More problems with climate predictions
The researchers compared predictions of 22 widely used climate “models” — elaborate schematics that try to forecast how the global weather system will behave — with actual readings gathered by surface stations, weather balloons and orbiting satellites over the past three decades.
The study, published online this week in the International Journal of Climatology, found that while most of the models predicted that the middle and upper parts of the troposphere —1 to 6 miles above the Earth’s surface — would have warmed drastically over the past 30 years, actual observations showed only a little warming, especially over tropical regions.
“Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? It seems that the answer is no,” said lead study author David H. Douglass, a physicist specializing in climate at the University of Rochester.
Douglass and his co-authors S. Fred Singer, a physicist at the University of Virginia, and John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, are noted global-warming skeptics.
However, Christy was a major contributor to the 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and is one of the world’s premier authorities on collection and analysis of satellite-derived temperature data, having been commended by both NASA and the American Meteorological Society for his efforts.
“We do not see accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere,” said Christy. “Instead, the lower and middle atmosphere are warming the same or less than the surface.”
The difference between the climate models and the satellite data has been known for several years.
Now, I would still love to see us get off fossil fuels, since doing so would de-fund large parts of the world that are most hostile to us (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, etc.), but that doesn’t make me less opposed to the hysteria about global warming. If the hysteria would take more practical turns, such as developing nuclear energy or using public schools to teach kids to turn out lights when they leave the room, I might be more interested in the whole thing. As it is, the misanthropy, the anti-Americanism, and the rank profiteering that characterizes climate change activism to me is a complete turn off, it’s not being used intelligently to deal with real problems and force real solutions, and I therefore resist it steadfastly.
