Climate Dissent: The Climate Debate Continues

J. Scott Armstrong, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and a leading expert in the field of professional forecasting, believes that prediction attempts are virtually doomed when scientists don’t understand or follow basic forecasting rules. He and colleague Kesten Green of Monash University conducted a “forecasting audit” of the 2007 IPCC report and “found no references…to the primary sources of information on forecasting methods” and that “the forecasting procedures that were described [in sufficient detail to be evaluated] violated 72 principles. Many of the violations were, by themselves, critical”. _Forbes

CLOUDs Over Climate Science (via AT)
A new peer reviewed paper from Lindzen and Choi keeps the focus on the critical "climate sensitivity parameter." If the climate models have exaggerated climate sensitivity, their projections will be worse than useless.

...the climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is estimated to be 0.7 K (with the confidence interval 0.5K – 1.3 K at 99% levels). This observational result shows that model sensitivities indicated by the IPCC AR4 are likely greater than than the possibilities estimated from the observations.

...This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5°C to 5°C and even more for a doubling of CO2 _

The paper discusses the relevance of a lower climate sensitivity than models are currently using. (Full study here)

The upcoming Lindzen-Choi paper follows closely on a recent paper from Spencer and Braswell, which -- using satellite observations -- calls into question other assumptions used by climate modelers. Another recent paper suggested that the most popular computer climate model exaggerates warming by 67%.

A PDF report on today's Global Warming Policy Foundation website traces the history of increasing alarmism and obfuscation of the limitations of climate models by the IPCC and IPCC - affiliated climate researchers. As politics, ambition, and greed became more closely tied to the "cause" of global warming catastrophe, self-interested collective bias came to replace objective scientific judgment more frequently (PDF). (More on the downward evolution of IPCC standards here)

Massive redistribution-of-wealth schemes have somehow become tied to the global warming agenda at the highest levels of government and inter-government. Literally $trillions are on the table in this high stakes game of faux environmental poker. And yet the basis of all of this hoopla! -- alarmist climate models -- are seemingly not ready for prime time. What is worse, the very ground-level data which is fed into climate models is unreliable.

The advanced world is in a twin quagmire of debt and demography. To any objective observer, this would be the worst possible time to commit struggling economies to an grand absurdist gesture based upon little more than "garbage in -- garbage out" computer models.

This would be a good time to take a look at your political leaders, and how they are likely to play this high stakes poker game as it approaches the end-stage. Choose well.

Remember -- Even the IPCC once admitted that it was impossible to accurately predict future climate states:

“In climate research and modeling, we should realize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” _IPCC 2001 PDF_via_Forbes

More: The US National Institue of Standards and Technology says that we need to get a lot better at measuring greenhouse gases -- and their sources and sinks. (NIST workshop report available here) Without better observations and measurements over the full range of climate related parameters, climate models are no better than an academic circle jerk.