The global warming alarmists tell us to trust the science. But when it comes to climate studies, there’s less science and more accounting going on there.
Computer models have an important place in science. They are useful in helping us understand our world, but models themselves aren’t science. Encyclopaedia Britannica says “scientific models at best are approximations of the objects and systems that they represent,” but “they are not exact replicas.” In the case of climate models, they are not even close to being approximate replicas.
“There can be too much of a good thing,” scholars Patrick J. Michaels and David E. Wojick wrote last week in a Cato At Liberty blog post about climate models. And in climate science, the “good thing” has become the dominant thing.
Michaels and Wojick did a little digging and what they learned was "that modeling completely dominates climate change research.” In other words, climate scientists put greater faith in results produced more by math calculations than solid science.
So much of climate change research is based on modeling, in fact, that it accounts for "fully 55% of the modeling done in all of science. This is a tremendous concentration, because climate change science is just a tiny fraction of the whole of science,” they write. “In the U.S. federal research budget, climate science is just 4% of the whole and not all climate science is about climate change.
“In short it looks like less than 4% of the science, the climate change part, is doing about 55% of the modeling done in the whole of science. Again, this is a tremendous concentration, unlike anything else in science.”
Trusting the models too much is not the only gaping hole in the climate alarmists’ claims. Their bigger problem is that they rely on models that have been consistently wrong. The heat that the models have predicted for decades has simply not arrived.
And, as the Daily Caller pointed out last week, the federal government has spent billions — close to $100 billion, actually, since just fiscal 2012 — on “science” that is undergirded by failed models. About a month earlier, the Daily Caller also noted that the models were unable to “predict CO2 would green the Western U.S.”
Yet the modeling template marches on, even as, Michaels and Wojick note, “the climate science research that is done appears to be largely focused on improving the models.”
Get that? Climate scientists are spending more energy and resources trying to upgrade their flawed models than they are trying to understand the climate itself. And it’s a good bet that what most climate scientists will consider improved modeling will be programs that predict even greater warmth.
As we noted above, modeling has its place in science, but modeling itself isn’t science. In science, questions are asked and a hypothesis is developed, then tested through experimentation. The results either align with the hypothesis or they don’t.
The models, however, simply spit out the outcomes that the researchers who developed them programmed them to. Quite clearly, the science isn’t settled. In fact, to some extent, it isn’t even science.