Wall Street Op-Ed Global Warming Wars, Denial, Hysteria

A few days ago a group of scientists wrote an Op_ed in the WSJ about the lack of need to panic about Global Warming. They were immediately slimed by the alarmosphere and have written a reply to the hysteria they received in response to their original editorial . And I love the lack of hysteria and spitting in this article. Too bad the alarmosphere isn’t capable of that. Kudos to these guys.

The authors of the Jan. 27 Wall Street Journal op-ed, ‘No Need to Panic about Global Warming,’ respond to their critics.

Editor’s Note: The authors of the following letter, listed below, are also the signatories of “No Need to Panic About Global Warming,” an op-ed that appeared in the Journal on January 27. This letter responds to criticisms of the op-ed made by Kevin Trenberth and 37 others in a letter published Feb. 1, and by Robert Byer of the American Physical Society in a letter published Feb. 6.

The interest generated by our Wall Street Journal op-ed of Jan. 27, “No Need to Panic about Global Warming,” is gratifying but so extensive that we will limit our response to the letter to the editor the Journal published on Feb. 1, 2012 by Kevin Trenberth and 37 other signatories, and to the Feb. 6 letter by Robert Byer, President of the American Physical Society. (We, of course, thank the writers of supportive letters.

Here’s the rest: No-Panic Scientists Reply To Critics

This article is also now on WUWT: “No Need to Panic about Global Warming”, revisited

2/28: Cambridge Prof, who’s hardly a skeptic, slams the alarmists.

Heartland Institute and Green Funding

Update 2/24: WUWT has a ton of links on this whole affair, which the alarmists are defending. Rep. Markey has definitely swallowed the kool-aid here.

Some notes on the Heartland fluffle:

There’s been a lot of bed-wetting in the alarmist blogosphere about “the evil Heartland Institute” (corrupting small children, spreading rumors, etc.) They’e horrified, just really outraged and totally frazzled, that Heartland had the unmitigated gall to contribute some money to skeptic climate concerns. Many of them don’t even care that the core Heartland doc was faked (hence the label, Fakegate.) Doesn’t bother me, since it just makes them look even sillier than usual.

Heartland. Oh the horrors. Oh the wet sheets. Ugh.

JoNova, as usual, puts it all in perspective.
(click image for a bigger pic.)

Image is a slightly modified on from JoNova’s site: Fakegate: the smog blog exposes irrational rage, innumeracy, and heartland’s efficient success.

So we have this:

• Heartland budget, $7 mil
• Greenpeace, WWF, Pew, Sierra club: about $1.4 billion.

So with a little math… 202 times that of Heartland. One could make interesting remarks about their credibility, I think.

By the way, being green pays rather well: see green funding,

As far as this non-scandal Vs Climategate? Well, there really isn’t any comparison, but I don’t think anyone’s mind will be changed here.

Update 2/18: Can’t really argue with what Steve says:

The scandal has nothing to do with HI funding skeptics.

It has to do with warmists engaging in felony fraud, forgery, libel and defamation of character. Any journalist who hasn’t figured that out yet is clearly in a weakened mental state. They should be running away from this as fast as they can.

Here’s the post.

Update 2/19:

• Briggs on Heartlandgate Versus Climategate

Update 2/21:

Peter Gleick has fessed up to all but forging the memo. I seriously doubt the he, or most on his side feel that he’s done anything wrong.

Gleik is too valuable an asset to the cause. His legal costs till be covered by the cause and he’ll lay low for a little while, until the smoke clears, Shortly thereafter he will start making noises again, after all is forgotten and forgiven by the green side. I doubt that any legal action brought by any parties damaged by his actions will amount to much. He’ll be back.

Judith Curry writes, in part:

When ‘Heartlandgate’ first broke, I saw no parallels with Climategate.  Now, with the involvement of Gleick, there most certainly are parallels.  There is the common theme of climate scientists compromising personal and professional ethics, integrity, and responsibility, all in the interests of a ’cause’.

On the one hand, Climategate involved a large number of people that were involved in the IPCC.  Apart from the FOI avoidance that was arguably criminal, everyone seems to have been ‘cleared’ by the various investigations.  On the other hand, Gleick is only one person, but his actions are far more serious, particularly if they involve fabrication of a document.

If the scientific and environmental communities were to react like Andy Revkin, then the damage from this potentially can be contained (one bad egg):

The broader tragedy is that his decision to go to such extremes in his fight with Heartland has greatly set back any prospects of the country having the “rational public debate” that he wrote — correctly — is so desperately needed.

Joe Romm, at least so far, has ignored the whole issue.  Which strategically is not a bad move.

Unfortunately, already we are seeing signs of exactly the opposite strategy.  Over at DeSmog Blog:

Whistleblowers – and that’s the role Gleick has played in this instance – deserve respect for having the courage to make important truths known to the public at large. Without condoning or promoting an act of dishonesty, it’s fair to say that Gleick took a significant personal risk – and by standing and taking responsibility for his actions, he has shown himself willing to pay the price. For his courage, his honor, and for performing a selfless act of public service, he deserves our gratitude and applause.

Scott Mandia, a leader of the Climate Rapid Response Team, is quoted:

…”Heartland has been subverting well-understood science for years,” wrote Scott Mandia, co-founder of the climate science rapid response team. “They also subvert the education of our school children by trying to ;’teach the controversy’ where none exists.”He went on: “Peter Gleick, a scientist who is also a journalist just used the same tricks that any investigative reporter uses to uncover the truth. He is the hero and Heartland remains the villain. He will have many people lining up to support him.”

The climate insanity factor has just jumped upwards a big notch.

Here’s the whole article, well worth reading: Gleick’s ‘integrity’

As far as DeSmog and Mandia’s remarks, I don’t think they can be called lies since these guys believe them to the core of their being. That they are nonsensical is another matter.

2/23: Monckton weighs in on WUWT: Fakegate: why the perps should be prosecuted

…what we call Fakegate – the frauds recently perpetrated to the detriment of the blameless Heartland Institute. Among some there was a feeling, often expressed by the nicer but more woolly-headed and ineffectual sort of skeptic, that somehow scientists who commit frauds ought not to be prosecuted for them, for otherwise academic research would become impossible.

I hear this unsoundly-founded point so often that it is hard to keep an even temper. A fraud is a fraud is a fraud, whether perpetrated by a scientist or by anyone else….

But will anyone act?

I’ll be very surprised if anyone faces criminal charges, much gets anything more than a slap on the wrist. I fully expect that all guilty parties will be well defended by their crowd and will, in a few weeks, be continuing as if nothing had happened. More likely it’ll be “Dude! Fake, but accurate! You spoke TRUTH to the evil-doers!”

2/23b: Should anyone get jail time? Hmmm….. Maybe it’s enough for the skeptic crowd to know the lengths these people will go to. They’ve lost credibility in the eyes of a group who gave them none to begin with. They’ve lost a few people more or less on their side. They’ve reinforced themselves in the eyes of their hysterical base. Would libel penalties be a deterrent or a call to further Martyrdom?

2/23c: Dr. G. wins the coveted Hippie of the Week award. Congratulations!

2/25: Gleicks possible motives? Is this the editorial which pushed him over the edge. Gleick joins another association.

2/27: About the funding of the evil climate denial (there is no climate???) machine, check this out.

2/28: Killer question, since the alarmosphere considers Gleick’s escapes to be wonderful: “Would Copernicus and Galileo have been right to lie about the nature of the solar system if that lie prevented the undermining of the Catholic Church, which most everyone at the time felt to have substantial positive benefits?”

2/28: Donna Laframboise adds : Where Do Gleick’s Apologists Draw the Line? Climate audit explains why Gleick could be in serious trouble (not that he will be.) Idiocy from the LA Times.

Heartland info & FAQ

WUWT Gleick thread, part two.

Fakegate timeline

3/1: A graphic which beautifully illustrates the overwhelming superiority of Heartland funding.

3/11: Nice to be proven right (2/21 above:)  17 Days Later, Peter Gleick is Back in the Saddle

3/19: The climate of history – condemned to repeat it. “Some have suggested that the Fakegate affair has been discussed enough. They are wrong. Peter Gleick is a minor figure in climate science and his actions are of little account. But the reaction of all the global warming alarmists, who see nothing wrong with what he did, is much more significant.” Includes bits appropriate for classroom discussion. Also includes links to what the hysterics believe should be done to “deniers,” including the 10:10 video.

Solar Activity and Climate

From WUWT, of course.

I loved this line:

The fact that there’s a scientific workshop discussing the solar-climate relationship at all,especially when doomsayers like Hansen say there’s no solar connection, should tell you something.

Go here: Interesting presentations from the Nagoya Workshop on the Relationship between Solar Activity and Climate Changes

Various links to more info. One of the pics shown has an “It’s the Sun, Stupid!” graphic. Was she serious or being snarky? Perhaps one of the attendees will shed further light on that.

Update: Dr. S. did comment and he agrees that it was snark. She was making fun of the “It’s the Sun” crowd.

Note that her presentation will take a bit to download, even on a cable modem.

Edited Photos, So What’s Real

Once upon a time the Navy took this photo:

Apparently the original caption read:

Skate (SSN-578), surfaced at the North Pole, 17 March 1959

But it seems to have morphed to:

Skate (SSN-578),taken in summer, perhaps in August 1958.

The above is from Real-Science: Navy Changes Their Caption

Innocent error by some alarmist file keeper who couldn’t conceive of the upper caption being correct?

An adjustment to better suit the Global Warming hysteria meme?

Settled Science, Explained

Some commentary on the “Settled Science” mantra that the greens use to push their delusions and to silence dissent.

Day by Day, from Sept 28:

Original source for this cartoon: Day by Day

Day by Day is a long running series. Years, actually. It leans strongly conservative, so if you lean that way you’ll probably like it. If you don’t, well…

Chaos, Attractors, CO2, Milankovic Cycles, and Ice Ages

WuWT has a great article on Chaos and Strange Attractors which is very readable. It explains very nicely why Catastrophic Warming isn’t going to happen and why an Ice Age very likely will.

….

This strongly suggests that while the the linear response assumption made in a) may be valid (per attractor) — or may not, but it will be a huge problem to prove it — the effect isless than the natural excursion, not greater than the natural excursion, and the negative feedback factors that make the multistable attractors (locally) attractive also act asnegative feedback on the CO_2 induced shift!

The latter is the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, as I already noted in one thread or another (two tired of writing to go see if it was this one). In an open system in a locally stable phase, the oscillations (fluctuations) couple to the dissipation so that more fluctuation makes more dissipation — negative feedback. If this is not true, the locally stable phase is not stable.

This is a strong argument against catastrophe! The point is that given that CO_2 is making only small, slow, local shifts of the attractors compared to the large shifts of the system between the attractors, if there was a point where the system was likely to fall over to a much warmer stable point — the “catastrophe” threatened by the warmists — italmost certainly would have already done it, as the phase oscillations over the last ten thousand years have on numerous occasions made it as warm as it is right now.

The fact that this has not happened is actually enormously strong evidence against both positive feedback and catastrophe. Yes, anthropogenic CO_2 may have shifted all the attractor temperatures a bit higher, it may have made small rearrangements of the attractors, but there is no evidence that suggests that it is probablygoing to suddenly create at new attractor far outside of the normal range of variation already visible in the climate record. Is it impossible? Of course not. But it is not probable.

The whole thing: No new strange attractors: strong evidence against both positive feedback and catastrophe

Luboš Motl, of The Reference Frame, writes about Milankovitc Cycles and how some recent work has greatly tightened up their agreement with observed data. He also adds some remarks on CO2 and temperatures.

This paper by a former student of Richard Lindzen finally managed to fix Milutin Milankovič’s theory which hadn’t worked and the outcome was a theory that does work. The graph below contains both theoretical predictions as well as the observed data about the Northern Hemisphere temperature and you may see that the match is beautiful:

As the TRF article mentioned above shows, previous attempts to make the theory work displayed the right frequencies but the graphs never really agreed. The probability that the agreement above is coincidental is pretty much zero. Lots of high-frequency wiggles agree. In the future, one may optimize the Milankovič theory but these will be incremental improvements; the qualitative fact that the astronomical cycles dictate “most” of the dynamics in the glaciation cycles has been established by the graphs above.

….

Dynamics of CO2 concentration after fossil fuels

However, what’s even more absurd is the role that is being attributed to CO2. CO2 will only be modified due to the human activity for a few centuries which is much shorter than the time needed for the ice age cycles to collect several Celsius degrees – that requires thousands or tens of thousands of years….

Here’s the rest: Will CO2 save us from next ice age?

I do have a quibble, though. As I understand it, most plants (even grasses) have severe difficulty when CO2 levels drop below 200ppm. If it were to drop to 180ppm as LM suggests, then I suggest that we might see some major plant extinctions, beyond that caused directly by the lower temps of an ice age.

So either plants can survive at lower CO2 and the CO2 biology is not understood or, much more likely, CO2 levels were actually higher during the ice ages than we think.

Here’s a good book on understanding how Chaos works. It’s just the thing for those of us without advanced Math/Physics degrees:

On Amazon.com: Chaos: Making a New Science

Ocean Acidifiction Hysteria Unjustified

As if we didn’t already know that it was all wildly overblown. From JoNova:

There goes another scare campaign.

Until recently we had very little data about real time changes in ocean pH around the world. Finally autonomous sensors placed in a variety of ecosystems “from tropical to polar, open-ocean to coastal, kelp forest to coral reef” give us the information we needed.

It turns out that far from being a stable pH, spots all over the world are constantly changing. One spot in the ocean varied by an astonishing 1.4 pH units regularly. All our human emissions are projected by models to change the world’s oceans by about 0.3 pH units over the next 90 years, and that’s referred to as “catastrophic”, yet we now know that fish and some calcifying critters adapt naturally to changes far larger than that every year, sometimes in just a month, and in extreme cases, in just a day.

Data was collected by 15 individual SeaFET sensors in seven types of marine habitats.  Four sites were fairly stable (1, which includes the open ocean, and also sites 2,3,4) but most of the rest were highly variable (esp site 15 near Italy and 14 near Mexico) . On a monthly scale the pH varies by 0.024 to 1.430 pH units.

Ocean acidification happens all the time

 

 

CO2 Concentration and Plant Growth

There was a comment on this WUWT post which I found to be very interesting.

Plants require a certain amount of CO2 to survive. People claim that ice cores taken from Antarctica and Greenland show that CO2 levels during the last ice age dropped to 180ppm. It’s then claimed that a 180 to 280 climb drove us out of the ice age.

The problem is that plants don’t do well at 180. Most just die. Grasses can scrape by, but it’s rough on them. So a period of 100k years of starvation should have had a major hit on grasses and destroyed other plants. Apart from being buried under a whole lot of ice.

Since that didn’t happen it seem reasonable to assume that the CO2 measurements from the ice cores are not accurate.

This is the comment:

Gail Combs says:

November 21, 2011 at 4:57 am

…..In past times, during the transition between an ice age and a warm period, atmospheric CO2 concentrations changed by some 100 parts per million (ppm) – from an ice age value of 180 ppm to about 280 ppm during warm periods….

If this was true there would be no trees and certainly nothing like mammoths during the last ice age. At 180 ppm Class 4 plants (grasses) could possibly survive but would not have the “energy” to produce seed. At 200 pm CO2 trees starve http://biblioteca.universia.net/ficha.do?id=912067 (That link of course has since been purged from the internet – SURPRISE – not)

…According to Barnola et al (1987) the level of CO2 in the global atmosphere during many tens of thousands of years spanning 30,000 to 110,000 BP were below 200ppm. If this were true then the growth of C3 plants should be limited at the global scale because their net Photosynthesis is depressed as CO2 concentration in air decreases to less than about 250ubar (less than about 250ppmv)(McKay et al 1991) This would lead to the extinction of C3plant species . This has however not been recorded by paleobotanists (Manum 1991).”http://www.co2web.info/stoten92.pdf

“…Plant photosynthetic activity can reduce the CO2 within the plant canopy to between 200 and 250 ppm… I observed a 50 ppm drop in within a tomato plant canopy just a few minutes after direct sunlight at dawn entered a green house (Harper et al 1979)” Source

Another study on wheat (a grass) in open fields showed the CO2 level 2 meters above the crops was reduced to a near constant 300 ppm during the day but fluctuated during the night. Again indicating a lower threshold of 250 ppm ~ 300 ppm and certainly not indicative of below 180 ppm.

WHEAT: The CO2 concentration at 2 m above the crop was found to be fairly constant during the daylight hours on single days or from day-to-day throughout the growing season ranging from about 310 to 320 p.p.m. Nocturnal values were more variable and were between 10 and 200 p.p.m. higher than the daytime values.
Source

From the people who know and depend on the truth – FARMERS

Hydroponic Shop

…Plants use all of the CO2 around their leaves within a few minutes leaving the air around them CO2 deficient, so air circulation is important. As CO2 is a critical component of growth, plants in environments with inadequate CO2 levels of below 200 ppm will generally cease to grow or produce… http://www.thehydroponicsshop.com.au/article_info.php?articles_id=27

….With the advent of home greenhouses and indoor growing under artificial lights and the developments in hydroponics in recent years, the need for CO2 generation has drastically increased. Plants growing in a sealed greenhouse or indoor grow room will often deplete the available CO2 and stop growing. The following graph will show what depletion and enrichment does to plant growth:

GO TO SITE for CO2 vs Plant Growth GRAPH

Below 200 PPM, plants do not have enough CO2 to carry on the photosynthesis process and essentially stop growing. Because 300 PPM is the atmospheric CO content, this amount is chosen as the 100% growth point. You can see from the chart that increased CO can double or more the growth rate on most normal plants. Above 2,000 PPM, CO2 starts to become toxic to plants and above 4,000 PPM it becomes toxic to people….. http://www.hydrofarm.com/articles/co2_enrichment.php

Keith in another WUWT discussion brought up another good point the effect of partial pressure of CO2 at higher elevations on plants.

Speaking of carbon dioxide as plant food there is something else often missing in discussions of CO2 concentration. That is CO2 and its relation to altitude. Humans have trouble breathing near the top of Mount Everest even though the “concentration” of oxygen in parts per million is the same as at sea level. This is because the total density of the air is less so the actual amount of oxygen available per cubic meter is also less. The same holds true for carbon dioxide. Air density at 1000 meters altitude is about ninety percent of its sea level value, and crops grown at that altitude have access to ninety percent of the CO2 at sea level despite the fact that the “concentration” as usually given is the same. Half of the land surface of the earth is about 840 meters above sea level, and the absolute concentration of CO2 there is therefore ninety percent less. http://www.ecowho.com/blogs/120/CO2_global_levels_rising%2C_is_this_a_problem%3F/-b33b2

Now when will Engelbeen come to valiantly defend this very important pillar of CAGW? After all low CO2 is the KEY to CAGW.

Dr. Jaworowski tried to do the study to determine the accuracy of the Ice Core CO2 data but the funding was turned down because it was feared his study would “Disprove” the CO2 readings from the ice cores and we couldn’t have that now could we???

Another comment from Gail:

Gail Combs says:

November 21, 2011 at 6:01 am

Aside from the plants during the Ice Age showing the CO2 reading are way off there is another elephant in the room.

It is called Water Vapor.

95% of the green house effect is caused by WATER not CO2. It is up to 4% where as CO2 is a puny 0.036% That is why water is left out of the IPCC reports. (Another lie by omission) http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

Next what did the last ice age to to the water content of the atmosphere???

Glacial Climate and Sea Level
The North American and European ice sheets of the last glaciation began forming after a prolonged cold stage with increased precipitation (mostly snow in this case) took place. Once the ice sheets began forming, the cold landscape altered typical weather patterns by creating their own air masses. The new weather patterns that developed reinforced the initial weather that created them, plunging the various areas into a cold glacial period.

The warmer portions of the globe also experienced a change in climate due to glaciation in that most of them became cooler but drier. For example rainforest cover in West Africa was reduced and replaced by tropical grasslands because of a lack of rain.

At the same time, most of the world’s deserts expanded as they became drier….
http://geography.about.com/od/climate/a/glaciation.htm

So there goes the change of 100 ppm in CO2 having any effect because it would be completely swamped by the water vapor changes! Not to mention the effect of the Milankovich cycles that would directly effect those changes in the amount of water vapor.

The influence of these cycles on insolation (INcident SOLar radiATION) at different latitudes has been calculated by Berger (1991), and Laskar (1993). Below is Berger’s solution for 65 degrees north latitude from the present to 1 million years ago. In the Northern Hemisphere, peak summer insolation occurred about 9,000 years ago when the last of the large ice sheets melted. Since that time Northern Hemisphere summers have seen less solar radiation. http://deschutes.gso.uri.edu/~rutherfo/milankovitch.html

Of course we KNOW the sun has nothing to do with our climate because climate scientists tell us that is so. /sarc>

So as usual these [self-snip] scientists are busy chasing grant money with the get out of peer review CO2 card and not doing real science.

Another commenter:

higley7 says:

November 21, 2011 at 8:18 am

It is completely wrong to assume that CO2 measurements from ice cores have anything to do with absolute values. They can show trends and highs and lows, but they are NOT quantitative in any way. Jaworowski, the leading expert has stated that there is 30–50% losses of CO2 during the traumatic process of core extraction. If you back calculate the losses, you end up with CO2 concentrations the same or higher than now.

It is only the IPCC that likes to pretend that ice core data, clearly indirect data, is quantitative—it is NOT!

Global Warming Pseudoscience

This is from a Matt Ridley (warning, Heretic alert) speech: The Angus Millar Lecture of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 31 October 2011

The speech was posted on WUWT, but a full PDF can he found here.

Here are some clips, but it’s important to read the whole thing.

My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?

Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones.

• Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience.
• Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience.
• Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience.
• Vaccination is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience.
• Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience.
• Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.

…

Experts are worse at forecasting the future than non-experts.

Philip Tetlock did the definitive experiment. He gathered a sample of 284 experts – political scientists, economists and journalists – and harvested 27,450 different specific judgments from them about the future then waited to see if they came true. The results were terrible. The experts were no better than “a dart-throwing chimpanzee”.

…

I’ve looked and looked but I cannot find one piece of data – as opposed to a model – that shows either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm.

…

Does it matter? Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent. So what?

After all there’s pseudoscience and confirmation bias among the climate heretics too.

Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

…

At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.

At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.

…

…did you know that the collective annual budget of Greenpeace, WWF and Friends of the Earth was more than a billion dollars globally last year? People sometimes ask me what’s the incentive for scientists to exaggerate climate change. But look at the sums of money available to those who do so, from the pressure groups, from governments and from big companies. It was not the sceptics who hired an ex News of the World deputy editor as a spin doctor after climategate, it was the University of East Anglia.

…

In conclusion, I’ve spent a lot of time on climate, but it could have been dietary fat, or nature and nurture. My argument is that like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts and especially when predicting the future and when there’s lavish funding at stake. It needs heretics.

Read it all, here

My only quibble:

He says, ” I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible. “

And then says, “For, apart from the hockey stick, there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than in the past, when it changed naturally.” (emphasis mine)

So what is man partly responsible for, when there’s no evidence that there is anything different about whatever current change may be happening?

Updates:

More by Matt Ridley

WUWT search for Matt Ridley

Models, Predictions, IPCC

An issue with climate models is whether or not they have any capability to actually predict anything. The amazingly complicated climate system of this planet, for example.

The hysterics place great value in the models, those that produce the “We’re all gonna die!!!” results.

Willis Eschenbach on WUWT posts some thoughts on scientific models in general:

There’s a lovely 2005 paper I hadn’t seen, put out by the Los Alamos National Laboratory entitled “Our Calibrated Model has No Predictive Value” (PDF).

…..

The paper’s abstract says it much better than I could:

Abstract: It is often assumed that once a model has been calibrated to measurements then it will have some level of predictive capability, although this may be limited. If the model does not have predictive capability then the assumption is that the model needs to be improved in some way.

Using an example from the petroleum industry, we show that cases can exist where calibrated models have no predictive capability. This occurs even when there is no modelling error present. It is also shown that the introduction of a small modelling error can make it impossible to obtain any models with useful predictive capability.

We have been unable to find ways of identifying which calibrated models will have some predictive capacity and those which will not.

There are three results in there, one expected and two unexpected.

Interesting stuff. Read it all (and 300 comments) here: A Modest Proposal—Forget About Tomorrow

RealClimategate.org asks:

Are Computer Models Reliable – can they be used to predict the future climate?

No: says the IPCC (Chapter 14, 14.2.2.2, Working Group 1, The Scientific Basis)

Third Assessment Report: “In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

…..

All the computer models do is produce scenarios based on the assumptions and limited understanding of climate programmed into them. They do not do clouds,  some of the assumptions are estimates that vary by orders of magitude, we have different scenarios varying from 1.0C to 6.0c,  some scarier scenarios of 10 – 12 C  for the next century.  These assume ‘climate sensitivity’ – ‘feedbacks’ due to CO2 which amplify the simple physics of per doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere of ~1.0C , to increasing temperatures due to positive feedbacks producing the  various accelerated global warming scenarios… Yet the order of magnitude of the sensitivity is unknown.

In fact the sign is unknown, it is assumed positive, is could equally be a negative feedback, it is currently uncertain.

I do hope that some  scientists somewhere are doing some actual experimentation with observable data to establish this.  The fact that the Earth has not experienced this behaviour in the past at point when CO2 were much higher naturally, must demonstrate these assumptions of strong positive feedbacks are wrong.

The original post, well worth reading: Are Computer Models Reliable – Can they Predict Climate?

Updates:

But then…  a commenter on the WUWT post adds:

“Sir, you say the IPCC does not make predictions. The IPCC says the world is going to warm. I call that a prediction.”