Wednesday, March 4, 2009

So how good were those Global Warming models?

A while back I had a post about a report that tested Global Warming Models

Well now even the biggest Climate Change people are realizing that something is... not up.


Discovery has the story:

Earth's climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.


Continues to confound? That really inspires confidence in their ability to predict climate into the next century. They couldn't even figure out what's currently happening.

Yes, let's use these models to base economic and taxation changes that'll cost trillions!

I like that given a 30 year warming and an 8 year trend in cooling. They still maintain that this is only a "pause" in overall warming.

Over about the last 40 years a nearly quarter of them have been cooling. They don't know why, and yet they're sure it's just a temporary setback.


The discrepancy gets to the heart of one of the toughest problems in climate science -- identifying the difference between natural variability (like the occasional March snowstorm) from human-induced change.


Yes the occasional March snowstorm, or the occasional ice age.


But just what's causing the cooling is a mystery. Sinking water currents in the north Atlantic Ocean could be sucking heat down into the depths. Or an overabundance of tropical clouds may be reflecting more of the sun's energy than usual back out into space.


So there's factors the your models are not taking into account? And they turn out to dramatically affect your results? Shocking.


Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years. But he warned that it's just a hiccup, and that humans' penchant for spewing greenhouse gases will certainly come back to haunt us.

"When the climate kicks back out of this state, we'll have explosive warming," Swanson said. "Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive."


So 30 years of warming, followed by nearly 40 years of cooling, followed by a giant warming spike. And what model are you basing this prediction off of?

Was it one that can predict the current trend? Oh wait no... that's a "mystery".

Let me be clear. This is not science.

Science does not pull predictions out of thin air, or worse pull them out of a model they know is flawed.

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