Not all that long ago, a favorite claim of the left, especially the climate change shouters, was that they "freakin' love science." (They didn't usually say "freakin'," but you get the idea.) You don't hear that claim so much anymore, probably because the actual application of the scientific method to the claims of climate scolds just doesn't bear out their assertions. Science is all about data — facts — and requires the dispassionate analysis of those facts.
Climate scolds aren't interested in facts or in any dispassionate analyses. They aren't about science; this isn't an issue of science to these people. It's an issue of politics; it's an issue of control, not control of the climate, but control of people. But we can and should apply such reasoning to their claims, though one question has to be answered first: What constitutes "proof" of their claims?
A recent piece by Francis Menton at the Manhattan Contrarian details a presentation from the Heartland Institute's 16th International Conference on Climate Change, and Mr. Menton's account is a revelation on how these things should be argued. He writes:
The most interesting presentation on this subject came from John Clauser. For those who haven’t heard of him, Clauser was one of the co-winners of the Nobel Prize in physics in 2022. The specific subject of Clauser’s prize was something called “quantum entanglement,” which seems to be only peripherally related to climate change. However, Clauser’s presentation made it look like since winning the prize he has spent much of his time studying the literature on climate change, and particularly studying the data that are cited to support claims of impending climate crisis. Over that period, he has become a very outspoken climate skeptic. He is clearly a very smart guy, with a sharp critical eye. Also, he has taken a specific approach, which is to examine the data looking for gaps, alterations or manipulations that might render the data insufficient to support the claims being made.
We might note that a faulty claim can not only arise from alterations or manipulations, but also from ignoring the data. What we are looking for in climate change data is trends over time, and Clauser begins by showing that with the very data provided, there are no significant trends over the last hundred years or so — an eyeblink in geologic time.
For this sub-topic, Clauser began with a 2012 article from Physics Today by Jane Lubchenco and Thomas Karl, titled “Predicting and managing extreme weather events.” (L&K) At the time of the article, which was during the presidency of Barack Obama, Lubchenco was the Administrator of NOAA, and Karl was Director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and Chair of the US Global Change Research Program. In other words, these were the people then in charge of collecting the U.S. weather data, including data on extreme weather events, on behalf of the government. As Clauser noted in his talk, if there were any people who would have access to the very best data to support a claim of increasing extreme weather, it would be these two.
If there was any recent administration that was in the pockets of the climate scolds, it would be the Obama administration. But under Dr. Clauser's scrutiny, it turns out that Lubchenco and Karl, referred to as "L&K," are hoist on the petard of their own data.
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Dr. Clauser and Francis Menton have their ducks in a row when it comes to a critical examination of climate scold claims:
L&K present a series of charts that they assert establish the proposition that extreme weather events in the U.S. have “grown steadily over the past several decades.” To measure the level of these extreme weather events within the U.S., L&K come up with something they call the “US Climate Extremes Index.” They describe the Index as having been calculated based on “the area percentage of the country experiencing extreme monthly temperature, drought severity, soil water surplus, days with and without precipitation, land-falling hurricane activity, and one-day heavy precipitation events in any given year.” However, beyond that description, there is nothing in the way of a technical description and backup of how the charts have been constructed quantitatively. A footnote with a link to a prior Karl article on the subject, presumably containing these details, returns a message “not found.”
My first comment on this “Climate Extremes Index” is that it is an extremely dubious metric, obviously subject to very easy manipulation. For example, who has decided how much land area was covered by a particular “land-falling hurricane”? Is it just the land area where the wind speeds exceeded 75 mph, or is it the entire area overswept by the hurricane storm system over its full life span of possibly several days, mostly with far lower windspeeds? Hidden decisions like that could easily be used to manipulate an index like this to produce a desired result.
However, Clauser does not go there, and instead he just takes the values of the index as presented by L&K and asks whether they actually increased over the period covered. Here is Figure 2a from L&K, showing the values of their U.S. Climate Extremes Index over the period 1910 to 2011:
Here's that chart:
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) April 16, 2026
If you look at that and don’t see any particular increase, let alone some dramatic surge in recent years, you won’t be the only one.
And it gets worse. Clauser took the values of the Index shown on the bar graph, and re-plotted them as dots on a scatter diagram. Then he did another plot where he reversed the order of the observations, so that the newest observations were on the left and the older on the right. In other words, the two plots are mirror images of each other. Here they are:
And here are those scatter diagrams:
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) April 16, 2026
OK, that's a lot to absorb. Take a moment and think about all this.
Ready? Good, let's move on.
This claim from two Obama administration officials isn't based on any strict examination of data. There don't appear to be any strict definitions of things like "land-falling hurricane." There are too many variables, and it appears as though L&K made no effort to pare down any of those variables. A dispassionate analysis of their data disproves their claims, and it doesn't even necessarily take an extensive analysis, just a visual presentation of their own data.
The left claims they freakin' love science. They don't. The climate scolds shout that the science is settled. It isn't. Science is never settled. For one thing, science is a tool; it doesn't settle anything, it's just a method of gathering facts and drawing conclusions from those facts. For another thing, scientific research, hypotheses, and the theoretical conclusions that derive from them, are always tentative; they are always subject to re-examination when new data is available.
What L&K did here wasn't science. What the climate scolds are shouting about when they yell for us to stop using fossil fuels, to start eating bugs, and to cram ourselves into rabbit-warren 15-minute cities, isn't about science. It's about control. It was always about control, and it will always be about control. That's the only way their ignoring the data makes any sense, and that's why we have to counter them at every opportunity — as Dr. John Clauser has done.
