Climate Change Is Real. Too Bad Accurate Climate Models Aren’t.

Climate Change Is Real. Too Bad Accurate Climate Models Aren’t.

MAY 6, 2014 By Sean Davis

The Obama Administration released a new report on global coolingglobal warming climate change this week, and its findings and recommendations are about what you’d expect: conservatives are stupidheads who hate Science™, so give us eleventy trillion dollars.

From the Chicago Tribune:

The Obama administration Tuesday released an updated report on how climate change requires urgent action to counter impacts that touch every corner of the country, from oyster growers in Washington State to maple syrup producers in Vermont.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the report said.

Unfortunately, climate models — ones that can accurately and consistently predict global temperatures in the not-so-distant future — simply don’t exist in the present. Indeed, for a group that so nakedly appeals to the authority of “consensus,” the faith-based global warming alarmist movement is shockingly impervious to the consensus of actual data:

I’ll see your “95 percent of scientists believe in global warming” talking point and raise you a “95 percent of reality thinks your climate models are garbage.” According to that chart of actual satellite and surface temperature observations vs. what was predicted by 90 different climate models, 95 percent of models overestimated actual temperatures. Nothing says Science™ like predicting stuff incorrectly over and over and over again.

And therein lies the real reason why so many global warming cultists are so desperate to change the terms of the debate. Rather than discuss the actual science, they’d rather marginalize anyone who disagrees with their policy prescriptions.

The global warming alarmists aren’t attempting to shut down debate because they’re worried the dissenters are wrong; the alarmists are attempting to shut down debate because they know their models are wrong, and they’d rather nobody focus on that inconvenient little fact.

As the old legal adage goes: When you have the facts, argue the facts; when you have the law, argue the law; when you have neither, just accuse your adversary of hating science and hope that nobody will listen to what they have to say about your consistently wrong forecasting models. And if that doesn’t work, blatantly manipulate and torture the English language and hope that nobody will notice.

Of course climate change — the notion that climates change over time, not the idea that we should spend a fortune futilely trying to change the weather — is real. Climates have changed consistently throughout the earth’s history. I am not aware of a single person who disagrees with the fact that climates change. Accusing someone of being a “climate denier” (does anyone on earth deny that climates exist?) doesn’t tell me that you’re awesome at science — it tells me that you’re awful at understanding what words mean.

And of course the earth has been gradually warming over the past 150+ years. That’s what happens when you emerge from a Little Ice Age, which lasted for hundreds of years and extended through the mid-19th century.

It is clearly possible (and quite common) to simultaneously believe that the earth is warming and that global warming cultists have utterly failed in their attempts to predict future climate changes.

I have a simple rule when it comes to people who want me to invest obscene sums of money in their forecasts of discrete future events: just be accurate. If you come to me and tell me you can predict future stock market performance based on these five factors, then you had better predict future stock market performance based on those five factors. All you have to do is be correct, over and over again. But if your predictive model is wrong, I’m not going to give you any money, and I’m certainly not going to pretend that what you just did is science. Any idiot can make incorrect guesses about the future.

Science, properly practiced, is the search for truth. Science, properly practiced, rejects forecasting models that consistently produce inaccurate forecasts. There’s nothing scientific about shouting down anyone who has the audacity to point out that the only thing your model can accurately predict is what the temperature won’t be.