DDP Newsletter November 2015 Vol. XXXII, No. 6 [published March 7, 2016]
The whole global warming/climate change furor is based on predictions of a computer model, which only a select few are deemed qualified to understand, and based on which a world government is to determine diet, land use, energy use, population targets, housing, anything related to carbon emissions—which is virtually everything.
How reliable are the predictions? Sherwood Idso and Craig Idso document a total of 2,418 failures of today’s top-tier climate models to hindcast a whole host of climatologic phenomena (Mathematical Models vs. Real-World Data: Which Best Predicts Earth’s Climatic Future? CO2 Science 9/24/15, http://tinyurl.com/h7lc63b).
Christopher Monckton calls “climate science” a New Religion, or New Superstition, which he names “climastrology” (http://wmbriggs.com/post/17554/). Pope Francis’s encyclical, Monckton states, gets every material climatological fact wrong. For example:
- The encyclical says a strong scientific consensus finds recent warming mostly manmade, but only 0.3% of 11,944 climate papers published from 1991-2011 were willing to declare this.
- It says sea level is rising steadily, but sea level fell from 2003–2008.
- It says polar ice-caps are melting, but thanks to a near-record high sea ice extent in the Antarctic the global extent of sea ice has barely changed in the past 35 years (http://tinyurl.com/hzb739c).
Like the TV weatherman, the climastrologers talk in terms of probability, but unlike the weatherman, they are not accountable for their 100-year forecasts. Michael Mann, creator of the “Mann-made hockey stick,” et al. write in a peer-reviewed paper:
We find that individual record years and the observed runs of record-setting temperatures were extremely unlikely to have occurred in the absence of human-caused climate change…. These same record temperatures were, by contrast, quite likely to have occurred in the presence of anthropogenic climate forcing.
Four fundamental errors—which are “banal and ubiquitous”—are dissected by William Briggs (http://wmbriggs.com/post/17849/) in a “primer in how not to analyze a time series.” First, Mann et al. treat temperature values (anomalies) as if they are certain, when in fact they are the estimates of a parameter of some probability model. This “thesis-destroying error” is compounded by assuming that probability has any bearing on cause—the “fallacy of the false dichotomy.”
Every working scientist assumes that humanity has some influence on climate. The question is “how much?” The answer is likely “a trivial amount.” Briggs says that the way to answer the question is to build a causal or deterministic model with anthropogenic global warming as a component and use it to predict future temperatures.
Predictions of global temperature from models like CMIP [Coupled Model Intercomparison Project], which are not shown in Mann, do not match the actual values of temperature, and haven’t for a long time. We therefore have excellent evidence that we do not understand all of the causes of global temperature and that global warming as it is represented in the models is in error.
Beyond the problem of model error is the use of dishonestly manipulated data. “The U.S. government’s published temperature data for the years 1880 to 2010 has been tinkered with 16 times in the past three years,” writes Holman Jenkins, Jr. (WSJ 11/4/15). The “homogenization” of data from surface weather stations may be adding systematic errors rather than accounting for them, writes Patrick Michaels. The government’s homogenized data shows 50% more warming than data from stations Anthony Watts found to be well-sited and “clean” (http://tinyurl.com/hjcw82j).
“In 2012, we realized that the data offered by NASA was not the same as that offered in 2010,” writes Prof. Friedrich-Karl Ewert of the Univ. of Paderborn. “In 2012 there was twice as much warming in the sample we examined compared with just two years prior.” He adds: “This is not a one-off…. Until then measurements were sacrosanct. Can you call it fraud or falsification?” (http://tinyurl.com/z2dfukb).
The government’s “adjustments” always seem to make the past appear cooler and the present warmer, observes Larry Bell, and to cast doubt on the Pause in warming (http://tinyurl.com/jbvaagc).
Worse than lies is the cover-up. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) refused to turn over internal communications related to its research deliberations as requested by Congress. (ibid.). Documents were released only after Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit (http://tinyurl.com/o9vk22d).
Then there are lies about unanimity. It is recognized that prevailing opinion can be reversed rapidly if only 10% of committed agents argue for an alternate view (Science, December 2015). Hence the need to marginalize and suppress dissent. In UK, judges propose making it illegal to utter any statement denying global warming (http://tinyurl.com/gp6lrsz). A recent survey by Rasmussen Reports showed that 27% of U.S. Democrats favor prosecuting climate skeptics. “This is the mentality of religious fanaticism, not scientific debate,” write Matt Ridley and Benny Peiser (WSJ 11/28-29/15).
♦♦♦
A classical contrast to the pronouncements of the modern climate priesthood:
The oracle at Delphi, located at the omphalos or navel of Zeus’s earth mother Gaia, reputedly told Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus (7th century B.C.?):
There are two roads, most distant from each other: the one leading to the honorable house of freedom, the other the house of slavery, which mortals must shun. It is possible to travel the one through manliness and lovely accord; so lead your people to this path. The other they reach through hateful strife and cowardly destruction; so shun it most of all.
34TH ANNUAL MEETING
Our annual meeting will be held July 9-10, 2016, at the Embassy Suites Old Market in Omaha, Nebraska. Registration is now open at ddponline.org. On Friday, July 8, there will be an optional tour of the Strategic Air and Space Museum. See the SR 71 Blackbird! On Monday, July 11, we will visit the Nebraska Biocontainment Patient Care unit, where Ebola patients were treated. Only 15 persons can be accommodated, so sign up early!
Program highlights include The War on Freedom by Robert Zubrin; Beethoven’s Ice Cream, Tolstoy’s Fire, Happer’s Picosecond Pedestal: What Do These Have to Do with Climate? by Willie Soon; Update on Emerging Diseases by Steven Hatfill; Radiation Monitoring by Arthur Levy; and much more!
DDP, 1601 N. Tucson Blvd. Suite 9, Tucson, AZ 85716, 520.325.2680, www.ddponline.org. Follow us on Twitter @d4dp.