Global Warming: Observations vs. Climate Models
By Paul Homewood
Roy Spencer has written a long, detailed critique of climate models:
https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/global-warming-observations-vs-climate-models
The full report is worth reading, but his key graph and conclusions are below:

Conclusion
Climate models produce too much warming when compared to observations over the past fifty years or so, which is the period of most rapid warming and increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The discrepancy ranges from over 40 percent for global surface air temperature, about 50 percent for global lower atmospheric temperatures, and even a factor of two to three for the United States in the summertime. This discrepancy is never mentioned when those same models are used as the basis for policy decisions.
Also not mentioned when discussing climate models is their reliance on the assumption that there are no natural sources of long-term climate change. The models must be “tuned” to produce no climate change, and then a human influence is added in the form of a very small, roughly 1 percent change in the global energy balance. While the resulting model warming is claimed to prove that humans are responsible, clearly this is circular reasoning. It does not necessarily mean that the claim is wrong—only that it is based on faith in assumptions about the natural climate system that cannot be shown to be true from observations.
Finally, possible chaotic internal variations will always lead to uncertainty in both global warming projections and explanation of past changes. Given these uncertainties, policymakers should proceed cautiously and not allow themselves to be influenced by exaggerated claims based on demonstrably faulty climate models.
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Not only is the science not settled (is it ever), it turns out much scientific data that should have been gathered has been ignored. Slowly but surely the case for the Net Zero alarmist agenda is unraveling
Yet, TPTB are knitting furiously to prevent it all unravelling. When an activist’s fortune depends on lies and alarums which is it likely to give up?
This morning, R4 had a report that Spanish olive oil had gone up in price 167% over the last two years. The BBC reporter claimed, in what must gave need a 40-word announcement, that it was because of CC – THREE times – but failed to get the Spanish businessman to say it was anything but weather (a five-year drought).
A friend of mine has a small olive grove in Greece. Last year was a record year for him with a very high quality to boot. This year he said it was hardly worth collecting. This variation is quite normal although this year was disappointing. I dare say the whole of the Med producing areas would suffer the same fate.
Christopher Booker’s book: ‘The real Global Warming Disaster (2009′) makes relevant observations between pages 335- 339. However, even if I summarised these observations, it would be longer than the following description of the book’s contents.
This original book considers one of the most extraordinary scientific and political stories of our time: how in the 1980s a handful of scientists came to believe that mankind faced catastrophe from runaway global warming, and how today this has persuaded politicians to land us with what promises to be the biggest bill in history. Christopher Booker interweaves the science of global warming with that of its growing political consequences, showing how just when the politicians are threatening to change our Western way of life beyond recognition, the scientific evidence behind the global warming theory is being challenged like never before. The book exposes the myth that the global warming theory is supported by a consensus of the world s top climate scientists’. It shows how the UN s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is run by a small group of global warming zealots, who have repeatedly rigged evidence to support their theory. But the politicians, pushed by the media, have so fallen for its propaganda that, short of dramatic change, our Western world now faces an unprecedented disaster.
The book contains observations covering over forty years, during which his opinions appeared in the Sunday editions of the Daily Telegraph.
The whole GLOBAL WARMING fraud has been made up by the UN to try to destroy Western economies . https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/01/22/the-u-n-s-global-warming-war-on-capitalism-an-important-history-lesson-2/
But hopefully more people are starting to realise where the Marxist/ Socialist lies are taking us , with anti Globalist demos in France , Germany and other EU states . We now need more people in this country to understand and do something about it .
Reposted for the benefit of those unfamiliar with it:
“At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said. Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”</b?</i?
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism/
More than ever, we have to hope that President Trump can overcome any DemoTwat electoral fraud in November and from January start dumping all the climate change crap in the US and inspire others to do the same.
But sadly Trump seems intent on destroying the US economy with absurd trade policies and other interventions.
Why base policy decisions on models known to be perpetually inaccurate in one direction only i.e. too much warming, when actual data is readily available to use?
It seems that “Old Sol” is persistently refusing to follow the diktats of the climate models. After an enthusiastic arousal into Cycle 25, he seems to be losing some of that initial enthusiasm and is nodding off slowly again.
One of the principle causes of the “J-Hook” temperature surge which gave rise to the “Global Warming” theory, is reckoned to be the shift from manual readings, recorded in whole degrees Fahrenheit, to remote automated readings recorded in degrees Centigrade to a couple of decimal places. As the change-over took place, between around 1980 – 2000, it gave the impression of a slow rise in temperatures, in fact it was more due to the translation/transcription error slowly being introduced. Hence the apparent flattening post 2000.
The best signal of temperature changes is Dr.Richard Lindzen’s temperature anomalies graph for the period 1900 to 2020.
Dr. Roy Spencer’s conclusions do not come as a surprise. It is inevitable that a discrepancy should develop between observed climate data and models. This is because modelling is based on the false assumption that a true ‘steady state’ is possible. No true stable state is possible on the basis of a simple linear relationship between variables. Only non-linear systems can have a defined steady state to which they can return, in a dynamic sense.
This linear approach I have called, ‘The tyranny of the equals sign.’ Analysts make assumptions based on assumed equalities between variables and then concatenate these assumed equalities to make a model. That is the basis of the linear algebra developed on the Continent at the end of the 18th century.
This approach can never achieve full physical rigour and as the history of science teaches us, such solutions tend to be ‘weighed in the balance and found wanting.’
A full non-linear approach, as is recognised by the IPCC, is not possible with present computational methods and power. As a doyen of non-linear theory, Y.H. Ku, stated many years ago. “Nature is non-linear, even the pendulum of Galileo is controlled by a second order, non-linear differential equation.” Did it all start to go wrong that long ago?
It went wrong when people decided that models were reality rather than models of reality. Useful but not fact. We use models that have no skill all the time now - OBR’s forecasts or the BoE’s say – as well as the very silly GCMs and I cannot understand why. Hayek warned of the rise of “Scientism” in Economics in his Nobel speech – the illusion of science by using numbers and formulae. As with pretty much everything, he was right.
A further problem is that that ‘observation graph’ is now largely ‘modelled and adjusted’. NOAA, NASA, HadCru, and Berkeley, amongst others, all model and adjust their ‘observations’ so they are not actual thermometer readings at all. The real measured thermometer temperature line is much flater than the adjusted (not thermometer) observations line in that graph.
ITRW – “we need more people——- to do something about it”. For years I’ve queried others’ belief in AGW etc but I’ve often found it similar to discussing religion – people would rather talk about something else. It’s almost frightening how many folk sort of believe that carbon is evil etc etc but their cynicism in our glorious leaders is gradually starting to show.
I’ve met one or two middle class educated people recently who when asked “What do you think causes climate change?” don’t have a ready answer. Worrying, Global Warming has been submerged
What I find surprising is that many people will readily say that the models used for government borrowing, inflation, Covid etc were useless, but refuse to even contemplate that the models used for climate change might be equally as useless. There is a complete lack of understanding that the problems of the models they know fail are exactly applicable to climate models.
“…we’ll discuss model failings in a lot more detail. Second, absolute temperatures are important for another reason. Natural and enhanced greenhouse effects depend on the infrared radiation emitted from Earth’s surface, and the amount of infrared radiation emitted to space by our planet is a function of its absolute surface temperature, not anomalies…”
That’s profound.
Some interesting talkin points here and some interesting graphs regarding maximum and minimum data bases.
The departure from the supposed trend line of actual warming is often much greater than the slope of the trend. That pretty much guarantees there is a great deal of natural variation possible.