Climate science explained

exclusive to Free Republic | May 16, 2016 | Peter O'Donnell

[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.

[octex]

Great read! Thanks for posting the truth and humor!

[Moltke]

FWIW, here’s my take on climate science as a lowly physicist:

1.) Legitimate climate science. It uses physical measurements (ice cores, tree rings, etc. etc.) within the framework of experimental methods to study and explain climate changes in the *past*. Amazingly well done.

2.) Bogus climate science. It relies on arbitrary computer models to *predict the future* without a shred of actual physical measurement data (because that can only be gathered *in the future*). Bzzzz. Losers.

And that’s all there is to the science part. We can measure the past, but we cannot predict the future. The rest is *politics*.