Arguments
Climate Adam - The Dumbest Climate Denial Ever?
Posted on 3 September 2025 by Guest Author
This video includes personal musings and conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any).
As the northern hemisphere experiences summer, we have also been experiencing the disastrous impacts of climate change - extreme weather like heatwaves droughts; records being smashed time and time again; and wildfires raging through our cities and our forests. But despite the fact that we're seeing unprecedented conditions, some are still claiming that all this can be explained by simply saying "It's Called Summer". But this form of climate denial - that today's conditions are normal summer, rather than a symptom of a changed climate - is surprisingly widespread... despite also being nonsensical. In this video, I get into why this kind of argument holds back climate action.
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There is an old joke in places that I have lived where people say "if you don't like the look of the weather, wait five minutes - it will change".
Likewise, calling this "the ... dumbest ever" may not last long. Don't underestimate the limits of arguments presented by the contrarian world.
In the video, I particularly liked where Adam highlights the contradiction between "its called summer" and "you can't predict the weather two weeks from now, so you can't predict climate" (number 63 on the Arguments list). As Adam says, identifying seasons as a recurring cycle is, in fact, a climate prediction. A reliable one. Not just because we have many observations of the cycle to look back on - but because we understand the physics involved.
Physics explains the earth's orbital patterns, and those orbital patterns explain the distribution of solar energy arriving at different locations and times on earth, and physics explains how those differences and cycles lead to the seasons. A year from now, the northern hemisphere will again be experiencing "summer". A climate prediction.
Skeptical Science used to have a list of the contradictions in contrarian arguments. It became too difficult to maintain.
True that climate scientists obviously have a grasp of seasons, and true that many people use seasons as a strawman argument to bash climate change, but it's also the case that climate science hasn't figured out non-seasonal natural climate variability — for example, being able to predict the next El Nino more than a few months before it happens. Yet, there may be a seasonal interaction with another factor that will unlock the mystery behind the erratic natural climate cycles. It's all related to nonlinear interactions of the seasonal cycle with lunar tidal forces. Go to the github site pukite.com and see how well a model works to fit various climate indices — it also works on monthly extreme tidal levels on various coastal sites around the world — there are 130 of these spanning around 100 years each. The caveat is that a long interval of data is required to avoid over-fitting. The basic physical mechanism is simple — the ocean's thermocline is very sensitive to tidal forcing and because the thermocline varies seasonally, the math of tidal effects is much more complicated than that used for conventional tidal analysis. Climate scientists have simply overlooked this kind of analysis all these years. I published this approach in late 2018, so please dive in if you are interested. A reminder that this is not a contrarian argument but a peer-reviewed explanation of natural climate variation.