The trillion dollar guess and the zombie theory - Climate Change: The Facts - page 114

inoceanmud, 12 androcks,stalagmites,coralsandclamshellswereusedtoestimatethelast
2,000yearsoftemperature. 13 Themessagewasclear:therewereglobalupsanddownsthat
have nothing to do with CO 2 . Some mystery factor is moving temperatures on Earth and
the models don't know what it is, and it's more important than CO 2 . Perhaps that mystery
factor is working now, perhaps it isn't. The models can't tell us.
In response, the scientific-financial-green complex swung into action. Postmodern
Dadaist scientific papers appeared. Everyone from UN committees to investment bankers
churned out glossy reports (which everyone cited but almost no one actually read). Vice
Presidents did full-fear documentaries and black belt graphs evolved to protect the dead.
Fans cheered, and blind journalists applauded. Let no man ask a difficult question! It's
really been a spectacular public relations effort.
Can I sell you a used theory?
There's a shell game going on with evidence. Almost all of the pin-ups of climate change
are irrelevant because there's no cause and effect link. It's true the world is warming,
sea levels are rising, glaciers are melting, and small fish are getting reckless. 14 But the
effects of all the causes of warming are largely the same. Whether it is the sun, cosmic
rays or a Klingon plot, seas would rise, glaciers would melt, and heatwaves roll on.
The real problem, then—the $2 trillion question—is how to tell 'wot did it' and by how
much . It's a multivariable nightmare. All factors are changing simultaneously, and there
are no controls, and no reruns. Strip back the advertised 'signs of warming', and the
sacred-vault-of-95-percent-certainty contains almost nothing pointing the finger at CO 2 .
The climate simulations are 'it'.
All the talk of 'it' being 'simple physics' is, and always was, a complete red flag.
Two-thirds of the forecast of doom comes from complex, debatable feedbacks, not the
simple physics of CO 2 .
The models are consistent. They're bad at everything.
With a bad assumption at the core, it's no wonder the models don't work. 98 per cent of
the models predicted that there were no circumstances where global surface temperatures
would pause for as long as fifteen years. 15 The pause has now been somewhere around
seventeen years long, or twenty depending on who is counting. 16 As The HockeySchtick
blog says, 'If you can't explain the “pause”, you can't explain the cause'. 17
Thus and verily the excuses for the pause have flowed: humans were once forecast
to slow the winds, 18 but then faster winds arrived instead, and so now, perchance, they