Climate misinformation from Norway spreads internationally

Colleagues in the Climate Advisory Board report that they have been confronted with the arguments presented in a discussion note posted on the website of Statistics Norway. The note caused controversy in the Norwegian media, and researchers from several institutions criticized numerous aspects of the note.

• The note does not have the character of a scientific publication, it does not contain a review of prior research in the area and contains a thin, selective, outdated, and biased literature list.
• The introductory chapters are off topic, containing statements about climate modelling and atmospheric physics that are mistaken, false, and inappropriate.
• Choice of temperature measurements is very selective and represents only 6% of the Earth’s surface.
• Not considering any factors influencing temperatures means that well-understood natural variations and known human influences are treated as noise, reducing the sensitivity of the method and making it harder to detect the influence of CO2.
• One of the notes authors, John K. Dagsvik, acknowledges that they try to detect global warming examining one measurement station a time. This leads to a low sensitivity of their method and ignores that temperatures are increasing synchronously across stations.
• Authors are silent on the detection limit of their method.

Apparently the note is garnering a lot of interest and creating confusion also in other countries. Many readers will benefit from having a basic understanding of climate science and become familiar with some of the standard arguments of climate denial. I have tried to create clarity in two blog posts.