Actual Scientist Destroys Libs Argument about Climate Change Models
Melting ice caps. Polar bears dying. The disappearing snow. Haven’t you seen enough to convince you of how serious global warming is (or “climate change”, depending on how cold the winter ends up being)? No? You perfidious climate denier, you.
As we’ve already been told, the science is “settled” on global warming, as proved by the fact that we’re told there’s a consensus on these things. Once a consensus is declared, only heretics will go against it — heretics who have no idea what science really is and should leave the profession in shame.
Yet, an odd thing has happened in recent years. It seems that the most vocal proponents of the global warming status quo have been individuals who are far from actual scientists. Bill Nye, “The Science Guy,” is one key example, although his febrile, bowtie-bedecked ramblings have proved that being a “Science Guy” is significantly different from being a scientist, the same way that being interested in “science!” is a lot different than being well-versed in science.
William Happer is decidedly less “science!” and more actual science, and he’s got a few more credentials than Mr. Nye and his libidinous ice cream.
A Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, Happer also taught at Columbia and has peer-reviewed countless articles as well as co-authored several books — including one on the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“In short, I know a lot about the earth’s atmosphere and climate,” Happer said in a video for Prager University.
“I also know a lot about long-term predictive climate models,” he continued. “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.”
“There’s a common-sense reason for this. Aside from the human brain, the climate is the most complex thing on the planet,” Happer continues. “The number of factors that influence climate — the sun, the earth’s orbital properties, oceans, clouds, and, yes, industrial man — is huge and enormously variable.”
He proved just how massive the issue was by zeroing in on just one element of the solution: dihydrogen oxide — what laymen refer to as “water.”
“For the purposes of illustration, let’s just focus our attention on water,” Happer said. “The earth is essentially a water planet. A major aspect of climate involves the complicated interaction between two very turbulent fluids: the atmosphere, which holds large amounts of water (think rain and snow), and the oceans, which cover fully 70 percent of the earth’s surface.
“We can’t predict what effect the atmosphere is going to have on future temperatures because we can’t predict cloud formations. And the convection of heat, oxygen, salt and other quantities that pass through the oceans, not to mention weather cycles like El Niño in the tropical Pacific, make predicting ocean temperatures an equally difficult business. We can’t predict either side of the atmosphere/ocean equation.”
Happer pointed to the problems in predicting Hurricane Irma’s path when it made landfall last summer.
“First, the models predicted a direct hit on Miami and the east coast of Florida,” he said. “Then, defying these predictions, the hurricane suddenly veered to the west coast of Florida. In other words, even with massive amounts of real-time data, the models still could not accurately predict Irma’s path two days in advance.
“Does any rational person believe that computer models can precisely predict temperatures decades from now? The answer is, they can’t. That’s why, over the last 30 years, one climate prediction after another — based on computer models — has been wrong. They’re wrong because even the most powerful computers can’t solve all the equations needed to accurately describe climate.”
That hasn’t stopped scientists from doubling down on their hypotheses.
“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 writes.
“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. 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.”
Those, ladies and gentlemen, are the words of an actual scientist, not a Netflix host. Yet, Nye is celebrated while voices such as Happer’s are dismissed and silenced as being politically motivated and a hack — at least in the media, which we know is obviously filled with graduates in STEM fields.
The science fiction, it seems, goes far beyond the climate change numbers, and it seems to be of the dystopian variety.
Please like and share on Facebook and Twitter with what you thought about what Prof. Happer had to say.
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