#climastrology

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Those with ambitions for power over their fellow humans continue to speak of the threats of “climate change” and “global warming” as though they were expressing revealed truths. Religious dogmas can find their roots in scientific as well as theological thinking. Questioning either the “intelligent design” or “big bang” explanations for the origins of the universe can evoke angry responses from true-believers on either side of the issue. In the case of the High-Church Warmingists, a verifiable fact (i.e., increased temperature) is merged with an empirically unfounded assertion (i.e., human activity is the causal explanation) to provide true believers the rationale for their rule over mankind. Those who deny this article of faith are targeted for dismissal in academia and even televised weather shows.

Butler Shaffer

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I am tired of the continued pretense that climate models can produce accurate forecasts in a chaotic system. Sadly, the pretense occurs on both sides of the scientific debate. The reality is the models don’t work and can’t work for many reasons, including the most fundamental; lack of data, lack of knowledge of major mechanisms, lack of knowledge of basic physical processes, lack of ability to represent physical mechanisms like turbulence in mathematical form, and lack of computer capacity. Bob Tisdale summarized the problems in his 2013 book Climate Models Fail. It is time to stop wasting time and money and put people and computers to more important uses. The only thing that keeps people working on the models is government funding, either at weather offices or in academia. Without this funding computer modelers would not dominate the study of climate. Without the funding, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could not exist. Many of the people involved in climate modeling were not familiar with or had no training in climatology or climate science. They were graduates of computer modeling programs looking for a challenging opportunity with large amounts of funding available and access to large computers. The atmosphere and later the oceans fit the bill. Now they put the two together to continue the fiasco. Unfortunately, it is all at massive expense to society. Those expenses include the computers and the modeling time but worse the cost of applying the failed results to global energy and environmental issues.

Dr. Tim Ball

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The great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses tested -- or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I see bad ideas can persist for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they become intolerant dogmas

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In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.

Frederick Seitz, (1996, referring to IPCC AR-2)

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Dr. Alan Carlin is an economist and physical scientist with degrees from Caltech and MIT and publications in both economics and climate/energy, who became actively involved in the Sierra Club in the 1960s as an activist and Chapter Chairman. This led to an almost 39 year career as a manager and senior analyst at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the mid-2000s he began researching the claims by the environmental movement and the UN that the release of carbon dioxide by modern civilization will lead to catastrophic global warming due to human-caused CO2 emissions (which they subsequently changed to climate change and now extreme weather). This is his account of his personal journey of discovery that concluded that the claims are based on invalid science and are being pushed by a far left wing conspiracy that tolerates no skepticism, that their “solution” will result in disastrous price increases and reduced reliability for electricity in the US, as it already has in Western Europe, and reductions in economic growth and living standards around the world, particularly for the less affluent.

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They didn’t address the science. They changed the label to “climate change” and amplified the personal attacks, as skeptics became deniers, with all the holocaust connotations. The name “climate change denier” is wrong on many levels. Its creation and use prove the creators and users do so to exploit the public lack of understanding. As usual, IPCC proponents ignored or deflected all scientific challenges. The overarching theme of the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) illustrates a similar response. Ignore the scientific questions and attack the individual.

Dr. Tim Ball

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For the sake of argument, let’s say that global climate change is occurring and that the sea level is rising. This still leaves several unanswered questions for the global warming enthusiasts:    1.  What is the cost of your plan to various populations in terms of the standard of living and human lives?    2. Is the cost of your plan greater than or less than the cost of other solutions, such as the gradual relocation populations from coastal areas.    3. Can you show that your plan has a very high probability of working, and if not, why should we implement it when we could spend those same resources on other more practical solutions and more immediate needs such as clean water, food, and basic necessities? All too often, the response to questions such as these are angry diatribes about how we must act now. But of course, such a position is similar to that of a person who, upon seeing that winter is approaching demands that everyone build the winter shelter his way immediately. “Can’t you people see it’s getting colder?” he says. “If we don’t build the shelter my way, we’ll all freeze.” When faced with questions of whether or not his shelter plan is really the best way to proceed, or if a different type of shelter might be more cost effective, or if others would rather build their own shelter, he angrily declares “you winter deniers don’t care if we all die.” Naturally, if the group then goes ahead with their belligerent companion’s shelter plan, they may find in the end that the shelter fails to keep out the cold or is structurally unsound. In that case, the group is actually much worse off because it expended large amounts of valuable resources that should have been applied elsewhere.

Ryan McMacken

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In the 5 years since I started stalking the uncertainty monster, we’ve seen a lot of intellectual progress on how to frame and approach this issue. It is becoming easier for scientists to do and publish research that challenges the consensus. That’s the good news. “The bad news is that the interface between climate science and policy remains badly broken. Many politicians seem to have become uncertainty deniers, with President Obama leading the pack. The UNFCCC/IPCC is on a collision course with reality; it will be interesting to see how the Paris meeting goes next Dec, and how the IPCC AR6 will proceed. But science seems less and less relevant to what is going on in the policy arena. Which is fine; please get out of our way and let us do our science so that we can try to figure all this out by exploring the knowledge frontiers, rather than pledging allegiance to the consensus.

Judith Curry