Global Warming Amusement
In a sudden spate of articles, climate scientists are now predicting a period of global cooling. For example, from the UK Daily Telegraph:
Terry Dunleavy, secretary of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, and executive vice-chairman of the International Climate Science Coalition, among others, points out the obvious irony here:
The Global Warming ballyhoo has been based in faith in "climate models," that no one with any experience with such things would take very seriously. The idea that such poorly-specified models could predict tenths-of-a-degree changes in temperature 50 and 100 years out is simply ludicrous.
But the question for the true believers who take the models as revealing gospel truth, the question is simply this:
How can it possibly be that these marvelous models, by which we are supposed to uproot whole economies, have so completely failed to predict this cooling trend?
The answer is not hard to find, once you realize that we are dealing here with backasswards science of the worst kind. These are the steps in the process of backasswards science in this particular case:
It begins with (1) a set of variously-motivated predictions about a looming global warming crisis. (2) Climate models are then devised to predict the predictions. (3) When contrary data appear, they are dismissed as short-term noise: In this case, observed cooling is dismissed as a short-term trend, a "lull" that merely obscures temporarily the underlying warming described by the models. In other words, the models are built to fit the predictions, then the data are made to fit the models!
It's the scientific equivalent of Girls Gone Wild: Science Gone Backwards!
Get out the popcorn, we're being treated to a public tutorial on how to create a scientific boondoggle.
What fun!
Byron
Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said. Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a 'lull' for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged.
This would mean that the 0.3C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the IPCC may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.
Terry Dunleavy, secretary of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, and executive vice-chairman of the International Climate Science Coalition, among others, points out the obvious irony here:
The Global Warming ballyhoo has been based in faith in "climate models," that no one with any experience with such things would take very seriously. The idea that such poorly-specified models could predict tenths-of-a-degree changes in temperature 50 and 100 years out is simply ludicrous.
But the question for the true believers who take the models as revealing gospel truth, the question is simply this:
How can it possibly be that these marvelous models, by which we are supposed to uproot whole economies, have so completely failed to predict this cooling trend?
The answer is not hard to find, once you realize that we are dealing here with backasswards science of the worst kind. These are the steps in the process of backasswards science in this particular case:
It begins with (1) a set of variously-motivated predictions about a looming global warming crisis. (2) Climate models are then devised to predict the predictions. (3) When contrary data appear, they are dismissed as short-term noise: In this case, observed cooling is dismissed as a short-term trend, a "lull" that merely obscures temporarily the underlying warming described by the models. In other words, the models are built to fit the predictions, then the data are made to fit the models!
It's the scientific equivalent of Girls Gone Wild: Science Gone Backwards!
Get out the popcorn, we're being treated to a public tutorial on how to create a scientific boondoggle.
What fun!
Byron
posted by Byron | Wednesday, May 07, 2008
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home