{"id":285218,"date":"2023-10-26T21:44:46","date_gmt":"2023-10-26T19:44:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=285218"},"modified":"2023-10-26T21:44:50","modified_gmt":"2023-10-26T19:44:50","slug":"do-we-really-know-that-human-greenhouse-gas-emissions-cause-significant-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=285218","title":{"rendered":"Do We Really Know That Human Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cause Significant Climate Change?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Sun is the source of most of the energy that drives the biological and physical processes in the world around us\u2014in oceans and on land it fuels plant growth that forms the base of the food chain, and in the atmosphere it warms air which drives our weather.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From The \u00a0Manhattan Contrarian<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Francis Menton<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s by far the most important scientific question of our age: Do human emissions of CO2 and other such \u201cgreenhouse gases\u201d cause significant global warming, aka \u201cclimate change\u201d? Based on the belief that an affirmative answer to that question is a universally accepted truth, our government has embarked on a multi-trillion dollar campaign to transform our economy by, among other things, eliminating hydrocarbon fuels from electricity generation (without any demonstrated workable plan for the replacement), outlawing the kinds of vehicles we currently drive, suppressing fossil fuel extraction, banning pipeline construction, making all your appliances work less well, and much more. Express any doubt about the causal connection between human activities and climate change, and you could very well get labeled as a \u201cclimate denier,\u201d fired from your academic job, demonetized by Google or Facebook, or even completely ostracized from polite society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But is there actually any real proof of the proposition at issue? In fact, there is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had two important posts on this subject back in 2021: one from January 2, titled \u201cCausation Of Climate Change, And The Scientific Method,\u201d<\/a> and the other from October 28, titled \u201c\u2018The Climate Is Changing And Human Activities Are The Cause\u2019: How, Exactly, Do We Know That?\u201d<\/a> Those posts covered the basics of how causation is generally established under the scientific method. Those posts also reviewed certain articles published at the time that gave good reasons to doubt the truth of the proposition that human greenhouse gas emissions are a main driver of significant climate change. Go to those posts for discussions of and links to the 2020\/21 articles that I reviewed at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason for today\u2019s post is that a couple of important new articles have come to my attention that further make clear that the proposition that human activities, particularly \u201cgreenhouse gas\u201d emissions, are causing significant climate change has not been proved and, based on existing data, cannot be proved. I\u2019ll provide links and summaries, and let you draw your own conclusions as to the significance of these new articles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But before that, let\u2019s review one more time the basics of how causation is extablished under the scientific method. This is from my January 2, 2021 post:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We start with the basic maxim that \u201ccorrelation does not prove causation.\u201d Instead, causation is established by disproof of all relevant alternative (\u201cnull\u201d) hypotheses. Everybody knows how this works from drug testing. We can\u2019t prove that drug A cures disease X by administering drug A a thousand times and observing that disease X almost always goes away. Disease X might have gone away for other reasons, or on its own. Even if we administer drug A a million times, and disease X almost always goes away, we have only proved correlation, not causation. To prove causation, we must disprove the null hypothesis by testing drug A against a placebo. The placebo represents the null hypothesis that something else (call it \u201cnatural factors\u201d) is curing disease X. When drug A is significantly more effective at curing disease X than the placebo, then we have disproved the null hypothesis, and established, at least provisionally, the effectiveness of drug A.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet somehow these principles don\u2019t apply in the field of climate science. Instead, all the inside clique of the climate science community have decided to agree that the new way to prove causation is to show really, really good correlation with the preferred hypothesis, in which case subjecting the proposition at issue to a test of invalidation against a null hypothesis can be dispensed with. The climate science community calls its system for establishing causation \u201cdetection and attribution\u201d studies. The basic idea is to come up with a model (i.e., a hypothesis) that predicts global warming based on increased greenhouse gases, and then collect data that show a very close match between what the model predicted and the data. Correlation with the model predictions is the claimed proof of causation. There are hundreds of such studies in the climate literature. My January 2, 2021 post linked to a classic of the genre, a 2018 IPCC-sponsored article written by a collection of some 36 co-authors who constitute a virtual \u201cwho\u2019s who\u201d of the insiders of the climate science cult (e.g., Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Tom Wigley, Ben Santer, etc., etc., etc.). The title is \u201cDetection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes.\u201d<\/a> Key quote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a wide range of evidence of qualitative consistencies between observed climate changes and model responses to anthropogenic forcing, including global warming, increasing land-ocean temperature contrast, diminishing Arctic sea-ice extent, glacial retreat and increases in precip- itation in Northern Hemisphere high latitudes.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just get yourself enough \u201cqualitative consistencies\u201d with your hypothesis and proof of causation will be yours!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The authors of the two new papers beg to differ. First, we have a paper by John Dagsvik and Sigmund Moen of Statistics Norway, dated September 2023, titled \u201cTo what extent are temperature levels changing due to greenhouse gas emissions?\u201d<\/a> <\/em><\/strong>This paper is particularly significant because it has been issued by a governmental agency \u2014 the government statistical agencies being otherwise all in lockstep in support of the human-caused global warming narrative. Excerpt from the Dagsvik and Moen paper (page 5):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At present, there is apparently a high degree of consensus among many climate researchers that the temperature increase of the last decades is systematic (and partly man-made). This is certainly the impression conveyed by the mass media. For non-experts, it is very difficult to obtain a comprehensive picture of the research in this field, and it is almost impossible to obtain an overview and understanding of the scientific basis for such a consensus (Koonin, 2021, Curry, 2023). By looking at these issues in more detail, this article reviews past observed and reconstructed temperature data as well as properties and tests of the global climate models (GCMs). Moreover, we conduct statistical analyses of observed and reconstructed temperature series and test whether the recent fluctuation in temperatures differs systematically from previous temperature cycles, due possibly to emission of greenhouse gases.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the conclusion of Dagsvik and Moen (from the abstract):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[W]e find, . . . that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A good deal of the discussion in Dagsvik and Moen covers various deficiencies and inadequacies of the existing temperature data series \u2014 inadequacies that make it impossible to draw conclusions from existing data about causation of temperature increases from human greenhouse gas emissions. Here is one comment on the data from page 10 that I find particularly significant:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all three surface air temperature records, but especially NCDC and GISS, administrative changes to anomaly values are quite often introduced, even for observations several years back in time. Some changes may be due to the delayed reductions of stations or addition of new station data, while others probably have their origin in a change of technique to calculate average values. <\/em>It is impossible to evaluate the validity of such administrative changes for an outside user of these records.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more than you will ever want to know on that subject, see my thirty part series \u201cThe Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.\u201d<\/a> Bureaucrats altering the data to support their preferred narrative have rendered the data completely useless for any legitimate public policy purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A second important new paper is from Antonis Christofides and co-authors dated September 26, 2023. They introduce their paper with a long post of that date at Climate, Etc. titled \u201cCausality and Climate.\u201d<\/a> The part of the full technical paper relating to the climate science application can be found at this link<\/a>. If you go to that last link and try to read through it, you will find technical math that will quickly have your head swimming, even if you are a quasi math geek like myself. However, their fundamental point as to causality in climate science is not very complicated: if you plot recent temperature increases against increases in CO2 in the atmosphere, it\u2019s the temperature increases that come first, and the CO2 increases follow. Thus, if there is causality, it must be that the temperature increase is causing the CO2 increase, rather than the other way around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is the key chart from the post at Climate, Etc.. The authors present it as a quiz: look at the chart, and the explanations, and without any further mathematical analysis, draw a conclusion as to the direction of causation:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Sun is the source of most of the energy that drives the biological and physical processes in the world around us\u2014in oceans and on land it fuels plant growth that forms the base of the food chain, and in the atmosphere it warms air which drives our weather. From The \u00a0Manhattan Contrarian Francis Menton […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121246920,"featured_media":285222,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Sun is the source of most of the energy that drives the biological and physical processes in the world around us\u2014in oceans and on land it fuels plant growth that forms the base of the food chain, and in the atmosphere it warms air which drives our wea","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[691818056,691818076,691818087,691824025],"class_list":{"0":"post-285218","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-climate-change","9":"tag-co2","10":"tag-global-warming","11":"tag-human-greenhouse-gas-emissions","13":"fallback-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/image-742.png?fit=1200%2C600&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paxLW1-1cci","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":277370,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=277370","url_meta":{"origin":285218,"position":0},"title":"Geologist Dr. Ian Plimer counters USA Today\u2019s \u2018fact-check\u2019 on CO2 levels: Media\u2019s \u2018fact-checking resorted to lies & omissions\u2019","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"05\/09\/2023","format":false,"excerpt":"It appears that fact-checking resorted to lies and omissions of pertinent information. 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