I spent the past couple of days attending the International Conference on Climate Change, put on by the Heartland Institute in Washington. There was a good deal of material that will be of interest to readers.

A major issue addressed by multiple presenters goes under the heading “What is the proof?”, and in particular what is the proof that there is some kind of climate “crisis” coming our way. You will not be surprised to learn that for most every claim of the climate cabal, the proof is lacking.

The most interesting presentation on this subject came from John Clauser. For those who haven’t heard of him, Clauser was one of the co-winners of the Nobel Prize in physics in 2022. The specific subject of Clauser’s prize was something called “quantum entanglement,” which seems to be only peripherally related to climate change. However, Clauser’s presentation made it look like since winning the prize he has spent much of his time studying the literature on climate change, and particularly studying the data that are cited to support claims of impending climate crisis. Over that period, he has become a very outspoken climate skeptic. He is clearly a very smart guy, with a sharp critical eye. Also, he has taken a specific approach, which is to examine the data looking for gaps, alterations or manipulations that might render the data insufficient to support the claims being made. (See also, my series on The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.) I think that this approach is the essence of the scientific method, but sadly it is mostly absent from the climate “science” cult. Finally, Clauser has specifically focused on certain flaws or manipulations of the data that can be seen easily and understood by a layman without any need for specific scientific expertise.

No proven climate crisis

Clauser titled his talk “Global warming, climate change, and scientific consensus have not been proven. There is no proven climate crisis.” The talk was accompanied by a Power Point deck of some 124 slides, which were way too numerous and detailed for him to cover everything or for an audience member to take thorough notes. However, I managed to get my hands on a copy of the deck. (Clauser’s full talk is available on the Heartland website, and I also understand that the deck will be available on the website within a few days.)

Today I will start with the part of Clauser’s presentation relating to the issue of what are called “extreme weather events” — e.g., floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, and the like. For this sub-topic, Clauser began with a 2012 article from Physics Today by Jane Lubchenco and Thomas Karl, titled “Predicting and managing extreme weather events.” (L&K) At the time of the article, which was during the presidency of Barack Obama, Lubchenco was the Administrator of NOAA, and Karl was Director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and Chair of the US Global Change Research Program. In other words, these were the people then in charge of collecting the U.S. weather data, including data on extreme weather events, on behalf of the government. As Clauser noted in his talk, if there were any people who would have access to the very best data to support a claim of increasing extreme weather, it would be these two.

Lubchenko and Karl

The thesis of the L&K piece is that extreme weather events in the U.S. have been increasing, and can be expected to increase further as the climate warms. Here’s the introductory paragraph:

Earth’s climate is warming, and destructive weather is growing more prevalent. Coping with the changes will require collaborative science, forward-thinking policy, and an informed public.

Besides making their own statement to that effect, L&K also quote multiple similar statements from the IPCC:

“It is very likely that heat waves will increase in length, frequency, and/or intensity over most land areas. . . . It is likely that the average maximum wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase throughout the coming century. . . . It is likely that the frequency of heavy precipitation or the proportion of total rainfall from heavy falls will increase in the 21st century over many areas of the globe.”

So what is the proof?

L&K present a series of charts that they assert establish the proposition that extreme weather events in the U.S. have “grown steadily over the past several decades.” To measure the level of these extreme weather events within the U.S., L&K come up with something they call the “US Climate Extremes Index.” They describe the Index as having been calculated based on “the area percentage of the country experiencing extreme monthly temperature, drought severity, soil water surplus, days with and without precipitation, land-falling hurricane activity, and one-day heavy precipitation events in any given year.” However, beyond that description, there is nothing in the way of a technical description and backup of how the charts have been constructed quantitatively. A footnote with a link to a prior Karl article on the subject, presumably containing these details, returns a message “not found.”

Climate Extremes

My first comment on this “Climate Extremes Index” is that it is an extremely dubious metric, obviously subject to very easy manipulation. For example, who has decided how much land area was covered by a particular “land-falling hurricane”? Is it just the land area where the wind speeds exceeded 75 mph, or is it the entire area overswept by the hurricane storm system over its full life span of possibly several days, mostly with far lower windspeeds? Hidden decisions like that could easily be used to manipulate an index like this to produce a desired result.

However, Clauser does not go there, and instead he just takes the values of the index as presented by L&K and asks whether they actually increased over the period covered. Here is Figure 2a from L&K, showing the values of their U.S. Climate Extremes Index over the period 1910 to 2011: