... Climate science is a mixture of real science and junk science. The real climate science knows a lot about climate, but it doesn't know how to predict the future, and it doesn't have a good handle on the effect of greenhouse gases. The fake "the sky is falling" climate science created a financial and professional windfall for numerous special interests: climate scientists, bureaucracies, politicians, green groups, ethanol producers, and windmill manufacturers, to name a few. The beneficiaries of this windfall are very protective of their empire. A climate mafia protects the windfall by suppressing dissent from the global warming party line. Very few scientists are brave enough and independent enough to publicly dissent. The scientific organizations that are sensitive to government funding gleefully promote the scare story. Many climate scientists know full well that a fraud is in motion, but they have no desire to walk into a buzz saw by complaining.
Climate doom predictions are based on very complicated computer models that disagree one with another and that are generally acknowledged to have major shortcomings. The models predict warming from increased concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. However, major contradictions are given little attention or ignored. The models are unable to explain the climate history of the 20th century, even when "calibrated" with speculative inputs. For example, the considerable warming trend in the early 20th century, from 1910 to 1940, has never been definitively explained. It wasn't due to increasing CO2, because CO2 was barely increasing during that era. The only warming trend that could be plausibly blamed on CO2 was the 1970-1998 warming, but that warming stopped 16 years ago, even though CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere continued to increase rapidly. Even scientifically literate people mistakenly assume that climate scientists must be disinterested and know what they are talking about.
The climate bureaucracy depends on the continuing global warming scare for its existence, and those familiar with the ways of government agencies know that a bureaucracy whose existence depends on a problem will always exaggerate the importance of the problem.
In this vein, a National Climate Assessment document has been released in draft form by the climate bureaucracy in Washington. The document was vetted by a federal advisory committee stacked with global warming promoters; it is 1,100 pages long and mostly lacks serious justifications for its broad claims. The global warming bureaucrats have entangled critics in a mushy science blob, but the blob has been refuted in considerable scientific detail by a 133-page CATO institute document.
Global warming is global, not something concentrated in the 48 states. Yet the National Climate Assessment, for propaganda reasons, frames the problem as if it is an American problem. The Americanization of global warming is carried to the extreme of abandoning scientific convention and expressing temperatures in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius. In another dumbing-down move, the scientific name "greenhouse gases" is changed to "heat-trapping gases." Local climate forecasts for the 21st century are given for 6 different regions of the 48 states, a procedure relying on highly dubious manipulations of similarly dubious global climate model results.
In short, doubt is piled on doubt in order to produce meaningless local climate forecasts. The report authors think that Americans are scientifically illiterate and uninterested in events outside their immediate environment, so they have warped the report to make it more appealing.
Although the critical role of China and India in global warming theory is ignored, an entire chapter is devoted to the impacts of climate change on American Indians. Supposedly, climate change will interfere with catching salmon or the harvest of whales -- presumably important sources of sustenance for Indians not partners in casino enterprises. For some politically correct reason, global warming promoters always seem to include something about Indians in their pronouncements.
The National Climate Assessment endorses the idea that CO2 increases extreme weather. There is little serious evidence to support the increasing extreme weather hypothesis. Given that climate has random variations as well as systematic natural variations, it is easy to mine the data to come up with evidence for increasing extreme weather in a particular zone, such as the continental U.S. or a smaller zone within the U.S. There are many types of extreme weather to choose from; thus, by picking over the weather record, one can always find something to support the extreme weather thesis.
However, a major problem with extreme weather theory is that weather is fundamentally driven by the equator-to-pole temperature difference. The computer models that the believers in global warming use predict that this temperature difference will decrease from global warming. Thus, logically, global warming should reduce extreme weather, not increase it.
(Incidentally, the phrase "extreme weather" did not begin to appear frequently in New York Times articles until around 2010, when it was starting to become clear that global warming had really stopped, at which point the global warming story was changed to the extreme weather story.)
It is easy to convince people that the weather is becoming more extreme because the most recent weather events are freshest in our memory. The problem with the "extreme weather from CO2" hypothesis is that it is basically a convenient invention rather than a scientific discovery. Speculative scientific justifications can be imagined, but on the whole, the science is missing. An increase in extreme weather is also missing.
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