Will The Overselling Of Global Warming Lead To A New Scientific Dark Age?

Lead to? No. It is a SYMPTOM of a new scientific dark age.

It will not be a scientific dark age.
It will, however, mean that we will no longer worship those in white lab coats and with scientific credentials as holier than thou experts.

I’ve posted this before elsewhere, and never received an answer by a warmist. I also rarely see it discussed.

I think the biggest problem with climate forecasting isn’t the models or even the politics, but the data itself.

Here are the major problems, as I see them. Uncertainty, calibration, environment.

Uncertainty: Whenever you take a measurement, it is seldom a discrete quantity. For day-to-day purposes, saying the outside temperature is 75 degrees is fine, but for a scientific use, the uncertainty must be measured. Depending on the equipment being used, this might result in 75+/-1 or 75+/-2. In other words, with 75+/-1, the measurement best guess is 75, but the temperature could be as low as 74 or as high as 76. Essentially any number in that range is equally valid.

Calibration: While it would seem obvious that a measuring instrument such as a thermometer needs to be calibrated I suspect this has been overlooked to a large degree by “climate scientists”. Digital instruments often drift, mercury and alcohol thermometers may or may not have been calibrated when built and may or may not have been verified when put into service. Equipment gets dropped, bumped, and subject to environmental stress. If it isn’t calibrated regularly, and verified against a standard, then all the data collected from it is suspect.

Environment: If you’re measuring one variable, you need to control for the others. In the case of outside temperature methods, this would include things like measuring at the same time(s) every day, controlling the amount of shade and sunlight, the effect rain, snow cover or ice may have on an enclosure or the measuring equipment, etc. Making sure, for example, that the nearby air conditioner isn’t dumping it’s heat onto the measuring equipment. Over longer terms, things like paving, bodies of water coming or going, trees, urbanization, deforestation, etc. come into play.

From my reading, I don’t know that any of the above has been taken into account. I bet the number of weather recording stations that haven’t been subject to changes in their environment due to forest growth, urbanization, etc. over the last 100 years can be counted in the single or double digits. Modern digital thermometers can potentially give very accurate readings, but are they being calibrated? What is the uncertainty of those readings?

And let’s go back 50 or 60 years. Those measurements were likely intended for weather forecasting and made using mercury thermometers. I’d guess those measurements are +/- 1 degree, not accounting for calibration and environmental variance.

What about 100 years before that, where we have the earliest measurements? I suspect those were taken by a guy at a lighthouse walking outside to a thermometer he made himself and hung under a tree. Did he go outside at the same time every day, even when it was raining/snowing/cold? Was his equipment ever calibrated?

I’d guess that data has uncertainties in the +/- 2 degree range, maybe more.

What about before that? From what I’ve read, all we have are estimates based on tree rings and ice cores, and those estimates are based on the 150 years of questionable measurements and extrapolating to the past. That uncertainty has to be far larger.

So what’s this all mean? Well, the data has uncertainties any were from fractions of a degree in the present to probably +/- 5 degrees or more as you go back in the past.

Now, if they were saying that the current or predicted temperatures were 20 degrees higher +/-5, I’d be on the bandwagon with the rest of the warmists.

But, instead they’re saying it’s .7 degrees warmer now, with no indication of the uncertainty. I don’t know how that number could have anything less than +/- 1 degrees of uncertainty. That means, what they’re really saying is it could be anywhere from .3 degrees cooler now, to 1.7 degrees warmer. Any of those numbers are equally valid, but .7 is the best guess. In other words, it may be exactly the same temperature now as it was before (0) - there’s no way to tell because the data isn’t there.

Similarly, predicting the temperature will rise .4 degrees if the uncertainty is +/- 1 degree is practically meaningless when that .4 prediction is really anywhere from -.6 to 1.4, including 0, which would mean nothing would happen. And I suspect the uncertainty could be far greater.

Now, I’m not a scientist or a statistician, but as I understand it, there’s no way to iron out these measurement uncertainties with mathematical tricks, averaging or other techniques. It’s a data issue and until someone invents a time machine, we can’t go back and remeasure.

If I’m wrong here, I’d appreciate it if someone would correct me.

The solution for this is the creation of a scientific organization that is hard to get into, and just as hard to stay in. And many things now included in science will have to be excluded.

1) Research will have to be done with a strict scientific method, with no results that cannot be vetted with the scientific method elsewhere with independent basic data. This means that all research will have to be verifiable in all places and times, using uniquely obtained raw data.

2) Vetting cannot be done by those with similar educational or professional backgrounds. This means research must be described clearly enough to be carried out independently by scientists in unrelated fields. It is an effort to defeat “incestuous”, “round robin”, or otherwise corrupt vetting.