Climate Depot’s Marc Morano has a new video out (with transcript) for the Clear Energy Alliance, invoking Karl Popper’s rule of thumb that real science needs to be falsifiable. While details are scant on who funds the Clear Energy Alliance, the fact that it’s set up specifically to attack climate activists and defend the fossil fuel industry is all you need to know. Bonus: it’s run by Mark Mathis, a longtime denier-for-hire who has also dabbled in defending creationism by, in the words of the Anti-Defamation League, “using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution.”
In the video, Morano argues that climate science is impossible to disprove, and therefore not science. He oversimplifies findings to portray complementary theories as being in conflict.
Morano claims that because climate activists say that warming can bring more snow and less snow, “a sort of ‘climate astrology’ has taken over.” Unfortunately for Morano, it’s not at all contradictory to say that overall warming means less snow, but at the same time, there may be more periods of very intense snowfall. As temperatures rise, the atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture.
That means a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor in clouds for longer, potentially making droughts worse if wind patterns push those clouds elsewhere before the water falls as rain. But once the clouds are fully saturated, the ensuing rainfall is more intense than it would’ve been in a cooler climate, meaning that in different places and different times, climate change can manifest in different weather patterns.
Almost like weather and climate aren’t the same thing!
Morano’s other examples are similarly moronic, as is his shtick. By warming the oceans, climate change can create conditions suitable for more hurricanes, so studies focused on sea surface temperatures would suggest more frequent hurricanes. But warming can also increase windshear, which kills storms, so studies focused on that aspect would suggest fewer hurricanes. The big picture is that the storms that aren’t cut down by windshear are apt to be the strongest ones, so warming tends to lead to an increase in the strongest storms relative to moderate or weak ones. Climate change does, in fact, mean both more (big) and less (small) hurricanes.
It’s not clear why Morano’s dragging this argument out now, as it’s hardly new. If you’d like to dive in more, there’s a peer-reviewed study refuting this type of “logic.” There’s also some discussion at other blogs, including a fairly lengthy list of ways the theory of human-caused climate change could be falsified.
Doesn’t seem too outlandish to suggest that if the vast majority of scientists over the past half-century were all wrong about climate, it wouldn’t be all that hard to figure out.
If temperatures weren’t steadily rising over climatically-relevant time periods (at least 30 years) while CO2 levels continued to grow, then maybe we’d have to reconsider. Or if fundamental physics experiments showed that CO2 didn’t trap heat, that’d certainly do it. Or if the upper atmosphere were warming at the same rate as the lower, that’d suggest the layer of greenhouse gasses in between them wasn’t trapping heat. Instead, the upper atmosphere is cooling as the lower atmosphere warms, because that blanket of gasses is trapping heat.
But Morano doesn’t make his money by properly invoking falsifiability, or being honest and presenting a credible counter-argument to the climate consensus. If that were the case, instead of pulling down six figures, he’d be languishing as a penniless Popper.
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