Screenshot of the a YouTube video from “Friends of Science”, named “Climate Science and the Myths of Renewable Energy - FOS Steve Goreham”, which claims that climate change is not dangerous and is not caused by humans. Scientists who reviewed this video found that it comprises a litany of common myths about climate science. Goreham misrepresents global temperature data, the physics of the greenhouse effect, and the factors controlling sea level rise, among many other things. Graphic: Climate Feedback

By Scott Johnson
21 December 2018
(Climate Feedback) – This video of a talk by author and speaker Steve Goreham, posted by the YouTube channel “Friends of Science” has been viewed over 250,000 times and has been widely promoted by Youtube recently. In it, Goreham claims that climate change is not dangerous, and is not caused by humans.Scientists who reviewed the talk found that it was comprised of a litany of common myths about climate science. Goreham misrepresents global temperature data, the physics of the greenhouse effect, and the factors controlling sea level rise, among many other things, as explained below by scientists.

Reviewers’ overall feedback

These comments are the overall assessment of scientists on the article, they are substantiated by their knowledge in the field and by the content of the analysis in the annotations on the article.

  • Stefan Rahmstorf, Professor, Potsdam University: The video presents a litany of the usual climate denier talking points, none of which hold any water. It is full of outright false claims and does not even shy away from presenting a fake TIME magazine cover that supposedly warned of an ice age. “Friends of Science” is an advocacy group “largely funded by the fossil fuel industry”, according to Wikipedia. Already its name is intended to mislead.
  • Twila Moon, Research Scientist, University of Colorado, Boulder: The information in this video is consistently false, using some correct ideas (e.g. Greenland is thinning at edges and thickening in the center) to build up incorrect explanations (e.g. so overall Greenland is not changing much). The video builds scientifically incorrect understandings for a wide variety of topics.
  • Patrick Brown, Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science: The video is of very low scientific quality. It stitches together dozens of unoriginal myths about climate science that have been debunked over and over again.
  • Mark Richardson, Postdoctoral scholar, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology: This video is shameful and full of well-known tricks that deceive people about global warming. Almost every statement is false or misleading. Radiometer measurements of Earth’s atmosphere confirm CO2‘s heating effect just as expected, and other instruments rule out the Sun or volcanoes. There are specific “fingerprints” in patterns of warming that match CO2 caused warming and we have measured increasing water vapour in the air in response, just as predicted decades ago. This video is an embarrassment.

Key Takeaways

The statements quoted below are from Goreham’s video; comments are from the reviewers (and are lightly edited for clarity).1. Greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change by measurably strengthening the greenhouse effect in line with the expectations of physics and chemistry.

“There is no empirical evidence that increasing greenhouse gases are the primary cause of Global Warming”

Patrick Brown, Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science:
This is not true.The primary empirical evidence that greenhouse gasses cause global warming is the absorption (as a function of wavelength of radiation) of gasses like CO2, CH4, and N2O. This was discovered in 1859 by John Tyndall and has become a part of fundamental physics. Anyone can check this empirical relationship at any time with an absorption spectroscopy device.The empirical evidence that increases in greenhouse gas concentrations (from fossil fuel burning) are the primary cause of century-scale warming is that observed global temperatures have risen in line with what would be expected from the observed increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and observations of natural drivers of climate change (e.g. solar output and volcanic eruptions) indicate that natural drivers are not causing warming. [more]

Popular “Friends of Science” video promoted by Youtube presents long list of climate myths