Tice & Climate

Richard Tice’s latest declaration that “thousands of scientists” agree with him about climate change collapsing under scrutiny is a bit like announcing that “thousands of chefs” support your diet because you once met a bloke who eats chips.

The supposed “study” he’s citing isn’t a climate paper at all. It’s a discussion note from Statistics Norway, written by a statistician and a retired engineer, not climatologists. It wasn’t peer-reviewed, wasn’t endorsed by Norway’s climate institute, and – crucially – didn’t even analyse the causes of warming. It ran a statistical test for “stationarity” on temperature fluctuations, not the actual trend. That’s like measuring how noisy a kettle is and concluding it’s not boiling because the decibels haven’t changed.

The methodology, if we can call it that, treats two centuries of temperature data as if climate behaves like a random walk – ignoring CO₂ concentrations, solar forcing, aerosols, ocean currents, or any of the physics that actually drive the climate system. Then, because their chosen model couldn’t detect a clear break in the noise, the authors suggested there might not be one. This is not science; it’s statistical navel-gazing dressed up as revelation. It’s as if someone ran a coin-toss simulation and declared gravity unproven because the coins didn’t fall faster over time.

Every climate scientist who looked at the paper called it out for what it was – a mathematical parlour trick. One even noted that if you feed the same test a dataset of obvious warming, it still “fails to reject stationarity” half the time. In short, the method is too blunt an instrument to answer the question it pretends to. But that subtlety was apparently lost on Mr Tice, who saw “Norway” and “statistics” and thought he’d stumbled upon the Dead Sea Scrolls of denial.

Statistics Norway, mortified, hastily clarified that the views were the authors’, not theirs. That’s civil service Norwegian for “please stop embarrassing us.”

So when Tice waves this note about like a holy relic, what he’s really holding is a glorified spreadsheet that can’t tell the difference between weather and climate. The only thing it’s truly proven is that you can apply mathematics to anything – even ignorance – and make it look clever.