OPINION:
On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron told a joint session of Congress:
“I believe in building a better future for our children which requires offering them a planet that is still habitable in 25 years. We must find a smooth transition to a low-carbon economy By polluting the oceans, not mitigating CO2 emissions, and destroying our biodiversity, we are killing our planet. Let us face it. There is no planet B And I am sure, one day, the United States will come back and join the Paris Agreement.”
It is easy for Mr. Macron to back the Paris Agreement. After all, France gets about three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear energy which, even considering power plant construction and decommissioning, as well as mining and fuel preparation, produces far less CO2 emissions that does coal, oil, and natural gas, the sources of about two-thirds of electricity generated in the United States.
Regardless, like most politicians who support the climate scare, Mr. Macron clearly bases his opinions on the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific foundation of the Paris Agreement. In fact, he thinks so highly of the IPCC that, when President Donald Trump vowed to cancel U.S. financial support of the agency, Mr. Macron told the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany last June, that France would cover the cost of U.S .donations.
What the French president does not understand, or chooses to ignore, is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is not a valid source of scientific information. Every prediction made by the computer models that it cites have turned out to be wrong. And, if the prediction is wrong, the science is wrong. American Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard P. Feynman said, “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
So, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is not actually practicing science when they make their forecasts. It is pseudo-science for a political agenda. Here’s what happened.
To create climate forecasts, the IPCC relies on computerized models built on formulae and data to represent conditions in the atmospheric. Problem is, we lack a comprehensive ’theory of climate’ since we do not have valid formulae to properly represent how the atmosphere functions.
We also lack the data to properly understand what weather was like over most of the planet, even in recent years. And, lacking a good understanding of past weather, we have no way to know the history of its average condition — the climate. Meaningful forecasts of future climate states are therefore impossible.
An important data set used by the computer models cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the ’HadCRUT4’ global average surface temperature history for the past 167 years produced by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, and the Hadley Centre, both based in the United Kingdom.
Until the 1960s, HadCRUT4 temperature data was collected using mercury thermometers located at weather stations situated mostly in the United States, Japan, the U.K., and eastern Australia. Most of the rest of the planet had very few temperature sensing stations. And none of the Earth’s oceans, which cover over two-thirds of the planet, had more than the occasional station separated from its neighbor by thousands of miles.
The data collected at weather stations in this sparse grid had, at best, an accuracy of plus or minus 0.5 degrees Celsius, oftentimes no better than plus or minus 1 degree. Averaging such inaccurate data in an attempt to uncover global conditions cannot yield anything meaningful.
Modern weather station temperature data is now collected using precision thermocouples. But, starting in the 1970s, less and less data was used for plots such as HadCRUT4. This was done initially because governments believed that satellite monitoring could take over from most of the ground surface data collection. But the satellites did not show the warming forecast by computer models. So, bureaucrats closed most of the colder rural surface temperature sensing stations, thereby yielding the warming desired for political purposes.
Today, there is essentially no data for about 85 percent of our planet’s surface. Indeed, there are fewer weather stations in operation now than there were in 1960.
So, the HadCRUT4 and other surface temperature computations after about 1980 are meaningless. Combining this with the problems in the early data, and the fact that we have almost no long-term data above the surface, the conclusion is inescapable: We are unable to know how the Earth’s climate has varied over the past 150 years. The data are therefore useless for input to the computer models that form the basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s conclusions.
Indeed, there is insufficient data of any kind — temperature, land and sea ice, glaciers, sea level, extreme weather, ocean pH, etc. — to be able to determine how today’s conditions differ from the past. This means that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s climate forecasts have no connection with the real world.
Mr. Trump is right to get the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. Macron should follow his lead.
• Tim Ball is an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba. Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.
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