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How 'climate science' is done

29 Mar 2023 | OP ED Watch

In a remarkable clip from PBS “News Hour” about the failure to stay south of the unscientific 1.5°C threshold, the autolegendary Katharine Hayhoe brushes aside claims of failed climate predictions by saying the Paris Accord saved us from a 5°C temperature rise. And that the planet is running a fever. And that there never used to be temperature fluctuations. And on and on. It’s how you do “climate science” from that side, and nobody says “Boo.” Well, OK, we do. Booooo! Over and over, because of the amazing string of preposterous policy and scientific statements she served up to an admiring interviewer, who instead babbled that “If or when the planet reaches that level, scientists say Earth will pass tipping points that will lead to catastrophic environmental damage, including dangerous sea level rise, entire species going extinct, and even greater suffering in many nations, especially the poorest.” So no fact check for you.

Hayhoe claimed that “prior to the Paris agreement in 2015, the world was heading toward a future that was between 4 and 5 degrees Celsius warmer than today.” Which is a lunatic thing to say because no credible model says anything of the sort. But the increasingly bug-eyed Hayhoe was just warming up, because as we have pointed out, the models used by alarmists also say that if every nation on Earth were to meet its Paris commitments in full, it would change temperature in 2100 by a tenth of a degree.

So Paris changed the outcome by 4 degrees? Not even in her dreams. And since in reality virtually no nation on Earth has come close to meeting its Paris commitments, we’re not even going to save a tenth of a degree. And the notion that we have deflected whatever warming trajectory we’re on by even a thousandth of a degree in the eight years since nations made those unrealistic and in many cases insincere promises borders on madness.

Even so, Hayhoe was still just warming up. She went on to say “The temperature of the climate has been as stable as that of the human body over the course of human civilization on this planet.” Egad. Does this person not know that the temperature of a human body fluctuates considerably?

By the way and speaking of “settled science,” it has long been known that the “normal” body temperature is 98.6°F, or 37°C, because some German guy named Carl Wunderlich measured people’s armpits back when the planet was the right temperature according to the Hayhoes of this world and said the average of his 25,000 or so subjects was at that figure. Using those famously accurate Victorian thermometers. But more recent and accurate measurements say it’s lower, around 97.5/36.4, and falling. And, even more to the point, that it cycles on a daily basis, from 36.3 to 37.5. Which is more than the Earth’s temperature has changed since Wunderlich’s day. (Also, it tends to be higher in women than men and in youth persons than in elders, and varies by half a degree or more from day to day.)

Then there’s that awkward business of stable temperatures throughout the period of human civilization. Which is what, you ask? And we say well, as far as archeologists know though it’s not, um, “settled,” the first real “urban” location was Jericho, with a protective wall dating back some 11,000 years. So she’s basically in the Al Gore camp that “The places where people live were chosen because of the climate pattern that has been pretty much the same on Earth since the end of the last ice age 11,000 years ago.” (From An Inconvenient Truth) Though she doesn’t go as far as John Kerry’s version where it was stable for “literally millions of years… warming the Earth’s surface to the ideal temperature… about 57° Fahrenheit that keeps life going”.

So no Little Ice Age. No Medieval Warm Period. No Dark Age cooling. No Roman Warm Period. No dip between it and the Minoan Warm Period, the last part of the Holocene Thermal Maximum. (And for Kerry, no transition from Pliocene to Pleistocene and no glaciations.)

Kayhoe kept on digging, comparing the mild warming of the Earth back to conditions it had seen repeatedly even in the last 11,000 years, never mind the last 500,000 to a “life-threatening” fever. Hence the mass extinctions of the Eemian interglacial, we would ask if we thought there was any chance she would have heard of it and admit the fact.

She then said “So we have already, thanks to the Paris Agreement, changed, reduced the amount of change that we expect through policies that have already been enacted [the transcript differs from the audio here] by at least a degree. But we still need more because every bit of warming carries a cost with it.”

Got that? Policies announced but not yet implemented have already reduced warming from a deadly 4 to 5 degrees to a lethal 3 to 4. And “every bit of warming carries a cost” including the one that mitigated the short growing seasons and foul weather of the Little Ice Age and saw an inexplicable burst of material human flourishing including dramatic drops in extreme hunger even as world population surged.

In Hayhoe’s version, the calamity we may yet prevent is already here while still to come:

“We know we have always had droughts and floods and hurricanes and heat waves. But, in a warming world, they’re getting stronger and more dangerous. And they’re impacting all of us. But they are particularly affecting those who are vulnerable and marginalized the most. The warmer the world gets, the more it endangers our food supply, our water supply, the safety of our homes, our own health, our economy and supply chains, the natural environment. Every aspect of life on Earth, including our life on Earth, is at risk the warmer this planet gets.”

Sadly, she’s addressing some very dim people. After saying how terrible things have become, she says:

“The problem we have today, though, is, we still, many of us, don’t really understand how this issue affects us here and now. And we don’t understand that the majority of the solutions we need are already in our hands.”

So it’s easy, if only you’d realize a hurricane just blew your house into the floodwaters covering what used to be a field full of crops, you dummies:

“Over the last year, at least one in three Americans were personally affected by the way that climate change is making our extreme weather more severe. We might live somewhere where sea level is rising, where hurricanes are getting stronger, where wildfires burn in greater area, where the summers are now dominated by record-breaking heat waves. Climate change is no longer a future issue. It is right here where we live. It is right now. And the time to fix it is also here now.”

And naturally all you need is will: “If we wanted to accomplish this, we could.” Plus we already did, turning catastrophe into disaster that looms in the present.

If you talk this way from the alarmist side, no mainstream media outlet fact checks you. No interviewer interrupts to say that you are babbling fatuities faster than they can write them down. Everyone who’s anyone says you’re the best.

4 comments on “How 'climate science' is done”

  1. She claims to be a “climate scientist,” yet she teaches political science in Texas. Nothing one can find shows she has any education in real science, nor any experience or research that would validate her competence to evaluate climate models. Canada, please take her back!

    1. Karl,
      According to WikiP
      “She studied physics and astronomy at the University of Toronto and obtained a Bachelor of Science in 1994. She then studied atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and obtained a Master of Science, and a doctorate. She began her college career studying astrophysics, but upon taking a course on climate science to fulfill a course requirement, she shifted her focus to atmospheric science, which she ultimately specialized in at graduate school.”
      She does lack research creds, as you say, but to say she has no background in real science is not true. Although astrophysicists tend to be an overconfident, pontificating lot.

  2. When anyone describes to me how an ice sheet a mile thick covered parts of North America and other northern latitudes for centuries and then suddenly melted into the higher oceans we have now and bare earth (with a few glacial scars), I’ll begin to believe how humanity could affect the earth’s ocean levels, storms and temperature. Obviously Hayhoe has no idea.

  3. We are witnessing bought and paid for hysteria reinforcing the faith and comfort in salvation pedaling elected sociopaths who pay them. The same elected "leaders" incapable of forming an honest sentence or balancing a budget are honoured for saving the planet from imaginary crises in a world almost entirely scrubbed of critical thinking.

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