Guest essay by Bjørn Lomborg
The current climate models are running way too hot.
Over the past 30 years, they are at least predicting 71% too much heat. Maybe 159%. (see graph)
This should make us greet the next climate panel report somewhat smarter. Yes, there is a problem, no, it doesn’t look like the end of the world.
Let’s fix global warming without the fear.
Here is my latest Project Syndicate column: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/realism-in-the-latest-ipcc-climate-report-by-bj-rn-lomborg
The cat is well and truly out of the bag now, and has been for some time. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
it would appear that those so called experts who are driving the GCM buses not only have
faulty rear view mirrors, but also faulty headlights which need to be re-aligned.
“Let’s fix global warming without the fear.”
What’s to fix? If many people’s prognostications* are correct, we will be shovelling ‘global warming’ off our properties in large quantities this winter. I don’t call that fixing, I call that dealing with it.
* Word used in an attempt to forestall inane posts about ‘predictions’ or ‘projections’. 😉
Yes, there is a problem, no, it doesn’t look like the end of the world.
NO, nobody has yet shown any proof of it being a problem, The correct sentence would be “Yes, it is happening, no, it doesn’t look like it is a problem”.
Bjorn, if I may ask: You say ‘let’s fix global warming without fear.’ I quite agree that No fear is needed, but, doesn’t it seem like ‘fixing’ the climate, would be a matter of decades, if not a century or more? Even with everyone making a big push, which most are barely even attempting, and some, going hard in the opposite direction.
Lomborg goes on to say:
The European Union will pay $250 billion for its current climate policies each and every year for 87 years. For almost $20 trillion, temperatures by the end of the century will be reduced by a negligible 0.05ºC.
Two of my favorite Feynman quotes apply:
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
and
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
Bah !
Should be:
“Yes, it might be happening but our data to date is so bad that we really can not tell.”
Between the surface data “Adjustments”, lack or replicates / random sampling with both surface stations AND satellite data, bullcrap statistics, how would you discern such purported temperature changes from noise, limits of observation, or bias ?
HarryReadMe ??? corruption is us…
CO2 vs Temperature Trends:
http://tinyurl.com/ove6euy
http://tinyurl.com/pnplx3n
http://tinyurl.com/py68qh5
http://tinyurl.com/oo3c7a8
http://tinyurl.com/naa26qb
fah i don’t think they did any experiment, climate science is not experimental science,simulations are unavoidable, but , they just claim their hypothesis were right…they didn’t even wait to check if their forcasts were right…it is a new paradigm ; a model can make an hypothes become a truth and don’t ask why because it is soooooooo complicated that you can’t understand.
The problem is not being right or wrong because may be what they assume is right and the hidden heat will come back one day but how come they can be sure of that?????? I still refuse to beleive that real scientists endorse the claim of 90 or 95% of certainty has any logical meaning at all.
The Left -leaning media in Australia simply are not reporting the news. They continue trumpeting the fry-and-die line. Just how do you get through to these “true believers?” They are becoming as hard-line as radical Islamists.I may well laminate and mount the front page of “The Australian” newspaper to put up as an inspiration.
@fah “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
A very good and true Feynman quote, however, where the climate alarmists go wrong, is that in looking for another identical and pristine earth, by which to use as a control, and with which to experiment, they made the mistake of thinking that they could use models as a tool to extract accurate experimental data. What is actually happening is that there are lots of models, all coded with variants of the CAGW hypothesis*, which in reality are only providing demonstrations or explanations of the hypothesis’ prediction, rather than being experiments upon on the hypothesis, or tests of the hypothesis.
Testing by running a model, which has been biased with a variant of the hypothesis can ONLY tell you what the hypothesis predicts. It CANNOT test the hypothesis to validate if the hypothesis is correct or not. This is where the climate scientists have gone badly wrong in putting any faith whatsoever in the model being testable, by running the model.
Too many scientists seem to claim that what the model is doing is testing the hypothesis and producing a positive agreement that the hypethisis is correct and then they appear to be puzzled that the real earth is behaving differently to how ALL the models predicted it would behave.
The only scientifically valid way to test the CAGW hypothesis, is to observe and measure the real planet and gather accurate, consistent empirical data with which to compare to the data derived from the modelled hypothesis. If the empirical measured real world data matches what the hypothesis based model predicted, then the hypothesis remains a valid hypothesis which has not yet been falsified. If the empirical measured real world data does not match the modelled hypothesis data, then either the model is wrong or the hypothesis is falsified or both.
More and more empirical measured real world data reveals that the ALL models are wrong and I claim that this is because the hypothesis at the heart of all of them is WRONG.
I believe that the hypothesis has been falsified. The Atmosphere is not as senstive to CO2 as the CAGW hypothesis claims.
* CACW hypothesis posits that a doubling in atmospheric CO2 will result in n degrees C warming by the year 2100 based on a climatic sensitivity to CO2 at X and that this warming will be catastrophic.
Dr Lomberg, you are a dreamer if you think that we can”fix” the climate. Compared to the sun, the real climate driver, we are powerless. To claim that reducing the production of CO2 will do anything when CO2 has no input into increasing temperature is completely idiotic.
Looks to me from those graphs that the globe has fixed itself.
Not much point is our fixing something that aint broke, best to let nature take its course.
It is the models that are the problem that needs fixing, politicians should decide whether it is worth throwing billions to do this or spend the money on something useful.
.
“Although the IPCC is not perfect – it famously predicted that all Himalayan glaciers would be gone in 2035, when the more likely year is 2350 – its many experts generally give us the best information on the fractious issue of global warming.
*
*
*
“The new report’s fundamental conclusion will be that global warming is real and mostly our own doing. . . . As climate scientist Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University tweeted: “Summary of upcoming IPCC report: ‘Exactly what we told you in 2007, 2001, 1995, 1990 reports…’
*
*
*
“Yet these sensible and moderate findings. . . .”
Dessler? Really? Sensible and moderate? Really?
Frankly, I’m appalled at how credulous Lomborg remains about the science. If he can’t exercise a little judgment on the science, he shouldn’t have spent so much of his article discussing it. Instead, he should have dedicated more column inches to backing up the money passage: “The European Union will pay $250 billion for its current climate policies each and every year for 87 years. For almost $20 trillion, temperatures by the end of the century will be reduced by a negligible 0.05ºC.”
0.05ºC? Where did that precision came from? (From the error margin of the sensors?) When many measure points only have 0.1ºC resolution, it’s like “science” found in some Hollywood movies and tv series (ref. to their magical picture “enhancement”). It should be expressed with the same precision as the sample with the lowest precision. It’s bad math otherwise.
@Ken Hall. Concur completely. I read “theory” to mean “the models” and “experiment” to mean better and better data about the actual earth. The trouble with pinning down the rejection of the null hypothesis here seems to be that the “hypothesis” has never been well constructed and keeps squishing around as more and better data becomes available, in addition to assumptions as to effects of uncontrolled variables. The hypothesis that something will happen by 2100 is hard to test in the meantime.
How long did it take the believers in the Phlogiston Theory to admit their mistake?
A couple of decades?
Expect the same from CAGW cult fanatics.
In a world with a growing population to feed more heat does not appear to me to be a problem but lets fix the problems with the particulate pollution from coal mining and burning and maybe get back to some real environmental goals such as sustainable forestry, better technology for resource recovery and education that is not indoctrination.
The whole idea that the atmosphere with a thermal capacity equal to that of 3 meter water can warm the Earth including the oceans up to 2km deep or so is pretty ridiculous imo.
There is a much better explanation for our presently still pleasant temperatures.
But we are on an 80 million year cooling trend and there is no sign that it is bottoming out or reversing, so we should be worrying about cooling iso warming.
The deep oceans lost already 17K in the last 80 million years !!!
Yes, there is a problem, no, it doesn’t look like the end of the world.
Let’s fix global warming without the fear.
What problem?! There’s nothing to fix. The Romans thrived when temperatures were much warmer. More people die from cold than from heat. More heat means a longer growing period for plants and more land available for agriculture. More CO2 helps plants grow better and faster.
Pick a climate sensitivity that frightens you, and then calculate how cold we would now be without the influence of AnthroGHGs.
Note how the higher the sensitivity, the colder it would now be. When you get into the range of catastrophically high sensitivites, we would now be catastrophically cold without human input.
We’d better hope that natural processes dominate.
===============
What problem? It has never been the end of the world when co2 in the atmosphere was 10 times higher. Global warming looks like it fixed itself with over 16 years of a global surface temperature standstill with some predicting cooling ahead. It they are right then there really was never a problem and the IPCC should be disbanded. They have contributed nothing for the planet, just pain and energy poverty for the poor.
Ahhhhhh, now I see the problem. We are doomed. Is there no good in co2?
lemiere jacques says: @ur momisugly September 16, 2013 at 2:25 am
…. I still refuse to believe that real scientists endorse the claim of 90 or 95% of certainty has any logical meaning at all.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
They don’t. That is why you find websites like:
http://judithcurry.com/
http://drtimball.com/
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/johnkehrbio/
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/
http://www.climateaudit.org/
http://www.co2science.org/
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/
http://www.staatvanhetklimaat.nl/
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/
That is why 31,487 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs The Petition rejects the Global Warming Agreement that was written in Kyoto Japan, December 1997 and any other similar proposals….
You NEVER hear about that in the MSM except when they declare it a fraud. Otherwise you only read about the throughly debunked ‘97% Scientists’ agree numbers.
Cook’s 97% climate consensus paper crumbles upon examination
About that overwhelming 97-98% number of scientists that say there is a climate consensus…
What else did the ’97% of scientists’ say?
More articles on the ‘CONSENSUS’ can be found HERE
The information on how those ‘consensus’ numbers were ‘extracted’ from the real data is enough to tell ANYONE this is a bogus scam by politicians and corrupt* scientists for picking the tax payers pockets.
* Sorry mod.s that is the only word fit to print that describes people willing to lie or bury their heads in the interest of a big paycheck and acceptance by their peers.
A computer model is a system of equations that supposedly represent mathematically all the actions of a system. Different model runs are done using different input parameters. If you do not know what all the possible actions of a system are either because you have not identified them at all or because you have identified them but cannot express them mathematcally (including statistical methods), your model will not contain all the necessary information. Then, no matter how many times you run the model varying input parameter values your model will not reflect reality. This is elementary.
Modelling is a really useful technique to cheaply investigate systems which are well-defined; usually these are systems we have built ourselves which are, while often complex, limited in scope and function with a limited, if random-appearing action.
The climate models have not falsified the GW/AGW/CAGW hypotheses since there are many actions of the global weather system which are understood poorly or not at all and therefore cannot be included in the climate-models. In fact there are known climate-drivers that are deliberately omitted. There are also likely to be some climate actions which have yet to be identified at all. Until we have all these things correctly expressed mathematically we cannot meaningfully model them. At the present state the models even if correct as far as they go could, at best, give only very rough approximations. However these climate-models are not even correct as far as they go since even the effect of CO2 on climate, as expressed in the models, does not reflect reality.