The Money Behind The Climate Denial Movement (2013)

To roll back to your parent: "let me say that I'm not a climate skeptic ... yet"

I suspect it's unlikely, or that you would be convinced, but I make just one recommendation. If you haven't read or watched the movie of "Merchants of Doubt", you should as it's both a very revealing and very depressing read. The book has more depth, but the movie is more insightful as you get body language. Via interviews with the notable criminals, and TV clips. Like the fellow with a bloody big grin telling that he couldn't touch Hansen on the science, so took to discrediting him personally and had a good laugh about it. Or Heartland or CATO Institute's, I forget which, entirely scam inverse IPCC report - identical match on look and feel even to number of pages. Except says the opposite. With nary a science degree between the lot of them. Send it to every US representative, claim it's truth.

It's tobacco 2.0, and not limited to climate. Every method, every technique, every claim. From the same PR agencies and bullshit institutes, the same people who claimed there's no link between smoking and health now on TV claiming there's no warming. Then again that there is warming and it's a great thing, we should have more of it! etc. You might even understand why, on balance, I am more leery of industry than academia.

Check it out. Thankfully Europe is not nearly so scary yet. Even in the US leaning UK.

So, specifics:

Moving is probably the lesser cases for data adjustment of what springs to mind. There'll be transcription errors, calibration errors affecting a particular station or sensor, methodology and more general systemic errors, such as sea temperature readings as we discover the ship might have an effect on some methods, or that US Navy logs truncated some historic readings, IIRC rounding down to whole degrees only. I tried to find a link to the Navy story, but that seems thoroughly buried by denial results.

I come back to the very tedious simple question. What is in it for the Met Office to fraudulently and inaccurately rig their dataset? Their entire reputation, and the majority of income, depends on accurate weather and climate forecasts. What matters for their future is that they match with reality, otherwise they lose contracts to those who can match reality. They've made a few famous mistakes over their decades of forecasting too. So no, not perfect.

Then the multiple leaked internal oil company reports, not for public consumption. They have been accurately, surprisingly accurately, predicting effects since the 1950s. Even they have overshot some of the predictions - yet whilst they are claiming rising temperatures, I don't hear claims Exxon and BP are in the pocket of the great global climate conspiracy.

> One of the pillars of science is providing your raw data

Absolutely. Providing raw data set so others can audit and replicate, or find faults. Not presenting as the definitive raw graph to show a gullible public it's not happening at all.

Some things don't need adjusting, others require everything be. Weather recording will be somewhere in between. My only work exposure to sensors via software was liquid pressure sensors many decades ago, and entirely unrelated to climate. Every single reading bar none needed adjusting to fit the unique calibration of that particular sensor. Re-calibration was needed regularly. It was a pain in the ass, as that was a manual "send out an engineer" recalibration.

The blog overlays raw results to show there is no climate effect. Are you seriously claiming they have adequately invalidated every adjustment? Why isn't there a paper to read about in Nature? Presuming they haven't invalidated every last one, that's misleading in the extreme.

I'm perfectly comfortable that someone may find reason to suspect or exclude some data, and some adjustments. In fact I would expect it in every sizeable dataset. All? That better have some compelling basis. There's none. Just claims of fabrication.

So reading from your start point: There looks like reason for suspicion of one localised set of results. Except immediately after he's talking of disproving the hockey stick. Time to stop reading. No point digging for context, or looking to original source.

This is astonishingly well worn ground, and Muller, the instigator of that particular conspiracy theory, famously 100% recanted and has since set up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy

I'm out.

I can kinda understand how someone lacking any sense of balance, nuance, history could support Freedom Speeches™. That money is speech, and more money means more freedom, booyah. Some people are just wired to believe that might makes right.

But believing that corporations have the same rights, but none of the pesky responsibilities & obligations, as natural persons really is just misanthropic.

>Republicans (65%) are more likely than Democrats (42%) to favor the use of nuclear power throughout Gallup's trend dating back to 1994.

Democrats are now starting to come around. But Republicans have been in favor of nuclear since before you even heard of climate change.

Also, legislation isn't the only part of the story, so are lawsuits. Do you think environmentalist groups like the Sierra club who have a history of burying efforts to build plants in lawsuits are more closely associated with Democrats or Republicans?

Is CO2 responsible for about 50% of warming since 1850? Or 100%? or more than 100%, but natural variations have masked part of the warming we would have seen?

> whether global warming is a problem or a benefit

Is the warming we've had since 1850 primarily a problem or a benefit (hint: most lay people would say problem, but it has been overwhelmingly beneficial).