Much of the data underlying climate change is bad, as best I can tell, and quite a lot of the animosity surrounding climate legislation comes from the failure to acknowledge this. Our (US) government likes to show the climate increasing at 4-6°C/century, or .05°C/year, but this is based on bad data of average global temperatures, truncated conveniently to 1880, and the incorrect assumption that trends always continue — a bad idea for stock investing too. We really don’t have any good world-wide temperature going back any further the 1990s, something the Canadian ice service acknowledges (see chart below) but we do not. Worse yet, we adjust our data to correct for supposed errors.

Theory vs experiment in climate change data; 17 years with no change.

High quality observations begin only about 10 years ago, and since then we have seen 17+ years of no significant climate change, not the .05°C per year predicted. Our models predicted an ice-free Arctic by 2013, but we had one of the coldest winters of the century. Clearly the models are wrong. Heat can’t hide, and in particular it can’t hide in the upper atmosphere where the heat is supposed to be congregating. The predictive models were not chaotic, and weather is, but instead show regular, slow temperature rises based on predictions of past experimental data.

In Canada and Australia, the climate experts are nice enough to put confidence bars on the extrapolated data before publishing it. Some researchers are also nice enough to provide data going back further, to late Roman times when the weather was really warm, or 20,000 years ago, when we had an ice age (it’s unlikely that the ice age ended because of automobile traffic).

Canada’s version of Ice coverage data. The grey part is the error bar. Canada is nice enough to admit they don’t know what it was like in the 70s and 80s. We do not.

So what’s so wrong about stopping US coal use, even if it does not cause global warming. For one, it’s bad diplomatically — it weakens us and strengthens countries that hate us (like Iran), and countries like China that burn lots of coal and really pollute the air. It also diverts the US from real air pollution and land use discussions. If you want less air pollution, perhaps nuclear is the way to go. Finally, there you have to ask, even if we could adjust the earth’s temperature at will, who would get control of the thermostat? Who would decide if this summer should be warm or cold, or who should get rains, or sun. With great power comes great headaches.

Robert Buxbaum, June 21, 2014