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John Clauser, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, presented at the International Conference on Climate Change, questioning the proof of a climate “crisis” and examining data for gaps, alterations, or manipulations.

He highlighted a 2012 article published in Physics Today authored by two NOAA “scientists,” which fraudulently claimed extreme weather events were increasing due to climate change.

To prove the article was fraudulent, Clauser performed a simple test.  He plotted the NOAA researchers’ graph backwards and challenged the audience to identify which graph proved extreme weather was increasing.

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At The Heartland Climate Conference: “What Is The Proof?”, Extreme Weather Events Edition

By Francis Menton, as published by Manhattan Contrarian on 10 April 2026

I spent the past couple of days attending the International Conference on Climate Change, put on by the Heartland Institute in Washington. There was a good deal of material that will be of interest to readers.

A major issue addressed by multiple presenters goes under the heading ‘What is the proof?’ and, in particular, what is the proof that there is some kind of climate “crisis” coming our way. You will not be surprised to learn that for most every claim of the climate cabal, the proof is lacking.

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 that 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 an impending climate crisis. Over that period, he has become a very outspoken climate sceptic. 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. (See also, my series on ‘The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time’.) I think that this approach is the essence of the scientific method, but sadly, it is mostly absent from the climate “science” cult. Finally, Clauser has specifically focused on certain flaws or manipulations of the data that can be seen easily and understood by a layman without any need for specific scientific expertise.

Clauser titled his talk ‘Global warming, climate change, and scientific consensus have not been proven. There is no proven climate crisis’. The talk was accompanied by a PowerPoint deck of some 124 slides, which were way too numerous and detailed for him to cover everything or for an audience member to take thorough notes. However, I managed to get my hands on a copy of the deck. (Clauser’s full talk is available on the Heartland website and I understand that the deck will also be available on the website within a few days.)

Today I will start with the part of Clauser’s presentation relating to the issue of what are called “extreme weather events” – e.g., floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, and the like. 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 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”), and Karl was Director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Centre and Chair of the US Global Change Research Programme. In other words, these were the people then in charge of collecting the US 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.

The thesis of the L&K piece is that extreme weather events in the US have been increasing and can be expected to increase further as the climate warms. Here’s the introductory paragraph:

Earth’s climate is warming, and destructive weather is growing more prevalent. Coping with the changes will require collaborative science, forward-thinking policy, and an informed public.

Besides making their own statement to that effect, L&K also quote multiple similar statements from the IPCC:

“It is very likely that heat waves will increase in length, frequency, and/or intensity over most land areas … It is likely that the average maximum wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase throughout the coming century … It is likely that the frequency of heavy precipitation or the proportion of total rainfall from heavy falls will increase in the 21st century over many areas of the globe.”

So, what is the proof?

L&K present a series of charts that they assert establish the proposition that extreme weather events in the US have “grown steadily over the past several decades.” To measure the level of these extreme weather events within the US, 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 over swept by the hurricane storm system over its full life span of possibly several days, mostly with far lower wind speeds? 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.  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 US Climate Extremes Index over the period 1910 to 2011:

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 ones on the right. In other words, the two plots are mirror images of each other. Here they are:

The years on the x-axis both indicate that they run from oldest to newest, but Clauser states that he has left it that way intentionally to challenge the observer to figure out which chart is plotted backwards. Here is Clauser’s text from his slide 9:

The two graphs are identical, except that one is plotted left-to-right reversed, i.e. backwards, with time increasing to the left. (If you look carefully, you will see that they are mirror images of each other.) I assert that if you can’t tell which one of these graphs is correctly plotted and which one is time-backwards, then Lubchenco and Karl’s claimed recent increase in extreme weather-event frequency is not obviously indicated by their data. One of these graphs is claimed by Lubchenko and Karl to forecast an impending climate apocalypse! Are you really confidently willing to bet trillions of dollars that you can tell which one makes that forecast?

Clauser concluded this segment of his presentation by calling L&K’s conclusion “fraudulent pseudoscience.” It is an odd sort of fraudulent pseudoscience – baldly asserting that a collection of data supports a conclusion that the data obviously do not support and expecting everyone to just nod along. It’s hard to believe that with all the data at their disposal, this is the best that L&K could come up with to prove the case of increasing extreme weather events. But that’s a lot of how “climate science” works.

About the Author

Francis Menton is a former partner of the law firm of Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP.  He is President of the American Friends, an affiliate of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.  Menton publishes blogs on the website Manhattan Contrarian, “blogs from the West Village neighbourhood in Manhattan,” which is suffering from a stifling political and ideological orthodoxy.