The Crux

Thursday 3 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

The crux of the AGW debate from the POV of “deniers.”

With the IPCC now issuing the first segment of its latest mammoth study on the same topic, readers should take the NAS pronouncement with a large grain of salt—and the IPCC report too. This is an attempt to change the subject and ignore the elephant in the room: the crisis in “consensus” climate science arising from the growing mismatch between model-predicted warming and observed warming.

Less warming means smaller climate impacts, and less ostensible need for radical changes in the way we live to deal with them.

The urgent issue in climate science today is not whether man-made global warming is real but whether the climate models that scientists use to predict it are realistic enough to assess future climate change and inform public policy. And scientists themselves are pointing this out.

The real, observable evidence increasingly shows that the models, which are no more than computer simulations based on the data and assumptions that scientists currently think are relevant, are way out of line with the changes that scientists are able to measure. And the gap is widening.

The idea that something is fishy with the “science” is corroborated by the fact that the reports which supposedly describe the science, are not science, but politics disguised as rigorous scientific consensus and designed to elicit prescriptive policy preferences.

The lull in global warming has been noted by skeptics to show the flaws behind the science and the theory that human activities, primarily through burning fossil fuels, causes global temperatures to rise.

This has some governments worried, reports the AP, as documents show that the U.S. government along with some European nations tried to convince the report’s authors to downplay the lack of warming over the past 15 years.

The AP reports that “Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted, saying a time span of 10-15 years was misleading in the context of climate change, which is measured over decades and centuries.”

“The U.S. also urged the authors to include the ‘leading hypothesis’ that the reduction in warming is linked to more heat being transferred to the deep ocean,” the AP noted. “Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for any statistics. …Using 1999 or 2000 as a starting year would yield a more upward-pointing curve. Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for skeptics.”

Concern by governments over the lull in warming comes ahead of the deadline the world has set for reaching a global climate agreement in 2015. This report would serve as the scientific underpinning of such an agreement.

“This is the culmination of four years’ work by hundreds of scientists, where governments get a chance to ensure the summary for policymakers is clear and concise in a dialogue with the scientists who wrote it, and have the opportunity to raise any topics they think should be highlighted,” Jonathan Lynn, a spokesman for the UN’s climate authority, told the AP.

(Emphasis mine)

And it’s not just “deniers” who would agree that something with how the science is presented is fishy. Some scientists are skeptics too.

“I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence,” Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot, a global warming skeptic news site. “They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed it was 95 percent sure that global warming was mainly driven by human burning of fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases. The I.P.C.C. also glossed over the fact that the Earth has not warmed in the past 15 years, arguing that the heat was absorbed by the ocean.

“Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean,” Lindzen added. “However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans.”

“However, it is this heat transport that plays a major role in natural internal variability of climate, and the IPCC assertions that observed warming can be attributed to man depend crucially on their assertion that these models accurately simulate natural internal variability,” Lindzen continued. “Thus, they now, somewhat obscurely, admit that their crucial assumption was totally unjustified.”

And Lindzen isn’t the only one. A former warming alarmist, Judith Curry of The Georgia Institute of Technology agrees with his assessment that the 95% “consensus” is bogus being as there is more uncertainty now in light of the various climate models used to calculate global warming and the actual observations of what has actually happened differ greatly.

But even if one completely dismisses the presentation of the science, you’ll need to address the vast chasm between the predictions of climate change science in the primary literature and the reality of what has actually happened in the real world. What has been imagined by climate scientists has not been corroborated by reality. We still have summer ice in the Arctic despite predictions from just 6 years ago that it would all have melted away by now. Temperatures are anywhere from 71%-300% lower than have been predicted by the various climate models that have driven scientists in their predictions of what a warmer earth would be like. In fact, of 117 predictions made by climatologists during the 1990s, 114 of them have been wrong (PDF). That’s 97.4% of the time the very scientists who have told us the end is nigh have been proven to be wrong. How the IPCC can claim 95% certainty of their hypothesis when 97% of their predictions, and all of their models, have been wrong, I’m not sure. And I’m certainly not buying in to the idea that telling me “CONSENSUS!” is a good enough reason to convince me that global warming or climate change or climate variability or whatever term warmists want to use this week is a real problem, as opposed to using SCIENCE as a cover to enact policy changes. Nor are an increasingly larger number of scientists.

So while the world may well be warming, the earth isn’t warming anywhere nearly as quickly as every single climate model has predicted (and hasn’t warmed at all in over 15 years) and the nefarious effects of global warming as predicted by scientists have been overwhelmingly wrong. Is climate change a problem? Not now it isn’t. Will climate change create problems in the future? No one knows, and those who are supposedly in the best position to tell us have been inarguably wrong in their previous predictions. And all that adds up the one point that many skeptics have been making for years: that the science to date is not yet solid enough, not yet accurate enough to use as the evidence needed to set world-changing policy which would involve massive wealth transfers and the dramatic rise in energy prices, altering economies around the world drastically.

2013-10-03  »  madlibertarianguy