CNN or MSNBC.

And I’m just getting to the Democratic presidential candidates. Bernie Sanders. Is there anybody angrier? Always, and about everything. For that matter, all the contenders who have broken out of the less-than-1% category (and most of those who haven’t) are putting on a show of trying to out-angry all the others. Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris. Anger must be what sells these days to the categories of voters they are pursuing.

But how about Joe Biden, you say? Certainly he is not as angry as these others. You must have missed Biden’s July 5 interview with Chris Cuomo of CNN. Having just been outmaneuvered by Kamala Harris at the first Democratic debate, Biden decided that it was time to show that he can do anger with the best of them. According to that New York Post report of the interview, “throughout it all, Biden was angry.” It reached the boiling point when Cuomo raised the issue of Russian election interference, drawing this response from Biden:

“You think that would happen on my watch, on Barack’s watch? You can’t answer that, but I promise you it wouldn’t have. And it didn’t.”

Sure, Joe.

My observation is that, at least for those of the progressive mindset, the less they have to be angry about, the angrier they become. . . .

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