We are of two minds on John Clauser. On the one hand he is a prince of mainstream academia: a Ph. D. physicist who has worked at Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore, written countless celebrated papers and won top accolades from the academic herd including the 2010 Wolf Prize and the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics. But he can’t be all bad. After all he is refreshingly free with his unpopular opinions on climate change, which brings us to his new paper published in Science of Climate Change, a journal of which we are also of two minds. It has a good editorial board and sometimes publishes good articles, but frequently publishes dodgy stuff that serves only to throw red meat to the choir. (Yes, we know, “Block that metaphor” but some choirs including this one gobble the stuff.) Into this non-standard venue Clauser has injected a 62-page paper called “Global Warming, Climate Change, and Scientific Consensus have not been Proven: There is no Proven Climate Crisis! A Quantitative Audit Exposes Fraudulent Pseudoscience and Fudging of the IPCC’s Earth’s Energy Imbalance.” We wish more academic papers had titles that blunt, if not necessarily that long. Its keywords (the list scientific papers always solicit from authors to aid in search queries) reads “Global warming; climate change crisis; Earth’s Energy Imbalance; IPCC, scientific fraud; scientific misconduct; pseudoscience”. So far so good (including being shorter than the title) except for that F-word which we find gives too much credit to the climate science cabal. Are they really capable of pulling off a long-running global fraud, or are they merely wrong and stubborn? (And as we’ve said before and will again, human history demonstrates clearly that we have far more to fear from misplaced sincerity than deliberate hoaxes.) To continue to go back and forth, we are inclined to regard him skeptically because he obviously thinks too highly of climate scientists. But not everyone gets a Nobel prize in physics so in this new series we’ll suspend judgment and see what he has to say. Including his surprising and very technical starting point.

Clauser does not begin where many skeptics do: challenging temperature records or model accuracy or theories of natural variability or something else big and broad. Instead he plunges into a very specific detail most of us have never considered including us at CDN: flawed readings from a pair of satellites (called Terra and Aqua) that monitor energy flows in the atmosphere. These readings are used to measure EEI – the Earth Energy Imbalance. And EEI is crucial because the whole orthodox theory of climate change is that as greenhouse gas levels rise in the atmosphere, energy in the form of visible light and ultraviolet radiation keeps coming in as before but energy radiating back off the Earth’s surface as lower-wavelength infrared can’t escape as easily, because greenhouse gases are transparent to higher wavelengths but at least partly opaque to lower ones.

So far so good, because it does stand to reason that whatever else happens, if the same amount of energy is coming in and less is getting out, the resulting “energy imbalance” must cause the atmosphere to warm up. But again we quote the Spartans: “If”.

Clauser charges that it’s not so, that there’s something very basic wrong with this critical satellite monitoring:

“The satellites were effectively totally blind to specular reflection of sunlight from the ocean surface – sun glare! After a decade of observation, the satellites yielded a ridiculous result that was obviously flawed. The result was an ‘Aw [expletive]! What do we do now?’ moment in 2009-2010.”

And how did it happen?

“The flaw was in the choice of using a MODIS line-scan camera rather than using a panoramically viewing pyranometer to measure the Earth’s outgoing-radiation power. The scan-line is not parallel to the sunglare’s directional reflection-stripe!”

Dang. Or words to that effect. The tools they were using couldn’t reliably measure what they were supposed to. Clauser goes on to say that the huge flaws in the data readings had to be covered up by over-writing them with fudged and made-up data. Or at any rate were covered up, by people more attached to the theory than the data.

Hmmm. Interesting if true, and we will look carefully at his evidence. Because he’s right that the theory depended on the data doing what they were meant to. Indeed Clauser spells out neatly the chain of causation put forward by the IPCC and its hangers-on to justify the claims of a climate crisis.

“1. Extraction and consumption of fossil fuels is assumed to cause increasing atmospheric CO2. Increasing CO2 is actually observed via the Keeling curve from Mauna Loa.
2. Increasing CO2 is assumed to cause a positive Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI). Said positive energy imbalance is claimed to be observed via satellite and rising ocean heat-content ‘anomaly’ observations.
3. A positive Earth’s Energy Imbalance, if present, is expected to cause global warming. Global warming is claimed to be observed, based on observations of a rising global average ‘temperature anomaly’, almost all of which is irregularly and sparsely recorded almost exclusively in urban land areas.
4. Global warming is assumed to cause climate change. Said change is claimed to be observed as an increasing frequency of extreme weather events. An increasing frequency of extreme weather events is claimed to be well documented by NOAA’s historical weather data.
5. The claimed observed increasing frequency of extreme weather events then forebodes a predicted climate crisis and other bad stuff.”

For his part, Clauser readily accepts Claim 1, calling it “probably the only good science in the whole chain.” The rest he says are mere assumptions and:

“It is the purpose of this paper to show that, contrary to claims by the IPCC et al., global warming and climate change have not been proven, and that there is no proven climate crisis.”

So join us, dear reader, as we proceed in this new series to weigh the evidence Clauser has in store on various aspects of this claim.