In this part of our tour of Dr. John Clauser’s new paper on the fatal flaws at the heart of the climate crisis hoo-hah we go over the topics covered in his sections 2 and 3, respectively the absence of an upward trend in weather extremes, the flimsiness of global temperature records and the reasons to focus on Earth Energy Imbalance instead. And here we respectfully take issue, not so much with the substance as with the confusing manner in which he made his arguments. Actually there is one point where we will disagree with his analysis and find him to be in error. But otherwise he is saying things we too think and have often said, though we believe there are better arguments for the points he tries to make.

Section 2 of his paper is about “NOAA’s False Claim to have Actually Observed an Increased Frequency of Extreme Weather Events.” And it pertains to point 4 in his exposition of the supposed causal chain connecting carbon dioxide to we all die a miserable painful death due to a climate crisis.

We have discussed the lack of evidence of increasing extreme weather ourselves, and shown the data to back up our view that, other than a few types of events in a few places, the evidence does not support a claim of an increasing trend. (And as weather is highly variable and always has been, there is no period in Earth’s history where a comprehensive survey would not have found some things getting worse in some places.)

Clauser also shows data. But his is taken from an old (2012) publication by NOAA scientists that claimed global warming meant more extreme weather and showed a graph supposedly proving the point with reference to an extreme weather index. What Clauser did was to take the data from that graph and, instead of computing a trend and showing it is zero, to show it in two charts, one with the time axis reversed, then pointed out that since it’s hard to tell which is which, there can’t be an obvious upward trend.

OK, it’s a clever bit of rhetoric. But if you have the data why not just do the computation? And why not use more recent data? Since we don’t disagree with his point we’ll leave it and move on, but we’d have argued it differently.

Section 3 is called “Preliminaries” and starts with a discussion of what is needed to make a scientific measurement of global warming. Alas, in a kind of unintentional Steve Martin “plumber’s joke” he refers without explanation to highly specialized and technical jargon, in this case something called “Shannon and Nyquist sampling”. Which, according to Wikipedia, is a theorem about how many samples of a complex signal need to be taken to accurately reproduce it. Or something like that.

The core point is sound: the more noise there is in a system, the harder it is to distinguish a clear meaningful signal. And here specifically Clauser argues that in view of how big the Earth is, an accurate measure of the global average temperature would require 510 million thermometers reading the local situation at least once per hour. Which is obviously impossible, therefore... uh, it can’t be done.

OK, we share the belief that climate science makes many spurious claims about being able to detect changes in climate down to hundredths of a degree based on a sparse set of thermometers many of them over land in urban areas where the readings are swamped by heat island effects. But for people not already convinced of the point, Clauser’s argument is a mix of polemics and technicalities unlikely to win any converts. We do grant that winners of the Nobel prize in physics may have difficulty remembering what it is that most people do not know, as dentists may happily yap on about 2-3 distal while you gape baffled. But if you go into the public arena you have to equip yourself to communicate effectively in advance.

Now we come to an actual disagreement. When Clauser attacks the practice of analyzing temperature “anomalies” rather than temperatures themselves we think his substance rather than his communication misses the mark because these “anomalies” are simply deviations from a long-term local average which is the temperatures themselves. So yes, a 10C anomaly in the Arctic is still a cold temperature, while a 2C anomaly in the desert is very hot. But they’re useful to understand what’s happening, just as people find it helpful to look at weather maps showing anomalies because it tells you what to expect as a departure from what you are used to.

Clauser instead says an anomaly is “its change over time with respect to some previously recorded, and/or previously arbitrarily defined zero-reference value or set of values.” No, that description defines something different, namely the incremental differences over regularly spaced time intervals. A local anomaly of +3C doesn’t mean it’s 3C warmer than yesterday, it means it’s 3C warmer than average for that time of year. In Clauser’s usage if you knew the starting value of the anomaly series you could reconstruct the series of local temperatures, and he attacks climate scientists for using anomalies without specifying the starting value, making it impossible to reconstruct the original data sequence or join different data sets together in sequence. But that criticism fails because it’s not what climate scientists do. It may be that their approach is invalid because they use deviations from the local mean rather than the more scientifically-precise approach of using absolute temperature as measured in degrees Kelvin. But that’s not what Clauser argued.

Clauser then argues that a better metric for global warming is Earth Energy Imbalance: the difference between energy coming in and going out of the Earth’s atmosphere. And here he is on solid ground, or air, so to speak. He goes through definitions of some basic physics terms and states that the ideal measure of global warming would be the power flux at the top of the atmosphere, which can only be measured by satellites. And his subsequent argument is that the satellites launched for the purpose turned out to be useless (as we discussed last week) and so leading IPCC scientists quietly switched to a measure based on ocean temperatures, which he considers an invalid substitute.

We await the details next week.