Spreading the Manure of Climate Change

There has been a pause in global warming for almost twenty years now, acknowledged even by the staunchest global warming advocates, despite a rise in overall carbon dioxide emissions. None of the major climate models predicted this. Climate modelers have been perplexed as to why the predicted increase in carbon dioxide that has occurred has not resulted in the predicted higher temperatures. There are hundreds of models that offer no explanation of this unexpected variation.

With the advent of low-cost, powerful computers, everyone is building a mathematical model in an attempt to predict the future of earth's climate patterns. The only way to test the predictive ability of these models is to compare their predictions against the observed data. The weather that is being observed is telling us the models are wrong. Essentially, the assumptions used within the elaborate mathematical models for predicting global warming are being invalidated.

The fact that all these models have been refuted, all with the same contrary implications, indicates that one or more major variables being used is incorrect, or that they are the result of errant human bias. Model building is a fundamental tool for creating weather predictions. The planet's weather is enormously complex, yet with input of a broad enough range of data, useful models should be able to be generated. Aside from obvious political bias and apparent unscientific data distortions in some of the models, the over-looming discrediting of the bulk of them is the result of a failure to temper them with historic reality.

A quick look at historic weather data confirms that weather and climate on earth are cyclic events. People are endlessly surprised by some unusual weather, geological, political or economic event, often with the erroneous assumption that such a thing has never happened before. This lack of historical perspective is not confined to the uneducated public, but even experts in weather and climatology do not know the history of their own disciplines. The six-year drought in California has seemingly been brought to an end with one major storm within the past week, much to the surprise of weather forecasters, journalists, and politicians. But historic evidence shows that California has received regular floods of such proportions, albeit every 100 to 200 years, and that they usually follow extended periods of dry weather. Nothing new here. It has nothing to do with the politically-manufactured crisis of global warming.

The pressure for human bias is understandable. Nearly all climate studies and their resulting models are funded by government. Governments commit grant money to better understand and resolve major problems. If researchers come back and say there is no problem, then the money dries up. Of course they are going to find a problem; it's an ongoing existential conundrum researchers face.

Climate alarmists are tireless in saying “95 percent of all scientists agree” without ever providing the exact wording of the question and precisely who was surveyed. We are not told what the average global temperature is, how much higher it was than last year’s record or any previous records, or what the margin of error is supposed to be on those measurements. Instead, we get stuff like this from the New York Times:

"Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016—trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row."

Yet that’s what passes for “science reporting” on the issue of global warming, where asking for numbers and margins of errors apparently makes you an enemy of science. Instead, it’s all qualitative and comparative descriptions. It’s science without numbers. The fact remains that there is plenty of credible dissension in the scientific community, and that temperatures have not gone up despite the increase of carbon dioxide emissions.

Nearly everyone agrees that the planet has been in a warming phase since the last Ice Age. And it is hard to find anyone to argue the fact that humans do impact the climate with their activity, at least the micro-climates of the heat islands around large metropolitan areas. But no one, expert or not, has a reasonable grasp upon the degree of warming or cooling with any confidence or precision. Some scientists have now yielded to referring to theory as "settled science". But how much of the warming is caused by man and how and what can now be done in a cost-effective way to deal with it? There is no correct answer supported by empirical science. Maybe we should just adapt to it because there is really nothing we can do to effect any impact on historic weather cycles.

To shout "denier" at those who raise legitimate questions over the conclusions of a very "unsettled science" gets us nowhere closer to true understanding. It makes absolutely no sense to implement costly regulations and mandates to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions that will have little or no global effect on temperatures over the next century. There has been no agreement on what the optimal level of carbon dioxide even is, or what the optimal Earth temperature should be. We do know that plants grow faster with more carbon dioxide and thus food becomes more abundant and cheaper, and that most people prefer warmer places over colder ones. The problem is with the models and not with how the climate is changing.

The science is no where near settled or we wouldn't still be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on trying to understand the various factors that influence climate with new and improved climate models. It is no secret to anyone that solar activity is correlated with global temperature changes — with warm periods coinciding with higher levels of sunspot activity and cooling periods corresponding to lower levels. This has been going on for eons  through the evolution of our solar system. The past one hundred years of human increase in industrial output is a very minor incident in the grand scheme of things. Scientists know that clouds have great effect on Earth’s temperature; some clouds hold in heat, others reflect sunlight. Researchers at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland have shown that fewer sunspots result in less solar wind, which enables more cosmic rays to reach Earth and create more ionized clouds, which “make clouds more reflective." Human impact is inconsequential.

Refusal to own up to the distortions of climate science is a costly mistake.  Until we advance to the point where we can change solar output (I am being facetious), any measure that attempts to impact the cycles of climate by the adjustment of human behavior is little more than deceptive politics and not because of any "settled science", and should be regarded as such.