Climate Science Fiction

I am not at all qualified to offer an opinion about the “science” of global warming. Much of it is based on computer models. Which may or may not be accurate. And much of it has been debunked by important scientists in the field, from emeritus MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen to Nobel prize winning physicist Iver Giaever. They are not alone, but they are among the few who have not been shut up and shut down.

Now, we add Princeton University physicist William Happer to the list of those who believe that computer modeling cannot predict the future. We are happy to recall, yet again, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement, to the effect that there is no such thing as a scientific fact about tomorrow. The assertion that the sun will rise tomorrow morning is a hypothesis, not a fact.

Anyway, The Daily Caller explains Happer’s views:

Princeton University physicist William Happer is not a fan of models used to predict future manmade global warming, and stars in a new educational video laying out the reasons he believes climate models are faulty.

“And I know they don’t work. They haven’t worked in the past. They don’t work now. And it’s hard to imagine when, if ever, they’ll work in the foreseeable future,” Happer said in a video produced by PragerU.

In the video, Happer argues that even supercomputers used to predict the weather and forecast future global warming aren’t strong enough to capture the complexity of Earth’s atmosphere, including cloud cover and natural ocean cycles.

“That’s why, over the last 30 years, one climate prediction after another — based on computer models — has been wrong,” Happer said in the video. “They’re wrong because even the most powerful computers can’t solve all the equations needed to accurately describe climate.”

The point appears to be salient. Considering the multitude of factors that produce climate change, it seems absurd to believe that we can factor in all of them. How much do we know about what is happening on the sun? Surely the sun exerts an influence. Just as surely it is not influenced by carbon emissions.

Apparently, the global warming alarmists rejigger their equations in order to produce the results that they want to produce. No one should call it science:

Satellite temperature readings of the bulk atmosphere also show a mismatch between model predictions and observations. Climate scientist John Christy’s research has shown that models show 2.5 times more warming than has been observed.

“Instead of admitting this, some climate scientists replace the highly complex equations that describe the real-world climate with highly simplified ones—their computer models,” Happer said.

“Discarding the unmanageable details, modelers ‘tune’ their simplified equations with lots of adjustable inputs—numbers that can be changed to produce whatever result the modelers want,” Happer said. “So, if they want to show that the earth’s temperature at the end of the century will be two degrees centigrade higher than it is now, they put in the numbers that produce that result … That’s not science. That’s science fiction.”