Advancing the Myth

It seems that the more people are exposed to the realities behind the myths of global warming the more desperate the environmentalists become. The headline on a story at NewScientist.com reads

Global temperatures could be set to soar

It is a short article so I'll look it one paragraph at a time.

THE Earth could be even more sensitive to global warming than we imagined. If carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere double, as they are widely expected to do, the planet's temperature could rise by a huge 11.5 °C, according to early results from a project that uses home PCs to test climate models.

Given that no one has been able to accurately determine the level of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere, expecting it to double seems like a fairly empty exercise. And if the current level is unknown, the doubled level is equally a mystery. Thus any prediction based on that belief is likely to be as potentially accurate as using the lucky numbers in your fortune cookie to buy lottery tickets.

The result is surprising because it is far outside the 1.4 to 4.5 °C range predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the IPCC's estimate is based on just a handful of different computer models of the Earth's climate (see New Scientist, 24 July 2004, p 44). “We have anecdotal evidence that people tend to tune their models to be similar to other people's,” says David Stainforth of the University of Oxford. But this may also have the effect of limiting the predictions the models make. (emphasis added)

So this is how they got their scientific consensus ad their widely expected increases in carbon dioxide. The all “tuned” their model to produce similar results. Stainforth complains this may limit the predictions the models can make. Um yeah. But apparently the problem isn't that none of the models are allowed to predict less warming.

So Stainforth and his colleagues launched the website climateprediction.net to see what would happen when models were not tuned in this way. More than 95,000 volunteers have downloaded software from climateprediction.net, and have tested more than 2000 different climate models. The models are first tested to ensure that they simulate the past climate accurately, then checked to see what they predict for the future. The result is a forecast temperature rise ranging from 1.9 to 11.5 °C (Nature, vol 433, p 403).(emphasis added)

Right from the start the fact that Stainforth borrowed his methodology from the people trying to contact aliens does little to inspire confidence. According to climateprediction.net There are 29,378 machines currently working on this. I couldn't find much on their site about what they have done to insure the integrity of the data being sent back to them. As for their results a prediction of warming ranging from 1.9° to 11.5° seems pretty wide given the disaster forecast as a result of the finely tuned consensus of 1.4 to 4.5.

I can make a prediction every bit as accurate without all the trouble of setting up a climate model and building a distributed processing network of volunteers. Over the course of the next decade the the earth's climate will change by between -30° C and +30° C. Can I get a research grant for this?

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 06:55 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment