The problem with the climate change models

Jay Lehr:

For three decades, global warming alarmists have harassed society with stories of gloom and doom as a result of the carbon dioxide emitted into the air by the burning of fossil fuel. They are exercising precisely what prominent writer H.L. Mencken described as “the whole point of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”.

In fact, the man-caused global warming or climate change panic may well be the best hobgoblin ever conceived. It has half the world clamoring to be led to safety from climate change without a shred of physical evidence. Every single statement issued to support these fearmongering claims presented in a new 1,500-page report from 13 separate agencies of the federal government by 300 Obama-appointed scientists, has no basis in physical measurements or observations.

What they do have are mathematical equations considered to be models of the Earth’s climate. However, they have only a handful of the hundreds of variables that impact climate and the numbers inserted for the arbitrarily selected variables are little more than guesses. Unfortunately, the U.S. government has financed more than one hundred efforts to model our climate for the better part of three decades, with none coming close to actual results.

The problem real scientists who study climate -- not those paid for bias -- face, is that the public has no clue what a mathematical model actually is, how it works, and what they can and cannot do. Let’s simplify the subject and enlighten all Americans, and the rest of the world’s population as well.

There are many ways in which things or systems can be described. Before we build buildings or airplanes, we make physical small-scale models and test them against the stress and performances that will be required of them when they are actually built. When dealing with systems that are totally beyond our control we try and describe them with computer programs or mathematical equations that we hope may give answers to the questions we have about the system today and in the future. Historically, mathematical descriptions of such systems were used to better understand how the system might work. We would attempt to understand the variables that affect the outcomes of the system. Then we would alter the variables and see how the outcomes are altered. This is called sensitivity testing, the very best use of mathematical models.
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The fact that they can't tell you which of their assumptions is invalid when actual results don't match the models tells you there is something wrong with their theory.  It is not unusual for businesses to project cash flow over a period of time to determine whether a financing is realistic.  When the actual results do not meet the projections they can tell you precisely which of their assumptions was wrong.  The climate change crowd cannot.