Kill the IPCC, says Judith Curry in today’s Post. Her leading slogan for what ails the IPCC is “paradigm paralysis”. The IPCC’s official views are unchanged, even as we experience a 15 year long plateau in global temperatures. Instead, its views are re-iterated, only more so.
Previously, IPCC scientists were 90% certain that man was causing global warming. This time around, they are 95% certain. Where does all the missing heat go? Into the deep oceans, where conveniently it cannot be measured. How does heat sink, when, as we all know, heat rises and cold sinks? Through apparently processes known only to global warming scientists but unknown to physics.
As Curry points out, the consensus process and the paradigm lock are devastating the possibility of real climate science being conducted. Careers are being wrecked for climate heresy, in an endeavour where the term “heresy” should have no application, but where, alas, a smelly little orthodoxy prevails . Politicization of science discredits it.
Curry writes:
With the failure of climate models to simulate the pause and regional climate variability, we have arguably reached the point of diminishing returns from this particular path of climate modeling – not just for decision support but also for scientific understanding of the climate system. In pursuit of this climate modeling path, the climate modeling community — and the funding agencies and the policy makers — have locked themselves into a single climate modeling framework with a focus on production runs for the IPCC, which has been very expensive in terms of funding and personnel. An unintended consequence of this strategy is that there has been very little left over for true climate modeling innovations and fundamental research into climate dynamics and theory — such research would not only support amelioration of deficiencies and failures in the current climate modeling systems, but would also lay the foundations for disruptive advances in our understanding of the climate system and our ability to predict emergent phenomena such as abrupt climate change.
Climate modelling is actually worse than this. In 2007, Christopher Essex and Ross McKittrick wrote a book called “Taken by Storm”, which explores the many errors of ignorance and false theory that comprize climate modelling. Climate modelling, say Essex and McKittrick, is subject to uncertainties, fudge factors, large swathes of total ignorance, and assumptions stated as certainties, from which scenarios are derived to try to scare the witless into obedience. Once you have read this book, you will be unable to take modelling seriously. Nothing that has happened since its publication six years ago has made climate modelling less of an arbitrary exercize in propounding ignorance as if it were knowledge.