Don't b.s. me, bro

I'm not as dumb as I look, you know. In deference to my finely-tuned bullshit detector, opinions are expressed, arguments are made, bullshit is called out.

Filed under: climate change climate uncertainty global warming 

“Scientist” admits that climate modeling is just as reliable as throwing darts. Or maybe playing rock-paper-scissors.

This quote is real keeper, and tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the value of the “science” behind Global Warming™:

Communicating the value of climate modelling … requires confronting such apparent contradictions as the fact that increasing a model’s complexity — by adding the behaviour of clouds, people or ecosystem feedbacks, for example — may actually increase the uncertainty in climate projections.

It isn’t a contradiction at all - complexity leads to uncertainty pretty much all the time. I’m sorry, did they not warn you that critical thinking would be involved?

Atmospheric scientist Kevin Trenberth of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, has explicitly warned that unless such seemingly paradoxical results are communicated carefully, the more complex modelling being used in climate simulations for the upcoming fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may confuse both the public and decision-makers, thereby reducing their willingness to act.

Ah. Good to know then.

So this “scientist” is more worried about communicating results carefully and confusing the public and decision-makers, than about the fact that trying to make the model inputs more accurate actually increases the uncertainty of the model’s conclusions.

That, friends, is a politican, not a scientist.

These are the same models that the IPCC uses to convince us that the world is in danger. Yeah, those models. Apparently, they aren’t much good.

But promoting certainty about the idea that the world is in danger unless we do something comes first. The models to support that claim? Nah, sorry, we don’t need anything like that, we’re fine with just being certain.

Certainty sure does clear up a lot of messiness.

No need to include those messy, complex factors like clouds, people, or ecosystem feedback, such as that pesky solar radiation that heats up the oceans, which then store a tremendous amount of both heat and CO2, contributing to the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Or other messy, complex factors like relying on temperature stations located close to urban heat islands, or right next to other heat sources like buildings, air conditioner condensers, asphalt runways or parking lots, and the like. Hint: this makes them read too hot.

Or the fact that we changed the actual locations of these temperature stations over the years, gradually moving from more rural to more urban. Which, guess what, makes it look like the Earth is warming! What are the odds? 

Keeping all this messy data out of the models makes them so much less complicated and uncertain. Also, incorrect and useless. And that’s the way they like them!

Also, let’s not forget the “hide the decline” scandal, or the fact that none of the other “scientists” behind the IPCC models will release the source code, despite repeated attempts by many to get it, so that some less-crazy people can inspect it for errors and/or possible corruption. Can’t you just smell the science being done here? Smells like … a barnyard. 

Then there is the loony idea that certainty in climate projections is even feasible. Based on what evidence? When has that ever happened? Can somebody point me to a shred of evidence that man has ever predicted climate with any degree of accuracy? I’d love to see that. If we can’t predict weather more than two days out with any accuracy at all, why on Earth would anybody presuppose that we can predict climate changes 20 or 50 or 100 years from now? So when you start excluding essential pieces of weather data - on purpose - because they tend to “increase uncertainty in climate projections”, which we have no possibility of finding anyway, this is doubling down on insanity. But for these people, it’s more about building the right message to get buy-in from the public and the decision-makers. Telling people who write the checks what they want to hear, in other words. This is as far from true science as it is possible to get.

And why any non-partisan meteorologist would believe any of this, I have no idea. It ain’t science, it ain’t even close to science, and those who believe it are closer to following a faith-based belief system than to rational belief in empirical science. 

via Uncertain Climate Risks (Nature Climate Change) | Watts Up With That?