The alarmist science community lives on studies that claim to find that “It’s worse than we thought” and two beauties have just come out. It is all just computer games but the green press loves it.
The first study melts a new bunch of the Antarctic ice sheet. They do it the same way you would get a bigger boom in a video game, which is simply add some new equations to the computer model. These new “mechanisms,” as the equations are euphemistically called, do not change nature but they sure change the melting in the computer.
For example, we are now told that Louisiana will get over seven feet of sea level rise by the end of this century, a mere 82 years from now. Good by New Orleans, we will miss you. The world as a whole gets over a foot by 2050, just 32 years from now. Moreover, there is nothing we can do now to stop this global rise. Clearly it’s worse than we thought!
Plus they do not stop there. Instead they run the model out a full 300 years, because Antarctica is kind of slow to melt. I am not making this up. They are telling us what the Antarctic climate will be like 300 years from now. As science this is just junk, but it is great alarmism. It is no surprise that the National Science Foundation paid for this stuff.
Of course the hyper-alarmist Climate Central loves this study, in part because they did some of it, saying “Antarctic ice sheet models double the sea-level rise expected this century if global emissions of heat-trapping pollution remain high, according to a new study led by Dr. Robert Kopp of Rutgers University and co-authored by scientists at Climate Central.”
That CO2 does not trap heat and is not pollution is irrelevant to these folks. Anytime someone refers to CO2 emissions as “pollution,” you know they are an alarmist. Atmospheric CO2 is actually the global food supply. That adding a few equations to a model doubles the predicted sea level rise tells us a lot about models, but nothing about Antarctica or sea level.
The second study is just about models, but it too makes big alarmist claims. Here is how it works. To begin with the UN IPCC draws on about 100 government run climate models around the world. No two models agree so they average them all together to get their alarmist predictions. Some people think that these averages are not hot enough so they are looking for ways to juice it up.
The new study does just that. It starts by finding what it calls the best models, which simply means those that come closest to matching the historical records of several climate parameters. It then assumes, on no real basis, that these models are the best when it comes to predicting global temperatures 100 years from now.
It turns out that these “best” models collectively make hotter predictions than the average of all the models, so there you are. It’s worse than we thought (again).
That none of the models are any good is irrelevant to these folks. After all, alarmism is based entirely on computer models, so what the models say, goes. This study is out of Stanford, which may well be the science capital of the alarmist world.
Ironically a skeptical scientist has used the same method, but with more precision, and got the opposite result. It just depends on how big the “best” pile is. His report is presented here, on Judith Curry’s great Climate Etc. blog, along with considerable discussion. This is the climate change debate in action.
As these two studies suggest, alarmist science is models all the way down. I have a little study showing that there is more computer modeling in climate science than in all of the rest of science put together. There is very little actual science here, just endless computer games. And it is always worse than we thought.
What were the temperatures when the Vikings grew gapes in Greenland?
The climate models are only as good as the algorithm programmed into them. The AGW believers think that those who built the algorithms understand completely all the variables and how they interact. Hogwash. If the models are near actuality, it is only by a lucky guess, nothing more, nothing less.
Dr. Wojick, CO2 does not trap heat. It absorbs infrared and re-emits it almost instantaneously. The re-emitted energy can go in any direction, up, down, sideways. If it strikes another CO2 molecule, the process repeats. Infrared light should travel through the atmosphere at close to the, um, speed of light. From surface to space it should take less than a thousandth of a second. But because of all the bouncing around, it takes a few minutes. Temperature is defined as the amount of heat in a system. The longer the residence time of heat in the atmosphere, the hotter it gets. This is pretty basic science. You can replicate it for yourself quite easily at home. Buy a block of dry ice and rent a digital thermocouple for a day. Engineers use digital thermocouples to identify bearings that are running hot. By measuring the temperature of a heat source, like an incandescent light globe, with and without CO2 intervening, you will see that yeah, CO2 is semi-opaque to infrared.
Yes, you can believe in the greenhouse effect and still be a climate skeptic. It’s good to know, however, that your skepticism is grounded on solid science.
Garbage in Garbage out, computers are programmed and they spit out what they are told to spit out. Just more pretend BS.