For several days I have been debating a scientist on a popular science web site. We’ve been debating the issue of global warming’s impact on accelerating the melting of multi-year ice in the Arctic - the subject and reason for my previous blog.
We reached a point in our debate where he said that I was missing the point of what was being observed. That point being that the Global Circulation Models (GCM) used by the IPCC grossly underestimated the impact of global warming on polar sea ice. Today’s observations were not accounted in the predictions, indicating that global warming is worse that the GCM’s could have accounted for.
Having a background as an information theorist in medical and technology research I immediately raised the red flag on this wholly illogical assertion. My global warming scientist friend is really saying “our global warming models failed to predict this sudden regional change so global warming must be accelerating far worse than we thought!” He’s basing his conclusion on a gross failure of the models rather than on investigating why the models are failing and finding the unexpected confounding variable that is driving the models to failure. Science doesn’t get any more bogus than when global warming scientists resort to unscientific methodologies of proving a hypothesis through an observed failure of the hypothesis. This twisted logic is nothing short of climatology malpractice.
I believe a huge logical mistake is made when alarmists pounce on regional short term temperature changes and attempt to tie it to anthropogenic forcings in the GCMs. Global warming implies “global” warming, not regional temperature variability. To place this debate into proper context lets look at the NWIV (Net World Ice Volume). If global warming is indeed driving the melt in the Arctic we should see a similar case in the Antarctic. But we’re not.
On the contrary, we’re observing an increase in the ice extents in the Antarctic which serve to balance the NWIV at normal levels. In other words, there is no decrease in the total NWIV. Therefore, global warming is having no impact on the world’s total volume of polar ice. The GCMs fail miserably in this prediction.
The CGM models predict an exponential increase in extreme weather disasters in direct relationship to global temperature increase. The period from 1950 to the present records no increase whatsoever in natural disasters. It is interesting to note that Al Gore was forced to remove his slides of global disaster graphs from his presentations because the agency he “lifted” the graphs from sharply rebuked him for misrepresenting that global warming was depicted when the data set (and abstract) clearly indicated global warming was not involved. That the global warming campaign now requires the “leading expert” to resort to intellectual dishonesty to make the case indicates how desperate the cause has become.
Appeals to authority, claims of consensus, citing failed models, and pouncing on regional weather changes to back what data does not support does little to convince me and a growing host of reputable scientists of the doom and gloom scenarios that alarmists champion. If anything, such hyperbole is promoting ever increasing public cynicism.
It really comes down to a simple question; If the CGMs fail miserably to accurately predict what should be easy to confirm in observable data (changes in NWIV and increases in extreme weather) how can they be so ardently relied on to predict the effects of CO2 on such a complex climate system even 20-30 years into the future? How do the abject failures of the models somehow prove them to be more correct than previously believed? This illogical statement wins the LWHancock Explorations “Bogus Science Award.”