Of climate models and other toys

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently announced that 2024 was the warmest year on record, the key being “on record.” When IPCC speaks it is treated in the media as an ex cathedra source (a Catholic expression meaning “from the chair”, or infallible). There are several reasons for this:

• IPCC was set up on the founding principle that greenhouse gases were heating up our climate, a finalistic principle that has led to circular thinking from the beginning.
• IPCC relies on 30 or so climate models coming from around the world, each starting with the assumption that the Earth’s climate is in equilibrium, and that only human activity will change that. All of these climate models drift off into catastrophic warming except one, the Russians, who have always produced better scientists than here in the West. Save that, none of the climate models are in sync with real climate data, and yet are followed with rigor by governments all over the planet. Hence, windmills littering the landscapes along with solar panels, and countries like Germany and Great Britain drifting into perilous shortages, blackouts, and rationing. One can infer from this, as during Covid, that all the governments on the planet (save perhaps Tanzania) march lockstep to an undisclosed higher power. We were once told that we should fear a “one world government”, but I am here to tell you that while we were barring our doors against it, it came in through the bathroom window.
• All news agencies everywhere treat the IPCC as the man behind the green curtain, and none will dare pull back that curtain to reveal the Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs – like character who is governing our perceptions. This gives IPCC an entrenched aura of (unearned) authority, as in essence it is a propaganda body, and follows the principles of propaganda far more faithfully than those of science.

That said, 2024 was not the hottest on record. I can prove that matter for a large part of our lower 48, but on a larger scale, temperature measurement around the globe loses its robust quality:

• In the developed world, IPCC deliberately ignores UHIs, or Urban Heat Islands, claiming that they have little effect on overall temperatures. In fact, as University of Alabama Huntsville scientist Roy Spencer, who tracks weather via satellite and balloon data, observes, recent U.S. warming trends might be largely spurious due to urbanization effects not being adequately accounted for in official land temperature datasets. He claims that UHIs might account for 57% of our warming temperature trend. IPCC says not so, that it is 10% or less. That sounds oddly like a number they just threw at it, unscientific and serving a propaganda purpose.
• For the rest of the world, there are simply not enough measuring stations to gather enough data to make such a broad claim about 2024.

Anyway, “on record” only covers about 160 years, which in the long run is not enough data to pronounce anything so profound as a warmest year. Even with that in mind, temperatures in Antarctica are stable, and have been for years. Climatologists cannot explain that in terms of current “science” and are scratching their heads. In the end we might have to send NOAA in to alter the Antarctic past. (There has been monkey business from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,  for “adjusting” past temperatures to lower them to make the past cooler and the present warmer than they were/are. (Winston Smith, from Orwell’s 1984, worked for the Ministry of Truth. His job was to go through historical data, including newspaper clippings, and alter it to conform with the present. NOAA has more than a few Winston’s on its staff.)

Anyway, I can dispel 2024 as the warmest year on record for our lower 48 states. Bob Tisdale, whose cv is not clear to me other than an independent researcher, published the book Extremes and Averages in Contiguous U.S. Climate in 2018, prior to or in spite of any NOAA “adjustments”. Part of IPCC’s mission has been to alter the past to get rid of open and obvious evidence that the past has been much warmer, even during our Holocene Interglacial period. It has (using Michael Mann and East Anglia Research Unit friends) attempted to remove the Medieval Warm period (1,000 years ago), a time when Vikings farmed Greenland and northern Great Britain had vineyards in its upper regions. If the present is to be warmer than the past, they have to eliminate or obscure the past, and they have done so claiming that MWP was just a local phenomenon, not global. IPCC too employs its share of Winston Smiths.

I have some data from Tisdale’s books, illustrated below in a graphic format. Sorry they don’t come out clearer from my scanner darkly but the overall thrust is easily seen:

These are temperature records for (in order) the East North Central Region, the Central Region, and the West North Central Region of the lower 48 United States. Note the following:

• They cover the period from 1918-2018, or 100 years.
• The higher curve in red, the one I am looking at, is the highest monthly high for each of the 100 years.
• The general trend of these temperatures is flat or slightly downward. Isn’t that odd. (Solid black line through red data is a moving average).
• The red arrow points to the 1930s on each, our hottest decade on record. It was surely hotter than 2024 after NOAA monkey business, which may have happened after Tisdale pulled these numbers. (NOAA does not make this data easily available to the public. Tisdale had to download them on his own. As he says on the cover, this is “A book that NOAA should have published”.)
• The states covered within these regions are Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. That is pretty much the upper Midwest of the United States, and this area had much hotter temperatures in the 1930s than in any subsequent years. You might recall that the thirties was the decade of the Dustbowl and great migration from Central farming states to the West Coast. You might also recall John Steinbeck’s work.
• That the upper Midwest was so much hotter than the rest of the country in the 1930s points at the insanity of claiming that any year is “the warmest on record.” The upper Midwest is not the United States, but just a large region thereof. Similarly, IPCC claiming that any year is warmest on record is obvious deception. Was Newfoundland warmer than Patagonia? Sao Paulo over Buenos Aires? They do not compare.

I don’t recall any decade since the 1930s that has produced such suffering and tragedy as the 1930s, and Oklahoma is not even included on the list above. Oklahoma did have heat spikes in the 1930s, 1954, 1980 and 2011 that were all very hot, with the highest high monthly temps in the 100-108°F range. But in general Oklahoma temperatures during that 100 year period were flat, increasing .109°F per DECADE (1.09°F per century), which to human skin is not even perceptible. Nonetheless, that place is just hot. I have a cousin who lives in Oklahoma City. I think that heat messes with minds.

Climate is about long-term trends, and should not be left to climatologists, who are about headlines. The IPCC in claiming that 2024 is the warmest year on record (after 2023) is making a muck of a massive set of data, cherry picking to suit its political agenda, which is to get us to stop using fossil fuels.  We have not handled all of the problems with use of fossil fuels, but we have addressed a great many. Rivers no longer catch on fire, and even urban air on a hot day is breathable. We still ingest quite a bit of nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, especially around airports, which in my mind at least in part leads to the great detoxing we endure each year, aka cold and flu season.

But next time you hear that such and such a year was the “hottest on record,” just think “Oh yeah. IPCC is at it again, making headlines instead of science.”