Climatology Fail

The American Thinker ^ | February 23, 2014

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Climatology has been falling on its face lately. In addition to the failure of global warming predictions to come true in the last 16 years of "pause," this year's severe winter for most of the country came as a surprise to the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That august taxpayer-funded climatology center "predicted that temperatures would be above normal from November through January across much of the Lower 48 states," according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek.....

[SNIP]

.......The predictive models in use seem to have some major flaws. Climatology is a relatively young discipline, yet has received major funding for its research based on the apocalyptic claims made about global warming. The field is almost entirely based on complex mathematical models. Models are fine, but they need to rigorously be refined, and for that to be effective, assumptions must be challenged. With a phenomenon as complex as climate, the assumptions must be incredibly numerous, so correcting and refining may take a long, long time.

This process is cut short when political and bureaucratic pressure exists to find a catastrophe that strengthens the power of regulators in the name of saving the planet.

The analogy may be very loose, but phrenology was once regarded as a science. It posited a relationship based on a faulty model, between skull configuration and mental function.

Today, phrenology is an embarrassment in the history of science. I am not suggesting that the entire field of climatology is as mistaken as phrenology was, but rather that its foundations are also shaky, since the underlying relationships hypothesized (in AGW at least) are speculative, and may lack or insufficiently weight many important processes.

Climatology has a long way to go before it merits the clout to reshape our energy production and use.

[The_Reader_David]

A correction to the author’s assertion: climatology as practiced in the Anglosphere has fallen on its face. What I like to call the Russo-Danish school of climatology, which studies the sun, rather than general circulation models of the earth’s atmosphere, has been having its predictions upheld lately.

Quite frankly mankind had better hope there really is something to anthropogenic global warming, because if there isn’t, it looks like we’re headed for at best another Little Ice Age, and at worse an actual Ice Age. Humanity does better during warm periods (what used to be called “climate optima” before the statists decided scaring us with “runaway” global warming would be a good way to increase the reach of the state).

[Aevery_Freeman]

Amen!

As a programmer one must constantly determine to self-satisfaction that the code just written is functioning correctly.

Lacking external benchmarks this presents the opportunity to self-delude one of their own inherent brilliance.

Add to that the lure of continued funding and, voila, Anthropogenic Global Warming models that support the delusion of AGW.

[GOPJ]

Climatology is a relatively young discipline, yet has received major funding for its research based on the apocalyptic claims made about global warming.

Could that have something to do with the power and cash kicked back to corrupt democrat politicians?

[Paladin2]

There IS NO Climate Science.

Only various scientists trying to develop one.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Cincinatus’ Wife.