A major survey into the accuracy of climate models has found that almost all the past temperature forecasts between 1980-2021 were excessive compared with accurate satellite measurements. The findings were recently published by Professor Nicola Scafetta, a physicist from the University of Naples. He attributes the inaccuracies to a limited understanding of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS), the number of degrees centigrade the Earth’s temperature will rise with a doubling of carbon dioxide.
Scientists have spent decades trying to find an accurate ECS number, to no avail. Current estimates range from 0.5°C to around 6-7°C. Without knowing this vital figure, the so-called ‘settled’ science narrative around human-caused climate change remains a largely political invention, not a credible scientific proposition. Professor Scafetta has conducted extensive work into climate models and is a long-time critic of their results and forecasts. In a previous work, he said many of the climate models should be “dismissed and not used by policymakers”. Along with around 250 professors, he is a signatory to the World Climate Declaration which states there is no climate emergency and also notes climate models are “not remotely plausible as global tools”.
Scafetta’s latest work grouped 38 major climate models into low, medium and high ECS values, ranging between 1.8°C and 5.7°C. He found that models in the medium and high category “ran hot” in over 95% and 97% of cases respectively. The lower models were said to have done better when compared to global warming calculated for the period by the major surface datasets of 0.52-0.58°C. But the UAH satellite data showed warming up to 30% less during this period, suggesting even the low warming models produced “excessive warming” from 1980-2021.
According to Scafetta, these results are showed that the ECS figure could be as low as 1.2-2°C. Particular concern is expressed about surface temperature records that “appear to be severely affected by non-climatic warming biases”. Scafetta concludes that surface-based temperature records are likely to be affected by warming biases, such as the urban heat island effect due to expanding urban development, and subject to natural oscillations that are not reproduced by climate models. He concludes: “The global warming expected for the next few decades may be even more moderate than predicted by the low ECS-GCMs [Global Circulation Models], and could easily fall within a safe temperature range where climate adaptation policies will suffice.”
Scafetta’s work is vital in providing a realistic insight into the dominant role played by climate models in promoting the command-and-control Net Zero political agenda. Many of the constantly promoted climate thermogeddon scares use forecasts based on high ECS values. The higher values are behind every statement from bureaucrats, politicians, green activists and journalists that we are heading for a 2-3°C increase in global temperature in the near future. In the absence of any definitive ECS figure, these predictions are guesses.
In fact, once the ECS figure falls to around 1°C, it is moving into margin of error territory. However, many scientists have more or less given up trying to calculate ECS, since measuring the non-linear atmosphere is proving as difficult as it ever was. The atmosphere is a chaotic system with many powerful influences reacting unpredictably with each other. The huge heat transfers that obviously have a considerable part to play in climate are far from completely understood. Recent suggestions that modellers can ‘attribute’ single event weather events to human-caused climate change are unprovable, and little more than figments of over-active, agenda-driven imaginations. Furthermore, it is possible that carbon dioxide becomes ‘saturated’ beyond certain levels and its effect as a warming gas rapidly declines.
What we do know is that over the last 20 years, global warming has started to run out of steam. The latest September UAH satellite data, considered in some scientific circles as the most accurate measurement we have, show the current standstill has been extended to eight years. But whereas satellite data are common and invaluable in many geographical fields, these temperature results are less welcome. It is not hard to see why. Scafetta calculates that the results since the start of recordings around 1980 are 30% below surface temperature datasets. As it happens, the two adjustments since 2013 by the U.K.’s Met Office to its HadCRUT global surface temperature record have increased recent warming by a similar amount. Similar upward adjustments are to be found in the other major global datasets. A previous temperature pause from about 1998-2010 is no longer visible in these records.
Claims of ‘record’ heat years and ever higher temperatures are taken exclusively from the surface records. The satellite record is largely ignored. There are even attempts to cancel the inconvenient figures, with Google AdSense recently ‘demonetising’ the site of Dr. Roy Spencer, the Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, one of the main compilers of the UAH satellite record. The record, of course, that is a vital part of Professor Scafetta’s work investigating the accuracy of climate models.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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More powerful voices for sanity, but ‘Nett Zero’ is a runaway steamroller. It has its own momentum and the lies are stronger than the truth. The only way to stop it is to convince one person at a time. The more people who realise the narrative and the facts don’t join up, will eventually topple this. How much damage will have been done to our society and economies by then though.?
While I completely agree “the more people who realise the narrative and the facts don’t join up” and I do occasionally find the opportunity to speak with people who “believe” the narrative, I find when I point out the disconnect with the facts/data/reality most people get very angry. Carrying the conversation further, when I try to get a discussion about comparing the risk of what the computer says vs. the risk of what we seem to be doing to mitigate what the computers say about “climate change”, the concept of comparing risk mitigation alternatives goes way over their heads (even though I never use those words).
I fear that depending on convincing one person at a time is not quick enough. I of course am probably wrong.
The issues are unnecessarily, probably deliberately so, conflated. Relies on “I believe” and “Don’t you believe?”.
Don’t family ties make it worse as well….whether it’s Covid or Climate?…
I never agree with my niece on these two things, she’s a total believer in both, and as much as I love her, she is a fine example of a ‘sheeple’……
I do say what I think, but quietly, and then leave it alone, because I love my sister (her mum) and couldn’t bear a fall-out.
I imagine this scenario is played out all over the country….
“Family ties” can be a curse when there is a difference between deeply held opinions. It becomes problematic whether or not a family member suffers from mental illness or simply has an eccentric worldview: indeed the difference can sometimes be unascertainable and a matter of convention, religion, or climatism. In these situations I am reminded of Dinsdale Piranha, who, though a really nice guy (deep down) was episodically convinced he was being stalked by a ten-foot long hedgehog called Spiny Norman. Now imagine the problem facing Dinsdale’s wife. So long as Dinsdale’s position was that he “knows”[1,2] that the hedgehog was imaginary and that he was seeking help, he was merely neurotic, and she could probably cope with Dinsdale, and would be quietly be confident that there is no hedgehog. However, if Dinsdale’s position is that he “knows” that the hedgehog is real, he is psychotic and will believe that he is correct and his wife is either mistaken, stupid or psychotic. His wife now has a dilemma. If she openly denies his reality she will provoke a divorce. If she openly agrees with his reality while privately rejecting it she is colluding in his delusion and will make it worse but will remain sane herself, though at risk of cognitive dissonance. If she herself comes to sincerely believe in the reality of the hedgehog she preserves the relationship but at the expense of becoming brainwashed and will wind up in a happy folie à deux in which both are psychotic and will never recover without external assistance[2]. This process can be extended to groupthink, mass formation and psychotic delirium[3], and applies as much to climate and corona as it does to giant hedgehogs.
There is no happy and healthy relationship between a non-psychotic person and a psychotic person. “It is difficult to get a person to believe something if their marriage depends on not believing it”, as Upton Sinclair nearly said.
[1] Eric Berne: Games People Play
[2] Thomas Anthony Harris: I’m OK – You’re OK
[3] Michael Cook: French philosopher decries corona ‘madness’
Jonathan Swift: you can’t reason someone out of something they haven’t reasoned themselves into.
Same problem with CoVidians.
Covid madness also felt like an unstoppable runaway train at one point.
I trust chipping away at the Net Zero stupidity will work. We have the fact that it is insane and will cause a lot of damage on our side. Like with Covid.
I agree Stewart..those boosters are not flying off the shelf are they? We just have to keep chipping away, as you say…
I hear you. I was at a corporate Town Hall this week and they were pushing it ridiculously hard. There were so many blatently absurd statistics quoted that I had to leave the room and pretend I needed the loo otherwise I think I might have exploded. And everyone seemed to lap it up. God help us.
An example of the problems faced by the “enlightened”.
Good friends of ours, decent people, have purchased an EV.
Do we point out the child labour, Uyghur slave labour, “climate change” garbage to them and destroy the friendship, or allow them to feel they are “saving the planet” and keep on happy terms.
I’m yet to figure that one out.
The steam roller is about to run out of road particularly when the lights go out.
Maybe. I think there is a good chance that when the lights go off the mainstream media, especially BBC, will focus on “victims and their hardships”, recollections of the 1970’s from “old” people who now sort of fondly remember when this happened before, etc. If any connection to “cause” they’ll mention without elaboration “climate change” a few times without touching the true cause(s) of failure to delivery power. They will jump to “solutions” which means more “renewables” and ask why is the government holding back fixing this, looking for those to blame, etc.?
It would be a surprise if climate model forecasts were any better than weather forecasts when it come to accuracy versus time. https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/forecast-accuracy-time.html might be of interest, but it’s well known that forecasts are guess work after a week or so.
Yes, easily debunked by the fact that if mathematical models had ANY predictive powers then someone would have applied them to the stock market and become the richest man (or woman) on planet earth.
That’s not occurred yet for a very good reason, they don’t work.
It might be rather unkind, but I really hope we have a particularly nasty winter with plenty of power cuts, because I think that would have some good outcomes, even if it seems like hell at the time. Three that come to mind are;
It will make people question the ideas of net zero and AGW. Especially if MSM starts printing stories of people freezing to death.
It gives people a new focus to take their minds off covid.
It will show the severe limitations of EV’s when people can’t charge them up.
We need people to wake up and get angry, very angry. Mind you, we could all be nuked or broadsided by a massive solar storm as well. I think the world will be a very different place by next spring, assuming we are all still here.
The great majority of us will survive even a harsh winter. The most damaging effects are on the poor in developing countries who are denied affordable energy. Botswana is selling coal to Europe at the moment ironically.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europe-seeks-million-tonnes-per-year-botswana-coal-says-president-2022-05-10/
Monckton has published a paper (with distinguished colleagues) pointing out that the ECS is miscalculated because the feedback is only applied to the difference between a theoretical earth without an atmosphere and current measurements. His team’s contention (which seems correct) is that the feedback calculation should be based on the whole temperature rise from absolute zero. His flat line calculation (currently no warming for eight years by least squares linear regression) has some value but is partly to have a bit of fun at the expense of the eco-loons.
https://phys.org/news/2015-01-peer-reviewed-pocket-calculator-climate-exposes-errors.html
On Earth Day 2017 weekend seven shots were fired at the NSSTC building at UAH. The eco-loons don’t plan to give up their scam without a fight.
‘A total of seven shots were fired into our National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) building here at UAH over the weekend.
All bullets hit the 4th floor, which is where John Christy’s office is (my office is in another part of the building).’
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/04/shots-fired-into-the-christyspencer-building-at-uah/
Prof John Christie put together a chart of the results of running all the major climate model temperature ‘predictions’ starting from the same base at ~1970. All overstated the subsequent temperature record except for the one from Russia, which was pretty well spot on. The Russian computer model is based on zero influence (ECS=0) of CO2.
Anyone following this subject and getting their info from sources other than MSM and Government and Eco-Propaganda, as I have for the last 25 years, will recognise this as old ‘Fake News’.
All the climate models have consistently over-estimated warming compared to reality, the Urban Heat Island effect and the artificial warming bias in the surface record was researched and reported (published) years ago by Anthony Watts. The purported rate of global warming flat-lined after 1996, then about 15 years ago went into slight decline prompting ‘global warming’ (measurable) being abandoned as the war cry to be replaced by climate change (not measurable).
Years ago the Climate Sensitivity was put at around 1C per doubling of CO2, ignoring all other compensating factors which when taken into account meant the warming effect of C02 was approaching zero.
The parallels of the CoVid ‘Science’ and Climate ‘Science’ are irresistible, even now to the point that at last, the ‘not consensus’ are beginning to speak out and report the facts, the uncertainties and irrefutable data from observation which underline the non-evidence based claims.
May we expect grudgingly the MSM and other ‘experts’ to start claiming they knew all along it was a fake and they really never said Mankind was causing global warming/climate change just as so many are lining up to deny they ever said vaccinations were 100% effective, or that lockdowns and masks worked?
Dare we hope we are in the final days of the climate scam and Net Zero?
Dare we hope we are in the final days of the climate scam and Net Zero?
I fear we are in the mere beginning of it. Famine in the sub-Sahara, is coming now, and will produce a great northern march. If we dislike forcible illegal immigration we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Climate change, plus historic colonialism, will be blamed for the desperate emigration. The censorship and suppression of debate we have seen so far are a mere foretaste.
Net Zero is like a false god. Politicians say they believe in it despite all scientific evidence showing the Climate Change agenda is a pack of lies.
Grand ‘Renewables’ Delusion: Hard Reality Keeps Smashing Wind & Solar ‘Transition’ Myth
https://stopthesethings.com/2022/10/08/grand-renewables-delusion-hard-reality-keeps-smashing-wind-solar-transition-myth/
by stopthesethings
Embrace humanity, Reject the cold anti-human agenda.
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The Climate Change scam is the UN’s Agenda 2030 in action. The intention is to transfer wealth from the developed, western first world to the undeveloped third world….. to pay for the “original sin” of colonialism.
The likes of China and India, who are ignoring the instruction to cut CO2 and are growing their fossil fuel energy production, are simply exploiting the opportunity it gives them.
The UN is controlling the Agenda. There is no evidence to support it, but (as we have learned from Covid) if any Opposition is silenced and the sheeple are bombarded with fear-based propaganda, they will act as the Praetorian Guard.