Posted on 05/16/2016 3:16:05 PM PDT by Peter ODonnell
** not to be republished without donation to FR and appropriate credit to author **
The author is in fact a climate scientist of a sort, although not of the modern variety or persuasion. I graduated in 1971 with a degree in geography specializing in climatology. That's what it took back then to enter the field of climate science. As it happens, I have taken a strong interest in meteorology and forecasting and have become a recognized forecaster over the many years since that education, but almost everything I learned about forecasting was among actual meteorologists at private weather companies.
Then I went into research around 1980 hoping to delve into the many mysteries of atmospheric variation, not from any preconceived notion of how weather or climate are changing, but in an effort to understand how we might improve forecasting on monthly and seasonal time scales.
My intention with this article is to lift the lid on the murky business of climate science and give you some inside baseball type understanding of how they came to be the way they are.
Climatology was always a sort of semi-science akin to the social sciences, not without a logical or rigorous framework, but also not governed by strict equations that could be proven in a laboratory. And it used to be much less prominent than it is today -- climatology in the 1960s and 1970s was a rather sleepy backwater of academia and even in weather agencies, the climate division was not viewed as a very exciting place to work or visit. It was a place to find a lot of dusty old records that were stacked up waiting for the annual occasion when somebody might pull them off a shelf to see what lay within.
As many have heard, the 1970s crop of climate scientists (not yet known as such, the term is of more recent origin) became enamoured of a theory that a new ice age was about to begin. The reasoning was that global temperature trends had begun to decrease after a peak of warming in the 1920s to 1940s and that sea ice seemed to be expanding. There were articles written warning of the impending downturn, if not to total ice age conditions, then at least a return to the much cooler climate of the 17th and 18th centuries known as the Little Ice Age.
Now this theory gained some credibility when winters from about 1976 to 1979 proved to be quite harsh (especially in the eastern U.S.) but began to lose following when 1980 brought a very mild and snowless winter followed by heat waves across much of the U.S., but once again the theory gained steam when winters in 1981 and 1982 were quite severe and the summers not very warm in a lot of places.
Then came the massive El Nino event of 1982-83 and some freakish warmth -- December 1982 was particularly warm and blew away some very long-term records. Suddenly a new cry went up -- global warming has begun. It took only a short while for that to be blamed on human activity and steadily rising greenhouse gas levels. Before the 1980s were done, the AGW lobby was strongly entrenched in leftist politics and in the scientific community.
When the entire scientific community endorses climate science and its findings, they may or may not be aware that climate science tends to be the poor cousin of the physical sciences in terms of both personnel and theory. As to personnel, I am aware that many go into climate science nowadays because of the crusade nature, but in the past, climatology was seen as a relatively soft touch in educational terms, it was an easy science to learn and involved no difficult concepts or equations, and there were girls in it too !!
As to the theory, while something like gravitation or organic chemistry involves exhaustive trial and error experimentation based on the sound scientific principle of prediction and verification, climate science proceeds mainly from the foundation of a general if hazy consensus that something is going on and we'll fill in the blanks later as to what and when and how much. If any other science tried on what climate science does on a regular basis, it would be booted out of academia as a quack or pseudo-science. Climate science is about as credible in its current form as astrology -- it is anecdotal, it is "take our word for it, we are sincere" and it is demonstrably wrong almost all the time.
If you study the political side of it carefully, you will come to the conclusion that if you pay considerably more for gasoline, or if you kill a few million birds with wind turbines, then you will drop the earth's temperature by several millionths of a degree, and at the same time, you will provide a more comfortable retirement for public servants and politicians (and the executives of Chinese and Danish alternative energy companies).
You might be excused for being cynical about a scientific theory that says that temperature varies inversely with the retirement income of public servants. But apparently it does, climate science says that if we follow their instructions, this will be the case.
Bottom line is this, nobody ever did a lick of work in climate science to unravel the complexity of human signal interacting with natural variability, and the reason is, if you don't know what natural variability is going to produce, then how can you separate it out from a human signal? Add to that the documented fact that data sets are being manipulated, inconvenient data points erased, and new recording sites placed in poorly exposed locations bound to register warmer temperatures, and what you've actually got is a religion posing as a science.
We need a political response to this. The problem for politicians, even some of those we might otherwise trust, is that they don't know the level of incompetence and fraud that exists in this so-called science. They only hear the National Geographic version, that "everyone in science agrees" blah blah and it's a catastrophe. Oceans are rising (so slowly that it's almost imperceptible). Ice caps are melting (well a few mid-latitude glaciers are hundreds of yards up the hill from where grandmother saw them on her honeymoon).
It is all a house of cards waiting to fall under the weight of an inevitable natural cooling cycle or even, dare we say this, feedback loops from actual warming. The earth cannot warm up very much without the atmosphere finding a way to compensate.
Climate change (when they renamed AGW climate change you knew the fraud was intensifying) amounts to the same idea as this -- put an electric heater in your open garage and your house will burn down.
What's more likely is that your house will stay almost the same temperature, your electric bill will go sky high and your electric heater will short out.
And that's what I'm going to do soon if I hear one more serious discussion among politicians about how to "solve" the "climate crisis." This is about as sensible as saying that if we smile more, Muslims won't hate us (another apparent delusion of globalists) or if we define enough new gender alternatives, harmony will overwhelm the urge to hate. Or you know the list is endless, a couple more bike lanes and we'll have a paradise and delightful cooling breezes.
Now if you're in the east, why the heck would you want to bring about an end to warming? I think a lot of people are waiting for the beginning of warming.
Great post, thank you.
Dude, you’re doing it wrong. You could have tons of grant money if you just said what they said. Look at Al Gore, he’s laughing all the way to the bank!
Uncle George Soros says that you be lying!(/S)
Thanks, especially for making it readable to us non-scientists.
Thank you.
Pingy
I validated a model by comparing its output from a set of inputs to the actual results. If they are different, the model is wrong, or at least there is a factor that is not accounted properly.
And that's where climate modeling has gone wrong: with one exception, every other model failed to predict the actual results in the past decade.
In my work, that was enough reason to toss the entire model and start over. But, rather than doing that, the climate modelers still insist the past decade was simply an aberration. Or, they claim the data needs "adjusting".
I'll also note that someone experimented with the original model that generated the "hockey stick" graph, kicking off the entire debate. He found that no matter what data set he used, he still got the "hockey stick". He even tried random data, and still got the hockey stick.
I am sorry, but you are not permitted to call yourself a “climate scientist” unless you bow to the religion of Global Warming.™
The scientific method is so passé. Science is now determined by consensus, with only those that have the correct opinion being counted to determine the consensus. If you do not have the correct opinion, then you are a heretic that should be burned at the state.
Unfortunately, burning at the stake would cause more Global Warming,™ so you must be shunned and demonized until re-educated. May Gaia have mercy on your heathen spirit.
I have never understood why Canadians, of all the people on the earth, would be concerned about a warming climate.
Very true, and if you ask most people who are not hardcore IPCC types but familiar with weather data, they will agree that modelling has been a spectacular bust. The real trends since about 1990 amount to this — a very slight increase with a spike in the 1997-98 El Nino event to about 2006, then a flat-lined variable period with no discernible slope at all.
This is about what you would predict (from 1990) if you assumed that human contribution to the complex result was a very small one (0.3 C deg) and that declining solar activity that was already somewhat predicted (more often since 2000) would compensate for that.
Almost every model I have seen is basically overcooked by a factor of 5 to 10 and has the flaw of accelerating warming when many natural factors would lead to the conclusion that even if the warming was real, it would slow down over time.
But people make the mistake of thinking that when they see a computer simulation on the TV news, they are seeing some sort of very sophisticated prediction. It amounts to little more than a technically savvy person programming a computer to show accelerating warming, it’s not really a prediction it’s an illustration of a prediction. And the illustration has already begun to fail so what use could it be?
Well, outside of about a hundred academics, we aren’t.
If the theory were correct, it would do us more good than harm. Vast areas that cannot be inhabited now, or farmed, could be opened up. However, anyone who suggests that would be branded by this tiny band of zealots as a “climate criminal” for encouraging the destruction of other less fortunate places.
However, as I don’t believe the trends are very dramatic, I don’t really think that any of those benefits or problems will ever happen anyway.
Mass delusion has always existed, of course, but this one is particularly strange. It can be sustained, though, since about half the time the weather is likely to be warmer than average and every year a few unusual events are bound to happen. However, as I’ve posted before, climate change zealots should be challenged to put money on these three propositions:
— there will be a more severe heat wave than 1936.
— there will be a worse tornado outbreak than 1925.
— there will be a more destructive hurricane than 1900.
I would put a hundred bucks on only one of these three being surpassed by 2100 but I won’t be around to collect.
(and the point of that was of course that if the weather is not really getting more severe, then the basic premise of climate change, the new name of the old warming religion, is dead wrong. Many in the weather field don’t believe this new formulation at all, there are many signs that the weather is getting less extreme rather than more extreme).
:: and at the same time, you will provide a more comfortable retirement for public servants and politicians ::
Statement of the day!
Please note my tagline...
:: Vast areas that cannot be inhabited now, or farmed, could be opened up ::
Has anyone realized the amount of grain and other crops that could be harvested from the perma-frost area of Northern Canada?
We could eliminate poverty-cycle hunger in sub-Saharan Africa.
I can explain it in one sentence:
Government grants for subjective research has corrupted scientific research.
Being an “anti-science” conservative (despite my inexplicable past awards in the physical sciences), I operate by a simple axiom:
The model is never the thing itself. A model is either more or less accurate - especially in comparison with a competing model. If a model were equatable with reality, then it would, in effect, be an ostensive definition of a reflexive syllogism: “I am that I am.”
I do not expect a model (such as Relativity) to have a perfect one-to-one correspondence to reality; I expect it to have a high degree of agreement, and to be reliably useful as a tool.
The so-called climate models in vogue with the communists are - to use a technical term - crap, tools fit only for global redistribution (which, hey, come to think of it,...).
Thanks for the ping, PROCON, and thank you very much for this contribution to FR and honest science, Peter ODonnell!
Physicist Howard Hayden's one-letter disproof of global warming claims [pre-Climategate]Dear Administrator Jackson:
I write in regard to the Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act, Proposed Rule, 74 Fed. Reg. 18,886 (Apr. 24, 2009), the so-called "Endangerment Finding."
It has been often said that the "science is settled" on the issue of CO2 and climate. Let me put this claim to rest with a simple one-letter proof that it is false.
The letter is s, the one that changes model into models. If the science were settled, there would be precisely one model, and it would be in agreement with measurements.
Alternatively, one may ask which one of the twenty-some models settled the science so that all the rest could be discarded along with the research funds that have kept those models alive.
We can take this further. Not a single climate model predicted the current cooling phase. If the science were settled, the model (singular) would have predicted it.
(excerpted from Professor Hayden's letter to Lisa P. Jackson, Administrator Environmental Protection Agency. More at link.)
We still have poverty, because most of the world is ruled by thugs and managed economies, but happily we have less poverty than before because of the growth of capitalism. Warmth from CO2 is of no use because AGW is nonsense, and its so slight as to not be significant—so sorry, no help farming frosted ground. However food harvests have already significantly increased as a direct effect of man putting more CO2 in the air—plants love the stuff and thrive.
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