Stuck within a Failed Paradigm, Trump’s Climate Scientists Defer to IPCC Modelling. Shame

Counterpoint #15

President Trump’s Energy Department published a report last Tuesday essentially endorsing the human-caused global warming carbon-conspiracy (link to DOE report here). It is not being reported as such, it is being reported as authored by climate deniers who are attacking climate science, but that is just gaslighting or is it an inability to understand the limitations of the current paradigm (link to New York Times)?

The new DOE report entitled A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate, authored by John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick and Roy Spencer, has surprised me both in its scope and the extent to which it is essentially an endorsement of the current failed paradigm that climate change is human-caused. The Christy et al. report operates within the existing paradigm, critiquing IPCC excesses but not proposing any new hypotheses or methods. Worse, while claiming to be data and critical of general circulation modelling, it continually reverts to output from general circulation models to draw conclusions, ignoring studies that provide experimental measurements including for calculating Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) as I will show.

The day after the report was released in the USA with fake accusations that this was an attack on mainstream climate science, here in Australia a new parliamentary committee was established ostensibly to prevent disinformation on climate science (link to Australian inquiry here). I’ve been told that my blog and this Substack are part of an aggressive and coordinated disinformation campaign on climate change. In fact, I have been proposing an alternative paradigm, that undermines the foundation of human-caused climate change theory. For over two decades, I have been simply attempting a more evidence-based approach to climate science specifically through the application of artificial neural networks for rainfall forecasting. I have continually emphasised that the reasonable test of the value of any scientific theory is its utility, not the number of institutions that subscribe to it.

My father was a farmer, and like all farmers he was interested in the weather especially long-range forecasts. After the catastrophic flooding of the city of Brisbane in 2011 because at the time the general circulation models were forecasting endless drought and so key reservoirs were kept full of water despite the changing sea surface temperature patterns across the Pacific. Back in 2011 I constructed arrays of data to show the benefits of using artificial neural networks (a form of AI) instead of general circulation models. I was working with John Abbot who at the time was using this same AI modelling technique for share-market trading. We ended up developing a new technique for seasonal rainfall forecasting based on the concept of a dynamical climate system. Some years later, we applied this same method to calculate an Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) and had our method published in a climate science journal.

An ECS refers to the equilibrium change in global mean near-surface temperature that would result from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. It is something that preoccupies those interested in the politics of climate change, and is a focus of the new DOE report.

Back in 2011, after the catastrophic flooding of Brisbane, John Abbot and I went to the long range forecasting unit at the Australia Bureau of Meteorology, keen to demonstrate our technique, and share our data.

They weren’t interested. As their argument went, our method could not work because we relied on historical data as our input, while the climate was on a new trajectory. It didn’t matter that we could demonstrate a significantly better skill score for monthly rainfall forecasting than the Bureau was achieving with its general circulation models – they weren’t interested. The climate, they argued was on a new trajectory because of the rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, that was causing a significant reduction in the loss of long wave radiation to space.

Further this heating up of the atmosphere was causing further heating up from positive feedback specifically from water vapour because, as their argument goes, warm air holds more water vapour, that is also a greenhouse gas. This is the essence of human-caused global warming theory as endorsed by the IPCC and is the framework, by which I mean the same paradigm, used by John Christy et al. in their new DOE report.

When I started out, I assumed the Bureau of Meteorology and climate scientists more generally, were interested first and foremost in better weather and climate forecasts. I’ve since discovered in the West, this is rarely a primary motivation and the skill of such rainfall forecasts, for example, is not a consideration of the new DOE report. The situation is quite different in countries like Indonesia, where I have the privilege of teaching my new method of monthly rainfall forecasting using AI.

It is never quite as it seems with politics in the West and especially the USA; whether the Democrats or Republicans are in power, and along the way there is always much gaslighting and it is perhaps also, at least in part, because they have no real understanding of the framework limiting their public policy decision making. In Indonesia, by contrast, there seems to be an understanding within the intellectual class at least, that the headdresses about the women, the hijab, may be in deference to those with political power and as a symbol of modesty and faith. It does not affect the capacity of these women to choose the best models and tools for rainfall forecasting.

The new DOE report claims to review scientific certainties and uncertainties in how anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gas emissions have affected, or will affect, climate. In fact, it is severely limited by the apparent inability of the five authors to understand or accept the paradigm within which they operate and the severe limitations that this has imposed especially on their thinking including choice of models and tools.

So far, criticisms of the DOE report in the mainstream media lacks any understanding of this, because in the West it is simply unacceptable to criticise the theory of human-caused global warming. That could be interpreted as a sign of disrespect to the environment. Unable to grasp the science and how it is limited by the peculiar morality that has developed around the current climate science paradigm, mainstream reporting has instead focused on the authors, rather than the substance of what they have written.

Consider Judith Curry for example, one of the authors of this report, you only need to read her testimony under oath to know that she is not in any real way critical of the current paradigm. Her criticisms of its many exaggerations, the many exaggerations of the IPCC, for example, have in the past been misinterpreted as a criticism of its main thesis. This has no doubt been convenient for her at different times. Specifically, there is an episode in the 16-part podcast series about the trial of Mark Steyn for defamation, bought on by the king of climate science jokers, Michael Mann. Curry is called to give evidence. Asked about her credentials, she insists she is not a climate denier because, quoting from the actual transcript of what was said in the Washington DC courtroom:

“Overruled. Dr. Curry, is it true? Are you a climate denier?

"Of course not. Calling me a climate denier was something that was initiated and perpetuated by Michael Mann. I, along with all other climate scientists, understand that the Earth's temperature has been warming for about the past 150 years and that humans are contributing to that.

"It makes absolutely no sense to call a climate researcher a climate denier. Look, I'm an old school environmentalist. I love nature and work very hard to minimize my footprint on the planet.

"Our house has 28 solar panels, two Tesla power walls for battery storage. We drive an electric vehicle, and we have an electric heat pump and on and on it goes. In terms of travel, since February of 2020, this is the fourth airplane flight I've taken.

"None of them were international flights, so my climate footprint is much smaller than the jet-setting climate celebrities who are calling me a denier.”

So, according to Curry, the climate has been warming for 150 years, and don’t you go travelling anywhere especially not on a jet plane to see the world or broaden your horizon.

Judith Curry doesn’t at all fit the MAGA movement caricature and she believes in human-caused climate change. And she was chosen along with four other PhDs to put together a report for the Trump administration on climate change ostensibly to support the repeal of the Endangerment Legislation, considered a cornerstone of U.S. climate regulation that declares greenhouse gases like CO2 a threat to public health and welfare.

My reading of the new report, with Curry as a coauthor, is that it is a shocking betrayal of the traditional scientific method. By way of comparison, as disappointing as the Epstein fiasco but with more significant public policy implications especially for energy policy and also our capacity in The West to develop a theory of climate change that has any utility. More usually, and in Indonesia as an example, the usefulness of the paradigm and the tools used, are assessed in terms of their capacity to deliver a more reliable forecast of some aspect of climate. So, the Indonesian Bureau of Meteorology engaged me to teach their youngest and brightest meteorologists how to construct arrays of relevant climate variables and input this data into artificial neural networks, as a method for rainfall forecasting. Meanwhile the institutions in the West are intent on gaslighting, to the extent that there is even now a new committee established by the Australian parliament with the objective of cancelling me, and others who are at all critical of the current theory of human-caused global warming.

The new DOE report relies almost entirely on IPCC reports, that in turn rely on general circulation models, that are based on the failed paradigm of human-caused global warming. This is the very same theory that this new DOE is meant to be assessing. It is in no way “critical” of the theory and yet, as they so often do, the US media and the US government are pretending otherwise. To be sure, the new DOE report does not consider other methods for rainfall forecasting, for example AI, that we already know from my extensive list of publications with John Abbot, can provide a more reliable monthly and thus also seasonal, rainfall forecasting, neither do the authors, Curry included, seriously consider alternative experimental methods for calculating ECS, though they claim to.

Further, as I will discuss in future Substack posts, the report does not consider that increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide may be a consequence of increases in temperature, that changes in global mean temperature always precede changes in carbon dioxide. To be sure, the empirical data clearly shows that natural sources of carbon dioxide, both in terms of sinks and also sources, far outweigh those due to human activity.

Let me place all of this in some context because to understand the extent of the gaslighting – remember, this is a form of psychological manipulation – it is best to have an external reference.

Books, however old fashioned, can be useful. They can provide historical context, critical when history is continually being rewritten such that you might come to believe that Judith Curry has ever been in any way critical of human-caused global warming as a theory and that this paradigm is in any way based on an accurate assessment of even the last two hundred years of temperature measurements.

So, indulge me for a moment. Let me begin with reference to some of the information in three of my old books, published in the 1970s before the IPCC and the political triumph of general circulation models that extends to this new DOE report.

I do have a small library of books on climate, including several published in the 1970s that all concern themselves with global cooling. There is the book by Harvard University professor John Imbrie and his science journalist wife Katherine Palmer Imbrie about the coming ice age. A book by BBC journalist Nigel Calder begins with reference to the “meteorological upsets of the early 1970s” and the threat of food shortages and starvation should the climate cool further. Then there is the textbook by H.H. Lamb, a past Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), University of East Anglia, who wrote about carbon dioxide and the cooling temperature trend with comment: “The Observed decline of global temperatures since 1945 implies some other factor exercising about three times as strong an effect (in the opposite direction) as the C02 increase (page 46).

This cooling trend, the focus of much academic discussion in the 1970s, is absent from contemporary official temperature reconstructions as the IPCC uses entirely remodelled series, the technical term is homogenised. The historical temperature series are changed so that they better accord with the current paradigm which is concerned with human-caused global warming and a transition to so-called renewable energy sources that is making the global elite, particularly the bankers in the US, even richer. The financial implications of mandating a change in energy are significant, particularly with the invention of the carbon market that has become a direct source of revenue for bankers including here in Australia. All of this is underpinned by human-caused global warming theory, that in turn rely on general circulation models.

Some scientists will change data in plain sight so that it accords with what is fashionable, others will hang-on to the evidence, the real numbers, and attempt to minimise the internal conflict. Of course, it would be much better if everyone did proper science which would require acknowledging that long temperatures series are messy, because there is much regional variability, always with an underlying oscillatory pattern whether considering daily, monthly or annual temperature data. When considered as annual averages, temperature data oscillates within relatively narrow bands because contrary to human-caused global warming theory, in reality the feedbacks within the climate system are negative.

My work published a decade ago, in atmospheric science journals on the application of artificial neural networks for monthly rainfall forecasting, incorporated relatively long unhomogenised temperatures series for various Australian locations. What became most obvious, as I compiled these temperature series, was that the cooling through the early twentieth century was of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius for eastern and northern Australia to about 1960, followed by warming of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius since. I wrote about this in a report I compiled for the Sydney Institute in 2014, that includes a table listing all official temperature recording stations for New South Wales that have continuous temperature records of more than 60 years to 1960, and from 1960 to at least 2013, showing the trend as cooling or warming (click here for the presentation published in the Sydney Papers Online, Issue 26). Clearly there was significant cooling for the period to 1960, and there has been significant warming since. Tony Abbott who was the Australian Prime Minister at the time was aware of this. He understood the extent to which the bureau was remodelling the temperatures, cooling the past so the present appeared hotter and at the same time removing what had been a cooling trend until 1960.

The politicians and the elites on both sides of politics across The West, and the authors of this new DOE report, they understand these numbers. Then they put all of this aside, and find a temperature chart that shows continuous warming since 1850. Some even promote the absurd concept of Net Zero and endorse the Paris Accord that claims by phasing out oil, gas and coal, globally temperatures can be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius. They, along with Michael Mann and Judith Curry are jokers, in plain sight. That Curry and Mann dislike each other intensely, does not make either of them right.

I was at first pleased to see that this new DOE report acknowledges the earlier cooling with comment that it occurred from 1940 to 1976. Then they include a chart of entirely homogenised values, a HadCRUT5.0 reconstruction, their Figure 8.1. This is an official homogenised series put together by the Hadley Centre in the UK and republished by Curry and colleagues. It is relevant that the Hadley Centre was the brainchild of Margaret Thatcher, who worked with Rupert Murdoch all those years ago, to defeat the coal miners and close down their union, an industry that had made Britain so rich. But that is another story.

Some years ago, I deconstructed an earlier version of this HadCRUT global historical temperature reconstruction, to know what locations in Australia were incorporated in the calculation of these global average temperatures now used in the new DOE report.

Darwin, the city where I was born, in northern central Australia, has a disproportionate impact because there are few other long temperature series for this part of the world. The unhomogenised temperature data for this city shows cooling: a cooling trend of almost 2 degrees Celsius until 1960, like much of the data for New South Wales. The cooling, however, is changed to warming in the official remodelling that is subsequently incorporated into the HadCRUT reconstructions that are the basis of the new DOE report authored by Judith Curry and others.

In the new DOE report, the homogenised HadCRUT reconstruction is accepted as sufficiently reliable, with some mention of needing to correct for urban heat island effects. Never mind the industrial scale remodelling that completely changes even the direction of change over decades for many locations, including Darwin. The report then goes on, based on the remodelled temperature values, to endorse the IPCC equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) values, complete with the absurd notion that feedback within the climate system is positive, meaning that any perturbation will result in runaway global warming, yet we see oscillations in temperature data, not gradual linear increase year on year.

Much is made within the new DOE report about two of the authors, John Christy and Roy Spencer, being associated with the UAH satellite temperature series, as developing the first satellite-based technique for global temperature monitoring. ​ It is stated that their work has been instrumental in providing satellite-derived temperature data, including the UAH dataset, which is widely used in climate studies. Yet we never get to see what this data actually looks like.

The UAH satellite temperature series only begins in 1979, after the warming trend started – following the cooling. The UAH-satellite record does provide empirical evidence that the earth’s energy transport process, the climate system, is dynamically stable with a characteristic oscillatory pattern. After the 2023 – 2024 temperature perturbation, the July 2025 value shows regression, that was also the response of the climate system to the 1998 perturbation. The perturbation can be caused in large part by external drivers including lunar declination cycles affecting ocean circulation as I explain in my new Theory of Climate Resilience.

These real measurements from the satellites, compiled by John Christy and Roy Spencer, contradict the notion of amplification through positive feedback from increasing carbon dioxide, a theory that is central to their report and official human-caused global warming theory as promoted by the IPCC.

I can only conclude from the discrepancies between the real un-homogenised satellite data that Christy and Spencer publish, and the failed theory they promote in this new DOE report that they suffer from cognitive dissonance, which means they hold and promote contradictory ideas.

Interestingly, while acknowledging the observed cooling from 1940 to 1976, they suggest that this is nevertheless consistent with carbon dioxide as a potent greenhouse gas with an ECS of perhaps 2.7 degrees Celsius.

Consistent with others who suffer from cognitive dissonance they attempt to minimise the conflict by finding other justifications for the cooling from 1940 to 1976, specifically in this new DOE report they attribute this to aerosol emissions, ocean cooling and volcanic activity. This begs the question, if these factors (volcanoes, oceans and aerosols) were significant between 1940 and 1976, how do we know they are not significant now?

One of the other report authors, Steven Koonin, is a physicist and colleague of Will Happer, both members of the C02 Coalition. It must be disappointing for Happer, that there is no consideration given to his much lower ECS value that has been a focus of C02 Coalition research.

Happer does not subscribe to the mainstream human-caused global warming theory that there is significant positive feedback from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, rather he shows the assumptions about huge positive feedback in climate models are "rather puffed-up." ​ He uses basic physics and radiation transfer calculations to show that even a doubling of CO2 concentrations would only cause a temperature increase of 0.71°C, which he deems too small to matter. ​ Furthermore, he emphasises that most of the "catastrophe" in IPCC models comes from assumed feedback rather than direct effects of CO2, and he questions whether this feedback is properly accounted for in the models. I agree.

The value that Happer has calculated is close to the value that I derived with John Abbot of 0.6°C using an altogether different method, using proxy temperature data and artificial neural networks. As part of my research (funded by the B.Macfie Family Foundation, published in the international climate science journal GeoResJ, volume 14, pages 36-46, link to journal article here), we also reviewed ECS values from other published studies. We found that the method used significantly affected the result. For example, the range of values derived from spectroscopy methods is approximately 0.33°C to 0.9°C (0.33°C Lightfoot and Mamer, experimental measurements published in Energy Environ. 2014; ​0.8°C Laubereau and Iglev published in Europhys Lett., spectroscopic measurements on optically thick samples of CO2; 0.9°C Wilson and Gea-Banacloche, spectroscopy and radiative transfer equations published in Am J. Phys.). These studies provide experimental measurements of CO2's radiative properties and radiative transfer equations, which are fundamental to understanding the greenhouse effect and the radiative forcing of CO2. ​ They offer a direct, physics-based approach to estimating the warming potential of CO2, independent of the complexities and uncertainties inherent in climate models.

Our study, entitled The application of machine learning for evaluating anthropogenic versus natural climate change, incorporating a review of this experimental work, was undertaken nearly a decade ago but is not cited in the new DOE report. The DOE report does not reference any of the spectroscopy work either, yet it claims to be wide ranging and, in particular, inclusive of different techniques as published in the peer-reviewed literature. Indeed, the spectroscopy studies, such as those by Lightfoot and Mamer, Laubereau and Iglev, and Wilson and Gea-Banacloche, and my work with John Abbot published in GeoResJ, and the calculation by Will Happer published in C02 Coalition reports, are relevant to the discussion of ECS yet ignored by Judith Curry and her coauthors in this new DOE report with John Christy as lead author. They limit themselves to the peer-reviewed literature and the IPCC reports and only those studies that accord with mainstream human-caused global warming theory.

It may be that they are simply unable to think outside of the current paradigm, that is a recurring problem in science as detailed in another book in my library published in 1964 by Chicago University Press and written by Thomas Kuhn , entitled the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Perhaps what I have termed gaslighting is simply a case of incommensurability of ideas, whereby Christy et al. are stuck because there is no alternative framework at least not one that they can imagine. I will be writing more about this.

The human-caused global warming narrative is compelling but simplistic and not consistent with the evidence. The new DOE report fails to engage with alternative hypotheses or consider tools additional to, or instead of, general circulation models. In fact, natural carbon dioxide sources, such as ocean outgassing driven by warming, and regional carbon dioxide gradients (for example, higher variability in the Arctic), are inconsistent with the core of the current human-caused global-warming paradigm that has much more political than practical utility.

To be continued.