Friday’s release of the wildly alarmist “Climate Science Special Report” or CSSP has brought forth the predictable green gush from the lefty press. The fact that this is an official federal report that contradicts the Trump Administration’s climate skepticism is its big selling point. That the release is strategically timed with the beginning of the grand UN climate control festival in Bonn, Germany makes it more than timely. That the science is crap is irrelevant.

The Washington Post is typical. Their story title is “Trump administration releases report finding ‘no convincing alternative explanation’ for climate change.”

Natural climate change is ruled out in the title! This is not science.

Here are the first two paragraphs of WashPo’s very long alarmist love fest, each followed by some critical observations of mine:

The Trump administration released a dire scientific report Friday calling human activity the dominant driver of global warming, a conclusion at odds with White House decisions to withdraw from a key international climate accord, champion fossil fuels and reverse Obama-era climate policies.”

Actually Trump pulled out of the Paris Pact for economic reasons, namely us being screwed by the UN. He never mentioned the science. Also this dire report was written by Obama era selectees. The CSSR has been in the works for years.

To the surprise of some scientists, the White House did not seek to prevent the release of the government’s National Climate Assessment, which is mandated by law. The report affirms that climate change is driven almost entirely by human action, warns of a worst-case scenario where seas could rise as high as eight feet by the year 2100, and details climate-related damage across the United States that is already unfolding as a result of an average global temperature increase of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900.”

So now we officially have the threat of an 8 foot sea level rise in 82 years, even though the present rate is just a few millimeters a year (I am not making this up) and probably natural. Author instructions for the CSSR mandate a focus on absurd worst cases fantasies and that is what it mostly is.

The National Climate Assessment (NCA) stuff is actually a confusion. A 1990 law says the government should do periodic NCAs, but only three have ever been done. Significantly, the first was under Clinton (read Gore) and the other two under Obama, which makes them all alarmist fantasies. Obama started a third one and it is still in progress because Trump has not stopped it. The Obama selectees who are doing it added the CSSR to this NCA, hoping this would give it extra weight, which it seems to have done.

Lest you think that I am picking on WashPo, here is a similar story from the Associated Press, titled in screaming all caps “US REPORT CONTRADICTS TRUMP TEAM: WARMING MOSTLY MAN-MADE.” There are many more like this, all basically the same junk and all aimed at the Bonn conference. The idea is to undercut the Trump delegation

Getting back to the CSSR and NCA, here is how they turn natural climate change into looming human caused disaster. It is simply an artful and extreme case of what is called cherry picking.

Consider the following simple statistical facts:

1. Every climate variable oscillates naturally on the decade to century scale. Heat, cold, rain drought, you name it. None is ever constant.

2. This means that roughly half will be rising globally over the recent period.

3. Moreover, these oscillations all vary regionally. Some places are getting hotter, others colder. Some wetter, some dryer, etc.

4. This means that almost all of the nastier variables will be rising somewhere over the recent period, including those that are not rising globally.

The NCA and CSSR simply pick out the worst rising variables, global or regional, that might be related to global warming (which they also assume is human caused). That these are part of natural oscillations is simply ignored, but only experts can see what is not there. They then project these unpleasant changes as going on unabated for the next 100 years or so.

If that is not bad enough they throw in a bunch of wonky computer modeling to make it worse. This is where nutty things like the 8 foot sea level rise come from — computers, not the ocean.

The real message here is that the folks who produced this official pseudoscientific garbage need to be stopped. This is the US Global Change Research Program office (USGCRP). It was created by that 1990 law and it has done nothing since except churn out alarmist reports. The biggest of these are the National Climate Assessments but there are many others. The USGCRP office needs to be shut down, including the NCA4 project presently in progress.

As for the bogus Climate Science Special Report, this needs to be torn to shreds by a Red Team critique, which should be easy enough. Let’s have an equally official report that says what is wrong with this report. That should balance things out nicely.