“Greta, How Dare You!” (Debunking Climate Change)

Stephen Doty

27 Jan 2020

“Greta, How Dare You!”
(Debunking Climate Change)

Imagine if a 15-year old, Nigerian transgender with Asperger’s and OCD responded to Greta Thunberg with this open letter:

Dear Greta, your age, gender, and mental challenges insulate you from the criticism you deserve. It’s probably why you were selected. Given my age, race, and challenges, however, I owe you no special treatment. As Time’s person of the year, you must be held to account. Sympathy is different than science.

I see your credentials so far consist of skipping school to strike for the climate. That’s just playing hooky with a halo. And your speeches showed another type of OCD: obvious credibility deficiencies.¹

This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school.
True! That was the most sense you made.
You all come to us young people for hope. I wondered why they came to you. But the hope you give is “mass extinction.”
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood. Because you fell for their rhetoric. And now you want to steal more dreams? You should know better.
People are suffering. People are dying. That’s a red herring. People have always suffered and died. For the past 20 years, modern technology, powered by fossil fuels, have raised living standards worldwide at unprecedented levels. Extreme poverty, infant death, climate death, and malaria are all down.² Life expectancy is up. Ignoring what is most prominent to give the opposite impression is a form of deceit.
For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away. How dare you falsify history! You essentially promote a theory of imminent, man-made catastrophic global warming, which has never been proven. It’s propped up by fallacies of presumption and crisis rhetoric while you “look away” from 30 years of failed annual predictions and vigorous dissent. You then mislabel it all as “united science.” If it were, we would not have books like Inconvenient Facts by G. Wrightstone,³ which lists facts devastating to your theory. To deny them makes you the denier. Why not read it next time you skip school?
Failing to act [is] evil. No, misleading others with doomsday-climate mythology is evil. So is pretending political science is real science and basing expensive world policy on it. You seem like a sanctimonious bully who uses natural variation in the climate as a club to beat capitalism.
Cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions. That’s baseless speculation. No such probabilities exist. Rather than learn the past, you guess the future. Your theory has never rested upon clean statistics. And its models have no record of success. Your toughest opponent is not oil companies, but nature.
They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air. There’s no such reliance. The preferred method to cool the planet, if necessary, involves emitting particles to block sunlight.⁴ It costs about $2 billion, a small fraction of the alternatives.
The young people are starting to understand your betrayal…we will not let you get away with this. Spoken like a Bolshevik, with a sneer and veiled threats. You later mentioned putting politicians “against a wall.”⁵ But what can we expect from the climate youth? You’ve been subjected to indoctrination methods that Joseph Goebbels would admire.
You are still not mature enough to tell it like it is. Spoken like a brat from a high perch you haven’t earned. You just swallow the UN’s position whole. The UN is politics. The essence of science is skepticism and testing. Years ago, Michael Crichton smelled a rat behind the global-warming orthodoxy and spoke up as a truly-concerned citizen should. He was a role model. Not you.
We no longer have time to leave out the science. Yes! If the UN had a cogent argument in science, they’d use it instead of sending out a teen truant to scare people with doomsday predictions she can’t defend.
Every fraction of a degree matters. Not in science, where tenths and hundredths are insignificant figures if temperatures were recorded in whole numbers in years past.

Tell the UN

To demonstrate critical thinking, and reveal their intolerance of it, I dare you to tell the UN this:

Why do governments claim to know the earth’s mean temperature was 14.33C in 2000⁶, or 14.69C in 2018⁷, when it’s an obvious statistical fraud to describe an unknown population parameter that way?⁸ In statistics, we calculate a mean from a random sample and use its variance to figure a margin of error, called a confidence interval, for a given confidence level, say, 99%. This method gives us an interval that only captures the true population mean 99% of the time.⁹ It should look something like 14.5C +/- 1.5C. Instead of saying you are sure the 2018 mean was 14.69C, which is sham precision, you are really only 99% sure the mean is between 13C – 16C.
After 20 years of “hottest year ever” warnings, you now claim temperatures only rose by +0.36C this century? That’s not only less than the margin of error for a statistical estimate of the earth’s mean temperature, but probably also within the error range of the thermometers used. So, 0.36C is statistically meaningless. But no journalists or politicians say so, which shows their mindless groupthink, intent to deceive, or ignorance of statistics.¹⁰ It has to be one of those three.
What were, and are, your sample sizes? How did you, and do you, ensure randomness in locations and accuracy in all thermometers?
How come you never mention the benefits of higher CO2 for forestation and higher crop yields? Or that people die more from global cooling? That CO2 is still less than 0.0% of our atmosphere, while oxygen is 21%? Or that the planet was hotter before modern carbon emissions, during the Medieval Warming Period?¹¹ So, forces other than mankind had to cause warming then. How do you know they don’t exist now?
During the past 400,000 years, four ice ages have ended naturally with global warming higher than today’s, without any SUVs, jumbo jets, or power plants.¹²
You have only observational studies and no control experiment to justify your allegation that CO2 is the sole cause of warming. Why can’t you admit what every statistician knows? Lurking variables confound your results.¹³ Plus, causal inference follows the law of one variable.
Over the past 20 years, CO2 rose without producing a concomitant rise in temperature. That created a correlation coefficient too low to justify inferring earth temperature is determined by CO2 levels.¹⁴
Given the earth’s long-term climate history, at what level of probability did you reject the null hypothesis, i.e., the mean earth temperature for this century is within the bounds of expected, normal variation compared to last century?¹⁵
Why do you claim hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and fires are occurring more often when the historical record doesn’t support it?¹⁶ Don’t you deceive by cherry-picking time intervals and data sources? And activists change the subject to people affected by weather, which is a function of population growth, not of climate change.
Why do you ignore the growth of ice and snow on the land of Antarctica, which is too cold to melt even at your alleged rates of global warming? So, ocean water depletes by evaporation and becomes fixed as snow and ice. Yet, you warn of rising oceans from melting Arctic glaciers, while forgetting they are in the ocean, 7/8ths submerged. If they melted, ocean rise would be negligible; and ice loses volume when it melts.¹⁷

* * *

Remember, people only assert a theory of climate change. And in science, he who asserts must prove. Climate skeptics have no burden of proof. When climate activists try to shift that burden, it shows the weakness of their case. And science demands skepticism, so falsity won’t pass as truth.

And their standard of peer review means nothing if it is limited to a cadre of like-minded activists who entered the field with their minds made up. How can they construct computer models which overestimate warming every year, which indicates GI/GO, and pretend their theory has any merit? It’s become a racket. Climate opportunists exist in psychology now, shamelessly cheerleading for government money to treat stress, which they suggest could result from the slightest warming.¹⁸

Meanwhile, has the National Science Foundation ever given one climate skeptic a grant? Or do they wait for corporations to do it, so Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse can use the ad hominum circumstantial fallacy to dismiss their findings, no matter how accurate, rather than engage the science?¹⁹

In 1952, Bertrand Russell said the way to limit mental bias is to demand clarity and exactness in our thinking,²⁰ lest we fool ourselves. We must seek clarity and exactness anew in statistics and physics to develop a correct theory of climate change.

¹ In New York: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit ; and in Madrid:
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1216452/Greta-Thunberg-UN-speech-full-COP25-Greta-Thunberg-speech-transcript-climate-change

² J. Norberg, “The 2010s Have Been Amazing” Wall Street Journal 12 Dec 2019: A15.

³ Gregory Wrightstone, Inconvenient Facts (Silver Crown Productions, 2017).

⁴ https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/12/05/harvard-scientists-begin-experiment-to-block-out-the-sun/#3c35e50140c2 Holman Jenkins, “Is There a Green Rational Deal” Wall Street Journal 16 Mar 2019: A13.

⁵ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/greta-thunberg-apologizes-against-wall-comment-n1102326

⁶ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/daily-mangle/comment-page-2/

⁷ https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature

⁸ D. Moore, W. Notz, M. Fligner, Basic Practice of Statistics 8th ed (New York: W.H. Freeman, 2018) 352: “The value of a parameter is not known because we can rarely examine the entire population,” e.g. it’s cost prohibitive or impossible to continuously measure every square meter of the earth’s surface 24 hours a day for a year. You can’t survey every person on earth either; people die and are born every minute.

⁹ Moore, Notz 379: “The sample mean varies from sample to sample, but when we use the formula” x-bar +/- the appropriate critical value of t times the standard error of the mean to contain 95% of the area of our t-distribution curve, “we get an interval based on each sample, [and] 95% of these intervals capture the unknown population mean mu.” And P. 387: “The confidence level [95% or 99%] is the success rate of the method that produces the interval.” That’s important for the UN to admit, to have any credibility in statistics. It means even a wide 99% confidence interval will only capture the earth’s true mean temperature 99% of the time, assuming clean statistics, including randomness. Yet, climate-change advocates talk as if they are cocksure in their results to the 1/100th of a degree. That’s a sign of deceit. As they say down South, that dog don’t hunt.

¹⁰ Timothy Puko, “2018 was Fourth Warmest Year since 1880,” Wall St. Journal 7 Feb 2019: A3. In the entire article, he never gave the average temperature for 2018, the whole point of the headline, nor the temperatures of other years, so you could see the trivial margins. He just said there has been “0.79C” of warming this century beyond the 20th century average. He also omitted last century’s alleged average of 13.90C, the party line; add 0.79C to that to get 14.69C, the figure I mentioned in the main text. He also failed to mention the sham precision in estimating an unknown population parameter, such as a whole planet’s annual mean temperature, to a 1/100th of a degree without any margin of error or confidence level.

¹¹ Wrightstone 24. A temperature graph shows the Medieval Warming Period includes at least the years AD 1200-1400.

¹² Wrightstone 39. A temperature graph shows four ice ages ending via global warming that was independent of man’s influence. The last ice age lasted over 100,00 years. We are now around 11,000 years into an inter-glacial warming period; in about 4,000 years, a new ice age will probably come and may last for 100,000 years. So, we are lucky to be alive now. In a few millennia, the UN will be frantic over global cooling.

¹³ Moore, Notz 247: “Variables are confounded when their effects on a response can’t be distinguished from each other. Observational studies and uncontrolled experiments often fail to show that changes in an explanatory variable actually cause changes in a response variable because the explanatory variable is confounded with lurking variables.”

¹⁴ Moore, Notz 136-7: r squared minus one shows the variation in y that is not explained by changes in x; in other words, suppose CO2 on the x-axis correlates with temperature on the y-axis since 2000 at a value of r = 0.3; then r squared = .09. Statistically, that means 91% of the change in global temperature is due to variations independent of changes in CO2. Remember that a high value of r is a necessary condition for inferring an underlying causal relationship between two variables (x causing y), but not a sufficient one, because many variables correlate by coincidence or as co-effects of third variables.

Children are now trained to be gullible on the topic of climate change. Critical thinking is punished. We see mindless, copycat Greta-strikes, in which pressure to conform makes free-thinkers not risk the insults and ostracism of speaking the truth. Germany had its youth movement in the 1930s. Now know-nothing, true believers are creating a new one. They are polluting children’s minds.

¹⁵ In other words, what was your P-value — your level of statistical significance, your probability of rejecting the null hypothesis if it were true, as in committing a type 1 error when only random variability accounted for the difference between the two means? If they had a P-value of 0.05 or less, we would certainly have heard them crow about it by now. Their silence is on their P-value is deafening and shows how weak their data is. Let’s say it’s near 0.30. That’s insignificant, as in far too likely to happen by chance if the null hypothesis is true (that this century’s temperature is like the last one), so no good statistician would use it to claim this century’s mean temperature is out of step with the last century’s beyond expected random variation and margins of error for statistical inference, based on a large, random sample. And even if it were significant, it is no evidence of what exactly is causing the warming. Many things affect earth temperature: the sun’s hot cycles, our changing proximity to it, variations in orbit, planet tilt, wobble, changes in water vapor, which is the strongest greenhouse gas, volcanic particulates, and other lurking variables, both known and unknown.

Consider setting a thermostat to 72F. In the course of the day, with doors opening, the temperature of the room varies from 69F to 75F every day, say. It is in what’s called statistical process control. If it goes from 72-5F one afternoon, the UN has no right to declare a “climate crisis” and extrapolate that, at current rates, the room will reach 100F soon and kill everyone in it, so it can take your SUV and money for its power and prestige. You can respond that the room’s temperature is still “in control.”

https://www.engineering.com/AdvancedManufacturing/ArticleID/19494/An-Introduction-to-Statistical-Process-Control-SPC.aspx

And for more on type 1 errors, see:

https://www.statisticssolutions.com/to-err-is-human-what-are-type-i-and-ii-errors/

¹⁶ Wrightstone 26, 65, 71, 89, 93.

¹⁷ Wrightstone 113-21.

¹⁸ Devon Frye, “A Rapidly Warming World May Pose a Mental Health Challenge” Psychology Today Jan/Feb 2019: 11-12. He wrote, “Using data from 2002 to 20012… When the average monthly highs shifted from below…about 86 degrees Fahrenheit to above that mark, there was a half-a-percentage point increase in the probability of mental health challenges in those locations. If the link is causal, that change would translate to almost two million additional people across the U.S. facing worse mental health… revenue from carbon taxation – a frequently propose deterrent to climate change – could help fund general therapy programs or initiatives to improve sleep quality.” The war in Iraq, the rise of social media, and the Great Recession all occurred during the study period and could not be ruled out as more-likely causes of stress. If a little more heat is to blame for mental-health problems, why do kids go to Florida for Spring Break?

¹⁹ On 13 March 2018, Sen. Whitehouse gave his 200th speech on the climate, “Time to Wake up.” He uttered gems such as, (i) “So who should we listen to? How about Pope Francis, who called climate change ‘one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day’”; (ii) “The science denial apparatus is public relations dressed up as science, so it behaves like public relations and goes straight to its market, an inexpert public, to work its mischief”; (iii) “the science denial apparatus doesn’t need to stop lying when it’s caught. As long as they are getting their propaganda out, the truth doesn’t matter. This is not a contest for truth, it’s a contest for public opinion… And finally, they don’t have to win the argument, they just have to create the illusion, the false illusion, that there is a legitimate argument.”

A socialist Pope is not a credible authority on climate change. There is also psychological projection there: The “dark money” influence he’s worried about is not oil money, as he says, but government money funding only one side. And the people with the “propaganda” who only care about “public relations” (thus, Greta) are the climate-change activists, not the skeptics. And notice how he says there is only a “false illusion” of a “legitimate argument” about climate change, to spare him the task of rebutting it. Let’s see him rebut Wrightstone’s Inconvenient Facts.
https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/release/whitehouse-delivers-200th-time-to-wake-up-climate-speech

²⁰ https://youtu.be/_DRixynbLp0 Two years after he won the Nobel Prize, Russell gave timeless advice on how human thinking can go astray from sloppy word choice and personal prejudices. It’s easy to fool yourself – now, as then.