The trillion dollar guess and the zombie theory - Climate Change: The Facts - page 119

While internet trolls make out that the sceptics deny basic laws of physics, a sea
of climate scientists stand silently by keeping their error bars cloaked. Don't mention
the feedbacks. Don't mention cloud microphysics either, and definitely don't mention
humidity .
To be sure, greenhouse physics is fairly settled, but the climate system is a mess.
Temperatures are difficult to predict, and nearly everything else is harder. The uncertainty
monster practically eats rainfall projections for breakfast.
The climate billboards point at one small process, but the outcome depends on the
whole system. Imagine a log cabin in the Antarctic Circle. Closing the window doesn't
make you much warmer when the front and back door are open and channelling the
Katabatic wind. So is it with the Earth. Energy has other ways to escape.
It could be that we closed a window in a house with no walls. Time to panic?
#4 Fingerprint? What fingerprint?
Whenscepticsputthehot-spotpredictionsnexttotheradiosonderesultsandpubliclyasked
wherethesignatureeffectofgreenhousegaseswas,prettysoontheresponsewastoexplain
thatitwasn'tafingerprint,becauseintheoryanyformofwarmingshouldcauseahot-spot.
Given that it wasn't there, it rather suggested the theory might be wrong and water vapour
wasn't amplifying anything much, and the climate was not that sensitive.
ItalsobeggedthequestionofwhythelargestbodyinUS-climatescience usedtheword
'fingerprint'74timesintheir2006synthesisandassessmentreport. 46 Thisfingerprintthey
discussedpromisedtoshowunmistakablythatanthropogenicforcingsproducedadifferent
patterntonaturalforces.ThepredictionswerepublishedinfullgloriouscolorinChapter1.
Curiously,thecontradictoryresultswerealsopublishedinthesamereportbutfourchapters
and 116 pages apart. 47 In 2006 the models showed that only greenhouse gas changes could
cause a hot-spot. But there was no sign of the hot-spot. Not even remotely. Which raises
the question of whether the same scientists would have still called it a fingerprint, had it
turned up.
#5 Discover 'uncertainty'and rejoice!
A team of sceptical scientists published a paper showing that all four of the major global
temperature datasets disagreed with the crucial modelled trends in the tropical
troposphere. 48 The response of the modellers was to publish, with much hullabaloo,
a refutation with seventeen authors. This was advertised as 'resolving a long-standing
conundruminclimatescience',butSanteretal.didnothavenewdata(theydidn'tevenuse
data after 1999). 49 Their great discovery was essentially to find uncertainties. By showing