Sherwood Publishes Latest Climate Horoscope. Climate Science Continues Its Stark Divergence From Reality

Professor Steven Sherwood’s newest climate crystal ball foretells that unless something drastic is done, terrible things are going to happen to our climate. And like in the regular fortune-telling business, there are plenty of customers just slurping it up.

Professor Sherwood of the University of New South Wales and a team of scientists now claim that climate models have underestimated global warming. Because clouds have not been correctly taken into account, the globe will likely heat up by close to 3° instead of 1.5°C by the end of the century. Study here.

But hyped climate fortune-telling is nothing new. The media love it. Early in the 20th century scientists had also warned of melting ice caps and rapidly rising sea levels, before warning of ice ages and extreme weather in the 1970s. And every time the scientists were almost certain and insisted action was paramount. And every time they were proved wrong.

The problem lies in that Sherwood’s claims are based on computer climate models, models that are chock full with assumptions (guesses).

EssexWhy climate models are unreliable for predicting the future of a non-linear chaotic system that is as variable as the climate is succinctly illustrated by Prof. Christopher Essex (photo right) in a presentation which I commented on here.

Because of the huge uncertainties involved in climate modeling, Prof. Essex, a leading international expert in computer modeling, calls projections for decades and centuries ahead using even today’s state of the art “Welcome to Wonderland”. The climate system is just too complex and it would take even today’s most powerful computer billions of years to run through a proper algorithm.

The results that today’s models put out are based on the crude assumptions that get fed in. When a model maker guesses that the globe is going to heat up, then that’s what his model will show.

Not only do modeling experts scoff at the claimed predictive powers of climate models, but so do some advisers to decision makers. Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s top business adviser Maurice Newman, for example, once said the world “had been held hostage by climate madness.”

In the UK Telegraph here, Newman is quoted as saying:

…the climate change establishment, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, remained ‘intent on exploiting the masses and extracting more money’.

‘The scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling,’ he wrote in The Australian. ‘Global temperatures have gone nowhere for 17 years… If the IPCC were your financial adviser, you would have sacked it long ago.”

Global warming activists fired back, calling Newman and Abbot flat-earthers for not having faith in climate model prophesies.

73 climate models_reality

All climate models projections are diverging from reality. Chart from Prof. John Christy, U of Alabama.

Yet, when one takes a closer look, the only thing that’s been flat lately are global temperatures (see chart above). Every model, most costing millions, failed to predict that global temperature would remain stagnant for almost two decades. Now it becomes obvious why experts like Essex describe them as “Welcome to Wonderland”.

Sherwood’s latest claim is in truth a profound departure from reality. In fact datasets are now even showing a slight decline underway over the last 6 to 8 years. The exact opposite is actually occurring. One has to ask what world scientists like Sherwood are really living in.

Naturally, one cannot exclude the possibility that Sherwood’s prediction may end up being right. As everyone knows: Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

 

9 responses to “Sherwood Publishes Latest Climate Horoscope. Climate Science Continues Its Stark Divergence From Reality”

  1. Mindert Eiting

    Perhaps it is something in the educational background of climate modellers, that they only used to fail for an exam when they answered one hundred percent of the items incorrectly. There are still a few straw halms in the ensemble, that may be accidentally correct. Happy new year.

  2. DirkH

    “Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s top business adviser Maurice Newman”

    The Leftist machine is currently cranking up demands that Abbott removes the “climate madman” Newman. (HuffPo, for instance)

    It’s pretty incredible how consistently wrong the collectivist faction of humanity has been and continues to be at least since Robespierre. (I love Le Terreur for its sheer madness. They haven’t improved one iot since)

  3. Here We Go: Another Climatologist Prognosticates That World Will Warm Faster Than Feared » Pirate's Cove

    […] (No Tricks Zone) Because of the huge uncertainties involved in climate modeling, Prof. Essex, a leading international expert in computer modeling, calls projections for decades and centuries ahead using even today’s state of the art “Welcome to Wonderland”. The climate system is just too complex and it would take even today’s most powerful computer billions of years to run through a proper algorithm. […]

  4. Mike Heath

    @Mindert.
    I seriously think you are on to something with your statement, and I wish I could shed some objective light on it, but I can’t. However, there are hints in life’s subjective experience about this. The comparisons with religious cults is perhaps too obvious, with their own dogma and shepherding methods, coupled with an inability to reason with those who don’t follow.

    There are also elitist attitudes that go with many of those who have excelled in education (or at least studied in Oxford), many of whom keep hold of their hippy clothes and lifestyles or goaty beards. The elitist attitude pervades all subject areas but is only noticed when one of these types strays into an area of equal interest to others, such as with this climate issue. With an arrogance typical of Britishness at is “best”, perhaps this whole scam is a carry over from the class system. The reaction of the educational elitists is one of a cultist priesthood saying “how dare you question your priests!”, or “how dare you elevate yourself to a position of challenging the Gods”. British politics is full of this same thing from the same people and for the same reason as far as I can tell.

    I wonder what you might be able to add to that.

    1. Mindert Eiting

      If you would have simulated blindly the climate future with a random procedure, some of your models would show increasing temperatures, some decreasing, and the remainder something in between. Perhaps fifty percent of your models would have been in accordance with reality. However, the graph shows a dramatic failure. Compare it with an exam. You will pass the exam when you have answered 2/3 of all items correctly. How can you claim that you passed the exam with almost all items wrong? The climate scientists do not give up, perhaps not even with one hundred percent wrong.

      1. Mike Heath

        But why do these scientists not “give up” even if they are 100% wrong? That is what I am getting at.

        Type A
        There are many examples of people who never gave up and then succeeded in their goal such as Edisson with his light bulbs, Watson and Crick, Howard Carter of King Tut fame, many sports men and women, musicians like Robert Johnsson and many others too.

        Type B
        At the same time there are many who believe totally in conspiracies, in UFOs, ghostly events, lost civilisations, Biblical numerology, astrology, homoeopathy, and many more things where nothing will make them give up.

        It would seem to me that AGWers think they are type A but are really type B, but they view climate sceptics in the same way. We think we are type A but could really be type B.

        The difference as I see it is that those of type B are unable to consider that they might be wrong. As Churchill once said “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”

        Are we able to ask ourselves if we are wrong?

  5. Silver Price

    What Freeman Dyson says is 100 percent correct. This is only a crisis because too much emphasis has been put on climate models which can be useful in learning about our climate, but which are totally useless for predicting future trends. Maybe 50-100 years from now we will have enough knowledge about how to deal with the problem of non-linear systems and enough factual and accurate bio-climate data to be able to make useful predictions.

  6. Ed Caryl

    “Even a broken clock is right twice a day”
    Not a good analogy. None of the climate models are EVER right. They all show random squiggles with various slopes of warming greater than reality. It’s like having a map of Liliput or Brobdingnag and expecting to drive across Portugal. All of them are totally useless. That’s why they insist on averaging them all together to get an even more meaningless “mean” prognostication. It is all the modern equivalent of examining goat guts, dressed up as output from a computer. I am continually amazed that anyone is taken in.

  7. mwhite

    “Professor Sherwood of the University of New South Wales and a team of scientists now claim that climate models have underestimated global warming”

    http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/new-computer-model-claims-global.html

    “New computer model claims global warming decreases clouds “

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