Climate Explainations

I used to write about climate a lot but when things got busy stopped.

When I did write I tended to suggest that a) the models were uncertain, b) natural variability was a much bigger deal than the warmists admitted, c) things like the Sun, the PDO and the vagaries of the Atlantic Ocean might have had something to do with the warming to 1998. I was certainly willing to concede that humans made some contribution to any warming which might have occurred but I suggested that it was unlikely to be just the CO2 emitting side of human activity. Finally, I suggested that the less significant CO2 was in the scheme of things the less it should signify in policy. In other words, I didn’t think the various carbon dioxide reduction schemes were worth the money.

The warmists, two or three years ago, denied each and every one of these ideas. The warmist position was that the Earth was warming fast and that man made CO2 was the only possible cause of such warming. They cited the IPCC Fourth Report to support their assertions and suggested that anything less was not peer reviewed and thus worthless.

and then, well and then came the pause. And with the pause the realization that the models and reality were gradually drifting apart. And with that drift there arose the need to explain where the heat in the models could be hiding and why it was hiding there.

The scientific immaturity of climate science was on full display as no less than 38 separate and often contradictory explanations for the pause were put forward. Many of which would have been heresy only a couple of years before.

As the explanations have been launched we’ve seen the curious spectacle of grown scientists coming up with enough cooling to overwhelm the observed warming all together. And many of these explanations involve the Sun, ocean currents, clouds and a host of other variables which we were assured could not have any effect on climate just a few short years ago.

It turns out that, in general, the climate science community has been exaggerating the precision of its models and the robustness of its physics. In the face of the unpredicted pause they have had to admit that maybe Nature and not Man might be responsible for at least a bit of the warming which has, well, disappeared.

The one thing which has become absolutely clear: the IPCC science and the policy recommendations based up on it are ungrounded in any serious, measurable, predictable science at all. There is no current theory of climate which implicates CO2 exclusively. And there is a great deal of uncertainty as to what the temperature’s sensitivity to CO2 actually is.

All of which means that any economic or energy policy based upon the theory that CO2 will create extreme climate change needs to be discarded at once before any more money is wasted.