A recently published paper by Jonathan Cohler in the winter 2025 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPANDS) argues that the global mean surface temperature (GMST)—the key metric underpinning international climate agreements like the Paris Accord—is thermodynamically and mathematically meaningless.
Cohler revives and highlights a 2007 analysis by Christopher Essex, Ross McKitrick, and Bjarne Andresen (published in the Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics), which demonstrated through physical and mathematical proofs that no single “global temperature” has physical meaning in the context of global warming. Different averaging methods applied to the same temperature data can produce arbitrarily different trends, rendering GMST an invalid intensive property (like averaging the temperature of boiling water and bathwater, or points on Mount Everest and the Sahara).The author contends that trillions in climate policy spending hinge on this “fiction,” with bodies like the International Standards Organization declining to define GMST and the IPCC offering only circular definitions.
Cohler concludes that reliance on such a metric indicates climate science has shifted toward political ends rather than physical reality.
Context and Counterpoints: The 2007 Essex et al. paper has been critiqued in mainstream climate science circles (e.g., a 2007 RealClimate response) as philosophically interesting but practically irrelevant. GMST is defended not as a strict thermodynamic temperature but as a statistical index or proxy that effectively tracks planetary heat content changes, particularly from well-mixed greenhouse gases. It correlates strongly with independent measures like ocean heat uptake (in joules) and enhances signal-to-noise ratios for detecting anthropogenic forcing.
The JPANDS, published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), is known for politically conservative viewpoints and has faced criticism for promoting non-mainstream positions on topics like climate change, vaccines, and health policy. It is not indexed in major databases like PubMed and is often described as outside the scientific consensus.This paper adds to ongoing debates about climate metrics but echoes long-standing arguments that have not shifted the broader scientific agreement on warming trends and their causes.
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December 17, 2025 at 5:57 am
tildeb
Atmospheric chemistry is not partisan nor subject to the word games used to ‘show’ just how foolishly wrong climate scientists are. The more milk you add to a coffee, the greater the chemical effects. The more greenhouse gases you add to the atmosphere, the greater the chemical effect. The argument put forth in this paper by an IT specialist is equivalent to that of a non mathematician pointing out velocity as a single factor does not exist and therefore all calculation of speed are meaningless. This is a common misunderstanding of what these terms really describe: values of comparison. The global mean surface temperature is the same: a comparison value over time. It doesn’t go down. It goes up. This is the point. But how and why this trend is caused is a point of contention because it’s very complex. Like predicting the exact concentrations of milk in certain artificial columns of coffee constantly subjected to additional milk being added and stirred, so too does atmospheric concentrations of CO2 make it very difficult to measure this specific cause and effect other than by comparison of before and later. Just because Grok 3 did the analysis doesn’t mean it is somehow more valid than the dedicated work from thousands of lives of dedicated climate scientists have been wasted because a computer guy finds a problem defining a word with enough specificity.
Compare and contrast this artificial understanding by Cohler with the offering from a Hansen paper just released and talked about on this site. James Hansen was the first to raise the alarm before Congress about rising levels of CO2 and its downstream effect on global temperatures. Now he’s saying we’ve badly underestimated (meaning the IPCC) because of the role of albedo in atmospheric chemistry has been underestimated (which in part explains why polar regions have significantly risen in mean temperature year over year at about 4 times the rate at the equator). The link to Hansen’s paper is in the article and it isn’t getting nearly the press it deserves.
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December 17, 2025 at 11:23 am
The Arbourist
You’re right—atmospheric chemistry doesn’t care about politics, and adding more greenhouse gases does increase the warming effect, just like more milk lightens coffee over time.
The global mean surface temperature (GMST) is a useful way to track overall changes, even if it’s more of a statistical average than a perfect physical measure.The paper by Jonathan Cohler (building on earlier work) isn’t saying trends don’t exist or that we can’t measure warming. It just raises a technical point from thermodynamics: there’s no single, uniquely “correct” way to average global temperatures in a strict physical sense, and different methods can give slightly different results.
It’s more of a philosophical question about whether this is the best basis for huge policy decisions.I completely agree that James Hansen’s recent work deserves way more attention. He’s arguing the IPCC has underestimated how much warming we’re seeing—partly because of reduced aerosols (like from cleaner shipping) and stronger ice/albedo feedbacks in the poles. Interestingly, Hansen uses the GMST record itself to show that warming is happening faster than many models predicted.
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