Mr. Prime Minister, how reliable are 30-year climate models?

I’m not sure there are many people over the age of 30 who are crazily celebrating the Morrison government’s decision to go to the UN climate conference COP26 in November to pledge a zero emissions target. net by 2o50. Net zero emissions will be both inflationary and industrial. Barnaby Joyce was barely clicking his heels in the air when he supported the PM’s policy and there is a lot of others to the National Party who do not and their supporters in the rural sector are not happy.

Let’s look at the difficulty objectively. Can the government finance the changes with zero net fiscal impact? The answer is no. Always, commitment to a zero emission target can be made acceptable to the rural sector, provided that sufficient funds are available for support the sector during the transition. Isn’t the real question the reliability of climate science as a science?

What if the climatology and computer models that scientists rely on for their catastrophic predictions were unreliable, neither in themselves nor in their results, so their predictions do not provide an appropriate scientific basis for policies.

The real problem, therefore, is whether the causal relationships between the very large number of factors, both man-made and natural, which determine both climate and weather have been precisely identified and functionally linked in accordance with very reliable mathematical principles.; because it is from these functional relationships that models predict future effects in 10, 20 or 30 years; that is to say when the climate crisis emerges.

I have read a number of climate reports and have to say they do not convince me of an impending climate catastrophe with violent and unleashed storms, cyclones and tornadoes, melting polar ice caps, l sea ​​level rise, landmass flooding, death of polar bears and dying people – the perfect storm, man-made and carbon-based.

The reason I am not convinced is because the methodology by which climatologists verify the climate and weather data of yesterday and today, determine the climate relationships (or is it meteorological) and generate predictive models whose 20 or 30 year forecasts require immediate corrective action. may be mathematically correct but unrelated to reality. It is the nature of mathematics. Corn if we are to believe the opinions of other Earth scientists, they too have doubts about the methodology; after all, GIGO is a valid rule of thumb for all predictive models.

Climate science relies on certain statistical methods to obtain data from scarce historical sources to determine the correlation relationships necessary for predictive models. One of the first things you learn when studying statistical methods is the need to carefully consider a large number of qualitative and non-mathematical considerations both before and after collecting data.

It is often claimed that articles on climate science are peer-reviewed in scientific journals. “Peer review”, however, means what it says, an evaluation by an equal, one of those who accept the overall veracity of the methodology of a particular branch of investigation, be it economics. , psychology, law, nuclear medicine or sexuality.

This is not the place to explain in detail the effect of subjective considerations on the results of a so-called objective science. However, it is worth knowing that the effect of statistical methods means that “true” now means “probably true” as qualified by confidence levels. In economics, the use of statistical methods is very important to generate preliminary results when all the data are not available; for example, unemployment or GDP. But any economist knows that in one, three or six months, all the provisional results will be amended to reflect additional data available.

The government’s decision to declare Australia net zero emissions by 2050 may be a smart policy decision; but if climate science cannot be proven reliable, then the net zero decision is reckless with both economic and national defense ramifications.

Scott Morrison is right to do its commitment to COP26, but at the national level, this commitment should be subject to reasonable verification of climate science methodologies to ensure that forecasts are reliable. On his return from the Conference, the Prime Minister should therefore create an independent commission to examine and report on climate science methodologies and their reliability.

The first step of the Commission would be to obtain evidence from climatologists, domestic and foreign, concerning the methods of collecting, extracting, adjusting and managing historical and current data; the statistical methods by which the functional relationships between variables are established and the methods for testing these relationships; and the methodologies with which the computer models are generated, with particular attention to the statistical and mathematical methods employed. The Commission’s first report would be a climatology manual containing all this information.

The second step of the Commission would be to circulate this document among prominent members of the scientific community at large, including, but not limited to, geosciences, hydrologists, ocean sciences, nuclear sciences, solar and Mathematics. They would be responsible for providing solid critiques and critiques of the various methodologies and hypotheses where their areas of expertise overlap with those of climate science.

The third step of the Commission, upon receiving the expert reports, would be to prepare a final report containing all the expert reports, as well as a summary of the critiques that attack the validity, reliability and any major deficiencies or Theoretical anomaly in methodologies that impinge on the accuracy of climate science, the accuracy of predictions and therefore the practical utility of climate science.

The final report would be circulated among all climatologists who contributed, voluntarily or by subpoena, to the Commission’s investigation and any subsequent criticism of the Commission would be published as a supplement to the final report.

If governments are to make policy decisions based on predictions of relatively new science, decisions that will lead to major and orchestrated changes in our lives, it is fundamentally important to establish whether this science is trustworthy.