CAGW failed ‘Predictions’

by R. Istvan, Dec 4, 2020 in WUWT


My last ruminating climate guest post compared ‘big’ climate science issues to ‘weeds’. This is a follow on big picture post, from a different perspective, albeit partly overlapping the first. (First perspective was basic science claims, this is resulting predictions.) I am tired of whack-a-mole minutia, and think that detailed rebuttals to garbage climate alarm papers no longer matter in our politicized ‘GND’ environment.

This post incorporates by reference (not by links [lazy me], just by key WUWT search words or other occasional generic mentions) many previous WUWT guest posts plus other writings that relative newbies can review for your selves. All the previous referenced posts and other writings have many linked reference footnotes for your personal follow up. Trolls, beware.

Since the Charney and Hanson 1988 climate alarm proceedings, there have been many dire climate prognostications. NONE have come true.  Lets review some of the most salient. (We skip trivial stuff like Dr. Viner’s since disappeared 1990 prediction that ‘UK children will not know snow’—since they soon did.)

  1. Temperatures have recently suddenly risen. This was the essence of MBH’s 1999 hockey stick, and later 2013’s Marcott’s equivalent. Both ‘observations’ have been fully discredited. (I personally proved Marcott’s academic misconduct in essay ‘High Stick Foul’ in ebook Blowing Smoke in late 2014.)  True, temperatures have risen since the last Thames Ice Fair in 1814, as the world warmed out of the Little Ice Age (LIA). Climate changes… How much, we dunno for three reasons:
    • In the US, early data is sparse, and later data is contaminated by multiple surface station siting issues. The latter issue proven here at WUWT by 2009.
    • Outside the US and Europe, land temp data is worse than just sparse, it often does not exist at all, or only recently.
    • Over oceans comprising 71% of the Earth surface, data is worse than just sparse. It is mostly non-existent (SH). Where it does exist (until ARGO) it is contaminated by trade routes and ladings.
  2. Temperatures will increase unsustainably. This is based on the IPCC nominal ECS of about 3, recently goosed up by forthcoming CMIP6. Except, temps have NOT. As just one example of predictive model falsification, the CMIP4/5 models predicted tropical troposphere hotspot simply does NOT exist. There are several reasons why these models have abjectly failed, explained in several previous posts.
  3. Sea level rise accelerates. Except it hasn’t. And the most accurate SLR dGPS corrected tide gauges not only show no acceleration, they show it with ~closure (thermosteric rise plus ice sheet melt). And, the present rise rate is no different from the peak of the previous interglacial, the Eemian. (Details are in previous WUWT posts and in essay PseudoPrecision in eBook Blowing Smoke)
  4. Polar bears will go extinct from lack of summer sea ice. Except as Dr. Crockford has amply explained, this is an alarmist misconception at two levels. First, polar bears do not depend on summer sea ice. They depend on spring ice during the seal welping season, their main feeding cycle. No one suggests that is diminishing. Second, Arctic sea ice is cyclical, and the notion that it is spiraling ever down (Wadham’s alarm) is just factually wrong. (Essay Northwest Passage in ebook Blowing Smoke covers the Arctic Ice cycle issue in historical detail.)
  5. Extreme weather increases. Except per IPCC SRES (2012) it has NOT, anywhere, in any form. (Climate is rigorously defined as the envelope of weather [like temp, rainfall] over at least 30 years.) All the annual recent climate ‘extremes’ in the press are just weather (like this year’s accurately predicted overactive Atlantic hurricane season). As an example, landfalling US hurricane ACE over 30 years has NOT increased as a recent paper claimed—by falsely including hurricanes that touched land but then went back out to sea and re-intensified.

There are also a lot of unworkable ‘Green New Deal solutions’ to this non-problem. The most prominent are ‘renewable electric generation’ and EV’s.