Where are the exhaustive peer-reviewed scientific journal articles that evaluate the data and present different conclusions, or event present different independently verifiable data?
After a dust-up over a NOAA analysis of sea surface temperatures that bolsters the case that climate change is a measurable, material and increasing phenomenon, a multi-institution team led by Zeke Hausfather at Berkeley evaluated data from three largely independent sources — National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Extended Reconstruction Sea Surface Temperature (ERSST), the Hadley Centre SST data set (HadSST3), and the Japanese Meteorological Agency’s Centennial Observation-Based Estimates of SSTs (COBE-SST) from 2003 to the present. I include the link to the study below for those of you who do not have enough charts and Greek letters in your daily diet. As I understand it, they consulted different data sets from different gathering mechanisms – buoys, ships and floats – to account for biases that could emerge in the devices or methodologies.
The science continues to hold up. There are too many conscientious scientists of all political stripes from too many governments and institutions for there to be a credible conspiracy to manipulate either the data or the conclusions or both for very long. Everything that is being studied is observable and knowable, so it would be a difficult fraud to perpetrate on a global interdisciplinary and intergovernmental scale for any sustained period of time. The financial and intellectual resources exist and the will is certainly there to present similarly academically and intellectually rigorous counterarguments to this research article if they can be made. So, where are the mavericks to do the work and where are the papers to blow the lid off this massive scientific and political cabal?
As business leaders and allocators of capital consider the validity of the climate change argument, they also need to take into account both the consequences and the opportunities presented by climate change. For instance, can you turn a blind eye to the rising risks of storms, flood and fire if you run or are invested in a property and casualty insurance company? As a purveyor of food, can you ignore the responsibility and the opportunity to address nutritional insecurity caused by unprecedented draught? What are the roles, responsibilities and profit outlook for a company that possesses the technology to bring access to potable water to large segments of the world population? A considerable amount of global capital is at risk if even part of the climate change thesis is correct. Investors can address this in two ways – first, direct investments in ways that potentially mitigate climate change, and second, direct investments to places where the risks and opportunities are being acknowledged and addressed if and when the first effort comes up short.
“Assessing recent warming using instrumentally homogeneous sea surface temperature records” – Science Advances, Jan 4, 2017 – Zeke Hausfather, Kevin Cowtan, David C. Clarke, Peter Jacobs, Mark Richardson and Robert Rohde