Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
In their recent article, “America’s Climate Anxiety Map”, Axios claims that Americans across the country are increasingly distressed about climate change, and that this emotional distress can be neatly visualized in map form. That claim is misleading at best and politically constructed at worst. Why? Because the “climate anxiety” map itself looks eerily familiar—it mirrors the 2024 presidential voting map, with the most “anxious” areas neatly aligning with Democrat strongholds.
In their recent article, “America’s Climate Anxiety Map”, Axios claims that Americans across the country are increasingly distressed about climate change, and that this emotional distress can be neatly visualized in map form. That claim is misleading at best and politically constructed at worst. Why? Because the “climate anxiety” map itself looks eerily familiar—it mirrors the 2024 presidential voting map, with the most “anxious” areas neatly aligning with Democrat strongholds. The data doesn’t suggest a climate emergency; it suggests a partisan psychological phenomenon manufactured by relentless media messaging.
Let’s start with the map Axios published. It’s presented as a national heat map of where people feel most “anxious” about climate change, based on polling from the American Psychological Association (APA) and The Harris Poll. The darker the color, the more distress reportedly felt.
But do a simple hue shift on that image—flipping greens and blues to blues and reds—and something remarkable happens: it starts looking a lot like the 2024 electoral map by county. Red counties (which dominate the interior) show lower concern, while blue coastal urban centers light up like warning beacons of existential dread.
So, what are we really mapping here? Is it climate anxiety—or is it partisanship?
The entire premise of this map is based not on physical reality—no temperature data, no CO₂ concentrations, no storm frequencies—but on self-reported feelings.
Let that sink in. Axios and the APA are treating emotional distress as a reliable indicator of climate danger. But we know from decades of polling that political orientation has a powerful influence on how people perceive risk, especially on abstract or complex issues like climate. According to Gallup’s long-term tracking, Democrats consistently report far more concern about global warming than Republicans or independents. This has remained true even when objective metrics—like hurricane landfall trends or U.S. temperature anomalies—have shown little change.
So what this map actually reveals is not where the climate is changing the most—but where people have been most influenced by alarmist messaging.
The problem is that media narratives are driving climate perception, not actual events or trends.
If you live in New York, San Francisco, or Seattle, you’re inundated daily with headlines predicting everything from the end of snow to boiling oceans. If you believe the mainstream narrative, every heat wave is a sign of the apocalypse. Never mind that these claims often fall apart under scrutiny.
For instance, climate models used by the IPCC have repeatedly run too hot compared to observed temperatures—a fact acknowledged in the AR6 report itself. Additionally, data from NOAA and the National Hurricane Center shows no upward trend in U.S. hurricane landfalls since records began (link). In fact, some categories of extreme weather have shown declines in intensity or frequency. But those facts rarely make it into mainstream coverage.
Instead, young people are bombarded with terms like “eco-grief,” “climate trauma,” and “solastalgia”—psychological disorders supposedly caused by fear of climate change. These are not mental illnesses born from lived experience. They are constructs shaped by repetition and ideology.
The American Psychological Association, which co-sponsored this anxiety map project, has increasingly positioned itself not as a neutral observer, but as an active participant in climate activism. Their climate change resource center is filled with advocacy language, warning of the devastating psychological impacts of global warming—most of which are based on projections, not measurements.
Let’s be clear: there’s no established medical consensus that climate change is causing widespread diagnosable mental illness in the U.S. Instead, people are reporting worry, which the APA then recasts as a psychological crisis. This is classic feedback-loop thinking. The more people are told they should be terrified, the more they are—and the cycle continues.
We’ve seen this movie before. During the Cold War, some Americans lived in daily fear of nuclear annihilation. But no one suggested we map national anxiety as if it were proof that war was imminent. Anxiety is a consequence of perception, not a measure of external truth.
Strangely absent from the Axios article is any mention of actual weather trends where anxiety is supposedly highest. Did New Yorkers suffer a record number of natural disasters in 2024? Was there a heat dome over Boston? Did the Pacific Northwest burn to the ground last year?
The answer is no. In fact, U.S. wildfire acreage burned in recent years is well below the peak decades of the 1930s and 1940s, as documented by the National Interagency Fire Center. Heat waves, while attention-grabbing, are not more frequent than they were in the early 20th century. And cold extremes still regularly sweep through “climate-anxious” zones—undermining the simplistic idea that people’s emotions are a rational response to their environment.
If the fear were rooted in actual weather experience, we’d expect rural Texans and Floridians—who live with droughts and hurricanes—to top the list. But they don’t. Instead, we see anxiety clustering in university towns and media hubs.
This map also unintentionally reveals how successful climate messaging has become in certain demographics. For years, groups like Climate Central, the UN IPCC, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program have pushed increasingly dire forecasts into the public consciousness. In schools, in newsrooms, and even in mental health training, the message has been: you should be afraid. Basically, Climate messaging has become ideological grooming.
And when people—especially younger generations—report that fear, activists point to it as evidence of crisis. But it’s not. It’s evidence of indoctrination. An emotional reaction to a steady drumbeat of narrative, not a scientific appraisal of conditions on the ground.
Let’s not forget the tangible consequences of this climate-induced psychological fragility. People who believe the world is ending in 10 years are less likely to invest in their future, more likely to support extreme policy interventions, and increasingly distrustful of dissenting viewpoints. This isn’t just emotional discomfort—it’s a recipe for poor decision-making at every level of society.
And the irony? Many of the same people who are emotionally paralyzed over “climate catastrophe” live in regions with some of the lowest per capita emissions and highest standards of living in the world. They are not suffering from climate change—they are suffering from narrative fatigue.
In the end, what Axios published was not journalism. It was narrative engineering. A psychological temperature chart built not on data, but on feelings—feelings shaped by decades of one-sided storytelling and political ideology.
This is not a “climate anxiety map.” It’s a partisan vulnerability map. And The Hill, the APA, and Axios ought to be ashamed of pushing this kind of pseudo-scientific, politically driven drivel onto the public. It is simply bad journalism hiding behind a map.
The job of the press is to inform, not manipulate. But when it comes to climate, lately that line has been blurred beyond recognition.
This is the text of a talk I gave at an American Institute for Economic Research Bastiat Society of Houston Meeting on September 26, 2024.
The IPCC, or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, AR6 report and the so-called “climate consensus” cabal hide and suppress many inconvenient truths that run counter to their hypothesis that man-made climate change is dangerous. I will list and discuss some examples in this post, more are explained in our recent book, The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC: An Analysis of AR6.
But first, some personal examples of the suppression of non-consensus ideas.
Two papers rejected for political reasons
Figure 1. Two of my invited papers that passed review and were later rejected by higher authorities.
Both of the papers illustrated in figure 1 were invited, both passed peer-review and/or editorial review, but they were ultimately rejected by people higher in the respective organizations, just before the scheduled publication date, and with no valid reason given. I took this as a clear sign that both rejections were purely political. After all, any technical reasons for rejection should have been voiced during the review process.
The PETM paper was invited by the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists or RMAG. They intended to publish the paper in their online publication called The Outcrop. Articles for The Outcrop are reviewed by the staff and editors, but not in a formal way as academic journal articles are.
The paper’s rejection was not for technical reasons but was blatantly political and after months of work by the editor, another RMAG staffer, and by me. The rejection was a board decision, done at the at the last minute, and without explanation or justification, except to point out that I am not a “trained climatologist” and I’m a “blogger.” Thus, it was pretty clear that the paper was rejected not because of any problems with it, but because of who I was.
When I complained, the board sent the paper to yet another reviewer; after the paper had already been reviewed and accepted. The additional reviewer was sent an early draft and not the final version. In a conference call he pointed out several flaws that I knew were not in in the final version causing much confusion, until I realized he had the wrong version of the paper.
Thus, the board either did not see the final version when reversing the decision of the editor and the peer-reviewers or sent, either deliberately or by accident, their extra reviewer the wrong version. I explained all this, but it was rejected anyway without reconsideration or even a look at the final draft. Thus, it was clearly a political decision based on the conclusions of the paper, the fact that I am not a trained climatologist, and I’m a blogger. The paper now appears on my blog and has been one of my most popular posts.
The second invited, but ultimately rejected, paper was written for the Creative Society at their request. They specifically wanted me to write a paper on climate shifts, such as those that occurred about 1925, 1947, 1976, and 1997. They asked me to present it in an online interview on October 10th, 2022. The interview was recorded and when I asked when it would be posted online, they said they would have to get back to me. They never did, so I posted the paper on my blog. I was never given a reason why it was not posted online by the Creative Society.
The discussion on climate shifts was interesting, since they believed that they might be related to periodic changes in Earth’s mantle.
A Paper that caused an editor to resign
Figure 2. A very reasonable paper by Roy Spencer and William Braswell that caused the editor who published it to resign.
Wolfgang Wagner, then editor-in-chief of the journal Remote Sensing, resigned over a perfectly reasonable, but counter to the “consensus” paper, by Roy Spencer and William Braswell in 2011. Spencer and Braswell presented solid observations and facts, and their critics presented only model results.
The debate between the two sides is complex, and mostly over the sign and magnitude of feedbacks to greenhouse gas (mainly CO2) warming. This is how science is supposed to work. When an editor proclaims from on high that one well supported opinion is wrong and the other is correct, without proper discussion and debate, it is politics not science.
Two papers that caused the editors to be fired
Figure 3. Two of Prof. Richard Lindzen’s papers that caused the editors that accepted them to be fired. The paper on the right is Lindzen’s landmark first paper on the Iris Effect.
Willie Soon and Dick Lindzen report that two editors were fired for publishing two of Lindzen’s papers. The first, published in 1990, lays out Lindzen’s objections to the idea that a man-made enhanced greenhouse effect could be the dominant reason behind current warming, the paper is quite reasonable and certainly not a reason to fire anyone. The paper warns that more definitive evidence of the potential dangers of man-made global warming must be found before drastic actions, like eliminating fossil fuels, are taken. He reminds us that climate model results are not evidence, they are conjectures. Lindzen’s paper is still viable today since definitive evidence and examples of man-made climate change dangers have not been found, even 34 years later. This is well illustrated in Table 12.12 of AR6 WGI on page 1856, shown a little later in this post.
The second is Lindzen’s landmark first paper on the Iris Effect on the right side of figure 3. Now, more than 23 years later, the Iris Effect is widely accepted and when incorporated into climate models it moves model results closer to observations. Certainly, accepting such a landmark paper is no reason to fire anyone.
One must remember that Albert Einstein’s first PhD thesis was rejected. Years later, he submitted a series of papers to Max Planck at the Annalen der Physik journal, and one of them was accepted as his thesis and he finally got his PhD. Planck published Einstein’s new thesis and several other papers, without formal peer-review and Einstein’s reputation was made. Max Planck said that publishing risky papers is important, it is far worse to reject a possibly groundbreaking work. The peer-review process can, and often does, suppress truly innovative work. Papers are sometimes rejected simply because they are novel and opposed to the “consensus” opinion.
Today the Iris Effect is discussed in detail in the IPCC reports, although often without mentioning Lindzen’s name, and a search using Google Scholar shows seven published papers since the original paper was published in 2001. Five of them were published after 2015, and the most recent in 2022. This major discovery was reported in a journal that fired the editor for publishing it, and now the discovery is well established science. I could find no evidence that the professors who rejected Einstein’s thesis were fired.
The Retraction of the Alimonti paper
Figure 4. An excellent paper that is supported by Chapter 12 in AR6 was retracted by SpringerNature without any reason except “concerns were raised…”
In what Roger Pielke Jr. calls the most egregious failure of modern scientific publishing this perfectly fine paper by Gianluca Alimonti and his colleagues was retracted due to pressure from the “consensus” and the mainstream media. Pielke Jr. believes that the retraction was based solely on the following sentence from the paper:
“In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”
Which is simply the same thing that AR6 WGI says in their Table 12.12 shown in figure 5. The SpringerNature retraction notice contained no substantive issues with the paper, it just says “concerns were raised…” For more details see here.
AR6 and Extreme Weather
Figure 5. Table 12.12 in AR6 WGI. The colored boxes show the climate changes that have emerged from climate noise to date. Only a few very benign climate changes have been observed. Most, including flooding, sea level rise, drought, and cyclones, have not.
Here we see part of the previously mentioned Table 12.12, from AR6, Chapter 12, page 1856. The right-hand column of the table shows detected “climate change impact drivers” that can be seen today or in Earth’s recent history, that is since ~1750 or later. The IPCC defines climate change impact drivers or “CIDs” as physical climate system conditions that affect an element of society or ecosystems. Human caused CIDs can be detrimental, beneficial, neutral, or a mixture of each across regions of the Earth.
That is, a particular change in climate can be beneficial in one part of the world and detrimental in another. This is obvious, but often ignored by the climate establishment which tends to only consider the negative impacts of climate change. A climate change impact driver is defined as a change that has exceeded a signal to noise ratio of one. It occurs above a defined level of random change, the so-called “Noise level.” Thus, the definition of climate change is statistical. It takes time to tell whether a particular change is real on climate time scales. Roger Pielke Jr. and his colleagues found that even if a particular change occurred, we could not be sure it was real climate change for over 100 years. It would take that long just to gather the necessary data to show the change had emerged from the noise.
As the legend shows, orange means a decrease and blue means an increase, a white box means no change is detected above the noise level. The tropical cyclone box is white, likewise the boxes for wind speed, drought, flooding, precipitation, wildfires, landslides, ocean acidity, and sea level rise are white, meaning no significant change is detected.
An increase in incidents of extreme heat is detected, but the footnote limits this to some tropical and mid-latitude regions, so even an increase in extreme heat events is not apparent globally. There is a decrease in cold spells and an increase in mean air temperature in most regions. Likewise, there is a decrease in permafrost, in lake and river ice, and an increase in mean ocean temperature. So, if the scientists only found these obvious changes, that are largely benign, why do the politicians act like the world is coming to an end? This is what we must ask ourselves. I guess they didn’t expect anyone to read all the way to page 1856.
Cyclones and Extreme Weather
From AR6 WGI, Chapter 11, (written by scientists), on page 1583-1585.
“… there is low confidence in observed long-term (40 years or more) trends in TC [tropical cyclone] intensity, frequency, and duration, and any observed trends in phenomena such as tornadoes and hail; … it is likely that the global frequency of TCs will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged, … there is low confidence in projections of small-scale phenomena such as tornadoes and hail storms; and there is medium confidence that there will be a reduced frequency and a poleward shift of mid-latitude cyclones due to future anthropogenic climate change.”
From the AR6 WGI Summary for Policymakers (written by politicians), on page 8
“Human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since AR5.”
Ideas that go against the consensus can get editors fired. They can also be suppressed by mindless bureaucrats who haven’t read them, even after the peer-reviewers have approved them. Sometimes, politicians can change what the scientists have written to achieve political ends. This happens in every IPCC report. Each report has a political section up front called the Summary for Policymakers. This summary is written by politicians for politicians, it is distinct from the rest of the report which is written by the scientists who did the work and does not say the same thing.
The top quote above describes the scientific findings. They have low confidence that any trend exists in tropical cyclone intensity, frequency, or duration over the past 40 years. They also expect the global frequency of cyclones to decrease or remain the same in the future, although they believe the most intense storms will increase in some places, but not globally. They have medium confidence that there will be a reduced frequency of mid-latitude cyclones due to anthropogenic climate change.
How is this presented in the Summary for Policymakers, written by politicians? They say evidence of observed changes in extreme weather, and the attribution of these changes to human influence, has strengthened since AR5. Who do you believe? The scientists or the politicians? You can’t believe both.
The IPCC and Al Gore like to tell us that higher temperatures will lead to stormier weather. Research by many climate scientists, including Zhongwei Yan, Phil Jones, Anders Moberg, Susana Costas, Philippe Sorrel, and many others dispute this idea. As the planet warms the equator-to-pole temperature gradient decreases since tropical temperatures barely change. A smaller equator-to-pole temperature gradient provides less power for storms.
Earth’s atmosphere is like a heat engine. It is powered from below and as the heat moves through the atmosphere it does work just as the steam moving through a locomotive does work on its way to the smokestack. The work it does is our weather. When the gradient is steep, as in the Little Ice Age, it does more work, and the world is stormier.
Leon Barry tells us that most heat is moved from the tropics to the poles by mid-latitude storms, if there is less heat to move, there are fewer and less severe storms. Zhongwei Yan tells us that extreme weather has decreased since the 19th century, especially in the winter months. Work by Roger Pielke Jr. and Bjorn Lomborg confirm this trend. On longer time scales, we see that storminess has greatly decreased since the Little Ice Age, which is labeled “LIA” in the figure in the slide.
What about Sea Level Rise?
Figure 7. Various global sea level reconstructions and their rate of rise since 1900. See here for references.
We are constantly told that the rate of global mean sea level or GMSL rise is accelerating. Is it? How definitive is the evidence? If it is accelerating, why? Is the acceleration dangerous?
We will remember from a previous slide that AR6 concludes that any recent change in the rate of sea level rise is not above the noise in the measurements. In fact, a change in the rate of sea level rise is not expected to be detected globally before the end of the 21st century, except possibly using the extreme, and unlikely, RCP 8.5 scenario (paywalled, try here or here to get the full text).
The usual assumption is that it is rising mostly because of man-made global warming and the resulting melting of glaciers and the polar icecaps. Is this true? Maybe not.
Dangendorf, et al. (the green sea level record in the graph) find a persistent acceleration in GMSL since the 1960s and demonstrate that this is ~76% associated with sea-level changes in the Indo-Pacific and South Atlantic. They also show that the initiation of this recent acceleration in sea level rise is tightly linked to changes in Southern Hemispheric westerly winds. Thus, much of the change in the rate of sea level rise in the 1960s is linked to changes in regional atmospheric circulation, not melting glaciers.
In absolute elevation, sea level is not the same in every ocean basin, this is due to the shape of the ocean basins, the individual ocean basin temperature, and in the strength and direction of the prevailing winds over the basin. Thus, the acceleration of sea level change in each ocean basin is different, the global mean sea level is a combination of all the changes in each basin and just reporting (or discussing) global changes in sea level masks a lot of complexity.
Global sea level is not global at all, it is largely a rise in sea level in specific regions. It is interesting that no acceleration is detected in the eastern Pacific or in the Arctic Ocean, and deceleration is detected in the Southern Ocean. Thus, the regions that should be most affected by melting ice, the Arctic and the Southern Ocean, show no acceleration in the rate of rise since 1960.
You will notice that there is a cyclical acceleration and deceleration in these records with a period of about 65 years. It is most easily seen in the blue Jevrejeva record and in the green Dangendorf record. We are now in the upswing of the rate of sea level rise that began between 1970 and 1990. We are currently about halfway through a cycle (near the peak) that is expected to end around 2050.
The AR6 model of warming since the Little Ice Age
Figure 8. The AR6 WGI illustration of the impact of various forces on the warming since the Little Ice Age.
This is a graphic showing the IPCC modeled components of global warming since 1750, just after the end of the worst part of the Little Ice Age. Their models say that the Sun’s variability had essentially no impact on global warming, or perhaps a very small negative impact. They claim volcanoes have a slightly larger negative impact on global warming, so all the warming is due to human activities in their model. This might be correct, but who knows? The alternative idea that nature caused some of the warming is still entirely possible and should be investigated, not ignored.
Recent Solar Activity
Figure 9. Plot of several solar cycle proxies since the worst time in the Little Ice Age. Number of sunspot groups from Hoyt and Schatten (black line), Usoskin (red), and Svalgaard and Schatten (blue). After Usoskin, 2017, A History of Solar Activity, Living Reviews in Solar Physics.
This graph compares various solar activity reconstructions from sunspot observations. Sunspots are considered a good proxy for solar output, with high sunspot counts equating to higher solar radiation output. Grand solar minima, such as the identified Maunder and Dalton Minimums are readily recognized, since the amplitude of the Schwabe 11-year solar cycle is very reduced in these times. Grand Solar Maxima, such as the Modern Solar Maximum from about 1930 to around 2010 are harder to see. These are periods when the smoothed sunspot number remains above 50 for two solar cycles or longer. The Modern Solar Maximum lasted about 80 years and was centered in 1970 according to Ilya Usoskin. This is the longest Solar Maximum since 1,200BC, 3,200 years ago, according to solar proxies. Solar Maxima do not have an instantaneous effect since the change in solar output is small and they work by accumulating excess thermal energy in the climate system, especially in the oceans. Very little energy escapes directly to space from the oceans, it must first be transferred to the atmosphere and carried to a location and altitude where it can escape to space.
Modern Solar Maximum
Figure 10. A comparison of the sunspot records to the HadCRUT4 global average surface temperature record.
Here we compare the same sunspot records to the HadCRUT4 surface temperature anomaly. We notice the late 19th century temperature decline as solar activity decreases to a minimum around 1910. Then they begin to rise rapidly until the 1940s, and ultimately fall until about 1976 as solar activity drops a bit during the 1960s and early 1970s. Then temperatures begin to rise again in the 1980s and 1990s, only to stall in the 2000s, prior to the 2016 super El Niño. The Modern Solar Maximum is now over, so some reduced rate of warming or even cooling in the next few decades is to be expected if solar variations make a difference.
Discussion
Censorship is an ugly thing. It has happened to presidential candidates and to scientists. It has happened to me. Censorship for any reason, other than to protect children from age-inappropriate images and text, is both unscientific and wrong. The main job of any scientist is to challenge accepted ideas with data and analysis, science is incompatible with censorship.
We constantly hear from the news media that human-caused climate change is dangerous now or that we are seeing signs that serious climate change disasters are imminent. Yet, the only observed so-called dangers are that the world is a little warmer and CO2 has increased in the atmosphere. These obvious changes have simply made the world a greener and better place. All the supposed “dangers” are projected into the future by climate models, and the climate models have been shown to be inaccurate.
Warming occurs mostly in the higher latitudes, temperatures in the tropics barely change and are limited to about 30°C by evaporation and the resulting deep convection of warm humid air that forms clouds. The transport of heat from the tropics to the poles acts as a heat engine that produces our weather, the more heat transported, the stormier it is. Thus, as the higher latitudes warm, aka “global warming,” less heat is transported to the poles, and fewer and less severe storms form in the mid-latitudes. All the data collected in the 20th century suggest that storminess is decreasing as the world warms, not increasing.
Sea level rise since 1900 is about 96% linear using all the common sea level rise records. The apparent acceleration seen since 1990 coincides with an upturn in the AMO and other ocean oscillations and is probably natural. Blaming it on human activities is premature, we won’t know for another 30 years, after the ocean oscillation turns negative.
The Sun is far more variable in its effect on climate than assumed by the IPCC and the climate consensus. Further these known variations in the Sun correlate very well with historical climate changes.
The bias in the U.N. climate change reports is mostly selection bias. They only choose papers that support their thesis that humans control the climate and ignore the abundant literature that shows nature, through cloud cover, ocean oscillations, and the Sun has a large effect, probably the dominant effect on our long-term climate. This censorship, by omission, radically misinforms the public.
Science is the well-established process for one person or one small group to show the world that their cherished beliefs are wrong. It only works in an open world with free speech and a free press. Censorship, suppression of speech, and consensus thinking are the enemies of science and truth.
Censorship and the suppression of free speech destroy innovation and human progress. In a world where the consensus rules and new ideas are suppressed, would a personal computer in every pocket and purse or a SpaceX Starlink exist? No, these were the vision of a few individuals under the leadership of Steven Jobs and Elon Musk respectively. Others would think the ideas were crazy, like Einstein’s thesis or Richard Lindzen’s Iris Effect hypothesis. The so-called “consensus” is the enemy of innovation and truth.
The claim is grossly misleading, because it is based on a model, and because there are factors associated with rainfall patterns and rainfall measurement that were not taken into consideration.
A June 26 article in the Washington Post (WaPo) titled “The places in the U.S. most at risk for extreme rainfall” makes this claim in the subtitle “New data from the nonprofit First Street Foundation finds that climate change is fueling more devastating rains and flooding in parts of the country.” The claim is grossly misleading, because it is based on a model, and because there are factors associated with rainfall patterns and rainfall measurement that were not taken into consideration.
In the article, WaPo cites a climate advocacy group, First Street, as the source of the claim:
But in this area and others across the country, such devastating precipitation is becoming more common as the world grows warmer, according to new data released Monday by the nonprofit First Street Foundation.
In a new peer-reviewed model, the group says the U.S. government’s current precipitation frequency estimates, considered the authoritative source for planning and infrastructure design nationwide, do not fully capture the frequency and severity of extreme precipitation in a changing climate. What now qualifies as a “1-in-100 year storm” — in short, an event with a 1 percent chance of happening any given year — is already happening more often in some places.
Taking the study itself by nonprofit First Street Foundation, which has a history of publishing climate alarm predictions, with a grain of salt, the claim is based on a model output result, rather than actual measurements, using wet-biased input data with a short history. These two factors create a misleading result.
In the map provided for the WaPo article, seen in the Figure below, there are some interesting patterns:
Figure: estimate of extreme rainfall rainfall rates per hour. Source, First Street.
Note that the most intense areas are coastlines, such as the Gulf Coast, East Coast, and parts of the West Coast. This is not surprising, since these are areas next to oceans with the greatest amount of available precipitable water.
In fact, that map really isn’t any different than the 30 year climatology of rainfall for the contiguous United States, except in the Houston area. That Houston anomaly can be explained by a single storm, Hurricane Harvey, the first major hurricane to make landfall in the United States since 2005, which dumped more than 40 inches of rain in the Houston area. According to Climate.gov:
The highest rainfall amount totaled 48.20 inches at a rain gauge on Clear Creek and I-45 near Houston Texas. It was the highest rainfall amount in a single storm for any place in the continental United States.
As we know fromClimate at a Glance: Hurricanes, there is no observed climate change signal in hurricane numbers. Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agrees, finding no increase in the frequency or severity of hurricanes. So, even that one-time intense rainfall on Houston from Hurricane Harvey can’t be linked to climate change.
So where does WaPo and First Street get the increase in rainfall severity from the rest of the country from? Airports and short term data. In the study abstract, First Street says:
The NOAA Atlases have provided the standard precipitation frequency estimates (PFEs) for over two decades in the United States, but they are losing that status due to climate change. This study evaluates the Atlases compared to new PFEs developed based on the Automated Surface Observing System and Regional Frequency Analysis (ASOS-RFA) as a benchmark.
For those who don’t know, the Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS) is an observation system jointly managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) designed to monitor airport runways, not climate change. Some, but not all ASOS systems record rainfall observed at airports. This is the rainfall data that First Street put into their model.
There’s two problems with using ASOS data. First, it has been established in another peer reviewed study in 2011 (which wasn’t cited by First Street’s study) that the airport environment tends to give higher rainfall readings:
Researchers have found that areas near commercial airports sometimes experience a small but measurable increase in rain and snow when aircraft take off and land under certain atmospheric conditions.
…
“It appears to be a rather widespread effect for aircraft to inadvertently cause some measureable amount of rain or snow as they fly through certain clouds,” Heymsfield says. “This is not necessarily enough precipitation to affect global climate, but it is noticeable around major airports in the midlatitudes.”
The combination of aircraft exhaust (soot) acting as condensation nuclei, plus turbulence and mixing of the atmosphere by aircraft is apparently enough to create a cloud seeding effect, resulting in more rainfall at the airport.
So, the airport ASOS data First Street used in their model was biased higher from the beginning. And, since the trend for the number of commercial airport flights has seen a steady upwards rise over the last two decades, it is reasonable to assume that the effect on rainfall around airports has also increased. First Street and WaPo didn’t take that into account.
Plus, there’s the length of rainfall record that is questionable. According to NOAA’s ASOS User Guide, the implementation of ASOS didn’t happen until the 1990’s, which means that there’s only about 30 years (possibly less) of rainfall data to examine. Further, the other data source used in the study, Atlas 14, didn’t come into existence until about a decade ago according to the study itself:
This means that some data from Atlas 14 might even be less than a decade old. But, the long term rainfall data for the U.S. shows that it has been naturally increasing for a long time, seen in the figure below, something First Street didn’t mention. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has this to say:
On average, total annual precipitation has increased over land areas in the United States and worldwide. Since 1901, global precipitation has increased at an average rate of 0.04 inches per decade, while precipitation in the contiguous 48 states has increased at a rate of 0.20 inches per decade.
Finally, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 report, Chapter 11, Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate, concludes that changes in the frequency and intensity of most severe weather events (with corresponding intense rainfall) have not been detected nor can they be attributed to human caused climate change.
First Street really hasn’t discovered anything new, but what they did do is use biased and short term data to spin a claim that is not supported by any other climate science.
All in all, First Street did a shoddy job of science, ignoring older data in favor of data that gave them the result they were looking for. WaPo authors Kevin Crowe, John Muyskens, and Brady Dennis apparently didn’t have the skills to critically review the claims made by First Street and published their claims without any critical review as if they were fact. WaPo did a shameful job of journalism, misleading their readers into thinking something that simply isn’t true.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.
Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts.
He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues.
He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
An article on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) website makes the claim that clear air turbulence (CAT) is getting worse, affecting airline flights, and the culprit is climate change. This claim is demonstrably false. Data from actual airline flights shows no increase in turbulence.
An article on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) website makes the claim that clear air turbulence (CAT) is getting worse, affecting airline flights, and the culprit is climate change. This claim is demonstrably false. Data from actual airline flights shows no increase in turbulence.
Scientists at Reading University in the UK studied clear-air turbulence, which is harder for pilots to avoid.
They found that severe turbulence had increased 55% between 1979 and 2020 on a typically busy North Atlantic route.
They put the increase down to changes in wind speed at high altitudes due to warmer air from carbon emissions.
“Following a decade of research showing that climate change will increase clear-air turbulence in the future, we now have evidence suggesting that the increase has already begun,” said Prof Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Reading who co-authored the study.
But, there’s a problem – the study failed to examine any actual airline turbulence event data to determine whether CAT incidents have increased – instead, they relied on data reanalysis and modeling of the atmosphere to make their claim.
Actual flight data presented in previous Climate Realism posts, here, here, and here, for example, refutes computer model simulations, which suggest flying conditions are worsening due to turbulence.
The scientists cited by the BBC completely ignored a 2021 report by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) which plotted accident data related to turbulence, finding no statistically significant increase since 1989, despite a tremendous increase in passengers and miles flown. See Figure 1 below:
Figure1: Turbulence and non-turbulence-related Part 121 accidents in the U.S. from 1989 to 2018. U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
If CAT had increased due to climate change as the study claims, there would be a clear upward trend demonstrated in the graph. Instead, the values of turbulence related aircraft accidents have held steady since about 1995 as seen in Figure 1.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 report, Chapter 11, Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate, concludes that changes in the frequency and intensity of most severe weather events have not been detected nor can they be attributed to human caused climate change.
The point here is that CAT occurs from changes in the jet stream and weather fronts, short term events which the IPCC says it is unable to attribute any changes to as a result of human-caused climate change.
Even if CAT was increasing, new technology is being introduced to spot it and avoid it. For example, Boeing, the world’s leading commercial aircraft manufacturer, has been doing tests with a laser based radar (LIDAR) on passenger aircraft. The system, seen in Figure 2, was developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and has a good lead time for detection of CAT:
JAXA had successfully developed the onboard system that weighs only 83.7 kilogram, which is equivalent to a passenger with one baggage, but boosts the world’s longest range of 17.5 kilometers in detecting clear-air turbulence ahead of the aircraft. A 17.5 kilometer means roughly seventy seconds for cruising aircraft, during which pilots can turn on the seatbelt sign to make advanced warning for passengers and crews to prepare for hazardous shaking. The system can potentially reduce turbulence-caused injuries by sixty percent.
Figure 2: How airborne LIDAR works for detecting Clear Air Turbulence. Source: Boeing/JAXA.
The bottom line is data from the ICAO, the authority on global civil aviation, refutes claims that climate change is producing more flight turbulence. In addition, the IPCC has not indicated atmospheric turbulence is increasing. Also, even if turbulence was increasing, new LIDAR technology will help keep airline travelers safer.
Increasing flight turbulence is a non-existent problem outside of computer models. Unfortunately, model projections supporting claims of a climate crisis seem to be the only thing the BBC cares to report on when the question is climate change. As shown in similar BBC stories, Should we give up flying for the sake of the climate? and What would a flying-free world look like?, the BBC’s writers seem to feel that seeking out data or evidence falls outside their role as journalists. The evidence suggests that this is just one more in a growing line of BBC climate scare stories attempting to scold or scare people into not flying.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.
Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts.
He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues.
He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Open letter to Dr Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC Professor Dr. Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC, c/o World Meteorological Organization 7bis Avenue de la Paix C.P. 2300 CH -1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland.
The Hague, May 25, 2023
Dear Dr. Hoesung Lee,
With the recently published Synthesis Report, the IPCC finished its sixth assessment cycle, consisting of seven reports in total. An international team of scientists from the 1500-strong Climate Intelligence Foundation (Clintel) has assessed several claims from the Working Group 1 (The Physical Science Basis) and Working Group 2 (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) reports. Results have been summarized in Clintel’s report The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC:
As background information, I wish to remind you of the 2010 InterAcademies Council (IAC) review of IPCC procedures, which was commissioned in the aftermath of disastrous publicity regarding errors in earlier IPCC reports and revelations of efforts by IPCC Lead Authors to stifle debate. The IAC concluded in part (emphasis added by me):
Given that the IAC report was prompted in part by the revelation of errors in the last assessment, the committee examined IPCC’s review process as well. It concluded that the process is thorough, but stronger enforcement of existing IPCC review procedures could minimize the number of errors. To that end, IPCC should encourage review editors to fully exercise their authority to ensure that all review comments are adequately considered. Review editors should also ensure that genuine controversies are reflected in the report and be satisfied that due consideration was given to properly documented alternative views. Lead authors should explicitly document that the full range of thoughtful scientific views has been considered.1
We regrettably conclude that the IPCC has failed to follow this advice and the AR6 exhibits the same flaws as before, namely biased selection of evidence, failure to reflect genuine controversies and failure to give due consideration to properly documented alternative views.
To give one example, the IPCC ignored crucial peer-reviewed literature, showing that normalised disaster losses have decreased since 1990 and that human mortality due to extreme weather has decreased by more than 95% since 1920. The IPCC’s authors asserted the opposite conclusions based on cherry-picked evidence, claiming increases in damage and mortality due to anthropogenic climate change, and the review process failed to correct this inaccuracy.
Clintel’s 180-page report, The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, is the first large scale international ‘assessment’ of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. In 13 chapters the Clintel report shows that IPCC makes numerous serious scientific errors that overall reflect a bias in favour of ‘bad news’ and against ‘good news’. This was the case throughout the report and especially in the preparation of the Summary for Policy Makers. The good news about disaster losses and climate related deaths was left out of the Summary for Policy Makers all together, for instance.
Additionally, where the IPCC AR6 has taken account of evidence that points away from a dismal, worst-case outlook, such as recognition that the RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0 emission scenarios are low likelihood and that models systematically overstate warming in the tropical troposphere, these findings are buried deep in the chapters and are not emphasized for the media or policy makers. Even worse, despite having concluded in its discussion of emission scenarios that the extreme ones are low likelihood, they are nevertheless given maximum prominence in other parts of the report for the purpose of projecting climate impacts.
Finally, we note that the IPCC has remained silent while the UN Secretary-General and other high-ranking officials repeatedly misrepresented the findings of the IPCC. For example, Secretary-General Guterres said of the Working Group 1 report 2
“Today’s IPCC Working Group 1 report is a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.”
The AR6 Working Group 1 report did not say these things, yet the IPCC never corrected him nor challenged any of the similarly inaccurate media coverage that distorts the contents of your report.
With all respect Dr. Lee, seriously misleading the world on such an important subject and on such a large scale is unacceptable for an UN organization that claims to be scientific. The errors and biases that Clintel has found in the AR6 report are worse than those that led to the 2010 IAC Review, indicating ongoing failure of the IPCC to live up to its mission.
The Clintel network therefore requests the following:
That the IPCC commissions a team with representation from Clintel and other independent persons not involved in IPCC Leadership to review whether the IPCC has fully implemented and followed the reforms recommended by the 2010 IAC Review, and whether more reforms are needed;
That the IPCC reviews prominent statements by major world leaders and media outlets paraphrasing the contents of the AR6 and correct the record where those statements are misleading or inaccurate;
That the IPCC meets with representatives from Clintel to receive input on the key deficiencies highlighted in our report that require a formal correction.
Looking forward to your response,
Yours sincerely, Dr. A.J. (Guus) Berkhout, President of Clintel Emeritus Professor of Geophysics Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
P.S. The main objective of the Climate Intelligence Foundation (Clintel) is to generate knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of climate change, as well as of the effects of climate policy. Clintel published the World Climate Declaration, which has now been signed by more than 1500 scientists and experts worldwide, thus rivalling in size and credentials the IPCC’s Working Group authorship lists. See www.clintel.org.
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