Evidence Mounting for Global Cooling Ahead: Record Snowfalls, Less Greenland Ice Loss

Despite the ongoing drumbeat of apocalyptic proclamations about our warming climate, a close look at recent evidence suggests we’re on the threshold of a cooling spell. Even before the northern 2020-21 winter arrives, early-season snowfall records are tumbling all over North America and Europe. And, while Greenland has been losing ice for decades, the rate of loss has slowed dramatically since 2016.

Could all this be a prelude to the upcoming grand solar minimum?

Snow extent in the Northern Hemisphere fall has in fact been increasing yearly since at least the 1960s, as shown in the figure below depicting the fall monthly average snowfall measured by satellite, up to 2019. The trend is the same for Eurasia as it is for North America.

But the 2020 fall extent is likely to surpass that of any previous year, based on data from the Finnish Meteorological Institute for Northern Hemisphere snow mass (as opposed to extent) to date. As seen in the next figure, the snow mass this season is already tracking above the average for 1982-2012; the mass is measured in billions of tonnes (gigatonnes, where 1 tonne = 1.102 U.S. tons).

In the U.S., much of the white powder blanketing the northern states prematurely in 2020 has fallen in Minnesota. The state recently experienced its largest early-season snowstorm in recorded history, going back about 140 years. Dropping up to 23 cm (9 inches) of snow in some places, which is a lot for the fall, the storm produced the second biggest October snowfall ever in the state. The cities of Alexandria and St. Cloud, Minnesota saw their snowiest October on record.

And snow records were also smashed in towns and cities across Montana and South Dakota. All of this has been accompanied by misery in the form of bitterly cold temperatures across the U.S. and Canada.

In Europe, skiing and sledding enthusiasts are delighted with the early onset of a snowpack deeper than 80 cm (3 feet) on some Austrian glaciers. Both the Alps and Pyrenees had several heavy early-season snowfalls in October, and even parts of lower-altitude Scandinavia are already buried in snow.

As for ice, much recent attention has been focused on the Greenland ice sheet. A  research paper published in the journal Nature in October 2020 set alarm bells ringing by insisting that Greenland’s ice is now melting faster than at any time in the past 12,000 years. This spurious claim seems to have been influenced by a big jump in the rate of ice loss, from an average 75 gigatonnes (83 gigatons) yearly in the 20th century to an average annual loss of 258 gigatonnes (284 gigatons) between 2002 and 2016; a greater-than-average loss of 329 gigatonnes (363 gigatons) occurred in 2019.

However, the paper’s authors failed to note that the rate of Greenland ice loss has not increased since 2002, or that the 2019 loss was less than seen seven years before, in 2012. In fact, as illustrated in the figure below, the loss rate has drastically slowed since 2016. The figure shows satellite measurements of the ice loss at regular intervals from April 2002 to April 2019, in gigatonnes, but doesn’t include the massive summer melt in 2019. The 2020 loss was only 152 gigatonnes (168 gigatons).

Although a hefty amount of ice is normally lost during the short Greenland summer, some of this ice loss is compensated by ice gained over the long winter from the accumulation of compacted snow. The ice sheet, 2-3 km (6,600-9,800 feet) thick, consists of layers of compressed snow built up over at least hundreds of thousands of years. In addition to summer melting, the sheet loses ice by calving of icebergs at its edges.

The slowdown in ice loss since 2016 is a clear sign that the doomsday talk and panic engendered by the Nature paper is unwarranted. And, not only is Greenland losing less ice, and snowfall in the Northern Hemisphere setting new records, but this year’s winter in the Southern Hemisphere was also exceptionally snowy and brutal – all likely harbingers of the soon-to-arrive grand solar minimum.

Next: No Evidence for Dramatic Loss of Great Barrier Reef Corals

It’s Cold, Not Hot, Extremes That Are on the Rise

Despite the hullabaloo about hot weather extremes in the form of heat waves and drought, little attention has been paid to cold weather extremes by the mainstream media or the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), whose assessment reports are the voice of authority for climate science. Yet, though few people know it, cold extremes appear to be on the rise – in contrast to weather extremes in general which are trending downward rather than upward, if at all.

The WMO (World Meteorological Organi­zation) does at least acknowledge the existence of cold weather extremes, but has no explanation for their origin nor their rising frequency. Cold extremes include prolonged cold spells, unusually heavy snowfalls and longer winter seasons. In a world obsessed with global warming, such events go almost unnoticed.

One person who has noticed is Madhav Khandekar, who has a PhD in meteorology and was formerly a research scientist at Environment Canada as well as an expert reviewer for the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. Although much of Khandekar’s work on cold extremes has focused on Canada, he has also catalogued cold weather events worldwide. In remarking recently that extreme weather – both hot and cold – is part of natural climate variability, Khandekar points out:

“Even when the earth’s climate was cooling down during the 1945-77 period there were as many extreme weather events as there are now.”

Before we look at recent cold weather extremes, it’s important to distinguish between climate and weather. Weather is what’s predicted in daily forecasts which describe short-term changes in atmospheric conditions. Climate, on the other hand, is a long-term average of the weather over an extended period of time, typically 30 years.

Recurring frigid global temperatures over the past 15 years have been documented by Khandekar, the WMO and the blog Electroverse. The northern winter of 2005-06 was exceptionally cold over most of western and northeastern Europe, while in May 2006 during the southern winter, South Africa reported 54 cold weather records. The winter of 2009-10 was equally brutal: Scotland suffered some of the bitterest winter months in almost 100 years; Siberia witnessed perhaps its coldest winter ever; and Beijing saw its coldest day in 50 years.

Northern climes experienced abnormally low temperatures again in the winters of 2014-15, 2015-16 and 2018-2019. The period from January to March 2015 was the coldest in the northeastern U.S. since 1895, as shown in the figure below. In January 2016, eastern China froze as far south as Thailand, a very rare event. And in early 2019, bone-chilling cold persisted for months over much of the north-central U.S. and western Canada.

During the current southern winter and northern summer, cold temperature records have been smashed all over the globe. The Australian island state of Tasmania recorded its coldest ever winter minimum, exceeding the previous low by 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit); Norway endured its coldest July in 50 years; neighboring Sweden shivered through its coldest summer since 1962; and Russia was also anomalously cold.

Snowfalls around the planet show the same pattern, in contrast to the climate change narrative that predicted snow would disappear in a warming world. In 2007, snow fell in Buenos Aires, Argentina for the first time since 1918. In the winter of 2009-10, record snowfall blanketed the entire mid-Atlantic coast of the U.S. in an event called Snowmaggedon. Extremely heavy snow that fell in the Panjshir Valley of Afghanistan in February 2015 killed over 200 people. In the winter of 2017-18, eastern Ireland had its heaviest snowfalls for more than 50 years with totals exceeding 50 cm (20 inches).

In the southern winter this year, massive snowstorms covered much of Patagonia in more than 150 cm (60 inches) of snow, and buried at least 100,000 sheep and 5,000 cattle alive. Snowfalls not seen for decades occurred in other parts of South America, and in South Africa, southeastern Australia and New Zealand. In the chilly northern summer mentioned above, monster snowdrifts almost obliterated the southern Russian village of Kurush.

Despite the mainstream media’s assertion that cold weather extremes are caused by climate change, Khandekar says such an explanation lacks scientific credibility. He links colder and snowier-than-normal winters in North America not to global warming, but to the naturally occurring North Atlantic Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and those in Europe to the current slowdown in solar activity. The IPCC and WMO are largely silent on the issue.

Next: Upcoming Grand Solar Minimum Could Wipe Out Global Warming for Decades

Australian Bushfires: Ample Evidence That Past Fires Were Worse

Listening to Hollywood celebrities and the mainstream media, you’d think the current epidemic of bushfires in Australia means the apocalypse is upon us. With vast tracts of land burned to the ground, dozens of people and millions of wild animals killed, and thousands of homes destroyed, climate alarmists would have you believe it’s all because of global warming.

But not only is there no scientific evidence that the frequency or severity of wildfires are on the rise in a warming world, but the evidence also clearly shows that the present Australian outbreak is unexceptional.

Although almost 20 million hectares (50 million acres, or 77,000 square miles) nationwide have burned so far, this is less than 17% of the staggeringly large area incinerated in the 1974-75 bushfire season and less than the burned area in three other conflagrations. Politically correct believers in the narrative of human-caused climate change seem unaware of such basic facts about the past.

The catastrophic fires in the 1974-75 season consumed 117 million hectares (300 million acres), which is 15% of the land area of the whole continent. Because nearly two thirds of the burned area was in remote parts of the Northern Territory and Western Australia, relatively little human loss was incurred, though livestock and native animals such as lizards and red kangaroos suffered.

The Northern Territory was also the location of major bushfires in the 1968-69, 1969-70 and 2002-03 seasons that burned areas of 40 million, 45 million and 38 million hectares (99 million, 110 million and 94 million acres), respectively. That climate change wasn’t the cause should be obvious from the fact that the 1968-69 and 1969-70 fires occurred during a 30-year period of global cooling from 1940 to 1970.

Despite the ignorance and politically charged rhetoric of alarmists, the primary cause of all these terrible fires in Australia has been the lack of intentional or prescribed burning. The practice was used by the native Aboriginal population for as long as 50,000 years before early settlers abandoned it after trying unsuccessfully to copy indigenous fire techniques – lighting fires so hot that flammable undergrowth, the main target of prescribed burns, actually germinated more after burning.

The Aboriginals, like native people everywhere, had a deep knowledge of the land. They knew what types of fires to burn for different types of terrain, how long to burn, and how frequently. This knowledge enabled them to keep potential wildfire fuel such as undergrowth and certain grasses in check, thereby avoiding the more intense and devastating bushfires of the modern era. As the Aboriginals found, small-scale fires can be a natural part of forest ecology.

Only recently has the idea of controlled burning been revived in Australia and the U.S., though the approach has been practiced in Europe for many years. Direct evidence of the efficacy of controlled burning is presented in the figure below, which shows how bushfires in Western Australia expanded significantly as prescribed burning was suppressed over the 50 years from 1963 to 2013.

Bushfires have always been a feature of life in Australia. One of the earliest recorded outbreaks was the so-called Black Thursday bushfires of 1851, when then record-high temperatures up to 47.2 degrees Celsius (117 degrees Fahrenheit) and strong winds exacerbated fires that burned 5 million hectares (12 million acres), killed 12 people and terrified the young colony of Victoria. The deadliest fires of all time were the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009, also in Victoria, with 173 fatalities.    

Pictures of charred koala bears, homes engulfed in towering flames and residents seeking refuge on beaches are disturbing. But there’s simply no evidence for the recent statement in Time magazine by Malcolm Turnbull, former Australian Prime Minister, that “Australia’s fires this summer – unprecedented in the scale of their destruction – are the ferocious but inevitable reality of global warming.” Turnbull and climate alarmists should know better than to blame wildfires on this popular but erroneous belief.

Next: The Futility of Action to Combat Climate Change: (1) Scientific and Engineering Reality

No Evidence That Snow Is Disappearing

“Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”

- 1945 Christmas song

You wouldn’t know it from mainstream media coverage but, far from disappearing, annual global snowfall is actually becoming heavier as the world warms. This is precisely the opposite of what climate change alarmists predicted as the global warming narrative took shape decades ago.

The prediction of less snowy winters was based on the simplistic notion that a higher atmospheric temperature would allow fewer snowflakes to form and keep less of the pearly white powder frozen on the ground. But, as any meteorologist will tell you, the crucial ingredient for snow formation, apart from near-freezing temperatures, is moisture in the air. Because warmer air can hold more water vapor, global warming in general produces more snow when the temperature drops.

This observation has been substantiated multiple times in recent years, in the Americas, Europe and Asia. As just one example, the eastern U.S. has experienced 29 high-impact winter snowstorms in the 10 years from 2009 though 2018. There were never more than 10 in any prior 10-year period.

The overall winter snow extent in the U.S. and Canada combined is illustrated in the figure below, which shows the monthly extent, averaged over the winter, from 1967 to 2019. Clearly, total snow cover is increasing, not diminishing.

In the winter of 2009-10, record snowfall blanketed the entire mid-Atlantic coast of the U.S. in an event called Snowmaggedon, contributing to the record total for 2010 in the figure above. The winter of 2013-14 was the coldest and snowiest since the 1800s in parts of the Great Lakes. Further north in Canada, following an exceptionally cold winter in 2014-15, the lower mainland of British Columbia endured the longest cold snap in 32 years during the winter of 2016-17. That same winter saw record heavy Canadian snowfalls, in both British Columbia in the west and the maritime provinces in the east. 

The trend toward snowier winters is reflected in the number of North American blizzards over the same period, depicted in the next figure. Once again, it’s obvious that snow and harsh conditions have been on the rise for decades, especially as the globe warmed from the 1970s until 1998.  

But truckloads of snow haven’t fallen only in North America. The average monthly winter snow extent for the whole Northern Hemisphere from 1967 to 2019, illustrated in the following figure, shows a trend identical to that for North America.

Specific examples include abnormally chilly temperatures in southern China in January 2016, accompanying the first snow in Guangzhou since 1967 and the first in nearby Nanning since 1983. Extremely heavy snow that fell in the Panjshir Valley of Afghanistan in February 2015 killed over 200 people. During the winters of 2011-12 and 2012-13, much of central and eastern Europe experienced very cold and snowy weather, as they did once more in the winter of 2017-18. Eastern Ireland had its heaviest snowfalls for more than 50 years with totals exceeding 50 cm (20 inches).

Despite all this evidence, numerous claims have been made that snow is a thing of the past. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” opined a research scientist at the CRU (Climatic Research Unit) of the UK’s University of East Anglia back in 2000. But, while winter snow is melting more rapidly in the spring and there’s less winter snow in some high mountain areas, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and WMO (World Meteorological Organization) have both been forced to concede that it’s now snowing more heavily at low altitudes than previously. Surprisingly, the WMO has even attributed the phenomenon to natural variability – as it should.

The IPCC and WMO, together with climate alarmists, are fond of using the term “unprecedented” to describe extreme weather events. As we’ve seen in previous blog posts, such usage is completely unjustified in every case – with the single exception of snowfall, though that’s a concession few alarmists make.

Next: When Science Is Literally under Attack: Ad Hominem Attacks

No Evidence That Marine Heat Waves Are Unusual

A new wrinkle in the narrative of human-induced global warming is the observation and study of marine heat waves. But, just as in other areas of climate science, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) twists and hypes the evidence to boost the claim that heat waves at sea are becoming more common.

Marine heat waves describe extended periods of abnormally high ocean temperatures, just like atmospheric heat waves on land. The most publicized recent example was the “Blob,” a massive pool of warm water that formed in the northeast Pacific Ocean from 2013 to 2015, extending all the way from Alaska to the Baja Peninsula in Mexico as shown in the figure below, and up to 400 meters (1,300 feet) deep. Sea surface temperatures across the Blob averaged 3 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal. A similar temperature spike lasting for eight months was seen in Australia’s Tasman Sea in 2015 and 2016.

Recent Marine Heat Waves

The phenomenon has major effects on marine organisms and ecosystems, causing bleaching of coral reefs or loss of kelp forests, for example. Shellfish and small marine mammals such as sea lions and sea otters are particularly vulnerable, because the higher temperatures deplete the supply of plankton at the base of the ocean food chain. And toxic algae blooms can harm fish and larger marine animals.

Larger marine heat waves not only affect maritime life, but may also influence weather conditions on nearby land. The Blob is thought to have worsened California’s drought at the time, while the Tasman Sea event may have led to flooding in northeast Tasmania. The IPCC expresses only low confidence in such connections, however.   

Nevertheless, in its recent Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, the IPCC puts its clout behind the assertion that marine heat waves doubled in frequency from 1982 to 2016, and that they have also become longer-lasting, more intense and more extensive. But these are false claims, for two reasons.

First, the observations supporting the claims were all made during the satellite era. Satellite measurements of ocean temperature are far more accurate and broader in coverage than measurements made by the old-fashioned methods that preceded satellite data. These cruder methods included placing a thermometer in seawater collected in wooden, canvas or insulated buckets tossed overboard from ships and hauled back on deck, or in seawater retained in ship engine-room inlets from several different depths; and data from moored or drifting buoys.

Because of the unreliability and sparseness of sea surface temperature data from the pre-satellite era, it’s obvious that earlier marine heat waves may well have been missed. Indeed, it would be surprising if no significant marine heat waves occurred during the period of record-high atmospheric temperatures of the 1930s, a topic discussed in a previous blog post.

The second reason the IPCC claims are spurious is that most of the reported studies (see for example, here and here) fail to take into account the overall ocean warming trend. Marine heat waves are generally measured relative to the average surface temperature over a 30-year baseline period. This means that any heat wave measured toward the end of that period will appear hotter than it really is, since the actual surface temperature at that time will be higher than the 30-year baseline. As pointed out by a NOAA (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) scientist, not adjusting for the underlying warming falsely conflates natural regional variability with climate change.  

Even if the shortcomings of the data are ignored, it’s been found that from 1925 to 2016, the global average marine heatwave frequency and duration increased by only 34% and 17%, respectively – hardly dramatic increases. And in any case, the sample size for observations made since satellite observations began in 1982 is statistically small.

There’s no evidence, therefore, that marine heat waves are anything out of the ordinary.

Next: No Evidence That Snow Is Disappearing

No Evidence That Heat Kills More People than Cold

The irony in the recent frenzy over heat waves is that many more humans die each year from cold than they do from heat. But you wouldn’t know that from sensational media headlines reporting “killer” heat waves and conditions “as hot as hell.” In reality, cold weather worldwide kills 17 times as many people as heat.

This conclusion was reached by a major international study in 2015, published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. The study analyzed more than 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries including Australia, China, Italy, Sweden, the UK and USA, over the period from 1985 to 2012. The results are illustrated in the figure below, showing the average daily rate of premature deaths from heat or cold as a percentage of all deaths, by country.

Perhaps not surprisingly, moderate cold kills people far more often than extreme cold, for a wide range of different climates. Extreme cold was defined by the study authors as temperatures falling below the 2.5th percentile at each location, a limit which varied from as low as -11 degrees Celsius (12 degrees Fahrenheit) in Toronto, Canada to as high as 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) in Bangkok, Thailand. Moderate cold includes all temperatures from this lower limit up to the so-called optimum, the temperature at which the daily death rate at that location is a minimum.

Likewise, extreme heat was defined as temperatures above the 97.5th percentile at each location, and moderate heat as temperatures from the optimum up to the 97.5th percentile. But unlike cold, extreme and moderate heat cause approximately equal numbers of excess deaths.

The study found that on average, 7.71% of all deaths could be attributed to hot or cold – to temperatures above or below the optimum – with 7.29% being due to cold, but only 0.42% due to heat. That single result puts the lie to the popular belief that heat waves are deadlier than cold spells. Hypothermia kills a lot more of us than heat stroke. And though both high and low temperatures can increase the risk of exacerbating cardiovascular, respiratory and other conditions, it’s cold that is the big killer.

This finding is further borne out by seasonal mortality statistics. France, for instance, recorded 700 excess deaths attributed to heat in the summer of 2016, 475 in 2017 and 1,500 in 2018. Yet excess deaths from cold in the French winter from December to March average approximately 24,000. Even the devastating summer heat wave of 2003 claimed only 15,000 lives in France.

Similar statistics come from the UK, where an average of 32,000 more deaths occur during each December to March period than in any other four-month interval of the year. Flu epidemics boosted this total to 37,000 in the winter of 2016-17, and to 50,000 in 2017-18. Just as in France, these numbers for deaths from winter cold far exceed summer mortalities in the UK due to heat, which reached only 1,700 in 2018 and just 2,200 in the heat-wave year of 2003.

Even more evidence that cold kills a lot more people than heat is seen in an earlier study, published in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) in 2000. This study, restricted to approximately 3 million deaths in western Europe from 1988 to 1992, found that annual cold related deaths were much higher than heat related deaths in all seven regions studied – with the former averaging 2,000 per million people and the latter only 220 per million. Additionally, no more deaths from heat occurred in hotter regions than colder ones.

A sophisticated statistical approach was necessary in both studies. This is because of differences between regions and individuals, and the observation that, while death from heat is typically rapid and occurs within a few days, death from cold can be delayed up to three or four weeks. The larger Lancet study used more advanced statistical modeling than the BMJ study.

And despite the finding that more than 50% of published papers in biomedicine are not reproducible, the fact that two independent papers reached essentially the same result gives their conclusions some credibility.

Next: No Evidence That Climate Change Is Accelerating Sea Level Rise

No Evidence That Climate Change Causes Weather Extremes: (6) Heat Waves

This Northern Hemisphere summer has seen searing, supposedly record high temperatures in France and elsewhere in Europe. According to the mainstream media and climate alarmists, the heat waves are unprecedented and a harbinger of harsh, scorching hot times to come.

But this is absolute nonsense. In this sixth and final post in the present series, I’ll examine the delusional beliefs that the earth is burning up and may shortly be uninhabitable, and that this is all a result of human-caused climate change. Heat waves are no more linked to climate change than any of the other weather extremes we’ve looked at.

The brouhaha over two almost back-to-back heat waves in western Europe is a case in point. In the second, which occurred toward the end of July, the WMO (World Meteorological Organization) claimed that the mercury in Paris reached a new record high of 42.6 degrees Celsius (108.7 degrees Fahrenheit) on July 25, besting the previous record of 40.4 degrees Celsius (104.7 degrees Fahrenheit) set back in July, 1947. And a month earlier during the first heat wave, temperatures in southern France hit a purported record 46.0 degrees Celsius (114.8 degrees Fahrenheit) on June 28.

How convenient to ignore the past! Reported in Australian and New Zealand newspapers from August, 1930 is an account of an earlier French heatwave, in which the temperature soared to a staggering 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Loire valley, located in central France. That’s a full 4.0 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above the so-called record just mentioned in southern France, where the temperature in 1930 may well have equaled or exceeded the Loire valley’s towering record.

And the same newspaper articles reported a temperature in Paris that day of 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit), stating that back in 1870 the thermometer had reached an even higher, unspecified level there – quite possibly above the July 2019 “record” of 42.6 degrees Celsius (108.7 degrees Fahrenheit).    

The same duplicity can be seen in proclamations about past U.S. temperatures. Although it’s frequently claimed that heat waves are increasing in both intensity and frequency, there’s simply no scientific evidence for such a bold assertion. The following figure charts official data from NOAA (the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) showing the yearly number of days, averaged over all U.S. temperature stations, from 1895 to 2018 with extreme temperatures above 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) and 41 degrees Celsius (105 degrees Fahrenheit).

The next figure shows NOAA’s data for the year in which the record high temperature in each U.S. state occurred. Of the 50 state records, a total of 32 were set in the 1930s or earlier, but only seven since 1990.

It’s obvious from these two figures that there were more U.S. heat waves in the 1930s, and they were hotter, than in the present era of climate hysteria. Indeed, the annual number of days on which U.S. temperatures reached 100 degrees, 95 degrees or 90 degrees Fahrenheit has been steadily falling since the 1930s. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)’s Heat Wave Index for the 48 contiguous states also shows clearly that the 1930s were the hottest decade.

Globally, it’s exactly the same story, as depicted in the figure below.

Of the seven continents, six recorded their all-time record high temperatures before 1982, three records dating from the 1930s or before; only Asia has set a record more recently (the WMO hasn’t acknowledged the 122 degrees Fahrenheit 1930 record in the Loire region). And yet the worldwide baking of the 1930s didn’t set the stage for more and worse heat waves in the years ahead, even as CO₂ kept pouring into the atmosphere – the scenario we’re told, erroneously, that we face today. In fact, the sweltering 1930s were followed by global cooling from 1940 to 1970.

Contrary to the climate change narrative, the recent European heat waves came about not because of global warming, but rather a weather phenomenon known as jet stream blocking. Blocking results from an entirely different mechanism than the buildup of atmospheric CO₂, namely a weakening of the sun’s output that may portend a period of global cooling ahead. A less active sun generates less UV radiation, which in turn perturbs winds in the upper atmosphere, locking the jet stream in a holding or blocking pattern. In this case, blocking kept a surge of hot Sahara air in place over Europe for extended periods.

It should be clear from all the evidence presented above that mass hysteria over heat waves and climate change is completely unwarranted. Current heat waves have as little to do with global warming as floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires.

Next: No Evidence That Heat Kills More People than Cold

No Evidence That Climate Change Causes Weather Extremes: (5) Wildfires

Probably the most fearsome of the weather extremes commonly blamed on human-caused climate change are tornadoes – the previous topic in this series – and wildfires. Both can arrive with little or no warning, making it difficult or impossible to flee, are often deadly, and typically destroy hundreds of homes and other structures. But just like tornadoes, there is no scientific evidence that the frequency or severity of wildfires are on the rise in a warming world.

You wouldn’t know that, however, from the mass hysteria generated by the mainstream media and climate activists almost every time a wildfire breaks out, especially in naturally dry climates such as those in California, Australia or Spain. While it’s true that the number of acres burned annually in the U.S. has gone up over the last 20 years or so, the present burned area is still only a small fraction of what it was back in the record 1930s, as seen in the figure below, showing data compiled by the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center.

Because modern global warming was barely underway in the 1930s, climate change clearly has nothing to do with the incineration of U.S. forests. Exactly the same trend is apparent in the next figure, which depicts the estimated area worldwide burned by wildfires, by decade from 1900 to 2010. Clearly, wildfires have diminished globally as the planet has warmed.

Global Burned Area

1900-2010

In the Mediterranean, although the annual number of wildfires has more than doubled since 1980, the burned area over three decades has mimicked the global trend and declined:

Mediterranean Wildfire Occurrence & Burnt Area

1980-2010

The contrast between the Mediterranean and the U.S., where wildfires are becoming fewer but larger in area, has been attributed to different forest management policies on the two sides of the Atlantic – despite the protestations of U.S. politicians and firefighting officials in western states that climate change is responsible for the uptick in fire size. The next figure illustrates the timeline from 1600 onwards of fire occurrence at more than 800 different sites in western North America. 

Western North America Wildfire Occurrence

1600-2000

The sudden drop in wildfire occurrence around 1880 has been ascribed to the expansion of American livestock grazing in order to feed a rapidly growing population. Intensive sheep and cattle grazing after that time consumed most of the grasses that previously constituted the fuel for wildfires. This depletion of fuel, together with the firebreaks created by the constant movement of herds back and forth to water sources, and by the arrival of railroads, drastically reduced the incidence of wildfires. And once mechanical equipment for firefighting such as fire engines and aircraft became available in the 20th century, more and more emphasis was placed on wildfire prevention.

But wildfire suppression in the U.S. has led to considerable increases in forest density and the buildup of undergrowth, both of which greatly enhance the potential for bigger and sometimes hotter fires – the latter characterized by a growing number of terrifying, superhot “firenadoes” or fire whirls occasionally observed in today’s wildfires.

Intentional burning, long used by native tribes and early settlers and even advocated by some environmentalists who point out that fire is in fact a natural part of forest ecology as seen in the preceding figure, has become a thing of the past. Only now, after several devastating wildfires in California, is the idea of controlled burning being revived in the U.S. In Europe, on the other hand, prescribed burning has been supported by land managers for many years.

Combined with overgrowth, global warming does play a role by drying out vegetation and forests more rapidly than before. But there’s no evidence at all for the notion peddled by the media that climate change has amplified the impact of fires on the ecosystem, known technically as fire severity. Indeed, at least 10 published studies of forest fires in the western U.S. have found no recent trend in increasing fire severity.

You may think that the ever-rising level of CO₂ in the atmosphere would exacerbate wildfire risk, since CO₂ promotes plant growth. But at the same time, higher CO₂​ levels reduce plant transpiration, meaning that plants’ stomata or breathing pores open less, the leaves lose less water and more moisture is retained in the soil. Increased soil moisture has led to a worldwide greening of the planet.

In summary, the mistaken belief that the “new normal” of devastating wildfires around the globe is a result of climate change is not supported by the evidence. Humans, nevertheless, are the primary reason that wildfires have become larger and more destructive today. Population growth has caused more people to build in fire-prone areas, where fires are frequently sparked by an aging network of power lines and other electrical equipment. Coupled with poor forest management, this constitutes a recipe for disaster.

Next: No Evidence That Climate Change Causes Weather Extremes: (6) Heat Waves

No Evidence That Climate Change Causes Weather Extremes: (4) Tornadoes

Tornadoes are smaller and claim fewer lives than hurricanes. But the roaring twisters can be more terrifying because of their rapid formation and their ability to hurl objects such as cars, structural debris, animals and even people through the air. Nonetheless, the narrative that climate change is producing stronger and more deadly tornadoes is as fallacious as the nonexistent links between climate change and other weather extremes previously examined in this series.

Again, the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), whose assessment reports constitute the bible for the climate science community, has dismissed any connection between global warming and tornadoes. While the agency concedes that escalating temperatures and humidity may create atmospheric instability conducive to tornadoes, it also points out that other factors governing tornado formation, such as wind shear, diminish in a warming climate. In fact, declares the IPCC, the apparent increasing trend in tornadoes simply reflects their reporting by a larger number of people now living in remote areas.

A tornado is a rapidly rotating column of air, usually visible as a funnel cloud, that extends like a dagger from a parent thunderstorm to the ground. Demolishing homes and buildings in its often narrow path, it can travel many kilometers before dissipating. The most violent EF5 tornadoes attain wind speeds up to 480 km per hour (300 mph).

The U.S. endures by far the most tornadoes of any country, mostly in so-called Tornado Alley extending northward from central Texas through the Plains states. The annual incidence of all U.S. tornadoes from 1954 to 2017 is shown in the figure below. It’s obvious that no trend exists over a period that included both cooling and warming spells, with net global warming of approximately 1.1 degrees Celsius (2.0 degrees Fahrenheit) during that time.

But, as an illustration of how U.S. tornado activity can vary drastically from year to year, 13 successive days of tornado outbreaks in 2019 saw well over 400 tornadoes touch down in May, with June a close second – and this following seven quiet years ending in 2018, which was the quietest year in the entire record since 1954. The tornado surge, however, had nothing to do with climate change, but rather an unusually cold winter and spring in the West that, combined with heat from the Southeast and late rains, provided the ingredients for severe thunderstorms. 

The next figure depicts the number of strong (EF3 or greater) tornadoes observed in the U.S. each year during the same period from 1954 to 2017. Clearly, the trend is downward instead of upward; the average number of strong tornadoes annually from 1986 to 2017 was 40% less than from 1954 to 1985. Once more, global warming cannot have played a role. 

In the U.S., tornadoes cause about 80 deaths and more than 1,500 injuries per year. The deadliest episode of all time in a single day was the “tri-State” outbreak in 1925, which killed 747 people and resulted in the most damage from any tornado outbreak in U.S. history. The most ferocious tornado outbreak ever recorded, spawning a total of 30 EF4 or EF5 tornadoes, was in 1974.

Tornadoes also occur more rarely in other parts of the world such as South America and Europe. The earliest known tornado in history occurred in Ireland in 1054. The human toll from tornadoes in Bangladesh actually exceeds that in the U.S., at an estimated 179 deaths per year, partly due to the region’s high population density. It’s population growth and expansion outside urban areas that have caused the cost of property damage from tornadoes to mushroom in the last few decades, especially in the U.S.

Next: No Evidence That Climate Change Causes Weather Extremes: (5) Wildfires

No Evidence That Climate Change Causes Weather Extremes: (3) Hurricanes

This third post in our series on the spurious links between climate change and extreme weather examines the incidence of hurricanes – powerful tropical cyclones that all too dramatically demonstrate the fury nature is capable of unleashing.

Although the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has noted an apparent increase in the strongest (Category 4 and 5) hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, there’s almost no evidence for any global trend in hurricane strength. And the IPCC has found “no significant observed trends” in the number of global hurricanes each year.

Hurricanes occur in the Atlantic and northeastern Pacific Oceans, especially in and around the Gulf of Mexico; their cousins, typhoons, occur in the northwestern Pacific. Hurricanes can be hundreds of miles in extent with wind speeds up to 240 km per hour (150 mph) or more, and often exact a heavy toll in human lives and personal property. The deadliest U.S. hurricane in recorded history struck Galveston, Texas in 1900, killing an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 people. In the Caribbean, the Great Hurricane of 1780 killed 27,500 and winds exceeded an estimated 320 km per hour (200 mph). The worst hurricanes and typhoons worldwide have each claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

How often hurricanes have occurred globally since 1981 is depicted in the figure below.

You can see immediately that the annual number of hurricanes overall (upper graph) is dropping. But, while the number of major hurricanes of Category 2, 3, 4 or 5 strength (lower graph) seems to show a slight increase over this period, the trend has been ascribed to improvements in observational capabilities, rather than warming oceans that provide the fuel for tropical cyclones.

The lack of any trend in major global hurricanes is borne out by the number of Category 3, 4 or 5 global hurricanes that make landfall, illustrated in the next figure. 

It’s clear that the frequency of landfalling hurricanes of any strength (Categories 1 through 5) hasn’t changed in the nearly 50 years since 1970 – during a time when the globe warmed by approximately 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit). So the strongest hurricanes today aren’t any more extreme or devastating than those in the past. If anything, major landfalling hurricanes in the U.S. are tied to La Niña cycles in the Pacific Ocean, not to global warming.

Data for the North Atlantic basin, which has the best quality data available in the world, do, however, show heightened hurricane activity over the last 20 years. The figure below illustrates the frequency of all North Atlantic hurricanes (top graph) and major hurricanes (bottom graph) for the much longer period from 1851 to 2018.

What the data reveals is that the annual number of major North Atlantic hurricanes during the 1950s and 1960s was at least comparable to that during the last two decades when, as can be seen, the number took a sudden upward hike from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. But, because the earth was cooling in the 1950s and 1960s, the present enhanced hurricane activity in the North Atlantic is highly unlikely to result from global warming.

Even though it appears from the figure that major North Atlantic hurricanes were less frequent before about 1940, the lower numbers simply reflect the relative lack of observations in early years of the record. Aircraft reconnaissance flights to gather data on hurricanes didn’t begin until 1944, while satellite coverage dates from only 1966. While the data shown in the figure above has been adjusted to compensate for these deficiencies, it’s probable that the number of major North Atlantic hurricanes before 1944 is still undercounted.

The true picture is much more complicated, and any explanation of changing hurricane behavior needs to account as well for other factors, such as the now more rapid intensification of these violent storms and their slower tracking than before, both of which result in heavier rain following landfall.

The short duration of the observational record, and the even shorter record from the satellite era, makes it impossible to assess whether recent hurricane activity is unusual for the present interglacial period. Paleogeological studies of sediments in North Atlantic coastal waters suggest that the current boosted hurricane activity is not at all unusual, with several periods of frequent intense hurricane strikes having occurred thousands of years ago.

Next: No Evidence That Climate Change Causes Weather Extremes: (4) Tornadoes

No Evidence That Climate Change Causes Weather Extremes: (2) Floods

Widespread flooding and devastating tornadoes in the U.S. Midwest this May only served to amplify the strident voices of those who claim that climate change has intensified the occurrence of major floods, droughts, hurricanes, heat waves and wildfires. Like-minded voices in other countries have also fallen into the same trap of linking weather extremes to global warming.  

Apart from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)’s dismissal of such hysterical beliefs, an increasing number of research studies are helping to dispel the notion that a warmer world is necessarily accompanied by more severe weather.

A 2017 Australian study of global flood risk concluded very little evidence exists that worldwide flooding is becoming more prevalent. Despite average rainfall getting heavier as the planet warms, the study authors point out that excessive precipitation is not the only cause of flooding. What is less obvious is that alterations to the catchment area – such as land-use changes, deforestation and the building of dams – also play a major role. 

Yet the study found that the biggest influence on flood trends is not more intense precipitation, changes in forest cover or the presence of dams, but the size of the catchment area. Previous studies had emphasized small catchment areas, as these were thought less likely to have been extensively modified. However, the new study discovered that, while smaller catchments do show a trend in flood risk that’s increasing over time, larger catchments exhibit a decreasing trend.

Globally, larger catchments dominate, so the trend in flood risk is actually decreasing rather than increasing in most parts of the globe, if there’s any trend at all. This is illustrated in the figure below, the data coming from 1,907 different locations over the 40 years from 1966 to 2005. Additional data from other locations and for a longer (93-year) period show the same global trend.

But while the overall trend is decreasing, the local trend in regions where smaller catchments are more common, such as Europe, eastern North America and southern Africa, is toward more flooding. The study authors suggest that the lower flood trend in larger catchment areas is due to the expanding presence of agriculture and urbanization.

Another 2017 study, this time restricted to North America and Europe, found “no compelling evidence for consistent changes over time” in the occurrence of major floods from 1930 to 2010. Like the first study described above, this research included both small and large catchment areas. But the only catchments studied were those with minimal alterations and less than 10% urbanization, so as to focus on any trends driven by climate change.

The second figure below shows the likelihood of a 100-year flood occurring in North America or Europe in any given year, during two slightly different periods toward the end of the 20th century. A 100-year flood is a massive flood that occurs on average only once a century, and has a 1 in 100 or 1% chance of occurring or being exceeded in any given year – although the actual interval between 100-year floods is often less than 100 years.

You can see that for both periods studied, the probability of a 100-year flood in North America or Europe hovers around the 1% (0.01) level or below, implying that 100-year floods were no more or less likely to occur during those intervals than at any time. The straight lines drawn through the data points are meaningless. Similar results were obtained for 50-year floods. 

Although the international study authors concluded that major floods in the Northern Hemisphere between 1931 and 2010 weren’t caused by global warming and were no more likely than expected from chance alone, they did find that floods were influenced by the climate. The strongest influence is the naturally occurring Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, an ocean cycle that causes heavier than normal rainfall in Europe and lighter rainfall in North America during its positive phase – leading to an increase in major European floods and a decrease in North American ones.

The illusion that major floods are becoming more common is due in part to the world’s growing population and the appeal, in the more developed countries at least, of living near water. This has led to people building their dream homes in harm’s way on river or coastal floodplains, where rainfall-swollen rivers or storm surges result in intermittent flooding and subsequent devastation. It’s changing human wants rather than climate change that are responsible for disastrous floods.

Next: No Evidence That Climate Change Causes Weather Extremes: (3) Hurricanes

No Evidence That Climate Change Causes Weather Extremes: (1) Drought

Weather extremes are a commonly cited line of evidence for human-caused climate change. Despite the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) having found little to no evidence that global warming triggers extreme weather, the mainstream media and more than a few climate scientists don’t hesitate to trumpet their beliefs to the contrary at every opportunity.

In this and subsequent blog posts, I’ll show how the quasi-religious belief linking extreme weather events to climate change is badly mistaken and at odds with the actual scientific record. We’ll start with drought.

Droughts have been a continuing feature of the earth’s climate for millennia. Although generally caused by a severe fall-off in precipitation, droughts can be aggravated by other factors such as elevated temperatures, soil erosion and overuse of available groundwater. The consequences of drought, which can be catastrophic for human and animal life, include crop failure, starvation and mass migration. A major exodus of early humans out of Africa about 135,000 years ago is thought to have been driven by drought.  

Getting a good handle on drought has only been possible since the end of the 19th century, when the instrumentation needed to measure extreme weather accurately was first developed. The most widely used gauge of dry conditions is the Palmer Drought Severity Index that measures both dryness and wetness and classifies them as “moderate”, “severe” or “extreme.” The figure below depicts the Palmer Index for the U.S. during the past century or so, for all three drought or wetness classifications combined.

What jumps out immediately is the lack of any long-term trend in either dryness or wetness in the U.S. With the exception of the 1930s Dust Bowl years, the pattern of drought (upper graph) looks boringly similar over the entire 112-year period, as does the pattern of excessive rain (lower graph).

Much the same is true for the rest of the world. The next figure illustrates two different drought indices during the period 1910-2010 for India, a country subject to parching summer heat followed by drenching monsoonal rains; negative values denote drought and positive values wetness. The two indices are a version of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (sc-PDSI, top graph), and the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI, bottom graph). The SPI, which relies on rainfall data only, is easier to calculate than the PDSI, which depends on both rainfall and temperature. While both indices are useful, the SPI is better suited to making comparisons between different regions.

India Drought Index

1910-2010

You’ll see that the SPI in India shows no particular tendency over the 100-year period toward either dryness or wetness, though there are 20-year intervals exhibiting one of the two conditions; the apparent trend of the PDSI toward drought since 1990 is an artifact of the index. Similar records for other countries around the globe all show the same thing – no drying of the planet as a whole over more than 100 years.

Recently, the mainstream media created false alarm over drought by mindlessly broadcasting the results of a new study, purporting to demonstrate that global warming will soon result in “unprecedented drying.” By combining computer models with long-term observations, the study authors claim to have definitively connected global warming to drought.

But this claim doesn’t hold up, even in the study’s results. Although the authors were able to match warming to drought conditions during the first half of the 20th century, their efforts were a dismal failure after that. From 1950 to 1980, the “fingerprint” of human-caused global warming completely disappeared, in spite of ever-increasing CO₂ in the atmosphere. And from 1981 onward, the fingerprint was so faint that it couldn’t be distinguished from background noise. So the assertion by the authors that global warming causes drought is nothing but wishful thinking.

As further evidence that climate change isn’t exacerbating drought, the final figure below shows the Palmer Index for the U.S. since 1996. Just like the record for the period from 1900 up to 2012 illustrated in the first figure above, there is no discernible trend in either dryness or wetness. While the West and Southwest have both experienced lengthy spells of drought during this period, extreme dry conditions now appear to have abated in both Texas and California.

In summary, the scientific evidence simply doesn’t support any link between drought and climate change. The IPCC was right to express low confidence in any global-scale observed trend.

Next: No Evidence That Climate Change Causes Weather Extremes: (2) Floods

Science, Political Correctness and the Great Barrier Reef

A recent Australian court case highlights the intrusion of political correctness into science to bolster the climate change narrative. On April 16, a federal judge ruled that Australian coral scientist Dr. Peter Ridd had been unlawfully fired from his position at North Queensland’s James Cook University, for questioning his colleagues’ research on the impact of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef. In his ruling, the judge criticized the university for not respecting Ridd’s academic freedom.

The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest coral reef system, 2,300 km (1,400 miles) long and visible from outer space. Labeled by CNN as one of the seven natural wonders of the world, the reef is a constant delight to tourists, who can view the colorful corals from a glass-bottomed boat or by snorkeling or scuba diving.

Rising temperatures, especially during the prolonged El Niño of 2014-17, have severely damaged portions of the Great Barrier Reef – so much so that the reef has become the poster child for global warming. Corals are susceptible to overheating and undergo bleaching when the water gets too hot, losing their vibrant colors. But exactly how much of the Great Barrier Reef has been affected, and how quickly it’s likely to recover, are controversial issues among reef researchers.

Ridd’s downfall came after he authored a chapter on the resilience of Great Barrier Reef corals in the book, Climate Change: The Facts 2017. In his chapter and subsequent TV interviews, Ridd bucked the politically correct view that the reef is doomed to an imminent death by climate change, and criticized the work of colleagues at the university’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. He maintained that his colleagues’ findings on the health of the reef in a warming climate were flawed, and that scientific organizations such as the Centre of Excellence could no longer be trusted.

Ridd had previously been censured by the university for going public with a dispute over a different aspect of reef health. This time, his employer accused Ridd of “uncollegial” academic misconduct and warned him to remain silent about the charge. When he didn’t, the university fired him after a successful career of more than 40 years.

At the crux of the issue of bleaching is whether or not it’s a new phenomenon. The politically correct view of many of Ridd’s fellow reef scientists is that bleaching didn’t start until the 1980s as global warming surged, so is an entirely man-made spectacle. But Ridd points to scientific records that reveal multiple coral bleaching events around the globe throughout the 20th century.

The fired scientist also disagrees with his colleagues over the extent of bleaching from the massive 2014-17 El Niño. Ridd estimates that just 8% of Great Barrier Reef coral actually died; much of the southern end of the reef didn’t suffer at all. But his politically correct peers maintain that the die-off was anywhere from 30% to 95%.

Such high estimates, however, are for very shallow water coral – less than 2 meters (7 feet) below the surface, which is only a small fraction of all the coral in the reef. A recent independent study found that deep water coral – down to depths of more than 40 meters (130 feet) – saw far less bleaching. And while Ridd’s critics claim that warming has reduced the growth rate of new coral by 15%, he finds that the growth rate has increased slightly over the past 100 years.

Ridd explains the adaptability of corals to heating as a survival mechanism, in which the multitude of polyps that constitute a coral exchange the microscopic algae that normally live inside the polyps and give coral its striking colors. Hotter than normal water causes the algae to poison the coral that then expels them, turning the polyps white. But to survive, the coral needs resident algae which supply it with energy by photosynthesis of sunlight. So from the surrounding water, the coral selects a different species of algae better suited to hot conditions, a process that enables the coral to recover within a few years, says Ridd.

Ridd attributes what he believes are the erroneous conclusions of his reef scientist colleagues to a failure of the peer review process in scrutinizing their work. To support his argument, he cites the so-called reproducibility crisis in contemporary science – the vast number of peer-reviewed studies that can’t be replicated in subsequent investigations and whose findings turn out to be false. Although it’s not known how severe irreproducibility is in climate science, it’s a serious problem in the biomedical sciences, where as many as 89% of published results in certain fields can’t be reproduced.

In Ridd’s opinion, as well as mine, studies predicting that the Great Barrier Reef is in imminent peril are based more on political correctness than good science.

Next: UN Species Extinction Report Spouts Unscientific Hype, Dubious Math

Does Climate Change Threaten National Security?

The U.S. White House’s proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security (PCCS) is under attack – by the mainstream media, Democrats in Congress and military retirees, among others. The committee’s intended purpose is to conduct a genuine scientific assessment of climate change.

But the assailants’ claim that the PCCS is a politically motivated attempt to overthrow science has it backwards. The Presidential Committee will undertake a scientifically motivated review of climate change science, in the hope of eliminating the subversive politics that have taken over the scientific debate.

It’s those opposed to the committee who are playing politics and abusing science. The whole political narrative about greenhouse gases and dangerous anthropogenic (human-caused) warming, including the misguided Paris Agreement that the U.S. has withdrawn from, depends on faulty computer climate models that failed to predict the recent slowdown in global warming, among other shortcomings. The actual empirical evidence for a substantial human contribution to global warming is flimsy.

And the supposed 97% consensus among climate scientists that global warming is largely man-made is a gross exaggeration, mindlessly repeated by politicians and the media.

The 97% number comes primarily from a study of approximately 12,000 abstracts of research papers on climate science over a 20-year period. What is rarely revealed is that nearly 8,000 of the abstracts expressed no opinion at all on human-caused warming. When that and a subsidiary survey are taken into account, the climate scientist consensus percentage falls to between 33% and 63% only. So much for an overwhelming majority! 

Blatant exaggeration like this for political purposes is all too common in climate science. An example that permeates current news articles and official reports on climate change is the hysteria over extreme weather. Almost every hurricane, major flood, drought, wildfire or heat wave is ascribed to global warming.

But careful examination of the actual scientific data shows that if there’s a trend in any of these events, it’s downward rather than upward. Even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found little to no evidence that global warming increases the occurrence of many types of extreme weather.

Another over-hyped assertion about climate change is that the polar bear population at the North Pole is shrinking because of diminishing sea ice in the Arctic, and that the bears are facing extinction. Yet, despite numerous articles in the media and photos of apparently starving bears, current evidence shows that the polar bear population has actually been steady for the whole period that the ice has been decreasing and may even be growing, according to the native Inuit.

All these exaggerations falsely bolster the case for taking immediate action to combat climate change, supposedly by pulling back on fossil fuel use. But the mandate of the PCCS is to cut through the hype and assess just what the science actually says.  

A specific PCCS goal is to examine whether climate change impacts U.S. national security, a connection that the defense and national security agencies have strongly endorsed.

A recent letter of protest to the President from a group of former military and civilian national security professionals expresses their deep concern about “second-guessing the scientific sources used to assess the threat … posed by climate change.” The PCCS will re-evaluate the criteria employed by the national agencies to link national security to climate change.

The protest letter also claims that less than 0.2% of peer-reviewed climate science papers dispute that climate change is driven by humans. This is nonsense. In solar science alone during the first half of 2017, the number of peer-reviewed papers affirming a strong link between the sun and our climate, independent of human activity, represented approximately 4% of all climate science papers during that time – and there are many other fields of study apart from the sun.

Let’s hope that formation of the new committee will not be thwarted and that it will uncover other truths about climate science.

(This post was published previously on March 7, on The Post & Email blog.)

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