Colorado’s Marshall Fire: Has Funding Needs Corrupted Climate Science?

 

I was totally shocked to hear the claims by a fire scientist I had once admired and often quoted in my blog posts about wildfire. 

In a National Public Radio interview Jennifer Balch said, “Climate change has lengthened the state's fire season”. Then she said “"Climate change is essentially keeping our fuels drier longer. These grasses that were burning, they've been baked all fall and all winter.” 

 Having studied fire ecology for 30 years and knowing her published science, I could only believe she had been corrupted by the need to attract large amounts of funding, and these days that comes to those who blame the climate crisis. And here’s why I now hold that opinion so strongly. 

Colorado’s Marshall Fire was a grassfire that happened with temperatures hovering around freezing. All fire experts and fire managers know grasses are 1-hour lag fuels. That means in dry conditions grasses can become flammable within hours. Attempting to link CO2 global warming, she and other alarmists were now blaming the Boulder area’s grass flammability on the warm dry conditions from July through November. But dry conditions in the past months are totally irrelevant. Those months could have also been cold and wet, but just one day of dry conditions is all that is needed for grasses to burn. 

To minimize recklessly set fire that often occur as people burn away unwanted dead vegetation, the Nova Scotia government felt the need to counter the misunderstanding writing:

The Myth:  “It's safe to burn grass as long as there is still some snow on the ground.” 

The Fact: “Within hours of snow melting, dead grass becomes flammable, especially if there have been drying winds. Grass fires burn hot and fast and spread quickly around, and even over, patches of snow.” 

That’s a fact that Balch and every other fire expert should know! Apparently, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles and the Nature Conservancy and acolyte of climate alarmist Michael Mann and Noah Diffenbaugh, also failed to understand grasses are 1-hour fuel.  He stated in an interview for NBC’s article How climate change primed Colorado for a rare December wildfire that “Climate change is clearly making the pre-conditions for wildfires worse a cross most fire-prone regions of the world,” 

But dry grasses are not the pre-condition to be worried about. The pre-conditions that neither Swain nor Balch shared with the public is well known: Boulder County’s invasive grasses increase fire danger. The “main offender is cheatgrass, which was likely introduced to the area alongside agriculture and ranching” and “is increasing fire danger by 29%” 

 In fact, in 2013 Balch published, Introduced annual grass increases regional fire activity across the arid western USA (1980–2009), writing “Cheatgrass was disproportionately represented in the largest fires, comprising 24% of the land area of the 50 largest fires” and that “multi-date fires that burned across multiple vegetation types were significantly more likely to have started in cheatgrass.” 

 It was also very disingenuous for Balch to say ““Climate change has lengthened the state's fire season”. It is the very same meme that every climate alarmist regurgitates that climate change has made “a year-long fire season the new normal”. But in 2017 Balch published in Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States that human ignitions “have vastly expanded the spatial and seasonal “fire niche” in the coterminous United States, accounting for 84% of all wildfires”. 

Balch’s published graph clearly shows that human ignitions have extended fire season all year long. Based on her own research, a more relevant comment would have mentioned that Louisville, Colorado’s population had jumped 10-fold; from 2,000 in 1950 to about 20,000 today. Does a 10-fold increase in population create a 10-fold increase in fire probability. The Marshall Fire was not naturally started by Lightning. 

In 2015, Balch created the Earth Lab program at Colorado University. In 2017 it became part of CIRES, a partnership of NOAA and CU Boulder. Earth Lab, got increasing attention from mass media that’s always seeking click-bait. As Earth Lab’s team began blaming more fires on climate change, it got more attention and Balch got more interviews. 

 Earth Lab hired Natasha Stavros as Earth Lab’s Analytics Hub Director. In videos posted by the Washington Post, she claimed climate change causes “longer, hotter, and drier fire seasons” reflecting Balch’s conversion to a climate crisis narrative. To get around Balch’s earlier scientific research Stavros deflected, “We are not talking about the ignition source” or the “availability of fuels”, “what we are talking about are the conditions of those fuels”. But in the case of the Marshall Fire, 1-hour grass fuels have nothing to do with climate change. It only takes a few hours to be in highly flammable conditions. That’s weather, not climate! 

 Although lacking in scientific integrity, pivoting to a climate crisis narrative worked in Balch’s favor. The U.S. Geological Survey has selected the University of Colorado Boulder to host the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NCCASC) for the next five years. Balch, as director of CIRES’ Earth Lab, and now NCCASC Director had attracted $4.5 million in funding. Universities around the country similarly create such centers to attract such major funding. Certainly, blaming fires on a climate crisis attracts more funding than if its director sounded like a “denier” blaming invasive grasses and human ignitions. 

 The politics of funding research requires a major level of group think. Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for discovering quasi-crystals that are now used in surgical instruments. But when he first announced his observations, he was kicked out of his lab by his colleagues. They saw him as a threat to the lab’s prestige and funding because observing quasi-crystals contradicted the consensus that was enforced by Linus Pauling that quasi-crystal did NOT exist. 

 Similarly, esteemed atmospheric scientist Dr Cliff Mass was criticized by Washington University administrator’s for detailing how an episode of problematic acidic waters that had been pumped into the state’s oyster’s hatcheries, was due to natural upwelling events, not climate change. But contradicting the climate crisis angle threatened funding to WU’s Ocean Acidification Center. Up until then Mass had been the Seattle Times go-to person for all weather events, but that stopped when his one analysis didn’t support climate crisis groupthink. Dr Peter Ridd was fired for presenting evidence showing his colleague's claims of coral reef destruction were exaggerated. So, all savvy university professors know you can’t contradict the meme if you want funding, or worse, keep your job. 

 Climate crisis groupthink, also ignores natural climate change, as did Balch and Swain. But one meteorologist confidently blamed the lack of snow and dryness on a natural La Nina. The science is well established that depending on how colder Pacific surface waters set up during a La Nina, atmospheric currents can carry higher or lower amounts of moisture to different regions. California had record snowfall this December while Colorado snowfall was very low. And if the Marshall Fire had been ignited just 2 days later, there would have been a snowfall to suppress the fire.

However too often, alarmists scientists cherry-pick one-year events. They weaponized this year’s low snowfall while ignoring that last year’s Colorado snowfall was far above normal. In November last year, Fort Collins received more than 15 inches of snow on its way to 80 inches, which is 25 inches more than normal. Again, such variations in snowfall are weather, not climate. 

Alarmists also weaponized the dry conditions as solely due to global warming drought. They ignored the drying and warming effects of the Chinook winds that are very common in Colorado. Chinooks are known as “snow eaters” because as the winds pass over the mountains of the western USA they are forced upward and precipitate all their moisture. When those winds descend from the Rockies down to Boulder, temperatures rise adiabatically (due to pressure not added heat) and the warm dry air quickly removes moisture or snow from the surface. Southern California’s Santa Anna winds are similar and drive large fires. 

Sometimes Boulder’s winds reach speeds of 100+ mile per hour. NOAA reported The Chinook Wind Events Winter of 1982 during which peak wind gusts more than 100 mph damaged areas around Boulder. Weatherwise journal reported 100+MPH winds over Boulder on January 7, 1969, which snapped power poles and toppled planes as seen in the photographs below. In November 2021 the weather service gave a red flag warming due to the high winds from a Chinook event. But without a coinciding human ignition, there was no rapidly spreading fire.

 

I would like to believe that Balch’s Earth Lab scientists have been campaigning for the housing developments in Boulder’s suburbs of Louisville and Superior to create a system of firebreaks and defensible space. Those suburbs had built into easily ignited grassland in a region where fires are rapidly spread by the dry Chinooks descending from the Rockies. Such natural fire danger is not always obvious to the public looking for affordable housing. But it is not obvious that was ever done, at least not as obvious as faulty climate change narratives. 

 Fire experts should have pushed for building codes, requiring adequate spacing between new houses. As a story in Wildfire Today reported today, one common feature of the surviving homes was they were more distant from neighboring homes. Many houses in the devastated subdivisions were only 10 to 20 feet apart. Without adequate fire breaks or defensible space, if just one house allowed the fire to reach it, the heat of that burning house is enough to ignite any house next to it. Similar dynamics were seen in California’s Tubbs and Camp Fires that demolished neighborhoods.

 

But perhaps local governments were greedy. Eager to build a tax base a growing Louisville population was most important. Politicians had worked hard to present Louisville as one of the top 10 most livable little cities. Putting natural fire danger front and center, might put a damper on the city’s attractiveness. And not surprisingly the Denver Democrats didn’t waste time to capitalize on the Marshall Fire devastation. The released a statement claiming “This fire has also punctuated our climate crisis and made abundantly clear the need for bold action. The science is clear, and the impacts are very real. We will continue to work with our community and legislators to ensure climate change is treated with the urgency and attention it deserves.” 

But the science does not show a connection between the Marshall Fire and Climate Change. And due to the greed of the media, politicians, and selfish scientists, only scientific integrity is facing a real crisis. 

 Finally, it is worth noting that some scientists are acutely aware of the increasing fire danger presented by the build-up of dead vegetation. To remove that hazard prescribed burns are being performed. But sometimes prescribed burns get away and burn down people’s homes. So prescribed burns are carefully planned for times when fires are most easily controlled. So, one must wonder just how unusually dangerous local conditions were if the City of Boulder planned a prescribed burn on Monday, December 13, 2021, just 2 weeks before the Marshall Fire. Had climate change really made conditions so dangerous? 

......

an addendum  1/3/22

Here are Boulder's December temperature and precipitation  trends since 1893 from NOAA. https://psl.noaa.gov/boulder/

No sign of global warming or drying trends

 Jim Steele is Director emeritus of San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus, authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism, and proud member of the CO2 Coalition.

HOW PRESSURE SYSTEMS CONTROL THE CLIMATE: PART 1 – THE DECLINE IN EXTREME WEATHER

Watch my video: 

HOW PRESSURE SYSTEMS CONTROL THE CLIMATE: PART 1 – THE DECLINE IN EXTREME WEATHER 

at https://youtu.be/67ie20cjJxU

The transcript is below

Unlike the effects of carbon dioxide, variations in the earth’s pressure systems directly affect climate and weather changes. Furthermore, new scientific research contradicts the climate crisis modeling claims that global warming is causing more extreme weather by increasing convective energy

In response to public questioning of how global warming could possibly cause both floods and droughts, scientists who were obsessed with a climate crisis, pushed a simplistic meme that wet regions will get wetter and dry regions will get driers. Unlike the absurd claims that rising co2 is causing everything from more wars and prostitution to more wildfires and higher divorce rates in albatrosses, their wet gets wetter – dry gets drier meme has some basis in reality

As scientists studying clouds on a microscale of 5 kilometers report, convection is in part initiated by solar heated earth surfaces that contact the air making the air warmer, less dense and more buoyant, and causing it to rise.

The exact same dynamics are at work on larger scales. The Hadley Circulation cell covering 7000 kilometers, its driven by intense solar heating around the equator, resulting in an area of low pressure with rising moist air. That air cools and condenses as it rises, resulting in the earth’s heaviest rainfall.  

What goes up must come down, and having lost it moisture while rising, regions of dry sinking air happen a few thousand kilometers to the north and south, creating a large area of exceptional dryness beneath high-pressure systems. Therefore, assuming rising CO2 is warming the planet, it was then logical to believe a warming planet would increase convection And increase rain-making but also increase the sinking air elsewhere that fosters dryness

So their models were constructed accordingly. 

The problem is, as research reveals,  observations do not support their CO2 connection.

Here I simultaneously present two views of the earth's major circulation patterns. Upper panel shows a cross-section of the northern hemisphere.    The lower illustration shows the average position of quasi-permanent pressure systems across the globe, here for the month of January

 Here I only focus on the pressure systems most implicated in the wet gets wetter dry gets drier narrative. Other pressure systems are discussed in other videos

The rising convection at the equator results in a global belt of low pressure known as the intertropical convergence zone or ITCZ and represented by the dashed red line And that generates the tropical rain forest ecosystems

The descending air happens about 30 degrees poleward of the equator and is focused over the oceans, and can reduce the transport of moisture which results in the earth's great desert regions

Recent results from an international team of scientists, referred to here as taszarek et al 2021, Examined trends in global rainfall based on observational data and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts' global reanalysis model from 1979–2019. 

 Research results suggested just the opposite of what global crisis warming theory predicts. On average the earth is experiencing declining convective energy, and thus declining extreme storms and rainfall. The wettest regions are getting drier. 

 This research was not trumpeted by the mainstream media, because it did not promote the click-bait climate crises the media seeks to profit from.

This map from their results illustrates the earth's regions with the greatest precipitation. As expected from the Hadley Circulation, the regions of the greatest annual rainfall exist in the low-pressure ITCZ regions around the equator, supporting the tropical rainforest ecosystems of the Amazon, central Africa and southeast Asia’s maritime continent consisting of Indonesia, Malaysia, Borneo and the Philippines and seas of the Coral Triangle, all colored in reds. 

Areas in green to white are low rainfall areas, beneath dry high-pressure areas in the sub-tropics

The trends from precipitation data suggests those wet areas are getting drier as seen here in blue. Significant drying is shown with hatched marks suggesting a decrease in evaporation contrary to global warming models There are also some non-significant wetter regions illustrated in light yellow but dry areas show very little increased rainfall  

Convective storms like hurricanes, tornadoes, heavy rain, hail & lightning are most destructive. So, to better predict these storms, scientists track changes in, CAPE, C-A-P-E, abbreviated for Convection Available Potential Energy. CAPE is driven by the warmer and moisture conditions of an air mass relative to its surrounding environment. As would be expected, the greatest annually averaged amount of potential energy for convection coincides with the warm moist regions where the greatest rainfall is observed .

But again, contrary to climate crises predictions the energy for convection and more extreme storms has declined for most regions. 

The cause for higher potential energy outside the tropics over the USA’s Great Plains and southern Europe requires some additIonal explanation. The high CAPE is partially driven by the result of warm moist air lying below dry cold air, dry due to crossing the mountains of western USA or arriving from the Sahara Desert.

Air freely rises only if it is warmer than its surrounding. Warm smoke from a chimney in winter rises at first but suddenly hits a glass ceiling and goes sideways. This is because the air above is warmer than the smoke. During the winter, the land cools much faster than the air above so the lowest atmospheric layers, the boundary layer, is colder than the air above it and this is referred to as an inversion layer. The smoke mixes with the cold air, and no longer becomes warmer than the air above.

The question then arises, if the smoke here doesn’t rise much higher than a thousand feet, how can warm air in the tropics rise to 14,000 meters? The answers has to do with the interaction of moist air with dry air

As known from the gas laws, dry air temperature drops by 10C for every 1000 meters it rises, solely due to the decrease in air pressure (referred to as adiabatic cooling). 

 For example, air on the surface at 10 C (50F) cools to minus -20 C (-4F) after rising 3000 meters. Likewise rising smoke was also cooled adiabatically.

However, moist air does not cool so rapidly. As moist air rises and cools it reaches a temperature that causes the water vapor to saturate and convert to liquid rain, which releases the extra heat the water vapor acquired during evaporation. 

 That released heat energy causes rising moist air to cool more slowly than surrounding dry air. Moist air cools at a rate of just 6C for every 1000 meters of altitude. It is that release of heat from water vapor that allows moist air in the tropics to remain warmer than its surrounding and allows rising air currents to reach 14,000 m in altitude, as well as providing more convective energy. 

 Thus warm moist air rising in an environment of dry cold air increases convective potential energy and enables more thunderstorms and tornados in the USA’s Great Plains and southeastern USA.

Accordingly, Taszarek 2021 found the highest frequency of thunderstorms in the in the warm moist tropics, but also reported a relatively high rate in the eastern USA. This is because the Pacific high-pressure system reduces moisture flowing from the ocean over the western USA. The eastward moving air is further dried as it passes over the western mountains. After passing over the rocky mountains, the resulting dry air often rides above the warm humid air being pushed into the great plains and eastern USA by the Atlantic high-pressure system, setting the stage for intense convective thunderstorms and tornados.

Yet despite the global warming narrative that global warming increases humidity and increases convective energy thus intensifying storms, thunderstorm frequency around the world, except for over India, has been declining.

Some of the most severe thunderstorms happen in regions where air is moving across mountain ranges and interacting with moist air causing the greatest duration of severe thunderstorms Yet again, in contrast to climate crises narratives, most of those regions have experienced fewer severe storms 

This decline might seem counter intuitive only because the mainstream media and politicians try to focus the public's attention on any destructive storms that still naturally happen as evidence of a climate crises

This scientifically documented decrease in convective potential energy and thunderstorms correlates with the decreasing trend in severe USA tornadoes.

Despite the data, the chief climate alarmist and digital book burner, the Joeseph Goebbels of climate change, Michael Mann, has been the media's go to person for click-bait climate crisis narratives

In an interview with USA today he falsely said “the latest science indicates that we can expect more of these huge (tornado) outbreaks because of human caused climate change"

To push that alarmist narrative Mann tweeted the graph from AEI showing declining intense tornadoes was denialist propaganda.

But the graph is just an extension of the very same declining trend NOAA had produced until 2014.

What NOAA’s website likes to now show are graphs of total counts, and 75% of that count is due to additions of very weak tornadoes that often escaped detection in the past.

Total counts had suggested the same declining trend from the 70s to 1980s, as the declining counts of just severe tornadoes

The sharp increase since the 1980s was the result of the Weather Service employing more storm spotters which added more very weak tornadoes to the count. According to a NOAA research paper tornado detection probabilities since 1987 increased from 30% to 75% in 2002

And despite increased detection, total counts have declined over the past 2 decades

So trust the science, not alarmists media nor wayward scientists like Michael Mann

Lastly, Severe convective storms are not always simplistically driven by warm moist air. Sometimes an air mass requires a disturbance that raises moist air to an altitude at which water vapor converts to liquid to initiate free convection. 

Other disturbances increase the dry air One such disturbance is caused by El Nino events during which the regions of tropical convection shift across the pacific altering regions of dry high-pressure systems and wet low-pressure systems as seen here. That pattern changes during La Ninas which increase dry air masses in the western USA and enhances convective energy potential for tornado weather 

Future videos will examine the varying ways pressure systems change, resulting in naturally occurring extreme weather events that have sadly been weaponized to fear monger a climate crisis. .

Up next HOW PRESSURE SYSTEMS CONTROL THE CLIMATE: PART 2 - DESERTS AND DROUGHTS

Until then embrace Thomas Huxley's sage advice: skepticism is the highest of duties and blind faith the one unpardonable sin

If you appreciate the science clearly presented here, science rarely presented by mainstream media, then please give it a like, share the video or subscribe to my channel to see all my videos or read my book Landscapes and Cycles and Environmentalists Journey tp climate skepticism

 

Kentucky's Devastating Tornadoes and Climate Change

 

watch the video 

KENTUCKY TORNADOES, CLIMATE CHANGE,

 AND PRESSURE SYSTEMS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4sZnwiUogE&t=184s

below is the trasncript

The heart wrenching devastation in Kentucky and surrounding regions due to several tornadoes has caught everyone’s attention. Fortunately, meteorologists have been increasingly capable of issuing tornado warnings and have greatly reduced tornado related deaths. But despite adequate warning, one tornado took direct aim on Mayfield, Kentucky causing buildings to collapse and a horrible death toll.

The USA experiences more tornadoes than elsewhere, suffering over 1100 a year. This is due to the mountain configurations that funnel cold, dry Arctic southward to collide with warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico moving northward. Tornadoes are most common in the spring as solar warming drives warmer air northward to collide with retreating cold winter air. Although rare in winter, tornadoes also happen.

Disturbingly, every disaster brings out the ambulance chasers hoping to profit from tragedy. As has become all too common, the ambulance-chasing climate journalists wasted no time trying to attribute climate change to this catastrophe, as seen by the Associated Press story that is being circulated by many outlets. Despite most scientists admitting attributing tornadoes to climate change is extremely difficult, the AP journalist tried to force a connection with statements like, “Warm weather was a crucial ingredient in this tornado outbreak” and the standard blather “extreme storms are becoming more common because we have a lot warmer air masses in the cool season that can support these types of severe weather outbreaks”.

But lets look at the Science!

As seen in the illustration below, both cold and warm air are required. Tornadoes develop when the atmosphere becomes unstable as cold, dry air overlays warm moist air. These conditions promote columns of intensively rising air. In addition, tornado formation requires spin, caused by winds from various directions (wind shear) imparting rotation.

I noticed all those tornado-promoting conditions developing the day before. So I am sure weather forecasters did too. Below are screen shots from the website https://earth.nullschool.net/ ,  a site I highly recommend for everyone who is interested in understanding weather and climate. I roughly overlayed a map of American states to help visualize the approximate locations of tornadoes, and a green circle to identify the location of Mayfield, Kentucky. The first screenshot shows cold air (blue color) from the west and Arctic colliding with warm air (orange color) intruding from the Gulf of Mexico. Temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico are just average, so the intruding warm air is not unusually warm, but raises Mayfield, KY temperatures to about 70°F. However what is unusual is the below average cold over the Great Plains.

The white lines represent the surface winds. The brighter the white, the stronger the winds. On the website the winds are animated, so I have added red arrows to show wind directions. Temperatures around southeastern Kansas are about 40°F. Thus, cold winds from the northwest colliding with warm air from the south create the lift and spin needed to spawn winter tornadoes.

The next screenshot is taken for the exact same time, but with an overlay of the atmosphere’s Total Precipitable Water. The cold air to the west and north is very dry (brown color), The warm air intruding from the Gulf of Mexico is very moist (blue color). Thus, all the conditions to spawn winter tornadoes are in place throughout the Mississippi River Valley.

It is also well established that a dip in the jet stream, as cold air pushes southward, is associated with extreme weather events and tornadoes. At the bottom of the trough wind speeds are slower but increase as the winds exit the trough to the east. This increase in upper level wind speed promotes a stronger low pressure zone at the surface that intensifies cyclones and tornadoes.

Accordingly the next screen-shot of the upper level winds at 500 hPa (approximately 18,000 foot altitude), shows an upper level trough forming to the west of Kentucky, and the town of Mayfield is situated below the region where the jet steam is increasing speed.

So why did these conditions develop? One piece of the puzzle is the location of the Bermuda High pressure system, and its clockwise circulation of winds. The Bermuda High is a key factor affecting tropical weather as well as how much warm moist air gets pumped into the eastern USA. Scientists compare the ever-changing position and strength of the Bermuda High to the motion of a cork in the bathtub. Various waves and disturbance readdiy shift its location making weather predictability difficult, never mind determining any climate trends. When located further east in the Atlantic, droughts occur in the Midwest, and even the eastern USA. The further west the Bermuda High’s location, the greater the amount of warm moist air gets pumped into the USA.

One factor affecting the location of the Bermuda High is the natural North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) which can change its phase from month to month. When the NAO is in its positive phase, pressure increases as well the strength of the Trade Winds. This pushes the Bermuda High further westward. The NAO is used in weather forecasting. While recently bouncing between positive and negative phases, scientists had determined the NAO would remain in its positive phase through mid-December 2021. As a result, warm moist air was indeed pushed up the Mississippi River Valley in winter, supplying the key ingredients that spawned the deadly winter tornadoes in Kentucky.

The mainstream media’s exploitation of this tragedy it is just another example of ambulance-chasing climate journalists failing to inform the public about natural dynamics that create  extreme natural weather events, choosing instead to fear monger a bogus climate crisis narrative.

The mainstream media’s exploitation of this tragedy is another disturbing example of ambulance-chasing climate journalists failing to inform the public about natural extreme weather events. Just as I finished crafting this presentation, I see Dr Roy Spencer published an article on the how increasing cold weather increases tornadoes. Spencer posted this graph that documents the declining trend in violent tornadoes, again refuting the idea that global warming is related to more destructive tornadoes

Choosing to fearmonger a bogus climate crisis narrative is so disgustingly shameful

Sadly President Biden, despite lacking any scientific knowledg,e joined the fear-mongers with the standard blather stating "The intensity of the weather across the board has some impacts as a consequence of the warming of the planet and climate change ...the fact is, that we all know everything is more intense when the climate is warming. Everything. And obviously it has some impact here.”

Really Joe???

DIGITAL BOOK BURNING AND THE DEGRADATION OF SCIENCE

Please view my video

THE NEW BOOK BURNERS AND THE DEGRADATION OF THE SCIENTIFIC CULTURE

link https://youtu.be/p_ihQsyq0jc

Below is the transcript 

Today i want to talk about how a small self-righteous group is trying to control what scientific ideas get shared with the public. I call them the new book burners As Ray Bradbury warned, you dont need to burn books to destroy a culture, ... Just get people to stop reading them

We teach students that science is driven by the scientific method. You make observations that raise questions. Then a plausible explanation or hypothesis is offered to answer those questions. Then experiments are done to test that hypothesis, and results and conclusions are published so others then can evaluate your methods and conclusions. But that is just one turn of many, in the scientific method

Science then requires debate. Others may have had similar observations but different explanations, which lead to different conclusions. We trust science as a truth seeking method because many eyes and many voices can weigh in and debate the final conclusions.

Robust science and our democracy require a culture that holds sacred the freedom of speech and skepticism As Carl Sagan said, science requires an almost complete openess to all ideas, balanced by rigorous and uncompromising skepticism. Similarly, America's founding fathers made sure any form of tyranny over the minds of people should be strongly opposed Walter Gilbert, a 1980 nobel prize winner for his contribution to the methods that enabled the sequencing of DNA and RNA, also praised the virtues of scientific skepticism and independent thought. But he also warned.....good scientists often morph into authoritarians who claim “only their way of doing science is the only valid view”

The first scientific society, the Royal Society, formed in 1660. It published Isaac Newtons' ground breaking research. Newton later became the society's president. America's Benjamin Franklin was in the forefront of promoting science and democracy and his experiments with electricity were published here also. The society's motto was “Nullius en Verba”, meaning take no one’s word for it. They understood that truth seeking science must not be shackled by narratives of so-called authorities.

The roots of our scientific culture began with the publication of Copernicus' book in 1543 that placed the sun ,instead of the earth, at the center of our solar system. It defied what the authorities had been claiming. That publication triggered the scientific revolution and the age of enlightenment But that idea was not new. Many thinkers from around the world had suggested the same thing for many centuries. The problem was - to modify a popular adage - what was expressed in their village stayed in their village It was the earlier invention of the printing press, that enabled Copernicus's views to circulate more extensively to the public.

Our digital media holds even greater promise than the first printing press for freely sharing information and alternative hypotheses from people all over the world. It promises to prevent tyrannical groupthink that always thwarts creativity and truth seeking The New York Times had great influence with over 5.5 million subscribers to its print editions. Their influence has multiplied via its internet outreach. Even greater outreach is seen by Twitter with 500 million tweets per day, Facebook, now called Meta, has 2.4 billion views a year Youtube gets one billion views a month Wikipedia gets 18 billion views a month 

 But with great promise lies great danger Controllers of social media can morph into authoritarians In the name of preventing misinformation or fake news. A very small group can control what you read. They can promote views they like to millions; Or limit views they dislike to less than a hundred. In other words they become digital book burners Beware of these digital book burners

Michael Mann is a climate scientist who morphed into an authoritarian book burner. He believes his view is the only valid view. If you disagree with his CO2 driven climate doom, he brands you a denier and anti-science, no matter how scientific your arguments. But he constantly presents himself as the poor little victim unfairly attacked by fossil fuel funded propaganda But the Climategate emails, released either by a hacker or a whistle blower, revealed Michael Mann has spent 2 decades stifling independent thought by other scientists in peer reviewed journals as well as the social media His public tweets also reveal his attempts to control what you can think and his book burning ways. Unsurprisingly, he just recently tweeted that it is now time for Youtube to “remove climate denial videos” because, they are a threat to humanity.

Mann rose from obscurity when his 1998 reconstruction of northern hemisphere temperatures over the past 1000 years suggested the activity of wealthy fossil fuel burning industrial countries had completely altered and endangered the earth's climate. The graph of his results resembled a hockey stick and became the perfect icon for any politician to suggest a global government is needed to save the world. So his hockeystick graph sat front and center at the United Nations 2001 IPCC climate conference It didn’t matter that it was scientifically flawed, the united nations saw it as a valuable icon; just as it didn’t matter that the 16 year old Greta Thunberg, who totally lacked any climate or ecological science background, was invited to speak and berate leaders at the United Nations. A young girl claiming we must save the earth from ecosystem collapse was another politically valuable fear-mongering icon .

Those with tyrannical political agendas know full well the most influential obstacle to freedom of thought is fear. And that social control is best managed by fear. So was Michael Mann just a shill for global politics, either knowingly or unknowingly? 

A multitude of various agents, knowing they could gain politically by championing solutions to save the earth from a climate crisis, eagerly supported the hockey stick hypothesis of impending climate doom Relishing in his new fame and fortune, Micahel Mann morphed into the authoritarian that Nobel prize scientist Walter Gilbert warned us about. Then Mann viciously attacked any & all who disagreed with his personal science as deniers 

 

So who decides what scientific opinions are valid and which are fake news? Who decides when the science is settled? Most fact checkers are journalists with miniscule scientific backgrounds in climate or ecology, But they stubbornly believe they know enough to judge. Those who accept the climate doom narratives are filled with fear. And readily attack good skeptical scientists ,steeped in the scientific culture, for simply presenting missing facts and offering alternative explanations 

  Due to the battle to control the narratives that enable political power, social media has been under relentless pressure from various actors, including Michale Mann, to prevent any opinions that differ from the climate crisis narrative. Facebook asks, How do we stop false news? But they avoid the critical question .....Who determines what is false news? Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have given control to so-called fact checkers as clearly stated in their policies. If a fact checker has the opinion that your text or video is false or misleading, it is moved lower in the newsfeeds which greatly reduces who will see it,... Precisely the book burning method Ray Bradbury warned us about 

If a fact checker deems you are a repeat offender, they can advocate to have you blocked After posting several of my educational videos promoting natural climate change which are always based on scientific evidence published in peer reviewed science, I suddenly found myself blocked from facebook with this message I went to my twitter account and got the same message that i was blocked. I asked friends if fb or twitter was down but they still had access. Several hours later i was then allowed access to both facebook and twitter at the same time. Apparently the same fact checkers are controlling both these major media outlets My blocking and re-instating also suggests that they dont know how to deal with valid science when it challenges the hockeystick climate crisis 

 John Cook is a psychologist at the Center for Climate Change Communication, a center that supplies fact checkers. Cook is not a climate scientist, but in 2007 Cook started the misleadingly named website SkepticalScience with a mission to disparage all skeptical challenges to the climate crisis hypotheses, A website often recommended by Michael Mann

 Cook's value to Mann's Climate wars was he had published tactics for neutralizing so-called mis-information via inoculation. Coincidentally all skeptic texts and videos now get inoculated Social media calls it providing more information to counter false information 

 For example, on my Facebook page, I posted a link to my friends for my Youtube video in which I analyzed some bad wildfire science in the Sierra Nevada , where I had done ecosystem research for over 25 years Facebook added this inoculating message that linked to their so-called Climate Science Center Although my video's analysis had shown why, fire experts do not use average temperatures to issue Red flag warnings, and the fact that official data shows in the localities where northern California's wildfires have started, the critical maximum temperatures have been lower than in the 1930s, Facebook's Climate Science Center linked to this graph showing rising average temperature to suggest climate change is the cause of worse fires 

 Likewise Youtube is inoculating every skeptic’s video posts. My video on wildfires in the Sierra Nevada was, unsurprisingly, linked to the United Nations' alarmist narratives, despite its narrative being completely devoid of any knowledge of conditions in the Sierra Nevada In an earlier video on natural cycles of warming and drying, it was inoculated with a link to Wikipedia, a site infamous for biased climate views . 

 I also suspected Youtube was manipulating the number of likes (and views) my videos were given, so i began archiving screenshots shared here. At 7 pm i had 34 likes The next morning the same video had 80 more views but...... But Youtube reduced the likes to just 14! Other screen shots of other videos had also revealed reduced views and likes as well I can only assume Youtube is trying to influence future viewers that my video is not worth watching 

 As documented here, Michael Mann has spent 2 decades trying to suppress any skeptical science from being published in scientific journals. In 2002, the high impact journal Science, published results from two paleo-climatologists analyzing tree rings and concluding temperatures today were similar to 1000 years ago, as seen in their graph 

 This challenged Michael Mann's 1998 Hockeystick hypothesis. We know from Climategate emails Mann berated 2 colleagues for not being more critical of that paper and the ranted that they now must do damage control. Then Mann denigrated the esteemed journal's peer review process for allowing a research paper that simply disagreed with the almighty Michael Mann 

 The next year, 2 Harvard Astrophysicists published in the journal Climate Research synthesizing several hundred peer reviewed papers and also suggesting 20th century temperatures were not uniquely warm or extreme over the past 1000 years. Mann descended deeper into conspiratorial despair emailing colleagues that the editorial board of climate research had been hijacked by a few skeptics. Skeptics "had staged a coup!" 

 He then suggested they all blacklist the journal and stop citing any papers published in that journal. Conspiring to stop citing any scientific paper with alternative views has the same effect as social media's factcheckers pushing articles further down the newsfeed, ...it greatly reduces how many people will ever read those papers. 

 Mann's buddy, Dr Tom Wigley, another key government climate scientist, further illustrated the book burning strategies of this cabal of scientists. When he replied... We must get rid of the editor von Storch and block other skeptical scientists like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singers and others Mann and his group pushed to get rid of editors that support skeptics. 

 Like a small group of factcheckers, just a few editors control what gets published To remove such editors., Mann's group conspired to contact the publisher telling them their journal was perceeved as a medium for disseminating misinformation. Wigley emphasized that “it didnt matter if that allegation was true or not”, because the publishers only cared about the economic damage that such a perception might cause. Mann concurred but argued other approaches might also be needed. Mann hated that the paper appeared to be legitimately peer reviewed science and that the authors' Harvard affiliation might give them more authority than Mann's Penn State affiliation. So Mann then successfully lobbied Harvard's scientifically ill-informed administrators to distance themselves from Soon and Baliunas 

In 2005, Mann lobbied editors of the highly respected Geophysical Research Letters journal to stop publishing a skeptical research paper. that strongly challenged the appropriateness of Mann's statistical methods that created Mann's hockeystick results Fortunately, the editor had more integrity and replied all 3 reviewers recommended publishing the paper and he found no reason to interfere with its publication. Still such an incident reveals how politics, and Mann, degrade science. With his attempted censorship thwarted Mann's conspiracy ideation deepened, ranting to colleagues that contrarians now have an “in” at Geophysical Research Letters. So, the journal can “no longer be seen as honest brokers in the climate debates. We best to do an end run around the journal” 

 Unable to completely suppress peer- reviewed skepticism, Mann entered the theater of social media by creating the website, self-righteously named "RealClimate" and announced his team of 9 scientists Some of RealClimate’s early posts took aim at France's highly esteemed scientists Vincent Courtillot and Claude Allegre, trying to cancel them for questioning man-made climate change and daring to suggest natural causes 

 Meanwhile one of Mann's team, William Connolley, was busily editing out thousands of Wikipedia entries that were skeptical of any CO2 driven climate crisis... Finally caught in 2010, Wikipedia's directors unanimously banned Connolley from editing climate topics but worrisomely allowed him to return later. 

 It’s well understood that the public typically lacks the skill or time to determine which scientific conclusions are the most truthful. The public really just wants reassurance their adopted blind beliefs are the truth Accordingly in a 2009 email, Mann admitted “we all know it isn’t about truth" its about plausible deniability Then further advised his team to be careful about what information his group sent to Andy Revkin of the NY Times because, in regards to the narrative Mann wants to push, “Revkin is not as predictable as we like” 

 Illustrating the height of Orwellian double-speak and hypocrisy, Mann teams up with John Cook's fellow psychologist, Stephan Lewandowsky, to blame the public's faulty beliefs for not accepting Mann's climate crisis narratives,... An allegation Mann dishonestly frames as "denial of scientific facts" 

 After 2 decades of trying to control peer review by removing editors and threatening journals who allow skeptical articles, Mann now accused skeptics of avoiding peer review 

And after 2 decades of promoting his own website and John Cook's skeptic bashing website, and after decades with he and his ilk claiming the debate is over, Mann now denigrates skeptics, whose only remaining platform for free speech is the internet, and accuses them of using the internet to stifle debate

 No wonder Michael Mann has been called a Disgrace to his Profession As Orwell warned in his book 1984, the whole purpose of Newspeak is to "narrow the range of thought" Because it makes people more easily controlled 

 Coincidentally, just as I finished drafting this presentation, a verdict on the John sStossel vs Facebook's factchecking slander, was posted to the Watts Up With That website. Court documents revealed that Facebook could not be held liable for the damage done by slandering Stossel's factual videos as fake news and misleading because their ignorant fact checkers are not arguing facts, just opinions; and opinions can’t be prosecuted. 

 But didnt we skeptics always know that about these factcheckers? 

But the power of biased so-called factcheckers' opinions is exactly what Bradbury warned against. Books don’t need to be burnt, just get people to stop reading them 

 So beware people , The thought police are legally immune and very active 

Michael Mann's call for 

Youtube to remove skeptical climate videos 

is just one more step that he and his team's have executed for decades to control what you think! 

Up next, I’m planning several short educational videos discussing how naturally varying locations and intensities of atmospheric pressure systems control climate in order to help people gain an understanding of what determines climate and severe weather events