Green panties in a bunch

The fit about DoE climate report is a glorious spectacle of projection

Note: You can find a detailed rebuttal of DoE climate report criticism by Judith Curry here. It’s an excellent read.

Once upon a time, or more specifically in July this year, the U.S. Department of Energy published a report titled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate”. The report, unsurprisingly to many, concluded that greenhouse gas emissions were not the death sentence we have been repeatedly told they were and that “Both models and experience suggest that CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and excessively aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”

The report’s conclusions unleashed, pardon the word, a massive fit among the transition crowd, with two environmentalist organisations — the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists — promptly filing a lawsuit against the Department of Energy, alleging the authors of the report “worked in secret” and equally secretly shared their findings with the EPA to provide it with grounds to rescind the so-called Endangerment Finding, which basically says that CO2 is a pollutant, which it’s not, as every 4th grader with a good science teacher knows.

But those two were just the beginning of the wave. In late August, the American Meteorological Society issued a statement on the DoE report, listing five “foundational flaws” with it.

The list included “Lack of breadth across scientific fields”, meaning there were not enough scientists from every academic field one can think of, because climate change affects everyone, and “No group of five scientists can possess the disciplinary breadth encompassed by all who study climate change.”

Fun fact: Michael E. Mann’s “hockey stick” paper only had three authors but I guess that’s different.

The list also included “Lack of depth within scientific fields and specific topics” with the elaboration that “To be credible, scientific assessments must include authors who reflect the full range of defensible views among the subject matter experts within every specific area of science that is included in the assessment.”

Funny how pro-transition papers never seem to feature authors from anywhere else in the range of defensible views on climate change except the far alarm corner but, once again, this must be different.

Further, America’s meteorologists claim that the report was “based on an unrepresentative group of subject matter experts.” The authors include a professor in economics (for that breadth), a climatologist formerly with NASA, a theoretical physicist, and not one but two more climate scientists. I suppose, the DoE should have got ten from each field to make it representative.

Moving on, the meteorologists accuse the authors of cherry-picking, which is priceless and further claim that “The DoE Report extrapolates from a limited subset of findings to reach conclusions that do not follow from comprehensive consideration of the scientific evidence,” and that might just be the most beautiful example of projection I’ve seen this year and let me tell you it has been a year of abundance in projection. Looking at you, Brussels.

That was not the end of it, oh, no. Now, as many as 85 whole scientists have cried out against the report, accusing the authors that the report “fails to adequately represent the current scientific understanding of climate change.” Per a Reuters article on the news about the 85 brave science warriors, the authors “relied too heavily on debunked research, misinterpreted other research and failed to undertake a peer-review process to ensure the assessment was credible.” Projection, thy name is 85 scientists.

The leaders, however, are two, both extremely accomplished scientists with no detectable trace of bias at all, one being Professor Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather and fan of witty T-shirts, to which I can relate, and Bob Kopp, who’s a fan of sea levels and “Big Data approaches to the assessment of the economic risks of climate change.”

The engine behind this “climate expert” get-together to hate on the DoE report was Professor Dressler, who told CBS that “Climate science is probably one of the most robust and scrutinized scientific fields in the history of science because of the economic implications,” and here I feel I should have put a hot beverage warning at the start of this post, so if you just spilled something hot on yourself or choked, my apologies.

Per CBS, “in less than a month, Dessler helped organize more than 85 international climate experts, mostly from universities, from the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and Canada, who voluntarily reviewed the DOE report and found that it was "full of errors," "biased" and "not fit to inform policy."“

All right, fun is all very well but what we have here, besides the chuckles, is evidence of just how deep the transitionist rot has gone in the scientific community. The people criticising the authors of the DoE report are quite literally accusing them of the very thing the almighty climate scientists informing policy decisions for the last 10 years have been doing seven days a week with no holiday breaks.

Selective citation of literature? This seems to have become standard operating procedure in the climate science field — they cite each other because they agree with each other and call this “peer review”, immediately shunning anyone who dares argue with their conclusions. Bias? Science says CO2 is a necessary condition for life on earth but they call it a pollutant. “A mockery of science” indeed, it’s just not the DoE report authors who have been doing it for years.

In fact, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, John Christy, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer have been among a very small group of scientists speaking out against the mockery, for which they have been demonised copiously as “climate dissenters.” Hell, they are even on a “climate disinformation” black list compiled by some individuals that advertise as “getting skeptical about global warming skepticism”.

Case in point, the phrase “climate dissenter” with its clearly negative connotation suggests debate about the topic should be discouraged because there is An Established Truth and this Truth should not be threatened in any way. You know who does that thing with the Truths? That’s right, totalitarians. There’s nothing scientific about totalitarian Truths and totalitarianism has no place in science because it stunts growth worse than nicotine.

As many “climate dissenters” have repeatedly pointed out, there is no such thing as settled science. Here’s an illustration of that.

Citizen X, one of the best films ever made in my non-binding opinion, came out in 1995. These are screenshots of the last few minutes of the film. For those unfamiliar with the story of Andrey Chikatilo, the police first caught him in the 80s but let him go because blood samples didn’t match semen samples. That’s what the left text refers to.

The right text, about the scoffing is the relevant bit. Because it implied that every forensic expert in the world knew this was impossible except the clueless head of Russia’s forensics service. Funny woman. But here’s the even funnier part: later it was confirmed that Chikatilo had different blood and semen types.

He was, in fact, something called a non-secretor, meaning he was part of a minority of people who do not release blood type antigens in their bodily fluids. The kicker? Blood type antibody secretion was discovered in the early 1930s. Yet in 1995, the science on blood type was settled enough for the filmmakers to take a jab at that forensics head (who should’ve known better but was probably a Party hire). Anyway, that’s the story I am always reminded when I hear “the science on climate change is settled” and how important it is to keep moving forward. That’s how we invented DNA testing to replace blood typing in criminology, after all. With a “settled science”, this would not have happened.