Global Warming?

This article in The Economist is worth reading.

Computer models are not magic. They are an attempt, just like all simulation techniques, to use mathematics to mimic reality, and predict outcomes.  In areas such as engineering, where the science of comparing those models with the actual physical things being engineered has been verified and refined for decades, those models are very, very accurate.  In areas where knowledge of the thing being studied is incomplete, the models are not very good.

In the case of "climate models", those models used by scientists warning of "global warming" have been poor predictors.  Translation: they are probably wrong. (background here and here)

We know that the climate on our planet has changed over time.  The last ice age, which was clearly considerably colder than today, only ended around 10,000 years ago.  You might recall from science class that most of north America and Europe were covered with an ice sheet thousands of feet thick.

We also know that Greenland was warmer than it is today some 800 years ago, enough that the Vikings settlers grew crops there  for decades.  We know about the Medeival Warm Period.

We know with certainty that our global climate has had these and other unexplained changes in both relatively recent and distant history.  Why on earth do we think that these changes will stop for us, just because we think they should?

In fact, climate change is normal.  It may be that human activity is affecting our climate.  Even if it is, and the "worst case" predictions of scientists come to pass, the changes will pale in comparison with known natural variations in the past.  For me, I attribute much of the climate alarmism to the oldest type of scientific corruption - self interest opposing new ideas that overturn established authority.

By making the climate a political issue, we have politicized climate science.  We don't have a search for truth.  We have have "skeptics" and "dogma".  We even have battles over whose "propaganda" gets into our schools.

Real science is never "settled".  Real science is always open to new ideas and has the humility to go back to basics when new data becomes available.  I cringe every time a supposed scientist condemns the skeptics as ignorant or heretics, as though the belief in climate change were a religion rather than the current evolving scientific understanding of a natural phenomenon.