Damning critique of global warming "science"

Climate sense

In a barnstorming tour de force, Luboš Motl of The Reference Frame exposes the shoddy practices passed off as science by researchers brainwashed with and biased by the dogma of global warming alarmism.

Luboš discusses the recent claims that stratospheric aerosols have “reduced” the global warming we would otherwise have seen from our emissions of carbon dioxide, which, the dogma states, is the main cause of global warming. He compares a recent paper on the subject with one from 1965, and the results aren’t pretty:

The point I want to make is that these difficult and technical questions were studied rationally in the 1960s; but they are no longer studied rationally today. The contemporary authors such as Solomon et al. have neither the expertise nor the scientific integrity to figure out where the aerosols are coming from and what’s happening with them. Consequently, they can’t make any justifiable predictions about the future evolution of the concentrations of these aerosols, either.

Instead of analyzing hundreds of numbers describing various elements etc. in the aerosol samples – which is what the 1965 paper is made out of – Solomon et al. are only interested in one, scientifically unimportant number – the average forcing that aerosols may be adding or subtracting from the energy fluxes that determine the global mean temperature.

Needless to say, they usually want to show that this number is low because aerosols shouldn’t threaten the “climate monopoly” that has been assigned to the carbon dioxide by all these a**holes. On the other hand, when they’re running into real trouble – e.g. when they predict a huge warming for a decade but they get a cooling – they want the aerosols to “explain” the discrepancy. They beg for a while, hoping that the aerosols will be erased from the science again in the future.

But if one only works with one number, such as the change of forcing caused by the stratospheric aerosols, it’s easy to adjust the arguments so that you get the number you wanted to get in the first place. It’s not robust science. To do robust science, one has to work with lots of numbers – such as the concentrations of the elements in various samples etc. in the 1965 paper. A theory can’t be scientific if it just “explains” one number – such as the global warming rate – by one parameter (and usually many more). A scientific theory must explain and/or predict many more numbers than the number of parameters. Using words of Feynman,

When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

The alarmists are violating this rule all the time. The main problem is that they’re not really interested in explaining Nature and the immense wealth of interesting patterns and unexplained numbers. They’re interested in making one ideologically chosen quantity, the global warming rate, high and seemingly believable – so that it may be worshiped by the brainwashed society. But that’s not science.

Read it here.