…is unscientific:
It seems to make no difference that those challenging the doomsday narrative include some of the world’s most distinguished scientists, or that numerous experts in climatology and related earth sciences have repeatedly gone public with their critiques. To climate ideologues, they’re invisible. “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous,” President Obama tweeted in May.
Really? That’s not what the American Meteorological Society learned from a recent survey of its professional members. Only a bare majority, 52 percent, said that climate change is largely being driven by human activity. Scientists with a “liberal political orientation” were much more likely to regard global warming as human-caused and harmful, the survey’s authors found — in fact, as a predictor of respondents’ views on global warming, ideology outweighed greater expertise. “This would be strong evidence against the idea that expert scientists’ views on politically controversial topics can be completely objective,” the authors observe.
In that light, consider the findings of a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Of 117 global warming predictions generated by climate-model simulations, all but three “significantly” overestimated the actual amount of warming that occurred during the past 20 years. The models typically forecast that global surface temperature would rise by more than twice as much as it did.
Why would so many scientists have relied on models that turned out to be so wrong? The authors propose several plausible explanations — volcanic eruptions? solar irradiation? — but their bottom line is that climate science still has a long way to go: “Ultimately the causes of this inconsistency will only be understood after . . . waiting to see how global temperature responds over the coming decades.”
That understanding won’t be advanced one millimeter by ideologues who thunder that the “science is settled.” Perhaps all those climate models wouldn’t have been programmed to overpredict global warming if the pressure to conform to the alarmists’ view weren’t so pervasive.
Ya think?
[Update a while later]
Global warming “proof” is evaporating:
Mind you, the term “pause” is misleading in the extreme: Unless and until it resumes again, it’s just a “stop.” You don’t say a bullet-ridden body “paused” breathing.
Remarkably, that stoppage has practically been a state secret. Just five years ago, the head of the International Panel on Climate Change, the group most associated with “proving” that global warming is man-made and has horrific potential consequences, told Congress that Earth is running a “fever” that’s “apt to get much worse.” Yet he and IPCC knew the warming had stopped a decade earlier.
Those who pointed this out, including yours truly, were labeled “denialists.” Yet the IPCC itself finally admitted the “pause” in its latest report.
The single most damning aspect of the “pause” is that, because it has occurred when “greenhouse gases” have been pouring into the atmosphere at record levels, it shows at the very least that something natural is at play here. The warmists suggest that natural factors have “suppressed” the warming temporarily, but that’s just a guess: The fact is, they have nothing like the understanding of the climate that they claimed (and their many models that all showed future warming mean nothing, since they all used essentially the same false information).
This is junk science. I would note to Mr. Fumento, though, that educated people knew the earth was round centuries before Columbus.
The way that AGW is being handled has been absolutely poisonous to the process of science. Science requires an atmosphere of open inquiry, curiosity, and intellectual rigor in order to advance but much of that is being shut down by folks who demand nothing less than strict orthodoxy. Critics are called “deniers” or “denialists” and lumped into the same moral categorization as the scum who refuse to believe in the reality of the holocaust.
This rhetoric is chosen carefully, to shut down debate and drive the appearance of “consensus” independent of the underlying scientific merits. We’ve already seen how this toxic environment has led to significant deteriorations in the practice of science within the climatalogy community. There are many examples of very serious flaws with research, the hockey stick comes to mind, which has only been corrected due to intense outside pressure from “skeptics” and which has typically merely been silently and stealthily corrected. Another example of that sort of thing is the lack of auditing of weather station siting and quality control, where it takes 3rd party investigators demonstrating the problems with a given site for it to be dropped from the network (which typically happens unceremoniously).
That’s not the way science should work, it’s not any reasonable way it *can* work effectively under such constraints. Scientists need to have the intellectual freedom to batter down the mistakes of past researchers, publicly and directly. Without that the mistakes tend to add up instead of diminish.
“Scientists need to have the intellectual freedom to batter down the mistakes of past researchers, publicly and directly.”
And the intellectual integrity. As you noted with the term denier and the science behind the hockey stick, integrity is lacking in the AGW alarmist community as a whole.
Indeed. The hockey stick has been invalidated. It’s utterly debunked. In any other scientific field that would have been a very public process. In climatology it happened fairly quietly. There are still a lot of people in the public at large who do not appreciate that it has been debunked, for example. The sad thing is that without the work of the “deniers” largely external to the core climate science community such a debunking may not have ever happened or might have been long delayed.
“Mind you, the term “pause” is misleading in the extreme: Unless and until it resumes again, it’s just a “stop.” You don’t say a bullet-ridden body “paused” breathing.
Remarkably, that stoppage has practically been a state secret. Just five years ago, the head of the International Panel on Climate Change, the group most associated with “proving” that global warming is man-made and has horrific potential consequences, told Congress that Earth is running a “fever” that’s “apt to get much worse.” Yet he and IPCC knew the warming had stopped a decade earlier.”
It appears you take the last 15 years of data as dispositive but you denounce the last 200 years of data
as fraudulent and meaningless.
that’s a heck of a basis to argue from.
We are taking the last fifteen years as dispositive because the warm mongers told us we should, you imbecile.
But then you denounce the prior 200 years of data?
WTF are you talking about? 200 years? There is no 200 years.
The effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, according to the hypothesis, were insignificant until the late 70’s. And, they’ve been evidently been insignificant since the late 90’s. So, there is a space of at most about 20 years in which AGW was purportedly evident. But, since it has gone away now, it is clear to anyone with brainpower above a cactus that, those 20 odd years provide no evidence for the conjecture at all.
Accepting the scientific consensus does not end the policy debate. Here’s Bjorn Lomberg, whom Rand frequently cites approvingly, in Tuesday’s NY Times:
There’s no question that burning fossil fuels is leading to a warmer climate and that addressing this problem is important.
But his acknowledgement of scientific reality does not stop him from arguing for more use of coal, oil and natural gas (the op-ed is titled “The Poor Need Fossil Fuels”).
Yes, Lomborg is more certain about that than he should be but, as you say, he is still economically sensible about solutions to the problem.
“The models typically forecast that global surface temperature would rise by more than twice as much as it did”
Sounds like this guy agrees the planet is warming, just not as fast as the models predict.
Seems like he agrees on the direction, just not the amplitude.
IOW, it seems like he is not interested in whether it is happening or not, and wants to focus attention away from unproductive arguments onto things that actually matter to people.
That the models are wrong should throw up some red flags for the AGW movement. Climate isn’t static. Temperatures vary above and below an average and the average itself changes all the time. We can point to warming or cooling in recent years but they are well within natural variation.
The contention of AGW alarmists is that we must act now before temperature changes are no longer in the range of natural variation. To back up their claims computer models were made predicting temperature increases. The last 15 years of data collected has shown the predictions to be wrong. Real world data isnt matching up with the computer model predictions.
That there has been warming but not as much as predicted, doesn’t support the AGW theory. It is evidence that AGW alarmists are wrong.
This is why Mann, in preparation for the last IPCC report, said that because temperature data wasn’t supporting the models that they were going to lower the bar. Temperatures were not meeting the low end of predicted increases so they lowered the predictions to meet the data. Mann tried to spin this as strengthening the models but it made them less precise. Instead of narrowing the range of predictions, meaning they would be more accurate, the range was broadened making predictions less precise.
Think about it like this. The same people who can’t build a website to shop for health insurance claim to know how the climate works with high enough confidence to predict the next 1000 years. Well, just like health insurance, it turns out the climate is more complicated than they realized. But the fear mongering is great for profits in the green industry.