WUWT Contest Winner, General Audience, Second Place – “Is There Really a Climate Crisis?” – Is it good?

The dog never perched

by David Hawkins

My background and insight

I read natural sciences in college many years ago, and in my opinion the scientific method is the best way to determine the validity of controversial issues.

After graduating from college, I trained and qualified to be a Certified Public Accountant (CPA in US terms) and used those skills in the industry as a Financial Controller for a subsidiary of a well-known UK food manufacturer. My team keeps the books and sets up monthly management accounts and annual accounts for audits. We’ve also spent a lot of time creating forecasts to show management how the business will perform in the months and years ahead.

My position in detailing former job responsibilities here is that the financial results for any given time period are in and of themselves almost meaningless: they are given context by comparison. with other similar results, previous period, same period last year. or against the forecast. Although the previous year was interesting, the most useful comparisons are always going against predictions: what you expect the period to do compared to what actually happens.

By now, many readers will be ahead of me and can understand why I mention this part of financial management here. The similarities between management accounting and climate science are clear: both record and publish actual results, and both make forecasts of what will happen in the near or distant future. . The difference for me is that management accountants always provide meaningful context for their factual reporting, and which climate scientists rarely do, and then never, ever do. best comparison.

Let me justify that strong statement. The actual temperature of a month or year is often reported by meteorological authorities (and subsequently by the mainstream media) compared to previous years, usually by stating that October is the second month (or third, select) the warmest for that month on record, usually for a location of their choice that will generate a record during this time period. This can make for a bunch of scary-sounding titles about rising temperatures over different times and different places. It is cherry picking data in itself, by choosing the correct comparison to do after all the results and not before. For every dreaded temperature record report, there are thousands that are not records and are therefore not interesting to report.

What I have NEVER seen is a story where any particular time period exceeds the predicted outcome in a forecast. Think about it: has anyone ever seen a magazine article or mainstream media where actual temperatures everywhere in the world are higher than climate models predict? If that happens to my financial forecast, I’ll get a response (for the reader to understand the wording) from senior management and headquarters that my forecast is bad, but it doesn’t seem to be. mechanism by which climate scientists are frequently called to account, so this essay is an attempt to do exactly that.

The title of this essay

I have titled this essay “The Dog Never Barks” as a misquote from the Sherlock Holmes story. Silver flame. In the story, Holmes solves the case because he, and only him, realizes that the guard dog not barking in the night when the crime was committed means that the guard dog knows the intruder and is not being attacked. he’s alarmed, so there’s a lack of barking. is the relevant truth. No one else understands that the lost piece of bark is the relevant truth.

In our present case, the lack of actual temperatures exceeding those predicted by climate models is a relevant fact. Not just once, as in Sherlock Holmes, but NEVER. The mainstream media, often fed press releases from climate activists rather than thinking for themselves, failed to notice the lack of comparison. This comparison to the forecast is the best response there is. The implications of the findings when comparisons are made are startling.

Compare A Paper reports

A very few comparisons are made and published in respected journals, written by scientists genuinely interested in the reliability of climate models. All of which suggest that the models overstate the increase in global temperature that actually occurs. For example, McKitrick & Christy^first tested a group of climate models in the Paired Model Comparison Project Version 6 (CMIP6) and found that: “All running models warmed faster than the counter-level observations. low- and mid-troposphere, in the tropics and globally. On average and in most individual cases, the difference in trends is significant. The warming trends in the models tend to increase with the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) model and we present evidence that the distribution of ECS values ​​across the model is one-to-one. unrealistic way. That quote is taken from their Pure Language Summary but in easier language I understand that means that the models run too hot and the modeler-selected parameters are set too high. high.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Figure 4 from the McKittrick & Christy paper shows the predicted and actual warming per decade.

Note that there is no play with the axes, both ECS and reheat have values ​​as low as 0. The open shape symbols refer to the middle troposphere, the closed symbols refer to the lower troposphere ; red vs blue shows only the high and low ECS values ​​used in the models. The really interesting point are the two inverted triangles at the base of the graph where ECS is zero, marked by arrows pointing down. These are the actual values ​​observed by various methods for the middle and lower troposphere. No overlap of warming trends was found in the actual values ​​with the models, in the middle or lower troposphere. The majority of data points for the temperature rise predicted from the models far exceed what has actually been observed.

The easier statement about the conclusion drawn from their paper is: climate models have been shown to be highly inaccurate and predict temperature rises beyond those found. Therefore, their predictions of future temperatures should not be relied upon.

Science is never solved

Climate campaigners like to avoid rethinking problems by saying “Science solved”. But this view is very much unscientific. The best summary of how scientists should behave was devised by sociologist Robert Merton around 1943, known as the Mertonian Norm.² This set of ideals takes on scientific goals and methods that should be binding on scientists. His list includes:

• Universalism: Scientific knowledge is scientific knowledge, no matter who comes up with it, as long as their methods make sense.
• Disinteredness: Scientists do not participate for money, for political or ideological reasons, or to enhance the reputation of themselves or their organizations. They should do science to advance our understanding of the universe.

• Community: Scientists should share knowledge with each other. This is the reason that the findings are published in the journals.
• Organized Skepticism: Nothing is sacred, a scientific claim should never be accepted as valid. We should suspend judgment on any given finding until we have correctly examined all data and methodology. The most obvious example of organized skepticism is the practice of peer review.

Ritchie shows that mainstream science has problems with the ideals of the Mertonian Norm, with numerous examples of fraud, bias, negligence, peer review problems, poor use of statistics (e.g. p-hacking) and false incentives in funding and recruitment.

Climate science almost seems to enjoy ignoring them or doing the exact opposite. Watts Up With That provides plenty of examples of this.

Inference

The environmental campaign leads to a demand for radical changes to our way of life based on the progression from one claim to another, all backed by science. This series begins with the assertion that climate models are a good predictor of future climate and temperature. The next (possibly biggest) assumption is that carbon dioxide is the main, if not the only, driver of these climate models. The next assumption is that a rise in global temperatures beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050 will have catastrophic effects on the planet’s ecosystems. The final assumption in the chain is that limiting anthropogenic carbon dioxide to arbitrarily set limits will stabilize global temperatures.

My essay here shows that the first assumption is wrong. Past climate models do not predict current temperature trends, so cannot be assumed to be accurate in the future. I might have chosen (and others probably would) to write and challenge any other assumptions in the series, since they are all equally false.

As a result, the environmental movement is inherently political, based on non-binding science, and needs to be open to strong challenges on both scientific and political grounds.

Authority to solve:

1. “Pervasive Warming Trends in CMIP6 Atmospheric Layers” Earth and Space Science 8(7)

2. “Fault in Science, Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Exaggeration in Science” by Stuart Ritchie, Vintage, 2021 p.21