Climate Alarmism Is Based on GCMs and Thus on Nothing

There are many problems with the General Circulation Models (GCMs) used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and climate alarmists as the basis for their doctrine that CO₂ is a pollutant and that increases in CO₂ emissions will result in catastrophic increases in atmospheric temperatures (the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming or CAGW hypothesis). In actuality CO₂ is a miracle molecule that is a basis for life on Earth. Plants could not exist without it and thereby animals including humans would not be long for this world either. Plants need as much of it as they can possibly get at current levels. Low levels of it came close to finishing off plants and indirectly animals during the last Ice Age. This CAGW doctrine of the climate alarmists has to be one of the most ill-founded scientifically and ridiculous doctrines ever proclaimed by a large movement pretending to be based on science in the history of the world.

The way the models were built and used violates nearly every aspect that would inspire confidence in them. For all practical purposes they cannot be reproduced, produce widely different results depending on the initial conditions used, and are so expensive that it is not realistic for any but highly funded researchers to test them. Their construction follows this general approach according to Mike Jonas:

(1) All known (ie. well-understood) factors were built into the climate models, and estimates were included for the unknowns (The IPCC calls them parametrizations)….

(2) Model results were then compared with actual observations and were found to produce only about a third of the observed warming in the 20th century.

(3) Parameters controlling the unknowns in the models were then fiddled with (as in the above IPCC report quote) until they got a match.

(4) So necessarily, about two-thirds of the models’ predicted future warming comes from factors that are not understood.

Why the GCM Basis for Alarmism Is Wrong

So why is the GCM basis for alarmism used by climate alarmists so wrong? The answer includes the following:

(A) The GCMs are very unreliable and should not be used as the basis for public policy. Mike Jonas has written the following:

“The models have come to predict a high level of future warming, and how they claim that it is all caused by CO₂. The reality of course is that two-thirds of the predicted future warming is from guesswork and they don’t even know if the sign of the guesswork is correct. ie, they don’t even know whether the guessed factors actually warm the planet at all. They might even cool it….

If you still doubt that the climate models are unreliable, then perhaps the IPCC themselves can convince you. Their Working Group 1 (WG1) assesses the physical scientific aspects of the climate system and climate change. In 2007, WG1.said “we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

(B) The Global Average Surface Temperatures (GAST) temperature data used in the GCMs have been manipulated by the climate alarmists to such an extent that the data are no longer representative and therefore useful for this purpose. A recent report finds that data sets used by climate alarmists are not a valid representation of reality, including their repeated claims of highest recorded average temperatures. The new research report argues that the GAST used by the UN IPCC and the USEPA are not sufficiently credible to be used for policy purposes.

In fact, the report says, “the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever–despite current claims of record setting warming.”

(C) The GCMs have generally run much hotter than satellite temperatures, one of the few measurements that have not been deliberately altered by the alarmists.

(D) Coupled, non-linear chaotic systems cannot be usefully modeled

The bottom-up approach used by the alarmists, based on weather models, is inherently inappropriate for this purpose and have never been validated. Like weather models, they lose validity in a few weeks, even though the alarmists would like us to believe that their results are valid for over a hundred years. And the climate GCMs are much less valid than the weather models because they must be simplified to fit on even the largest computers. Such utter nonsense is not possible to believe, and should not be.

My Proposed Alternative

So what do I propose to use to take the place of the expensive and useless climate GCMs? In a word: Top-down econometric studies based on appropriate simultaneous equations. Econometrics has long been used by large businesses and academics with considerable success and does not suffer the problems from trying to portray a chaotic system using linear equations. They are very inexpensive compared to the climate GCMs and they are worth using even if they have not been used by alarmists. They tell the reader what natural factors are correlated with temperature changes over the period from which the data were used.

One of the few climate econometric studies written to date says that CO₂ has no significant effect on temperatures. This does not mean that such effects cannot be found in a laboratory, but rather that in the real world and time period for which the data have been used, CO₂ does not. Further the report shows which natural effects have how much influence. This is based on the data used, not what “scientists” believe should be the way the climate behaves. This explains how temperature variations can be entirely explained by the effects of natural phenomena without the use of human caused effects.

The entire climate alarmist CAGW hypothesis is nothing more than a failed hypothesis despite the approximately $100 billion spent on building GCM models and other research and about $1.5 trillion spent on the basis of the models in each year in recent history. This is undoubtedly the worst scam-based science on a major public policy issue in the history of the world. Suppliers of windmills and solar cells have raked off many trillions of dollars on the basis of bogus and useless GCM models with the help of mass media, governments, and academic (who have often been well rewarded for their misleading and useless models) supporters.