Part four in a ten-part series on the unsettled science of climate change from Grassroots Alberta
Not long ago, I met a woman who said that she was absolutely terrified of global warming. I asked if she knew how much warming had actually occurred in, say, the last 140-150 years. She didn’t, but said she was pretty sure it was a lot.
When I told her that actual warming was less than a single degree Celsius (0.08o) during that time, she seemed relieved, then openly wondered how such a small amount over such a long period could lead to excessive carbon taxes and politicians spending billions on electrical subsidies.
Good question, but an even better question is why politicians have spent these billions even though the reliability of climate models has never been demonstrably proven.
Climate scientist and professor Judith Curry is the former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author of 180+ scientific papers on climate.
Curry says that alarmist fears are based on computer models rather than observable science. She says: “[The earth] is clearly warming, and it’s been warming overall for several hundred years, [yet] the key question is how much of the recent warming—say for the last fifty years—has been caused by humans, and my interpretation of the evidence is that we really can’t tell. And I don’t see a clear signal that it is being caused by humans, predominantly.”
Myron Ebell was the academic chosen by President Donald Trump to transition the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Ebell points out that “the official scientific view that promotes global warming alarmism is really not based on science or on data. It’s based on computer modelling.”
Ebell says: “The problem with computer models is that… they can’t forecast the future. They cannot predict what the temperature is going to be in ten years, fifty years, or a hundred years.”
Dr. John Christy is professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama, and has served in many capacities as a climate scientist, including a lead author on the U.N.’s IPCC (Climate Change Panel). Christy and his colleague, Dr. Roy Spencer, received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites.
Testifying before a Congressional Committee, Christy demonstrated how each of 102 U.N. IPCC climate models overestimated global warming. He said: “The [climate] models failed the simplest of validation tests; they can’t even reproduce what has already happened…. On average, the warming rate of the atmosphere in these models is three times reality. As a consequence, our science has not established the causal link between CO2 emissions and what the climate is actually doing.”
Highly respected Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson agrees. Dyson says it makes little sense to trust the computer models because they’re “full of fudge factors.” He says they’ve proven themselves unreliable and wrong, noting that global temperatures were absolutely flat during the early 21st century, even though human activity poured record amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere during that time.
Michael Crichton, the bestselling author of Jurassic Park, State of Fear, The Andromeda Strain, and others, pointed out exactly why computer climate models can’t be trusted. He said we already know that computer climate models can’t predict temperature over a ten-year period; why then should we assume they’ll be accurate over a period of a hundred years?
“At the Grassroots” is a feature service of Grassroots Alberta. The author, Kevin Avram, is a director of Grassroots Alberta.
About Grassroots Alberta
Grassroots Alberta Citizens Initiative was established to promote the responsible and efficient use of tax dollars and to carry out an educational role with respect to wealth creation and responsible public policy. Grassroots Alberta Citizens Initiative is a project of the Grassroots Alberta Landowners Association. “At the Grassroots” is a feature service of Grassroots Alberta. The author, Kevin Avram, is a director of Grassroots Alberta.