There is a dirty, big secret in the climate change debate: it’s mostly constructed on a foundation of bullshit. Very sophisticated, high-powered bullshit, to be sure. But even the excrement of a pedigree wagyu steer is still bullshit.
Every time you hear some pinch-faced Swedish teenager or placard-waving green activist claim that “the science says” that we are careening towards climate hellfire, just remind yourself: they don’t know what they’re talking about. Nobody does.
That’s because almost everything that’s shouted about climate change is based on two very shonky assumptions: climate models and reconstructed temperature records.
Japanese oceanographer and meteorologist, Dr Nakamura Mototaka, has published (in Japanese with limited English translation) a book on “the sorry state of climate science”. It’s available as a Kindle book. Dr Nakamura, who is eminently qualified to do so, roundly criticises the global climate models (GCMs) on which almost all climate science is based.
Today’s vast panoply of “global warming science” is like an upside down pyramid built on the work of a few score of serious climate modellers […] [but] the temperature forecasting models trying to deal with the intractable complexities of the climate are no better than “toys” or “Mickey Mouse mockeries” of the real world, [Dr. Nakamura] says.
The IPCC at least had the good grace to quietly admit as much up until its third report in 2001. Since then, though, the increasing stranglehold of green-left activists over the IPCC has ensured that all such admissions have been systematically expunged.
Nakamura […] accus[es] the orthodox scientists of “data falsification” by adjusting previous temperature data to increase apparent warming “The global surface mean temperature-change data no longer have any scientific value and are nothing except a propaganda tool to the public,” he writes.
“ […] the models just become useless pieces of junk or worse (worse in a sense that they can produce gravely misleading output) when they are used for climate forecasting.”
The basic fact of the “greenhouse effect” – how much heat from the Earth’s surface is trapped by atmospheric carbon dioxide is not in dispute. In a simple, linear relationship, doubling CO2 in the atmosphere would lead to a temperature rise of 1°C. But the climate is not linear or simple.
[Nakamura] projects warming from CO2, “according to the true experts”, doubling to be only 0.5degC. He says he doesn’t dispute the possibility of either catastrophic warming or severe glaciation […] [but] climate forecasting is simply impossible, if only because future changes in solar energy output are unknowable. As to the impacts of human-caused CO2, they can’t be judged “with the knowledge and technology we currently possess.”
In fact, among the absurd simplifications of GCMs (including clouds and oceans), the most bizarre would have to be their treatment of the Sun, which is modelled as a “never changing quantity”. This is empirical nonsense on stilts. We know perfectly well that the Sun’s output is constantly fluctuating, often dramatically. Some scientists are adamant that the Sun remains the single biggest driver of climate change.
But, their defenders claim, models accurately “hindcast”, that is, recreate what has been observed in the historical record. This is, quite simply, bollocks.
The models are ‘tuned’ by tinkering around with values of various parameters until the best compromise is obtained […][Nakamura] is contemptuous of claims about models being “validated”, saying the modellers are merely “trying to construct narratives that justify the use of these models for climate predictions.”
“Tuning” models is like a gambler betting on a seven, throwing two fours, turning one of the dice over to a three, and then triumphantly proclaiming their winning bet.
Even the historical temperature record is less reliable than climate campaigners would like to believe.
The supposed measuring of global average temperatures from 1890 has been based on thermometer readouts barely covering 5 per cent of the globe until the satellite era began 40-50 years ago. “We do not know how global climate has changed in the past century, all we know is some limited regional climate changes, such as in Europe, North America and parts of Asia.”
quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/09/a-climate-modeller-spills-the-beans
Worse, global temperature records, even the best efforts, are spliced together from completely different methods, all with their own intrinsic problems and error margins. Even the most reliable, satellite measurements, have had to be “corrected” because they disagreed with synchronous measurements from other sources. And satellite data reaches back less than 40 years, scarcely more than what is accepted as the minimum time scale of climate significance.
To pretend that this represents a continuous dataset is a complete fallacy. To pretend that GCMs should form the basis of staggeringly costly and far-reaching public policy is even worse.