Unsettled Science: 53 different explanations for the failure of computerized climate models

We are told by government-funded climate alarmists that their forecasts of dangerous man-made global warming rely on “settled science”.

Their “settled science” represents a mare’s nest of computer models, resting on a few match-sticks of science, surrounded by tall forests of uncertainty.

It is indeed settled science that all gases in the atmosphere can affect the exchange of heat between the sun, the Earth and outer space, and this can affect global temperatures. It is also agreed that certain gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide can absorb and redirect radiant energy passing through the atmosphere.

It is also settled science (but seldom mentioned) that the warming potential of each additional unit of carbon dioxide is progressively less, and is trivial at and above current levels. It is also agreed that water vapour has a far greater “greenhouse effect”, because it is fifty times more abundant, and it affects more radiation wavelengths.

However, it is not settled science that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the main controller of global temperatures. Nor is it proven or agreed that man’s production of carbon dioxide is harmful to life on Earth, or that it will cause catastrophic global warming.

The official climate models are based on a theory that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere drives surface temperature changes. However, not one of the dozens of computerized climate models relied on by the IPCC predicted flat-lining temperatures over the last 17 years. This indicates that their carbon-centric assumption is wrong. At last count, there were 53 different explanations for these failures. This is hardly “settled science”.

Here’s WHY COMPUTER MODELS CAN NEVER REFLECT REALITY. See todays paramount living physicist:

“... all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do _a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in_. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.”.... Freeman Dyson, (8/8/07) http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html

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As it pertains to climate science, for example, anyone who approaches it with an open mind is struck by the many exceptions that refute its central claim. So many black swans! It will not progress until those black swans can be reconciled with the white, and yet, proponents try to pretend the former don’t even exist.

In this regard, climate science is more like neurosis than science, since it operates via repression, rationalization, compartmentalization, wishful thinking, projection, etc.

HERE:

Thursday, August 07, 2014
Myth, Science, Scientific Myth, and Myths of Science http://tinyurl.com/pyyxa9s
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2014/08/myth-science-scientific-myth-and-myths.html

If spending is what counts, Republicans are far more pro-science than Democrats http://tinyurl.com/ot9szeg

HERE:

4 Warning Signs That Impartial Paper On Politics And Science Really Isn’t
By Hank Campbell | September 8th 2014 12:25 PM http://www.science20.com/science_20/4_warning_signs_that_impartial_paper_on_politics_and_science_really_isnt-141665?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Talk of a ‘secret sauce’ in decision-making and charges that government groups like the Environmental Protection Agency are politically motivated are not new. Every president has its opposition party contending that the administration is manipulating science to suit its agenda - in the 1990s, Democrats got it for scuttling the Superconducting Super Collider and gutting the NIH and NASA while a decade later Republicans were called anti-science for limiting federal funding for human embryonic stem cells to existing lines.

No one voted or did not vote for a candidate because of the SSC or hESCs, they were simply talking points to confirm decisions.

In the modern instant news and social media environment, such stories can easily become magnified, and they do. As a result, the public increasingly regards government science policy as just another political marketing tool, no different than mobilizing voters by claiming the opposition is going to impeach the president to drum up voter turnout for November.
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Credit: NYU

The result is a public just as divided over science as they are Obamacare and taxes. Even environmental science. It’s not like some people actually hate or love the environment more based on how they vote - global warming deniers conserve electricity and recycle as much as financial donors to Sierra Club do - they just filter their belief in what is meaningful action through the latest political prism.

As politics has become more polarized during the Obama years, so have positions, according to a new paper. Though a Republican created National Parks laws, the Clean Air Act and the EPA, and President George W. Bush made the Lacey Act finally effective against illegal logging, the gap between conservatives and liberals on environmental policy has broadened drastically, according to a new sociology paper.

Based on what? Spending by Congress.

That is to conservatives a flawed premise right out of the gate - you can’t spend your way to success, as we have seen trying to buy solar energy science breakthroughs by throwing money at them. Sociologists are overwhelmingly on the left so they may regard spending as what really matters but lead author Aaron McCright of Michigan State University knows money has little to do with it. He wrote a paper last year saying that people who accepted climate change accepted mitigation ideas regardless of being Republican or Democrat.

Fewer people on the right accept climate the same way fewer on the left accept vaccines and agriculture, but it isn’t because the right spends more on food.

Spending as a metric is also flawed because if spending is what counts, Republicans are far more pro-science than Democrats, so contending they are less concerned about environmental science is a hard claim to prove. Reagan was the greatest proponent of government-funded basic research in US history. Bush and a Republican Congress doubled funding for the NIH and boosted funding for NASA after declines in the Clinton years. In the Obama years, the NIH is again barely treading water and numerous NASA programs have been cut, like the Constellation.

The basis for the claim is annual national survey results from 1974 to 2012 that included a question on environmental spending. The benefit for the public is that it provides a way to see 4 Common Warning Signs that the paper you are reading is more about advancing a political agenda than a public service one.

Since the paper is using Congressional spending as a metric for a divide among the public, if you know any history at all, you will see the First Warning Sign readily enough:

Warning Sign #1 - Amateur Psychology As A Magic Bullet

The survey results found that the divide among citizens who consider themselves conservatives and liberals started growing particularly wide in 1992 - this was the year President Clinton was elected over George H. W. Bush with 43 percent of the vote, when right-wing candidate Ross Perot had a better showing than any third-party nominee in history - but highlighting 1992 shows that they are willing to draw conclusions that are not based on evidence, they are actually in defiance of it.

McCright and colleagues ignore the acrimony of that contest and claim the widening gap between conservatives and liberals about environmental spending was because of...the fall of the Soviet Union. Republicans, in the eyes of sociologists, just need to be afraid of something and so a “Red Scare” got replaced with a “Green Scare”.

What else did they leave out that invalidates their assertion? Congress was controlled by Democrats. Governor Clinton was incredibly polarizing in the 1992 election, to such an extent he put conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh on the national cultural map, but claiming that desire for more environmental spending is an accurate barometer of partisanship falls flat because it doesn’t happen anywhere else. When it comes to lowering costs for chronically ill people, bipartian bills sail through the House. If people are really more polarized about spending, that would not happen.

Warning Sign #2 - They Can’t See The Environmentalism For The Cheese

The sociologists contend if anyone doesn’t want the curve on environmental spending to continually go up, polarization is happening.

A simple thought experiment can help show that is flawed: If, in 1990, 75 percent of Democrats and Republicans believed the United States spent too little on cheese but by 2012 the spending on cheese was 3X what it was in 1990 yet the left had gone farther left and the right went farther right so while 68 percent of Democrats still believed we spent too little on cheese while only 40 percent of the Republicans now believed that, sociologists say Republicans are too polarized.

I know you are smart but in case you missed it, you can literally swap out cheese for environmental spending.

Warning Sign #3 - If The Federal Government Is Broken, It Must Be Republicans

The third warning sign the sociologists are trying to make a mountain out of a molehill - if the American public doesn’t want to pay higher prices for electricity, well golly, it must be mean Republicans at work again: “This political polarization is unlikely to reverse course without noticeable convergence in support of environmental protection among policymakers, with prominent conservatives becoming less anti-environmental in their public statements and voting records,” lead author McCright says in their release.

He frames our heroes and villains quite nicely, it is just not evidence-based. If we really care about poor people and the environment, for example, we have to mention that it is Democrats demonizing the science that most helps the poor in America and worldwide - agriculture. Opponents of food science are doing far more harm to people than resisting CO2 caps and they are “liberals”, in the giant stereotypical blanket used by the authors.

Warning Sign #4 - What’s A Null Hypothesis?

The humanities often pick a position and then find evidence to match it. It’s not a flawed strategy in literature, if you want to claim da Vinci was gay, just note that he got accused of being gay one time, and cite other books claiming he might be gay. Science instead has a null hypothesis, you would have to show he was gay. You can infer some thngs, we do that about dark matter, but you can’t take survey data and and create a matching curve and claim it is a real finding.

In this case, the curve is the environmental-protection voting patterns of Congress. Science 2.0 readers are smart enough to know throwing money at issues doesn’t help the environment, nor does having Democrats in control. In the years 2007-2009, Democrats had control of both houses but their only big environmental initiative was replacing spoons in the Congressional cafeteria with corn-based things that melted in soup - and when Republicans regained control of the House the outgoing Democrat in charge of the cafeteria asked the incoming Republican to undo that program, because it was a giant waste of money that helped no one.

If sociologists were correct, there would have been a huge upswell in desire for environmental spending and spending to match. Yet that did not happen, even when there was a bulletproof majority in Congress and a President in the same party.

*****

In conclusion, I can actually give you a 5th Warning Sign a paper on science beliefs is not impartial. It is not evidence-based and instead creates a belief and finds evidence to match it, so sociologists will feel right at home with my assertion - if Mother Jones endorses your paper, it is biased.

Citation: Aaron M. McCright, Chenyang Xiao, Riley E. Dunlap, ‘Political polarization on support for government spending on environmental protection in the USA, 1974–2012’, Social Science Research Volume 48, November 2014, Pages 251–260 DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2014.06.008

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