There is a more fundamental issue, which is that an average temperature has no physical meaning. Think about an experiment to proof that an average exists. Try it with mass to start with and total mass exists. If you use pieces of plasticine you can adjust the mass of each to the calculated average and prove that the total mass is the same. Try this with cups of water. Put the water in one container and you do not get a total temperature. This is because temperature is an intensive variable. A calculated global temperature does not have any physical meaning.
There was another mathematical error given publicity by Al Gore when he presented the temperature and carbon dioxide measurements from ice core data. He, and others, claimed that the temperature changes were being caused by the carbon dioxide changes and the we could "see" this from the complex graphs. No correlation analysis had been done and when it is done it reveals the opposite, that temperature is leading the carbon dioxide changes. But as every scientist and mathematician should know "correlation is not proof of causation". The properties are sea water are the proof - when the temperature increases, carbon dioxide is released.
I believe that Mann's initial work was a PhD thesis which was then published and peer reviewed. This shows a breakdown of the review process. There are many more people than just Mann who should be found guilty of of fraud. I would say that every maths teacher should know about the ice core error.
Despite I am layman in physics I agree. I never get an answer to the question what do you mean by average temperature? P.e. measure the temperature in your garden per day and calculate the average temperature. Take 10C. What is this average corresponding to? The average radiation of the sun, restricted to my garden?
Thank you, Alan. You've made me realised that averaged temperature is nonsense. In your plasticine example, the mass unit of the plasticine whether individual or total is not dependent on a transfer function. Whereas the temperature unit is dependent on the heat transfer function and so it cannot be averaged.
> I believe that Mann's initial work was a PhD thesis which was then published and peer reviewed.
The same is true for the "Ecological Footprint," which was Mathis Wackernagel's dissertation under William Rees at the University of British Columbia in the early 1990s.
Recently I met a guy whose company perform energy audits on various items. He explained with some passion that a recent audit on solar panels in the Uk showed that the mining, construction, transportation, installation, removal and recycling of the panels used far more energy than they could ever produce in our latitude.
I have wondered about that. Is there anywhere on the web that does that analysis, that is, shows the energy cost of producing, transporting, and installing solar panels compared to the amount of energy they will produce over their 20 year life?
With the geoengineering that is being carried out over Europe and the US, in the name of "climate change" solar panels will not get anything like enough solar radiation to work.
Three US states, Iowa, Tennessee and Florida have actually had to pass laws to try to prohibit the cloud seeding that is being done over their skies. 25 other states are also considering legislation, including Texas.
I have seen cloud seeding being done over my Sussex south coast home. Letters to my MP get no-where, this is clearly classified.
Since the spat between Trump and NATO, we have recently had a respite, and can see the sky again in the UK for the first time in three years.
Bill #1: Criminalizing Geoengineering with $100,000 Fines (Class A Misdemeanor) February 2025.
House Bill 1112 (HB 1112), sponsored by State Representative Monty Fritts (R-Kingston), and its Senate companion SB 1033, introduced by Sen. Janice Bowling (R-Tullahoma).
The bill explicitly designates the intentional injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus into Tennessee’s atmosphere for the purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or sunlight intensity as a Class A misdemeanor.
Additionally, anyone caught supplying or providing these chemicals or substances for weather modification purposes will face the same charge
Bill #2: Geoengineering as a Violation of the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act (Class B Misdemeanor)
The second bill, House Bill 0899 (HB 0899) and its Senate counterpart SB 0723, introduced by Rep. Chris Todd (R-Madison County) and Sen. Adam Lowe (R-Calhoun), ties weather modification activities to Tennessee’s Consumer Protection Act of 1977.
The legislation makes it a violation of consumer protection laws for any weather-related company to engage in cloud seeding or other weather modification activities such as:
Seeding clouds or dispersing substances to alter rain patterns, hail formation, or lightning activity.
Using heat sources to manipulate weather or fog conditions.
Modifying solar radiation by releasing aerosols, gases, dust, or other materials.
Altering land or water surfaces with substances like sprays, powders, or dyes.
Florida Introduces Bill to Ban Chemtrails, End Decades of Quiet Weather Modification Oversight
Florida Senator Ileana Garcia (R-36) has introduced legislation prohibiting weather modification activities that “affect the temperature, the weather, or the intensity of sunlight within the atmosphere” in the state.
The new bill was filed on Wednesday, November 20, 2024.
If passed and signed into law, it will take effect July 1, 2025.
23 Iowa Lawmakers Want to Ban Weather Modification, Geoengineering: HF 191
Feb 14, 2025
Earlier this month, Republican legislators in the Iowa House of Representatives introduced a bill (HF 191) that would prohibit weather modification, geoengineering, and what some refer to as ‘chemtrails.’
Air Force Whistleblowers, Gov’t Documents Confirm Covert Geoengineering Efforts
A 2010 report published by the U.S. Government Accountability Office implies billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent over the past few decades on geoengineering efforts.
it's called the embodied energy. go ask the GPT to tell you about it .
they do pay back over about 6 years for warmer climates . possibly 8 years for UK. plus panels last longer than 20 years. they just keep dropping in eficience by about 1% a year.
a 20 year solar panel will still be able to do about 80% of it's original abikty to generate.
only stupid rich people throw them away to get new ones
thank you. So you're saying that in a place like Arizona, the energy that it takes to produce the panel is generated by the panel in 6 years. So everything after 6 years is a net energy gain.
If a frugal person plans to keep the panels as long as they keep producing some amount of energy, what's the expected lifespan, assuming no ice storms or wind storm damage the panels? 50 years or more?
Thanks for this pointer. I wondered when this judgement on the Mann case would come after reading about it a year ago. I am surprised he even got $5,000 but I suppose that's next to nothing anyway for him. I had accepted the global warming narrative, though well within my skills to study it, because I was busy doing other things. Then covid-19 woke me up. Someone on a local social media platform, when we were all locked down, who clearly did not understand thermodynamics, was saying 'climate change' was a scam. I thought I would explain things to him but decided I didn't really know enough and would not just repeat the official narrative but would study it properly, reading IPCC reports and research from John Tyndall on. To be polite, the evidence is not there. However, when I looked into what Michael Mann had done in 1998 and his role at the IPCC in years following, I was appalled. I have friends who think I've gone nuts. However, it has me interested again in radiation physics and the interaction of light and matter. [Slightly off topic, I had a call from my GP surgery yesterday asking if we wanted to attend for the Spring Covid booster, and we must be on record as refusing every time - I can't believe this is still going on]. Anyone who says A is a dickhead to people who might know A – is a ********
I should make clear that I think Martin Neil is a clever chap. My statistical skills were basic until I read your joint book on Bayesian networks with very deep insights. Of course, he can be wrong as can any of us. However, the truly clever person then explains the mistake so that both parties can learn.
I too had accepted the climate change narrative and like you covid woke me up. Covid made it clear that:
Whenever governments around the world are pushing a narrative that will
1) give them more control over the people and/or
2) give them an excuse to raise taxes and steal land from the people,
they are LYING!
I have not taken the time to go into the details, but there are several things that happened recently that confirmed the climate change hysteria is bogus.
The first of these was the graph of global temps over the past 480 million years that WaPo published a few months ago, showing that global temps have been much much warmer in the past, as much as 27 degrees F warmer! Current global temps are near all time lows. Ditto for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
Second was Hunga Tonga increasing the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere by 10 percent which is likely at least part of the cause for the recent warmup that the models did not predict.
Third was Ethical Skeptic proposing that slow moving currents deep within the earth carry heat from the core (which is nearly 10,000 degrees F, the temperature of the surface of the sun!) to the earth's crust. His belief is that the recent warmup in the oceans was too fast for it to have been caused by atmospheric warmup, that it must have come from below.
Bottom line for me is that climate is way more complex than anyone knows, we don't know all the inputs, and human input is likely trivial compared to the others.
Models should generally be viewed skeptically in any case (and in any field), but my first question about climate models is whether they take volcanoes into account. Not only are volcanoes unpredictable, but how many EVs is one Hunga Tonga worth?
right. and of course it depends on where the volcano is and what it spews into the atmosphere. Hunga Tonga being an underwater volcano spewed millions of tons of water into the stratosphere which caused increase warming. Most land volcanoes would spew dust into the atmosphere which would likely cause cooling due to the dust reflecting some of the sun's rays back into space.
My point being that volcanoes can have huge and immediate impacts on the weather, and it's unclear if the possibility of that is ever taken into account in models.
Land volcanoes spew more than dust, of course. Including various gases.
yep. I think the models are missing a lot! Volcanoes being random events there's no way they are included in the models. The heat radiated from the sun is not constant. Is that in the models? Can we even predict that fluctuation in the sun's radiant energy? And what about Ethical Skeptic's theory that heat is transferred from the very hot core of the earth to the surface via slow moving currents deep within the earth. That's certainly not in the models!
At first blush, I'm doubtful about the earth's core stuff, but I haven't looked into it in any detail. The mantle has been circulating magma for the whole life of the Earth. There have been (literally breakthrough) events like the Deccan Traps which are one hypothesized factor in one of the major extinctions...
My point was that major but unpredictable events like volcanoes will render any model pretty much worthless.
Wasn't there also a massive underwater volcanic eruption a few years ago that caused changes in ocean temperatures? Yet these types of natural events are always conveniently ignored.
yes, that was Hunga Tonga. Undersea volcano that spewed millions of tons of water vapor into the stratosphere increasing the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere by 10%.
Jaime Jessop wrote about how in the early 2000's it was observed that the water vapor in the stratosphere had decreased by 10% and this had a measurable effect on reducing the warming that was expected during the first decade of the new century. So Hunga Tonga ADDING 10% more water vapor to the stratosphere would be expected to rapidly increase warming and this has indeed occurred over the past 3 years since its eruption. Here is a link to Jaime's article:
I certainly would not claim possession of the skills to make a fully-informed analysis of the issue, Mr. Dyson, but I do not shrink in fear of steep learning curves.
In similar fashion to yourself, I held no irrevocably fixed viewpoint, and then decided it was a tedious necessity to neglect my own fields of interest to evaluate the arguments, given the way capital flows were changing.
I cannot pretend to your erudition, but I nevertheless found myself seething with resentment over what was very quickly made plain. A devoted amateur can achieve a rudimentary grasp, al least, of complex systems, but not when there is obfuscatory deceit promulgating a narrative rife with inconsistency, deception, motivated reasoning and fallacious assertion.
It does not require a complete understanding of a multivariate, multidisciplinary paradigm, to discern simple errors of logic. The ice core evidence is a case in point. It was pointed out early-on, that the locations of evidence in the core samples were misrepresented from the very beginning.
I thought that I was going to do "homework" into compelling research of a very interesting hypothesis. What I found, immediately, was a tedious, tawdry and mendacious narrative rife with corruption, leading to dead-ends for anyone lacking depth of understanding in the various disciplines involved. The simple rule of rhetoric applies; sneering ad hominem in response to reasoned counter-assertion, is prima facie evidence of corruption.
As far as Mann goes, all anyone needs to know is that he raised large sums to avoid sharing his data. Those suffering a dearth of erudition similar to my own, need look no further than refusal to share data, in order to understand that it's time to simply follow the money. That dreary task, at least, I am at least somewhat competent to undertake.
Sigh.... nothing new under the sun. Where wealth and influence concentrate, predators and parasites congregate.
Correct. I just happen to enjoy the physics and I have learned some atmospheric physics over the last year that I neglected to take an interest in as a student. I still have some queries on the ice core data and hope to understand that better over this year.
Celebrity scientists seem to be celebrities first and scientists second (if at all). I remember a photo of Brian Cox physically holding a poster of the "hockey stick" and saying this is the proof of catastrophic AGW. Not to mention the Spiegelhalter and Fry nonsense on Covid, and Neil de Grasse Tyson's ridiculous comments about scientific consensus. Makes me sick.
Fantastic article - thank you for writing this. I admit the last line is my favorite. :)
Until my late teens, I was obsessed with severe weather and wanted to be a meteorologist.
I remember maybe 4-5 things from my Intro to Meteorology course but one of those things is the professor saying that "concerns" about "global warming" were, in effect, concerns about the average global temperature (a meaningless measure, in his view) rising a degree or two, and the potential effect on the water supply.
From that point on, I considered 'climate science' a complete joke and waste of time.
Now that I have a better understanding of mortality statistics/the recording & tracking of death, the connections between scams involving that endeavor and climate change are even more apparent.
You are probably right, but I believe mortality stats fraud goes back much further than COVID.
Also, it could be the circles I'm in, but I know fewer people who believe in climate change than in COVID/pandemics--and the COVID scam directly and suddenly impacted my family in a much more dramatic way.
As far as I'm concerned, you are completely absolved of any responsibility for that initial "Global Warming" documentary to which you contributed. Like Paul in the Bible, your conversion from a so-called pharisee status (though not actually true, given your stated misgivings and initial pushback) is complete and completely believable.
The most convincing heretics are the ones who first "at least somewhat" dabbled with being a True Believer -- they personally wrestled, not just with the ideas, but with the sociological momentum. Your speaking out is all-the-more believable knowing about the "opinion-avalanche" that you endured and survived.
Your thoughtful courage is very educational and inspiring. Thank you.
Fair play for acknowledging fallibility. Which is something the climate zealots have no conception of, it is clear to see. I have to add that I used to believe what Greenpeace said without question, as I had been a longtime member, supporter, fundraiser etc. Unfortunately I didn't realise they had (in my opinion now) been infiltrated over the years by political activists. Then I read Patrick Moore's book (Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom) blowing the lid off things there and the wider climate change movement and its propaganda machine generally.
Over the last quarter of a century in Scotland average annual temperatures have actually LOWERED (slightly). How unfortunate. This matters not to net zero politicians who push a climate emergency of RISING temperatures. The true conspiracy theorists and climate deniers of our time!
Basically this Article by NF shows how easy it is for opposing the 'settled science to be neutered. It was in operation a decade + ago, and it is a more sophisticated strategy today. Those challenging the narrative ( the official one thrust down our throats on a daily basis), and any 'disagreable'facts/truth they share, have been identified ( not in a good way) and subject to censorship/ shadow banning/ smear or plain old character assassination. Yes.....fallibility is a very human characteristic, and, I think we can warm to honest fallibility, have respect for the reasons for it at a particular time. What many cannot warm! to are the infallible proponents of the ever heating planet....'global boiling era'. These oiks never provide context, just blandishments and then threats...smart meters, heat pumps, alternative proteins etc. 'Do it for the planet'agenda.
Your apology, Professor, is reminiscent to some degree, of the dawning realization we observed in John Campbell's videos as the perfidy of the Covid narrative revealed itself to him.
So you had an NDA, a "gag order agreement" that hobbled your ability to publicly object to distortions of your views on the matter. At the time, there appeared to be some traces of honesty remaining among the media, or so it seems to me.
Your sin appears to be one of inappropriate trust. In fairness, I suppose it should be retailed that it was credulity leading to expression of an unwarranted trust, exacerbated by revoking your own right to protect your reputation.
Intellectual honesty urges retailing of that second possibility, regardless of my sentiments. There will, of course, be those who condemn you in perpetuity for your apparent lack of prescience, in similar fashion to the cohort that condemns John Campbell, to this day.
I consider such condemnation myopic and unrealistic. What matters, is that neither Campbell nor yourself have attempted to deceive anyone and each of you has openly made every effort to acknowledge how your thinking has evolved with more data becoming available.
That said, I must also disclose my own bias in favor of you both. Not sharing your expertise, the role of sentiment must be admitted. I will, however, defend that sentiment on the grounds that we are all vulnerable to the bad faith of others and that both of you have redeemed yourselves by laboring to publicly reveal your own misconceptions.
A somewhat apocryphal saying is that "God helps those that help themselves." There is truth to that, and I would add that God's redemption is given to those who labor to redeem themselves.
Seems to me, that correcting the record with updated priors is a sincere act of redemption. Then again, I am self-admittedly biased in your favor, so it's cold comfort that my sentiments offer, when what would be of assistance to you is competence.
Nevertheless, I do offer that sentiment, of however little worth it may be. I've a "soft spot" for those who do the work required to redeem themselves. We are all sinners, all in need of redemption.
Within a much narrower framework, I have had a few similar experiences, and the keenest expression of regret has been the bitterness of how much effort is required to set the record straight.
I wish you all the best in that regard, dear fellow.
Decent people are those most vulnerable to the bad faith of others: in a way, to fall victim can be proof of personal integrity.
In respect of lying academics, we should recall that every organism seeks to remain alive and comfortable: academics are such organisms before and above being (supposedly) rational beings devoted to the examination of truth, and we should not be at all surprised to find, esp if they enjoy prestigious posts, that they are lying scumbags without a trace of conscience about the matter if such a stance preserves their privileges.
A great read, thank you for posting this, and absolutely no need to apologise.
I too had a bit of a journey to the "dark side" (which in reality is - h/t Benjamin Disraeli - the side of the angels). My wife has never forgiven me for not agreeing to purchase that house by the sea in Middleton back in the early 2000s, a consequence of my certainty that it would, within our lifetimes, be in the sea rather than by it. My confidence was based substantially on the famous Hockey Stick (I use different adjectives these days).
Then came a casual read of the WSJ and Steve McIntyre/Ross McKitrick's devastating discovery of multiple problems with the analysis, the biggest one being the PC1 "error" (except those who practice stats/data science for a living know damn well it wasn't an error).
In trying to cooper up the publicly smashed pieces, Mann claimed Ian Jolliffe had endorsed his "de-centered" PCA calculations. That's a strong position if true - Jolliffe's Principal Components Analysis was the first and last word on the subject back in the day, possibly it still is. But, of course, it wasn't true, as is the case so much of the time in modern paleoclimatology. Some years later it was a pleasure to read Ian Jolliffe's robust rebuttal to Mann's unprofessional misrepresentation (link below). It was a shame for my (and my wife's!) retirement years that Ian hadn't heard about Mann's claim earlier. But then, if he had, perhaps he wouldn't have believed such shenanigans were possible at the highest levels of academia.
I believe that the BBC had a secret Climate Change seminar, described by the BBC as including 28 of “the best scientific experts”. However it turned out that only four of the 28 environmental activists where scientists. Not a single scientist was qualified in a causational or attributional climate science, such as an Atmospheric Physics or Solar Astronomy. This corruption includes the censorship of science that shows that ‘Climate Change’ is caused by a change in low cloud albedo. Professor Shaviv provided the German Bundestag evidence that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was ignoring the high-energy cosmic ray information that proved that the Sun was the primary cause for climate change. Also the scientist Enric Palle showed that between 1913 and 1996, only one of eight Solar Cycles was longer than the mean Solar Cycle length of 11.04 years, the last of these was the shortest Solar Cycle for more than 200 years, the strength of the Suns magnetic field more than doubled, the cosmic ray flux fell by 11 percent and there was a 8.6 percent reduction in clouds. This would be the cause of Global warming that is known but being censored by CERN: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com
I spent years worrying that humans were doing terrible things to the world but I always worried along the lines of pollution and plastic killing the natural world (you know, Greenpeace and Save The Whale). Then they started saying we were going to freeze, with polar bears roaming around London, which would be under water, but then we were going to grow grapes in Scotland and London would be a wasteland surrounded by deserts, but then we were going to be wiped out by CFCs destroying the ozone and acid rain destroying the trees, then the lead in petrol killed people but the lead replacement killed sparrows (or did it?) and so we ended up with CO2 (the gas of life) being the thing that was going to destroy us. By the time you made your programme, I'd realised it was all rubbish - are we gods that we can influence the climate and the planet? I think not! We can Save The World by stopping spraying it with toxic chemicals and filling it with plastic rubbish. That's all.
Concerning the presentation on the 95% confidence level showing supposedly that there is a 95% chance that at least 50% of global warming is man-made.
It seems to me to be a waste of time distinguishing whether the data is used to precede the hypothesis or the hypothesis is used to precede the data. The very statement of the comparison suggests an extremely questionable design. If you don't have a valid design, any statistical comparison is just random noise.
The statistical comparison is to find the probability that two groups are the same, given the sampling. The null hypothesis says the two samplings came from the same group. Generally, one group has received an experimental treatment. So the question is, has the experimental treatment had an effect at all?
What is the meaning of the design when your null group is defined by the statement "heat measurements in a world where humans account for less than 50% of climate warming"? Right away, you're into some heavy modeling totally dependent on your chosen parameters. It's obvious you have some far more serious problems than whether you can actually design a model giving different data when you put in parameters you think reflect the influence of human effect on climate warming.
There is a more fundamental issue, which is that an average temperature has no physical meaning. Think about an experiment to proof that an average exists. Try it with mass to start with and total mass exists. If you use pieces of plasticine you can adjust the mass of each to the calculated average and prove that the total mass is the same. Try this with cups of water. Put the water in one container and you do not get a total temperature. This is because temperature is an intensive variable. A calculated global temperature does not have any physical meaning.
There was another mathematical error given publicity by Al Gore when he presented the temperature and carbon dioxide measurements from ice core data. He, and others, claimed that the temperature changes were being caused by the carbon dioxide changes and the we could "see" this from the complex graphs. No correlation analysis had been done and when it is done it reveals the opposite, that temperature is leading the carbon dioxide changes. But as every scientist and mathematician should know "correlation is not proof of causation". The properties are sea water are the proof - when the temperature increases, carbon dioxide is released.
I believe that Mann's initial work was a PhD thesis which was then published and peer reviewed. This shows a breakdown of the review process. There are many more people than just Mann who should be found guilty of of fraud. I would say that every maths teacher should know about the ice core error.
Yes those are all valid points, although well covered elsewhere and beyond the scope of this article
Despite I am layman in physics I agree. I never get an answer to the question what do you mean by average temperature? P.e. measure the temperature in your garden per day and calculate the average temperature. Take 10C. What is this average corresponding to? The average radiation of the sun, restricted to my garden?
Thank you, Alan. You've made me realised that averaged temperature is nonsense. In your plasticine example, the mass unit of the plasticine whether individual or total is not dependent on a transfer function. Whereas the temperature unit is dependent on the heat transfer function and so it cannot be averaged.
> I believe that Mann's initial work was a PhD thesis which was then published and peer reviewed.
The same is true for the "Ecological Footprint," which was Mathis Wackernagel's dissertation under William Rees at the University of British Columbia in the early 1990s.
Recently I met a guy whose company perform energy audits on various items. He explained with some passion that a recent audit on solar panels in the Uk showed that the mining, construction, transportation, installation, removal and recycling of the panels used far more energy than they could ever produce in our latitude.
I have wondered about that. Is there anywhere on the web that does that analysis, that is, shows the energy cost of producing, transporting, and installing solar panels compared to the amount of energy they will produce over their 20 year life?
With the geoengineering that is being carried out over Europe and the US, in the name of "climate change" solar panels will not get anything like enough solar radiation to work.
Three US states, Iowa, Tennessee and Florida have actually had to pass laws to try to prohibit the cloud seeding that is being done over their skies. 25 other states are also considering legislation, including Texas.
I have seen cloud seeding being done over my Sussex south coast home. Letters to my MP get no-where, this is clearly classified.
Since the spat between Trump and NATO, we have recently had a respite, and can see the sky again in the UK for the first time in three years.
https://jonfleetwood.substack.com/p/new-texas-bill-would-ban-geoengineering
Bill #1: Criminalizing Geoengineering with $100,000 Fines (Class A Misdemeanor) February 2025.
House Bill 1112 (HB 1112), sponsored by State Representative Monty Fritts (R-Kingston), and its Senate companion SB 1033, introduced by Sen. Janice Bowling (R-Tullahoma).
The bill explicitly designates the intentional injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus into Tennessee’s atmosphere for the purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or sunlight intensity as a Class A misdemeanor.
Additionally, anyone caught supplying or providing these chemicals or substances for weather modification purposes will face the same charge
Bill #2: Geoengineering as a Violation of the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act (Class B Misdemeanor)
The second bill, House Bill 0899 (HB 0899) and its Senate counterpart SB 0723, introduced by Rep. Chris Todd (R-Madison County) and Sen. Adam Lowe (R-Calhoun), ties weather modification activities to Tennessee’s Consumer Protection Act of 1977.
The legislation makes it a violation of consumer protection laws for any weather-related company to engage in cloud seeding or other weather modification activities such as:
Seeding clouds or dispersing substances to alter rain patterns, hail formation, or lightning activity.
Using heat sources to manipulate weather or fog conditions.
Modifying solar radiation by releasing aerosols, gases, dust, or other materials.
Altering land or water surfaces with substances like sprays, powders, or dyes.
Florida Introduces Bill to Ban Chemtrails, End Decades of Quiet Weather Modification Oversight
Florida Senator Ileana Garcia (R-36) has introduced legislation prohibiting weather modification activities that “affect the temperature, the weather, or the intensity of sunlight within the atmosphere” in the state.
The new bill was filed on Wednesday, November 20, 2024.
If passed and signed into law, it will take effect July 1, 2025.
23 Iowa Lawmakers Want to Ban Weather Modification, Geoengineering: HF 191
Feb 14, 2025
Earlier this month, Republican legislators in the Iowa House of Representatives introduced a bill (HF 191) that would prohibit weather modification, geoengineering, and what some refer to as ‘chemtrails.’
Air Force Whistleblowers, Gov’t Documents Confirm Covert Geoengineering Efforts
A 2010 report published by the U.S. Government Accountability Office implies billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent over the past few decades on geoengineering efforts.
it's called the embodied energy. go ask the GPT to tell you about it .
they do pay back over about 6 years for warmer climates . possibly 8 years for UK. plus panels last longer than 20 years. they just keep dropping in eficience by about 1% a year.
a 20 year solar panel will still be able to do about 80% of it's original abikty to generate.
only stupid rich people throw them away to get new ones
thank you. So you're saying that in a place like Arizona, the energy that it takes to produce the panel is generated by the panel in 6 years. So everything after 6 years is a net energy gain.
If a frugal person plans to keep the panels as long as they keep producing some amount of energy, what's the expected lifespan, assuming no ice storms or wind storm damage the panels? 50 years or more?
Thanks for this pointer. I wondered when this judgement on the Mann case would come after reading about it a year ago. I am surprised he even got $5,000 but I suppose that's next to nothing anyway for him. I had accepted the global warming narrative, though well within my skills to study it, because I was busy doing other things. Then covid-19 woke me up. Someone on a local social media platform, when we were all locked down, who clearly did not understand thermodynamics, was saying 'climate change' was a scam. I thought I would explain things to him but decided I didn't really know enough and would not just repeat the official narrative but would study it properly, reading IPCC reports and research from John Tyndall on. To be polite, the evidence is not there. However, when I looked into what Michael Mann had done in 1998 and his role at the IPCC in years following, I was appalled. I have friends who think I've gone nuts. However, it has me interested again in radiation physics and the interaction of light and matter. [Slightly off topic, I had a call from my GP surgery yesterday asking if we wanted to attend for the Spring Covid booster, and we must be on record as refusing every time - I can't believe this is still going on]. Anyone who says A is a dickhead to people who might know A – is a ********
I should make clear that I think Martin Neil is a clever chap. My statistical skills were basic until I read your joint book on Bayesian networks with very deep insights. Of course, he can be wrong as can any of us. However, the truly clever person then explains the mistake so that both parties can learn.
I too had accepted the climate change narrative and like you covid woke me up. Covid made it clear that:
Whenever governments around the world are pushing a narrative that will
1) give them more control over the people and/or
2) give them an excuse to raise taxes and steal land from the people,
they are LYING!
I have not taken the time to go into the details, but there are several things that happened recently that confirmed the climate change hysteria is bogus.
The first of these was the graph of global temps over the past 480 million years that WaPo published a few months ago, showing that global temps have been much much warmer in the past, as much as 27 degrees F warmer! Current global temps are near all time lows. Ditto for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
Second was Hunga Tonga increasing the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere by 10 percent which is likely at least part of the cause for the recent warmup that the models did not predict.
Third was Ethical Skeptic proposing that slow moving currents deep within the earth carry heat from the core (which is nearly 10,000 degrees F, the temperature of the surface of the sun!) to the earth's crust. His belief is that the recent warmup in the oceans was too fast for it to have been caused by atmospheric warmup, that it must have come from below.
Bottom line for me is that climate is way more complex than anyone knows, we don't know all the inputs, and human input is likely trivial compared to the others.
Models should generally be viewed skeptically in any case (and in any field), but my first question about climate models is whether they take volcanoes into account. Not only are volcanoes unpredictable, but how many EVs is one Hunga Tonga worth?
right. and of course it depends on where the volcano is and what it spews into the atmosphere. Hunga Tonga being an underwater volcano spewed millions of tons of water into the stratosphere which caused increase warming. Most land volcanoes would spew dust into the atmosphere which would likely cause cooling due to the dust reflecting some of the sun's rays back into space.
Yes.
My point being that volcanoes can have huge and immediate impacts on the weather, and it's unclear if the possibility of that is ever taken into account in models.
Land volcanoes spew more than dust, of course. Including various gases.
yep. I think the models are missing a lot! Volcanoes being random events there's no way they are included in the models. The heat radiated from the sun is not constant. Is that in the models? Can we even predict that fluctuation in the sun's radiant energy? And what about Ethical Skeptic's theory that heat is transferred from the very hot core of the earth to the surface via slow moving currents deep within the earth. That's certainly not in the models!
At first blush, I'm doubtful about the earth's core stuff, but I haven't looked into it in any detail. The mantle has been circulating magma for the whole life of the Earth. There have been (literally breakthrough) events like the Deccan Traps which are one hypothesized factor in one of the major extinctions...
My point was that major but unpredictable events like volcanoes will render any model pretty much worthless.
Wasn't there also a massive underwater volcanic eruption a few years ago that caused changes in ocean temperatures? Yet these types of natural events are always conveniently ignored.
yes, that was Hunga Tonga. Undersea volcano that spewed millions of tons of water vapor into the stratosphere increasing the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere by 10%.
Jaime Jessop wrote about how in the early 2000's it was observed that the water vapor in the stratosphere had decreased by 10% and this had a measurable effect on reducing the warming that was expected during the first decade of the new century. So Hunga Tonga ADDING 10% more water vapor to the stratosphere would be expected to rapidly increase warming and this has indeed occurred over the past 3 years since its eruption. Here is a link to Jaime's article:
https://jaimejessop.substack.com/p/the-science-of-hunga-tonga-global-46d?publication_id=576327&post_id=139075945&isFreemail=true&r=mspe5
I certainly would not claim possession of the skills to make a fully-informed analysis of the issue, Mr. Dyson, but I do not shrink in fear of steep learning curves.
In similar fashion to yourself, I held no irrevocably fixed viewpoint, and then decided it was a tedious necessity to neglect my own fields of interest to evaluate the arguments, given the way capital flows were changing.
I cannot pretend to your erudition, but I nevertheless found myself seething with resentment over what was very quickly made plain. A devoted amateur can achieve a rudimentary grasp, al least, of complex systems, but not when there is obfuscatory deceit promulgating a narrative rife with inconsistency, deception, motivated reasoning and fallacious assertion.
It does not require a complete understanding of a multivariate, multidisciplinary paradigm, to discern simple errors of logic. The ice core evidence is a case in point. It was pointed out early-on, that the locations of evidence in the core samples were misrepresented from the very beginning.
I thought that I was going to do "homework" into compelling research of a very interesting hypothesis. What I found, immediately, was a tedious, tawdry and mendacious narrative rife with corruption, leading to dead-ends for anyone lacking depth of understanding in the various disciplines involved. The simple rule of rhetoric applies; sneering ad hominem in response to reasoned counter-assertion, is prima facie evidence of corruption.
As far as Mann goes, all anyone needs to know is that he raised large sums to avoid sharing his data. Those suffering a dearth of erudition similar to my own, need look no further than refusal to share data, in order to understand that it's time to simply follow the money. That dreary task, at least, I am at least somewhat competent to undertake.
Sigh.... nothing new under the sun. Where wealth and influence concentrate, predators and parasites congregate.
Correct. I just happen to enjoy the physics and I have learned some atmospheric physics over the last year that I neglected to take an interest in as a student. I still have some queries on the ice core data and hope to understand that better over this year.
Celebrity scientists seem to be celebrities first and scientists second (if at all). I remember a photo of Brian Cox physically holding a poster of the "hockey stick" and saying this is the proof of catastrophic AGW. Not to mention the Spiegelhalter and Fry nonsense on Covid, and Neil de Grasse Tyson's ridiculous comments about scientific consensus. Makes me sick.
Celebrity scientists, celebrity doctors…I ignore them on principle.
Fantastic article - thank you for writing this. I admit the last line is my favorite. :)
Until my late teens, I was obsessed with severe weather and wanted to be a meteorologist.
I remember maybe 4-5 things from my Intro to Meteorology course but one of those things is the professor saying that "concerns" about "global warming" were, in effect, concerns about the average global temperature (a meaningless measure, in his view) rising a degree or two, and the potential effect on the water supply.
From that point on, I considered 'climate science' a complete joke and waste of time.
Now that I have a better understanding of mortality statistics/the recording & tracking of death, the connections between scams involving that endeavor and climate change are even more apparent.
I think the statistics of climate change are an even more elaborate and dangerous scam than what they did with covid, and even any other pharma stuff.
You are probably right, but I believe mortality stats fraud goes back much further than COVID.
Also, it could be the circles I'm in, but I know fewer people who believe in climate change than in COVID/pandemics--and the COVID scam directly and suddenly impacted my family in a much more dramatic way.
I've been reading critical stuff about medical, pharmaceutical, and nutrition research for about 15 years. The bad science goes back a long, long way.
Take a look at this if you want evidence of just how blatantly the BBC pushes activism over truth.
https://johnsullivan.substack.com/p/activist-propaganda-from-the-bbc
Last line of the article: 10 years on, who is the real dickhead?!
Climate alarmists, 10 years on:
"Are we the dickheads?"
Would that they are, indeed, asking themselves that question. It is anathema to nearly all of them, and they defenestrate those who break ranks.
Prof. Fenton,
As far as I'm concerned, you are completely absolved of any responsibility for that initial "Global Warming" documentary to which you contributed. Like Paul in the Bible, your conversion from a so-called pharisee status (though not actually true, given your stated misgivings and initial pushback) is complete and completely believable.
The most convincing heretics are the ones who first "at least somewhat" dabbled with being a True Believer -- they personally wrestled, not just with the ideas, but with the sociological momentum. Your speaking out is all-the-more believable knowing about the "opinion-avalanche" that you endured and survived.
Your thoughtful courage is very educational and inspiring. Thank you.
Thanks!
I think someone undergoing personal paradigm upheavals is, as you say, more convincing because they've been on both sides of an issue.
This could just be me consoling myself for having been on what I now consider to be the "wrong" side on several issues ;)
Fair play for acknowledging fallibility. Which is something the climate zealots have no conception of, it is clear to see. I have to add that I used to believe what Greenpeace said without question, as I had been a longtime member, supporter, fundraiser etc. Unfortunately I didn't realise they had (in my opinion now) been infiltrated over the years by political activists. Then I read Patrick Moore's book (Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom) blowing the lid off things there and the wider climate change movement and its propaganda machine generally.
Over the last quarter of a century in Scotland average annual temperatures have actually LOWERED (slightly). How unfortunate. This matters not to net zero politicians who push a climate emergency of RISING temperatures. The true conspiracy theorists and climate deniers of our time!
https://biologyphenom.substack.com/p/newjust-transition-for-transport
Basically this Article by NF shows how easy it is for opposing the 'settled science to be neutered. It was in operation a decade + ago, and it is a more sophisticated strategy today. Those challenging the narrative ( the official one thrust down our throats on a daily basis), and any 'disagreable'facts/truth they share, have been identified ( not in a good way) and subject to censorship/ shadow banning/ smear or plain old character assassination. Yes.....fallibility is a very human characteristic, and, I think we can warm to honest fallibility, have respect for the reasons for it at a particular time. What many cannot warm! to are the infallible proponents of the ever heating planet....'global boiling era'. These oiks never provide context, just blandishments and then threats...smart meters, heat pumps, alternative proteins etc. 'Do it for the planet'agenda.
Your apology, Professor, is reminiscent to some degree, of the dawning realization we observed in John Campbell's videos as the perfidy of the Covid narrative revealed itself to him.
So you had an NDA, a "gag order agreement" that hobbled your ability to publicly object to distortions of your views on the matter. At the time, there appeared to be some traces of honesty remaining among the media, or so it seems to me.
Your sin appears to be one of inappropriate trust. In fairness, I suppose it should be retailed that it was credulity leading to expression of an unwarranted trust, exacerbated by revoking your own right to protect your reputation.
Intellectual honesty urges retailing of that second possibility, regardless of my sentiments. There will, of course, be those who condemn you in perpetuity for your apparent lack of prescience, in similar fashion to the cohort that condemns John Campbell, to this day.
I consider such condemnation myopic and unrealistic. What matters, is that neither Campbell nor yourself have attempted to deceive anyone and each of you has openly made every effort to acknowledge how your thinking has evolved with more data becoming available.
That said, I must also disclose my own bias in favor of you both. Not sharing your expertise, the role of sentiment must be admitted. I will, however, defend that sentiment on the grounds that we are all vulnerable to the bad faith of others and that both of you have redeemed yourselves by laboring to publicly reveal your own misconceptions.
A somewhat apocryphal saying is that "God helps those that help themselves." There is truth to that, and I would add that God's redemption is given to those who labor to redeem themselves.
Seems to me, that correcting the record with updated priors is a sincere act of redemption. Then again, I am self-admittedly biased in your favor, so it's cold comfort that my sentiments offer, when what would be of assistance to you is competence.
Nevertheless, I do offer that sentiment, of however little worth it may be. I've a "soft spot" for those who do the work required to redeem themselves. We are all sinners, all in need of redemption.
Within a much narrower framework, I have had a few similar experiences, and the keenest expression of regret has been the bitterness of how much effort is required to set the record straight.
I wish you all the best in that regard, dear fellow.
Ted: Thanks for your very kind words
Decent people are those most vulnerable to the bad faith of others: in a way, to fall victim can be proof of personal integrity.
In respect of lying academics, we should recall that every organism seeks to remain alive and comfortable: academics are such organisms before and above being (supposedly) rational beings devoted to the examination of truth, and we should not be at all surprised to find, esp if they enjoy prestigious posts, that they are lying scumbags without a trace of conscience about the matter if such a stance preserves their privileges.
read the michael crichton book “ state of fear”
says it all!
I second that recommendation.
A great read, thank you for posting this, and absolutely no need to apologise.
I too had a bit of a journey to the "dark side" (which in reality is - h/t Benjamin Disraeli - the side of the angels). My wife has never forgiven me for not agreeing to purchase that house by the sea in Middleton back in the early 2000s, a consequence of my certainty that it would, within our lifetimes, be in the sea rather than by it. My confidence was based substantially on the famous Hockey Stick (I use different adjectives these days).
Then came a casual read of the WSJ and Steve McIntyre/Ross McKitrick's devastating discovery of multiple problems with the analysis, the biggest one being the PC1 "error" (except those who practice stats/data science for a living know damn well it wasn't an error).
In trying to cooper up the publicly smashed pieces, Mann claimed Ian Jolliffe had endorsed his "de-centered" PCA calculations. That's a strong position if true - Jolliffe's Principal Components Analysis was the first and last word on the subject back in the day, possibly it still is. But, of course, it wasn't true, as is the case so much of the time in modern paleoclimatology. Some years later it was a pleasure to read Ian Jolliffe's robust rebuttal to Mann's unprofessional misrepresentation (link below). It was a shame for my (and my wife's!) retirement years that Ian hadn't heard about Mann's claim earlier. But then, if he had, perhaps he wouldn't have believed such shenanigans were possible at the highest levels of academia.
For reference (the comments are a good read too): https://climateaudit.org/2008/09/08/ian-jolliffe-comments-at-tamino/
Great story and thanks for the link
I believe that the BBC had a secret Climate Change seminar, described by the BBC as including 28 of “the best scientific experts”. However it turned out that only four of the 28 environmental activists where scientists. Not a single scientist was qualified in a causational or attributional climate science, such as an Atmospheric Physics or Solar Astronomy. This corruption includes the censorship of science that shows that ‘Climate Change’ is caused by a change in low cloud albedo. Professor Shaviv provided the German Bundestag evidence that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was ignoring the high-energy cosmic ray information that proved that the Sun was the primary cause for climate change. Also the scientist Enric Palle showed that between 1913 and 1996, only one of eight Solar Cycles was longer than the mean Solar Cycle length of 11.04 years, the last of these was the shortest Solar Cycle for more than 200 years, the strength of the Suns magnetic field more than doubled, the cosmic ray flux fell by 11 percent and there was a 8.6 percent reduction in clouds. This would be the cause of Global warming that is known but being censored by CERN: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com
I forgive you!
I spent years worrying that humans were doing terrible things to the world but I always worried along the lines of pollution and plastic killing the natural world (you know, Greenpeace and Save The Whale). Then they started saying we were going to freeze, with polar bears roaming around London, which would be under water, but then we were going to grow grapes in Scotland and London would be a wasteland surrounded by deserts, but then we were going to be wiped out by CFCs destroying the ozone and acid rain destroying the trees, then the lead in petrol killed people but the lead replacement killed sparrows (or did it?) and so we ended up with CO2 (the gas of life) being the thing that was going to destroy us. By the time you made your programme, I'd realised it was all rubbish - are we gods that we can influence the climate and the planet? I think not! We can Save The World by stopping spraying it with toxic chemicals and filling it with plastic rubbish. That's all.
Concerning the presentation on the 95% confidence level showing supposedly that there is a 95% chance that at least 50% of global warming is man-made.
It seems to me to be a waste of time distinguishing whether the data is used to precede the hypothesis or the hypothesis is used to precede the data. The very statement of the comparison suggests an extremely questionable design. If you don't have a valid design, any statistical comparison is just random noise.
The statistical comparison is to find the probability that two groups are the same, given the sampling. The null hypothesis says the two samplings came from the same group. Generally, one group has received an experimental treatment. So the question is, has the experimental treatment had an effect at all?
What is the meaning of the design when your null group is defined by the statement "heat measurements in a world where humans account for less than 50% of climate warming"? Right away, you're into some heavy modeling totally dependent on your chosen parameters. It's obvious you have some far more serious problems than whether you can actually design a model giving different data when you put in parameters you think reflect the influence of human effect on climate warming.
Conc