Measurement Error
Over the years I’ve been on all sides of the global warming/climate change issue. But the longer and deeper I’ve looked at it, the more I’ve come to believe the conclusions we’re meant to believe are backed by very weak data, no matter which dimension of the problem being measured. Instead, a lot of viewpoint enforcement by way of social psychology has been the main tool used to achieve consensus, such that it exists. Viewpoint enforcement works by persuading dissenters that the social costs of skepticism are too great to ignore.
The suspect elements of the science include overselling the idea that carbon dioxide is a poison—it is in fact essential to all life on earth. They also encompass appeals to the emotion of fear that the earth will be destroyed—the earth and life on it have withstood violent impacts far in excess of anything humans have been able to inflict so far. But some of the weakest elements of the claims have to do with the abysmally poor science at the most basic, most fundamental level.
Patrick Frank, PhD, is an experimental chemist with a long research career and lots of research publications. In this podcast with Tom Nelson, who is himself a chemist as well a noted skeptic of climate alarmism, Frank discusses some rather fundamental problems with the standard presentations of global warming. Namely, they simply ignore the essential issue of measurement error. In lab experiments, researchers are supposed to record the uncertainty in their measurement methods along with the data they gather. Failure to do so results in very misleading output. Uncertainty arises from weaknesses in the measuring instruments and in how researchers use and read them, among other sources.
From around the 32-minute mark, Frank goes into great detail describing the amount of error that is known and entirely omitted from the climate change discussion. It is the type of omission that could turn research into nonsense—and would turn undergraduate lab grades into fails. It is at best sloppy, and at worst intentionally deceptive. But the bottom line is that the climate change claims are smaller than the margins of error in the measurement instrument under laboratory conditions (!) while the measurements are in fact taken in the field, where the error margins are even greater.
Frank explains how the unavoidable measurement errors make temperature forecasts for the end of this century into pure nonsense. There is no basis to believe anything at all about future temperatures—based on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels or anything else. He also touches on unexplained past natural temperature changes that far exceed anything humans have ever experienced in our relatively short run as a dominant species so far. In a system as vast and complex as the earth’s climate, several known but poorly understood oscillations can cause dramatic lurches in global temperatures that would likely wipe out our modern systems for food production very quickly—and all of these would be entirely natural, having nothing to do with human activity. But such an event probably would not deter the viewpoint enforcers.
The video of the presentation is here:
I was just listening, a bit to Patrick Frank, as he was talking about the questionable accuracy of thermometers used to check daily highs and lows. I find his argument irrelevant. He explained why the temperature could be off by 5 degrees F. What he doesn't say is that if thermometers subject to this deviation have been in use for many years, they will still show a trend to either higher or lower temps. If a reading of 90 is really 95 and that has always been true, then if the readings have gone from 93 to 97, for example, they have gone up over time even if both the 93 and the 97 are inaccurate. It is the change of temperature, not the absolute number, that is in question if we are looking for climate change.
So, to me, this is just more meaningless talk, an effort to disprove something. If he is right, he has to do better to make his point. That is all I watched so I'm not saying he was entirely wrong and maybe he did a better job elsewhere. I watched the beginning, when he said his life's work was in some sort of chemistry (which made me wonder about his qualifications on the climate) and then I skipped to the suggest 32 minute mark, where I conclude he is likely correct about the thermometer accuracy but that says nothing about the measurement of a long-term trend, which is a relative matter.
I just wrote a long, brilliant analysis of the measurement question - and then closed the wrong window before posting.
You all have been spared!