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hatrack

(59,442 posts)
Tue Mar 1, 2016, 08:14 PM Mar 2016

Lord Lawson's Pet Foundation Releases Climate Report, Provoking Scientific Incredulity, Laughter

EDIT

And so we have the latest such unphysical climate prediction, made in a report by Loughborough University statistics professor Terence Mills, on behalf of the anti-climate policy advocacy group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The report essentially fits a statistical model to past global and local surface temperature changes, and then uses that statistical model to forecast future temperature changes. It’s an approach that’s been used to predict financial market changes, for example.

The obvious flaw in this application is that the Earth’s climate is a physical system, and the statistical model includes no physics whatsoever. You simply cannot accurately predict how a physical system will change if you ignore physics, like the increasing greenhouse effect. As DeSmogUK put it, the GWPF report predicts no global warming by ignoring the main cause of global warming. And as climate scientist James Annan wrote,

The basic premise is that if you fit a nonsense model with no trend or drift, you generate a forecast with no trend or drift (though with huge uncertainty intervals, necessary to allow for the historical warming we’ve already seen). Amusingly, even with those huge uncertainty intervals, the temperature is already outside them

EDIT

James Annan used the opportunity to propose a modest wager based Professor Mills’ forecast. As Annan describes it,

There followed a fruitless exchange in which [Mills] declined to comment on whether he thought the forecast was credible and refused to even discuss any possible bet. I’m still baffled as to what might motivate a statistics professor to put their name to such obvious drivel, it’s hardly something that will enhance his reputation in the academic community, or that he can feel proud to have written.

As Mann et al. (2016) most recently showed, physics-based climate models are doing a very good job at predicting global warming and climate change. As expected based on our understanding of the greenhouse effect, if we keep pumping vast amounts of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, the planet will continue to warm dangerously rapidly. The reason mainstream climate scientists have accurately predicted global warming, while contrarian predictions have failed, is that the former are based on physics while the latter are based on wishful thinking. Regardless of how many misleading charts and unphysical models climate contrarians cook up, and how many stories conservative media outlets run about this nonsense non-science, it’s not going to change the physical reality of global warming.

EDIT/END

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/feb/29/think-tank-throws-out-centuries-of-physics-climate-scientists-laugh-conservative-media-fawns

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