This is a useful commentary, although, as indicated in some comments, it is quite a bit more complex. For instance the depth of the engine intake varies with ships and also whether they are laden or not. But the main point I want to make is that the biggest uncertainties relate to data gaps. There are few if any observations over the southern oceans and Antarctica prior to the IGY (1957-58). What is assumed in the data gaps greatly influences the trend. For instance, NOAA in its analysis of ocean heat has used a fixed climatology and since the climate is warming, this has led to quite a lot of valid observations being discarded as too far out in recent years. As a result their trend is underestimated.
Hi Kevin, I agree that its more complicated; one could write an entire post (and I have written papers) about each individual type of instrument change or bias. Interpolation methods are also a driver of differences between records, though in my experience they are smaller (e.g. HadCRUT vs Berkeley Earth or NOAA vs NASA) than differences in SST products used (the two are, of course, not completely independent).
Hi Kevin and Mike- It’s good to be on the same venue discussing this subject. As I wrote in my earlier comment on this thread, we now have a more robust way to assess global warming. The record is over 20 years wrt ocean heat content changes.
While I agree assessment of surface temperatures remain essential (such for SSTs and water vapor input to the atmosphere), ocean heat content changes provides our best estimate of the Earth’s radiative imbalance.
Roger, the problem I have with the ocean heat content data is the size of the uncertainties claimed by the investigators. I'd be interested in your comments on my post below.
The advantage of using ocean heat content changes to diagnose global warming is that the ocean is a time-space integrator of heating/cooling. A low pass filter.
In contrast, surface temperatures, particularly on land, have much more heterogeneity. We certainly need surface air temperatures for local and regional climate assessments, but for a global average to diagnose global warming, its a poor metric when we have a better replacement.
Thanks, Dr. Roger. I asked some very specific questions in my linked file. Any chance you might answer them? Here's the questions:
"So, assuming there are no problems with my math, they are claiming that they can measure the temperature rise of the top mile of the global ocean to within 0.004°C per year. That seems way too small an error to me. But is it too small? If we have lots and lots of observations, surely we can get the error down to that small?
Here’s the problem with their claim that the error is that small. I’ve raised this question at Judith’s and elsewhere, and gotten no answer. So I am posing the question again, in the hope that someone can unravel the puzzle.
We know that to get a smaller error by one decimal, we need a hundred times more observations per decimal point. But the same is true in reverse. If we need less precision, we don’t need as many observations. If we need one less decimal point, we can do it with one-hundredth of the observations.
Currently, they claim an error of ± 0.004°C (four thousandths of a degree) for the annual average upper ocean temperature from the observations of the three thousand or so Argo buoys.
But that means that if we are satisfied with an error of ± 0.04°C (four hundredths of a degree), we could do it with a hundredth of the number of observations, or about 30 Argo buoys. And it also indicates that 3 Argo buoys could measure that same huge volume, the entire global ocean from pole to pole, to within a tenth of a degree.
And that is the problem I see. There’s no possible way that thirty buoys could measure the top mile of the whole ocean to that kind of accuracy, four hundredths of a degree C. The ocean is far too large and varied for thirty Argo floats to do that.
What am I missing here? Have I made some major math mistake? Their claimed error seems to be way out of line for the number of observations. I’ve not been able to find a good explanation of how they come up with these claims of extreme precision, but however they’re doing it, my math doesn’t support it."
Hi Willis - I recommend you contact Argo directly to answer this question. Closer to the surface changes likely are larger. Also, there is satellite data that combine with the bouys.
In addition to biases from the change from bucket measurements for SST prior to WWII to engine intake temperature during WWII and thereafter (a reason being so not shining a flashlight on deck during the observation, fearing a submarine might then sink the ship), there was a very different mix of ships traveling a range of different routes, sometimes heavily laden with war supplies, etc. with the engines working very hard (so sampling deeper water and bringing it into a very hot engine room) and other times lightly laden (so sampling closer to the surface and a less hot engine room)--all this and not reporting SSTs accurately in transmissions as this could give away where the ship is located. Getting all the biases out, given limited information, is proving very difficult. What I find very interesting is that if one looks at the temperature record for the oceans (which seems to very clearly suggest a significant bias--with virtually no bias appearing in the land only record) and for the global record that has the warm bias of ocean waters in it, and then covers the WWII period with your finger, the general impression of the change in global average temperature is quite different than if one looks at the record with the bias in it. With the WWII years covered, one sees a generally consistent warming with a sort of flattening mid-century likely due to sulfate induced cooling as a result of lofting coal plan emissions through tall stacks and so extending their lifetimes. On the other hand, an interpretation of the full record with the bias showing, the peak during WWII has been suggested by GHG contrarians to be due to solar forcing and recovery from the Little Ice Age when solar is thought to have been diminished even though this would imply a climate sensitivity well above what is thought to be the case as the changes in solar seem likely to have been quite small. It really seems to me that since the WWII both have a lot of likely biases and the biases seem able to change the interpretation of the 20th century record, it might really be best to just omit the observations for that period as irrecoverably flawed.
Living is easy(er) with eyes closed. (John Lennon). Sceptists refuse the evidence because they refuse the fact our abuses on Nature are causing climates changes.
The reason the brainwashing, that got a boost from the OTT 'covid' measures discrediting science, was so successful was that, of course, people want to hear that there's no crisis and nothing to worry about. That they can continue burning fossil fuels, driving and flying and consuming animal products (though many now like the more expensive green and compassion washed kind) without guilt. Easy to sell them a conspiracy of left wing government controlling and impoverishing us with plant based burgers and renewables.
Jo, you and I agree on some, maybe most things, but your MAHA-adjacent position isn't one of them. One doesn't have to overlook the greater-or-lesser corruption of segments of medical science by the pharmaceutical industry, to wish you'd left out the "OTT 'covid' measures discrediting science" part. If you're going to respond, please read my whole comment first.
Yes, vaccine manufacturers made handsome profits, but AFAICT the public benefit of reduced mortality and morbidity from what they would otherwise have been, justified the public expense. Shutdowns, masking and distancing requirements may have been costly and/or intrusive, but they too saved lives. Over the top? Maybe in the sensationalist media, traditional and social. Just how OTT will only be known in hindsight if at all, but neither perfect nor even "cost-effective" results were ever guaranteed. I'm in a high-risk age group, and I'm just grateful to have survived my single COVID episode, striking after three vaccine doses when it arrived in my home on a flight with my sister, also thrice-vaccinated; we both sat around coughing for a couple of days, until she was well enough to go home. The head cold I caught last month hit me harder.
Similar to our understanding of climate change, over two centuries of science backed up the development of mRNA vaccines. I'm acquainted with a number of retired virologists, immunologists, and epidemiologists, not currently paid by the pharmaceutical industry. They all agree COVID was (and is) a hard problem, with complete resolution improbable. None of them blames Anthony Fauci for anything that happened in the pandemic. And they agree the CDC may have been poorly led, but was not corrupt (at least not until this year), merely not up to the challenge of COVID. They agree that RFK Jr. is a dangerous crank, possibly due to a brain worm (I'm kidding about the worm, even if he's not). I'm afraid anti-vaxx and anti-public-health denialists and conspiracists have sadly damaged the public's trust of vaccines as well as non-therapeutic collective measures, with increasing infectious disease burden a likely consequence. Some resurgent historical microbe may even see me off. Reality will have the last word, as always.
We can agree to disagree, but like Prof. Dessler, I believe the primary connection between MAGA AGW denial and MAHA vaccine/public-health denial is simply the overarching enmity of plutocracy and the US Republican Party toward science, because science empowers collective intervention to limit the social costs of the otherwise-"free" market. Yet the tens of $billions/year in profits to COVID vaccine manufacturers are dwarfed by the $trillions/year at stake for the fossil fuel industry. There's less malice (i.e. money), more stupidity (i.e. ignorance and manipulated distrust of science) in MAHA than in AGW denial!
PS. In order to discuss the necessity or efficacy of drastic and potentially harmful measures (in retrospect realised harm) such as 'lockdowns' (a prison term) and other interventions affecting half the world, the onus is on governments to prove beyond reasonable doubt that there was a) a new deadly disease for which there was no prophylaxis or treatment and b) that the disease was caused by a new transmissible, replication competent, pathogenic particle. No one made any effort to do either of these things.
Indeed 'outbreaks' of respiratory symptoms not fitting into the 'spread' were ignored. In the UK 'covid' was downgraded (and remains so) from a high consequence disease before the first lockdown. Drosten's PCR technique (not a test) was designed from SARS 1, not a new disease, explaining why his Eurosurveillance paper appeared before the release of the first putative genome of SARS2 by Fan Wu.
Anyone dissenting in anyway from this narrative was targeted on social media with well funded, well organised climate crisis denial, migrant bashing and nonsense about left wing globalists. I had the advantage of knowing how peer review studies are designed to eg. exonerate saturated animal fat so I knew that there wasn't a conspiracy to lock us into 15 min dairy free cities. It was foolish for most of the MAHA to fall for this latest flood of propaganda but the 'left', climate scientists like John Cook and people who should know better, like Naomi Oreskes, smugly going along with the 'covid' measures without looking into the evidence as well as publishing unscientific papers about 'covid' outcomes between Republicans and Democrats and smearing 'anti-vaxxers', didn't help at all. https://jowaller.substack.com/p/those-linking-climate-misinformation?utm_source=publication-search
Thanks Jo. Rather than get into a back-and-forth between us, I'm hoping others who are skeptical of conspiracist ideation will weigh in. Ultimately, our different choices of whom to trust are informed by our individual personalities and cultural milieus. Conspiracism may be the default for some readers.
Hell, the Koch-club-funded climate-change disinformation campaign sounds like a conspiracy theory. Why is that theory now acknowledged as correct by experts and public alike, but distrust in public-health science is almost exclusively a lay attitude? IMO, the crucial difference is that the highly organized, massively-funded climate-change denialist strategy is abundantly, repeatedly documented in the mainstream public record, in highly trusted venues of record like the venerable New Yorker, with its famous fact-checking; I'd hesitate to call the New Yorker "popular", however. You may believe you're in possession of knowledge the majority of trained, disciplined expert peers and respected investigative journalists don't have. But the public and scientific records, built by the same methods used in climate disinformation investigations, do not support you. In either case, I trust that science, at least, will be self-correcting over time.
Smearing and sneering at anyone questioning anything to do with the safety and efficacy of pharma products as having 'conspiracist ideation' is also a great big fat win for pharma as well isn't it? Well done.
Jo, I take offense at that! How can you not see it's self-sealing logic? Can any evidence alter your conviction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory)? Are you going to say Wikipedia is a tool of Pharma? If you produce sufficiently high-quality evidence, I'm willing to change my provisional belief. I get to decide, however, just as you do!
Straw man. I question the safety and efficacy of pharma products all the time. It's always a cost-benefit analysis. It's what genuine skeptics do. Never mind. Your mileage may vary, as we said on Usenet.
'You may believe you're in possession of knowledge the majority of trained, disciplined expert peers and respected investigative journalists don't have. But the public and scientific records, built by the same methods used in climate disinformation investigations, do not support you' I am not in possession of any knowledge that other disciplined, respected and trained 'experts' don't have- but I, like Alfred Wallace and many other critical thinkers before me, can read and can assess experimental design. The evidence presented does not support the received wisdom or dogma of those you 'trust'.
Doctors supporting tobacco, vioxx and thilodamide is within living memory. Now some of them are supporting eating animal products.
I hope that people will learn to think for themselves before harm comes to them, but I doubt they will do.
As regards RFK being a dangerous crank, he has been coopted into the ridiculous stance of throwing seed oils under the bus to save animal fat, but the work that CHD has done on vaccines and pesticides has been very important.
The MMR has not been exonerated. The Cochrane review (no longer an independent body) left out the data which would have shown the association between antibiotic use, black boys, the MMR and autism. This is one of the ways that the peer review and the scientific method is abused by powerful interests. https://jowaller.substack.com/p/mmr-and-autism?utm_source=publication-search
Hi Maladapted, thanks for your engagement. I am not talking specifically about pharma or political corruption, or who's in the pay of them and who is aligned with which movement.
I am talking about specifically about the scientific evidence. Being a scientist with 25 years in histopathology, i don't have to rely on 'experts' (whose training and research is funded by pharma but leaving that aside). We were told 'trust the science', but the science that we were presented with didn't back up any of the measures imposed. And to my mind it didn't take a medical background to see it.
Beginning with the new disease indistinguishable from pneumonia (with similar death rate and demographic to the flu), the test, upon which the pandemic was built, that was developed from SARS1 because Drosten noted some social media reports of a viral like illness in some people on the net, the deaths that respected political borders and which in England and Wales occurred overwhelmingly in care homes and hospitals, coincided with 'good death' midazolam administration and happened to people with an average age of 83 (above the average death age), which boosted the 'covid' excess deaths. Overall the age and population adjusted death rate in 2020, the worst 'covid' year was the same as 2008 and every year before that in E and W. Whatever you think of Fauci etc personally- the measures for this flu like illness with no specific test were crazy and were not evidenced.
There doesn't have to be a conspiracy, just enough social and professional pressure to not speak out, to not look deeper and to accept the superficial reading of the peer review. For example; the interpretation of metagenomics, where computer operators picked, in the original Fan Wu et al paper, a genome out of a million putative ones from one sample and declare it's the cause of the one patient's symptoms and thus everyone else's new disease; without correlating its presence in others with and without the alleged new disease; to accept this as fact, when this is not how the scientific method works at all, is an error.
The scientific method, of rigorous and open debate and continuous attempts to prove your own and others reasoning and interpretation wrong, was, in my observation, abandoned and discredited by 'covid'.
This has been unfairly, but deliberately, used to discredit all science, particularly climate science, to the fossil fuel and animal ag's (pharma's biggest client and major disease market creator) advantage..
Yes Roger, good to hear that you are still going. We have dealt with energy for a looong time and especially ocean heat content.
This is a review:
Cheng, L., K. von Schuckmann, J. P. Abraham, K. E. Trenberth, M. E. Mann, L. Zanna, M. H. England, J. D. Zika, J. T. Fasullo, Y. Yu, Y. Pan, J. Zhu, E. R. Newsom, B. Bronselaer, X. Lin, 2022: Past and future ocean warming. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. 776–794. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-022-00345-1
but we have had annual reports on OHC for many years. e.g.
Cheng, L., K. E. Trenberth, J. Fasullo, J. Abraham, T. Boyer, K. von Schuckmann, J. Zhu, 2018: Taking the pulse of the planet. Earth and Space Science News, Eos, 99, 14-16. https://doi.org/10.1029/2017EO081839.
You may find this illuminating:
Trenberth. K.E., L. Cheng, Y. Pan, J. Fasullo and M. Mayer, 2025: Distinctive pattern of global warming in ocean heat content J. Climate, 38, 2155-2168 https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-24-0609.1
This avoids the complexities that you raise in your post. Of course we need surface air temperature for a wide range of other uses, but global warming is not an optimal use for it.
Second, even using surface air temperatures, if the goal is to assess heating, the component of heat in water vapor must also be included. This was proposed in
Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, and J. Morgan, 2004: Assessing "global warming" with surface heat content. Eos, 85, No. 21, 210-211.
Matthews, T., M. Byrne, R. Horton, C Murphy, R.A. Pielke Sr., C. Raymond, P. Thorne, and R.L. Wilby, 2022: Latent heat must be visible in climate communications. Wires, https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.779
And effectively a better metric just in terms of human experience, where the inability to achieve evaporative cooling leads to the physiological harm that the people in the Indus Valley suffer.
"This is somewhat compensated for by subsequent adjustments to land temperature records, but global raw temperatures continue to show more warming compared to homogenized data through 2024."
From the figure accompanying that statement it's clear that starting from any time since the 1940s adjustment, the homogenized data shows MORE warming compared to the raw data. Take the anomalies around the 1950 - 1980 mean instead to see what I mean.
Well, if you wish to consider yourself as moving the conversation forward, you could begin by quoting what I said that you think is wrong, and show us why …
… or you could sit on the sidelines and make vague unpleasant negative comments.
Nope. The Bayesian null hypothesis is that you are peddling denialism for the hell of it. It's up to you to show otherwise. That hasn't happened yet, AFAICT.
The main problem that skeptics I know have: temperatures are nearly allways displayed as "anomolies". Sometimes "seasonally adjusted". They do not trust the possible unintended bias or competency of these calculations. They do trust that climate scientists mean well. All of the skeptics I know are well educated.
The habit of showing the (often impressive) temperature anomalies we're experiencing has got people using them in the wrong contexts: Some on the hurricane watch blog will post the SST or ocean heat anomalies when what matters for tropical cyclones is the *absolute* temperature.
I myself have often whined that climate scientists speaking to the public should be cautious in using measures like global mean sea level rise or averaged warming over the planet, as they are not as useful to public as what they should expect locally (especially SLR).
Good point. I like precise language, but I can't speak for the rest of the public. I like to highlight the connection between enhanced greenhouse warming, which is global and scientifically shown to be anthropogenic; and climate change, which can be regional and local. Local climates are defined by observed weather statistics on multiple dimensions: temperature, rainfall, wind direction and speed, etc. Every place on Earth has a climate, wherein every weather event is on a statistical distribution. Both modal and extreme values are shifting incrementally in most places, due to global fossil carbon emissions.
IMHO that should be emphasized when communicating with the non-DK-afflicted public. Hurricane Harvey's gulf coast rainfall in 2017, the PNW heat dome of 2021, the TX hill country flash floods of 2025: new local record extreme weather events, made more extreme by global warming. The trends are measurable throughout the world, but there's nothing like feeling the outdoor temperature soar to 49.6 °C (121.3 °F) before your inland B.C. town burns down, to reinforce the message. We here should not wish for such human tragedy to increase, but until enough of the public gets the message, we can only watch and warn. For better or worse, we do not rule!
This is a useful commentary, although, as indicated in some comments, it is quite a bit more complex. For instance the depth of the engine intake varies with ships and also whether they are laden or not. But the main point I want to make is that the biggest uncertainties relate to data gaps. There are few if any observations over the southern oceans and Antarctica prior to the IGY (1957-58). What is assumed in the data gaps greatly influences the trend. For instance, NOAA in its analysis of ocean heat has used a fixed climatology and since the climate is warming, this has led to quite a lot of valid observations being discarded as too far out in recent years. As a result their trend is underestimated.
Hi Kevin, I agree that its more complicated; one could write an entire post (and I have written papers) about each individual type of instrument change or bias. Interpolation methods are also a driver of differences between records, though in my experience they are smaller (e.g. HadCRUT vs Berkeley Earth or NOAA vs NASA) than differences in SST products used (the two are, of course, not completely independent).
Hi Kevin and Mike- It’s good to be on the same venue discussing this subject. As I wrote in my earlier comment on this thread, we now have a more robust way to assess global warming. The record is over 20 years wrt ocean heat content changes.
While I agree assessment of surface temperatures remain essential (such for SSTs and water vapor input to the atmosphere), ocean heat content changes provides our best estimate of the Earth’s radiative imbalance.
Roger, the problem I have with the ocean heat content data is the size of the uncertainties claimed by the investigators. I'd be interested in your comments on my post below.
Thanks for all your good work,
w.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/26/decimals-of-precision-trenberths-missing-heat/
Hi Willis
The advantage of using ocean heat content changes to diagnose global warming is that the ocean is a time-space integrator of heating/cooling. A low pass filter.
Uncertainty is quantified at
https://www.data.jma.go.jp/kaiyou/english/ohc/ohc_global_en.html
In contrast, surface temperatures, particularly on land, have much more heterogeneity. We certainly need surface air temperatures for local and regional climate assessments, but for a global average to diagnose global warming, its a poor metric when we have a better replacement.
Thanks, Dr. Roger. I asked some very specific questions in my linked file. Any chance you might answer them? Here's the questions:
"So, assuming there are no problems with my math, they are claiming that they can measure the temperature rise of the top mile of the global ocean to within 0.004°C per year. That seems way too small an error to me. But is it too small? If we have lots and lots of observations, surely we can get the error down to that small?
Here’s the problem with their claim that the error is that small. I’ve raised this question at Judith’s and elsewhere, and gotten no answer. So I am posing the question again, in the hope that someone can unravel the puzzle.
We know that to get a smaller error by one decimal, we need a hundred times more observations per decimal point. But the same is true in reverse. If we need less precision, we don’t need as many observations. If we need one less decimal point, we can do it with one-hundredth of the observations.
Currently, they claim an error of ± 0.004°C (four thousandths of a degree) for the annual average upper ocean temperature from the observations of the three thousand or so Argo buoys.
But that means that if we are satisfied with an error of ± 0.04°C (four hundredths of a degree), we could do it with a hundredth of the number of observations, or about 30 Argo buoys. And it also indicates that 3 Argo buoys could measure that same huge volume, the entire global ocean from pole to pole, to within a tenth of a degree.
And that is the problem I see. There’s no possible way that thirty buoys could measure the top mile of the whole ocean to that kind of accuracy, four hundredths of a degree C. The ocean is far too large and varied for thirty Argo floats to do that.
What am I missing here? Have I made some major math mistake? Their claimed error seems to be way out of line for the number of observations. I’ve not been able to find a good explanation of how they come up with these claims of extreme precision, but however they’re doing it, my math doesn’t support it."
Thanks for all your good work,
w.
Hi Willis - I recommend you contact Argo directly to answer this question. Closer to the surface changes likely are larger. Also, there is satellite data that combine with the bouys.
For further discussion of this topic, see this Substack post
https://open.substack.com/pub/rogerpielkejr/p/wheres-the-heat?r=6ke4w&utm_medium=ios
Sez you! If scientists weren't messing with the temperature measurements, those crocuses wouldn't be popping up early!
In addition to biases from the change from bucket measurements for SST prior to WWII to engine intake temperature during WWII and thereafter (a reason being so not shining a flashlight on deck during the observation, fearing a submarine might then sink the ship), there was a very different mix of ships traveling a range of different routes, sometimes heavily laden with war supplies, etc. with the engines working very hard (so sampling deeper water and bringing it into a very hot engine room) and other times lightly laden (so sampling closer to the surface and a less hot engine room)--all this and not reporting SSTs accurately in transmissions as this could give away where the ship is located. Getting all the biases out, given limited information, is proving very difficult. What I find very interesting is that if one looks at the temperature record for the oceans (which seems to very clearly suggest a significant bias--with virtually no bias appearing in the land only record) and for the global record that has the warm bias of ocean waters in it, and then covers the WWII period with your finger, the general impression of the change in global average temperature is quite different than if one looks at the record with the bias in it. With the WWII years covered, one sees a generally consistent warming with a sort of flattening mid-century likely due to sulfate induced cooling as a result of lofting coal plan emissions through tall stacks and so extending their lifetimes. On the other hand, an interpretation of the full record with the bias showing, the peak during WWII has been suggested by GHG contrarians to be due to solar forcing and recovery from the Little Ice Age when solar is thought to have been diminished even though this would imply a climate sensitivity well above what is thought to be the case as the changes in solar seem likely to have been quite small. It really seems to me that since the WWII both have a lot of likely biases and the biases seem able to change the interpretation of the 20th century record, it might really be best to just omit the observations for that period as irrecoverably flawed.
Living is easy(er) with eyes closed. (John Lennon). Sceptists refuse the evidence because they refuse the fact our abuses on Nature are causing climates changes.
The reason the brainwashing, that got a boost from the OTT 'covid' measures discrediting science, was so successful was that, of course, people want to hear that there's no crisis and nothing to worry about. That they can continue burning fossil fuels, driving and flying and consuming animal products (though many now like the more expensive green and compassion washed kind) without guilt. Easy to sell them a conspiracy of left wing government controlling and impoverishing us with plant based burgers and renewables.
Jo, you and I agree on some, maybe most things, but your MAHA-adjacent position isn't one of them. One doesn't have to overlook the greater-or-lesser corruption of segments of medical science by the pharmaceutical industry, to wish you'd left out the "OTT 'covid' measures discrediting science" part. If you're going to respond, please read my whole comment first.
Yes, vaccine manufacturers made handsome profits, but AFAICT the public benefit of reduced mortality and morbidity from what they would otherwise have been, justified the public expense. Shutdowns, masking and distancing requirements may have been costly and/or intrusive, but they too saved lives. Over the top? Maybe in the sensationalist media, traditional and social. Just how OTT will only be known in hindsight if at all, but neither perfect nor even "cost-effective" results were ever guaranteed. I'm in a high-risk age group, and I'm just grateful to have survived my single COVID episode, striking after three vaccine doses when it arrived in my home on a flight with my sister, also thrice-vaccinated; we both sat around coughing for a couple of days, until she was well enough to go home. The head cold I caught last month hit me harder.
Similar to our understanding of climate change, over two centuries of science backed up the development of mRNA vaccines. I'm acquainted with a number of retired virologists, immunologists, and epidemiologists, not currently paid by the pharmaceutical industry. They all agree COVID was (and is) a hard problem, with complete resolution improbable. None of them blames Anthony Fauci for anything that happened in the pandemic. And they agree the CDC may have been poorly led, but was not corrupt (at least not until this year), merely not up to the challenge of COVID. They agree that RFK Jr. is a dangerous crank, possibly due to a brain worm (I'm kidding about the worm, even if he's not). I'm afraid anti-vaxx and anti-public-health denialists and conspiracists have sadly damaged the public's trust of vaccines as well as non-therapeutic collective measures, with increasing infectious disease burden a likely consequence. Some resurgent historical microbe may even see me off. Reality will have the last word, as always.
We can agree to disagree, but like Prof. Dessler, I believe the primary connection between MAGA AGW denial and MAHA vaccine/public-health denial is simply the overarching enmity of plutocracy and the US Republican Party toward science, because science empowers collective intervention to limit the social costs of the otherwise-"free" market. Yet the tens of $billions/year in profits to COVID vaccine manufacturers are dwarfed by the $trillions/year at stake for the fossil fuel industry. There's less malice (i.e. money), more stupidity (i.e. ignorance and manipulated distrust of science) in MAHA than in AGW denial!
PS. In order to discuss the necessity or efficacy of drastic and potentially harmful measures (in retrospect realised harm) such as 'lockdowns' (a prison term) and other interventions affecting half the world, the onus is on governments to prove beyond reasonable doubt that there was a) a new deadly disease for which there was no prophylaxis or treatment and b) that the disease was caused by a new transmissible, replication competent, pathogenic particle. No one made any effort to do either of these things.
Indeed 'outbreaks' of respiratory symptoms not fitting into the 'spread' were ignored. In the UK 'covid' was downgraded (and remains so) from a high consequence disease before the first lockdown. Drosten's PCR technique (not a test) was designed from SARS 1, not a new disease, explaining why his Eurosurveillance paper appeared before the release of the first putative genome of SARS2 by Fan Wu.
Anyone dissenting in anyway from this narrative was targeted on social media with well funded, well organised climate crisis denial, migrant bashing and nonsense about left wing globalists. I had the advantage of knowing how peer review studies are designed to eg. exonerate saturated animal fat so I knew that there wasn't a conspiracy to lock us into 15 min dairy free cities. It was foolish for most of the MAHA to fall for this latest flood of propaganda but the 'left', climate scientists like John Cook and people who should know better, like Naomi Oreskes, smugly going along with the 'covid' measures without looking into the evidence as well as publishing unscientific papers about 'covid' outcomes between Republicans and Democrats and smearing 'anti-vaxxers', didn't help at all. https://jowaller.substack.com/p/those-linking-climate-misinformation?utm_source=publication-search
Thanks Jo. Rather than get into a back-and-forth between us, I'm hoping others who are skeptical of conspiracist ideation will weigh in. Ultimately, our different choices of whom to trust are informed by our individual personalities and cultural milieus. Conspiracism may be the default for some readers.
Hell, the Koch-club-funded climate-change disinformation campaign sounds like a conspiracy theory. Why is that theory now acknowledged as correct by experts and public alike, but distrust in public-health science is almost exclusively a lay attitude? IMO, the crucial difference is that the highly organized, massively-funded climate-change denialist strategy is abundantly, repeatedly documented in the mainstream public record, in highly trusted venues of record like the venerable New Yorker, with its famous fact-checking; I'd hesitate to call the New Yorker "popular", however. You may believe you're in possession of knowledge the majority of trained, disciplined expert peers and respected investigative journalists don't have. But the public and scientific records, built by the same methods used in climate disinformation investigations, do not support you. In either case, I trust that science, at least, will be self-correcting over time.
Smearing and sneering at anyone questioning anything to do with the safety and efficacy of pharma products as having 'conspiracist ideation' is also a great big fat win for pharma as well isn't it? Well done.
Jo, I take offense at that! How can you not see it's self-sealing logic? Can any evidence alter your conviction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory)? Are you going to say Wikipedia is a tool of Pharma? If you produce sufficiently high-quality evidence, I'm willing to change my provisional belief. I get to decide, however, just as you do!
Straw man. I question the safety and efficacy of pharma products all the time. It's always a cost-benefit analysis. It's what genuine skeptics do. Never mind. Your mileage may vary, as we said on Usenet.
'You may believe you're in possession of knowledge the majority of trained, disciplined expert peers and respected investigative journalists don't have. But the public and scientific records, built by the same methods used in climate disinformation investigations, do not support you' I am not in possession of any knowledge that other disciplined, respected and trained 'experts' don't have- but I, like Alfred Wallace and many other critical thinkers before me, can read and can assess experimental design. The evidence presented does not support the received wisdom or dogma of those you 'trust'.
Doctors supporting tobacco, vioxx and thilodamide is within living memory. Now some of them are supporting eating animal products.
I hope that people will learn to think for themselves before harm comes to them, but I doubt they will do.
As regards RFK being a dangerous crank, he has been coopted into the ridiculous stance of throwing seed oils under the bus to save animal fat, but the work that CHD has done on vaccines and pesticides has been very important.
The MMR has not been exonerated. The Cochrane review (no longer an independent body) left out the data which would have shown the association between antibiotic use, black boys, the MMR and autism. This is one of the ways that the peer review and the scientific method is abused by powerful interests. https://jowaller.substack.com/p/mmr-and-autism?utm_source=publication-search
Hi Maladapted, thanks for your engagement. I am not talking specifically about pharma or political corruption, or who's in the pay of them and who is aligned with which movement.
I am talking about specifically about the scientific evidence. Being a scientist with 25 years in histopathology, i don't have to rely on 'experts' (whose training and research is funded by pharma but leaving that aside). We were told 'trust the science', but the science that we were presented with didn't back up any of the measures imposed. And to my mind it didn't take a medical background to see it.
Beginning with the new disease indistinguishable from pneumonia (with similar death rate and demographic to the flu), the test, upon which the pandemic was built, that was developed from SARS1 because Drosten noted some social media reports of a viral like illness in some people on the net, the deaths that respected political borders and which in England and Wales occurred overwhelmingly in care homes and hospitals, coincided with 'good death' midazolam administration and happened to people with an average age of 83 (above the average death age), which boosted the 'covid' excess deaths. Overall the age and population adjusted death rate in 2020, the worst 'covid' year was the same as 2008 and every year before that in E and W. Whatever you think of Fauci etc personally- the measures for this flu like illness with no specific test were crazy and were not evidenced.
There doesn't have to be a conspiracy, just enough social and professional pressure to not speak out, to not look deeper and to accept the superficial reading of the peer review. For example; the interpretation of metagenomics, where computer operators picked, in the original Fan Wu et al paper, a genome out of a million putative ones from one sample and declare it's the cause of the one patient's symptoms and thus everyone else's new disease; without correlating its presence in others with and without the alleged new disease; to accept this as fact, when this is not how the scientific method works at all, is an error.
The scientific method, of rigorous and open debate and continuous attempts to prove your own and others reasoning and interpretation wrong, was, in my observation, abandoned and discredited by 'covid'.
This has been unfairly, but deliberately, used to discredit all science, particularly climate science, to the fossil fuel and animal ag's (pharma's biggest client and major disease market creator) advantage..
Yes Roger, good to hear that you are still going. We have dealt with energy for a looong time and especially ocean heat content.
This is a review:
Cheng, L., K. von Schuckmann, J. P. Abraham, K. E. Trenberth, M. E. Mann, L. Zanna, M. H. England, J. D. Zika, J. T. Fasullo, Y. Yu, Y. Pan, J. Zhu, E. R. Newsom, B. Bronselaer, X. Lin, 2022: Past and future ocean warming. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. 776–794. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-022-00345-1
but we have had annual reports on OHC for many years. e.g.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-025-4541-3.
This article indeed detailed your suggestions:
Cheng, L., K. E. Trenberth, J. Fasullo, J. Abraham, T. Boyer, K. von Schuckmann, J. Zhu, 2018: Taking the pulse of the planet. Earth and Space Science News, Eos, 99, 14-16. https://doi.org/10.1029/2017EO081839.
You may find this illuminating:
Trenberth. K.E., L. Cheng, Y. Pan, J. Fasullo and M. Mayer, 2025: Distinctive pattern of global warming in ocean heat content J. Climate, 38, 2155-2168 https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-24-0609.1
Kevin
In discussing use of surface air temperature to assess global warming, there are these two other issues to consider.
First, ocean heat content change is a more robust to monitor his warming. This was discussed in
Pielke Sr., R.A., 2003: Heat storage within the Earth system. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 84, 331-335.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/r-247.pdf
which was motivated by
Ellis et al. 1978: The annual variation in the global heat balance of the Earth. J. Geophys. Res., 83, 1958-1962
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/ellis-et-al-jgr-1978.pdf
Latest values can be viewed, for example, at
https://www.data.jma.go.jp/kaiyou/english/ohc/ohc_global_en.html
This avoids the complexities that you raise in your post. Of course we need surface air temperature for a wide range of other uses, but global warming is not an optimal use for it.
Second, even using surface air temperatures, if the goal is to assess heating, the component of heat in water vapor must also be included. This was proposed in
Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, and J. Morgan, 2004: Assessing "global warming" with surface heat content. Eos, 85, No. 21, 210-211.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/r-290.pdf
and assessed recently in
Matthews, T., M. Byrne, R. Horton, C Murphy, R.A. Pielke Sr., C. Raymond, P. Thorne, and R.L. Wilby, 2022: Latent heat must be visible in climate communications. Wires, https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.779
Latent heat. Interesting!
And effectively a better metric just in terms of human experience, where the inability to achieve evaporative cooling leads to the physiological harm that the people in the Indus Valley suffer.
Thanks, Zeke. I fear you have a typo when you say
"This is somewhat compensated for by subsequent adjustments to land temperature records, but global raw temperatures continue to show more warming compared to homogenized data through 2024."
From the figure accompanying that statement it's clear that starting from any time since the 1940s adjustment, the homogenized data shows MORE warming compared to the raw data. Take the anomalies around the 1950 - 1980 mean instead to see what I mean.
What am I missing here?
w.
"What am I missing here?"
LOL! Where to begin?
Well, if you wish to consider yourself as moving the conversation forward, you could begin by quoting what I said that you think is wrong, and show us why …
… or you could sit on the sidelines and make vague unpleasant negative comments.
Your choice.
w.
Nope. The Bayesian null hypothesis is that you are peddling denialism for the hell of it. It's up to you to show otherwise. That hasn't happened yet, AFAICT.
Thanks - for a very comprehensive assessment
The main problem that skeptics I know have: temperatures are nearly allways displayed as "anomolies". Sometimes "seasonally adjusted". They do not trust the possible unintended bias or competency of these calculations. They do trust that climate scientists mean well. All of the skeptics I know are well educated.
The habit of showing the (often impressive) temperature anomalies we're experiencing has got people using them in the wrong contexts: Some on the hurricane watch blog will post the SST or ocean heat anomalies when what matters for tropical cyclones is the *absolute* temperature.
I myself have often whined that climate scientists speaking to the public should be cautious in using measures like global mean sea level rise or averaged warming over the planet, as they are not as useful to public as what they should expect locally (especially SLR).
Good point. I like precise language, but I can't speak for the rest of the public. I like to highlight the connection between enhanced greenhouse warming, which is global and scientifically shown to be anthropogenic; and climate change, which can be regional and local. Local climates are defined by observed weather statistics on multiple dimensions: temperature, rainfall, wind direction and speed, etc. Every place on Earth has a climate, wherein every weather event is on a statistical distribution. Both modal and extreme values are shifting incrementally in most places, due to global fossil carbon emissions.
IMHO that should be emphasized when communicating with the non-DK-afflicted public. Hurricane Harvey's gulf coast rainfall in 2017, the PNW heat dome of 2021, the TX hill country flash floods of 2025: new local record extreme weather events, made more extreme by global warming. The trends are measurable throughout the world, but there's nothing like feeling the outdoor temperature soar to 49.6 °C (121.3 °F) before your inland B.C. town burns down, to reinforce the message. We here should not wish for such human tragedy to increase, but until enough of the public gets the message, we can only watch and warn. For better or worse, we do not rule!
LOL! What do you think about that, Zeke?
I would note that if you are using Celsius or Fahrenheit as your unit of measure you are already using a temperature anomaly.
I've wondered if we recorded planetary warming and children's fevers in kelvin:
A child with a temperature of 313K instead of 310K has—pfft—a measly 1 percent increase in temperature. What's the big deal?