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If the science is settled, why do we need all these people working at it?

By Don Aitkin - posted Tuesday, 9 February 2016


His main support is that that the two satellite datasets not only accord with each other but they also accord with the radiosonde balloon measurements which  are quite separate in character, organised by different people altogether, and have been going for much longer than the satellites. He shows a comparison of the measurements taken by the satellite and balloon measurements, the latter at 59 American and Australian balloon sites; the correlation is 0.98. Moreover, while these measurements are steady, and show little change over the past 37 years (the balloons show an increase of +0.079 degrees Celsius per decade, the satellites +0.091 degrees C) the average of the GCM model runs over  the same period show an increase of +0.214 degrees per decade — and the disparity between them widens each year. Something is wrong with the models.

Christy is  well-published climate scientist, and is not easy to disregard, though of course the climate establishment tends to ignore what he says. His long section on models and modelling is very good indeed and, following on from his comparison of models with observations, I finish with this wise summary of climate science today:

A fundamental aspect of the scientific method is that if we say we understand a system (such as the climate system) then we should be able to predict its behaviour. If we are unable to make accurate predictions, then at least some of the factors in the system are not well defined or even perhaps missing… merely replicating the behaviour of the system (i.e. reproducing ‘what’ the system does) does not guarantee that the fundamental physics are well known. In other words, it is possible to obtain the right answer for the wrong reasons, i.e. getting the ‘what’ of climate right but missing the ‘why’.

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There is such a lot of good stuff in this paper. I recommend it without reservation.

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This article was first published on Don Aitkin.



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About the Author

Don Aitkin has been an academic and vice-chancellor. His latest book, Hugh Flavus, Knight was published in 2020.

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