$100 Billion And All I Got Was This Lousy Climate Model?!?

Since 1989 the US government has spent almost $100 billion on climate studies, modeling, prediction, regulations and more. In the end, the best models developed so far do 2 - 3 X worse than chance alone! As real world temperatures continue to diverge wildly from climate model projections, US taxpayers are starting to wonder where there money is going.

Jo Nova IPCC Consensus Vote

Joanne Nova's report, Climate Money, documents $79 billion spent by the US on climate science up until the year 2009. Since then, over the past 3 + years the Obama government has expanded spending on climate science, regulation, enforcement, and all aspects of the carbon orthodoxy. Almost no area of US government, academia, or media is left untouched by the agenda of carbon hysteria.

Random Walk Examples

Scientists and institutes associated with the IPCC receive many billions of US dollars per year to accomplish results which could be achieved by a 3 year old child with a random walk generator.

in 2008 and 2010, a team of hydrologists at the National Technical University of Athens published a pair of studies comparing long-term (100-year) temperature and precipitation trends in a total of 55 locations around the world to model projections. The models performed quite poorly at the annual level, which was not surprising. What was more surprising was that they also did poorly even when averaged up to the 30-year scale, which is typically assumed to be the level they work best at. They also did no better over larger and larger regional scales. The authors concluded that there is no basis for the claim that climate models are well-suited for long-term predictions over large regions.

A 2011 study in the Journal of Forecasting took the same data set and compared model predictions against a “random walk” alternative, consisting simply of using the last period’s value in each location as the forecast for the next period’s value in that location. The test measures the sum of errors relative to the random walk. A perfect model gets a score of zero, meaning it made no errors. A model that does no better than a random walk gets a score of 1. A model receiving a score above 1 did worse than uninformed guesses. Simple statistical forecast models that have no climatology or physics in them typically got scores between 0.8 and 1, indicating slight improvements on the random walk, though in some cases their scores went as high as 1.8.

The climate models, by contrast, got scores ranging from 2.4 to 3.7, indicating a total failure to provide valid forecast information at the regional level, even on long time scales. The authors commented: “This implies that the current [climate] models are ill-suited to localized decadal predictions, even though they are used as inputs for policymaking.” _FinancialPost

Jo Nova (PDF)

This table shows US government climate related expenditures up until the year 2009. But as you can see below, President Obama has expanded climate spending steadily year to year. This is even true for agencies such as NASA, whose primary mission is supposed to be outer space exploration. Something odd happened to NASA during the 1990s, when US VP Al Gore took a special interest in the agency . . . .

The table above illustrates the year on year spending increases in various US government departments, in the Obama years.

But these tables do not reveal the amount of spending related to climate policy which may go under different names in the department budgets. They likewise do not reveal the amount of climate spending at other levels of US government, or by other member governments participating in the IPCC. And they certainly do not reveal the $trillions slated to be routed through the IPCC in redistributive ransom payoffs from the developed world to the third world.

The largest costs from climate change policies will never be measured, since they are not truly measurable. These are the "opportunity costs" and the "opportunity destruction" brought about by the prevention of vital energy, commercial, industrial, and residential projects around the world. We are entering an era of climate agenda caused energy starvation and a consequent economic decay.

This is taking place at the same time that much of the developed world is experience a demographic implosion, likely to reduce the available brainpower and manpower which will be needed for humanity to work its way out of this carbon hysteria morass.

Climate Money PDF report by Joanne Nova

Validation and Forecasting Accuracy in Models of Climate Change (PDF)

The credulous attitude of academics, journalists, politicians, and media personalities toward the IPCC "consensus" reminds me of a raunchy scene from the movie "Idiocracy." The movie theatre is packed with patrons comically enchanted and amused by a single image on the giant screen: a rather ugly arse farting.

Welcome to the Idiocracy.