Awesome but Dangerous

It would be interesting to get your opinion about what I’ve pasted below, Jo. Do you believe this is what’s happening with regard to climate models? If so, do you agree this is an appropriate way of working? If you don’t agree that this is what’s happening, do you have any evidence to rebut what Alec Rawls has written?

Alec Rawls in a comment at IEEE Spectrum (http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/how-to-fix-the-climatechange-panel):

When Trenberth says that scientists are always “exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded,” you have to know WHAT omissions he is talking about to really get the import of it. What he and Schmidt and all the other modelers are talking about omitting is solar magnetic warming effects, which are known from numerous studies to account statistically for 50 to 80% of past temperature change. That’s what the .5 to .8 coefficients of correlation between solar activity and global temperature change mean, but Trenberth omit this factor ENTIRELY from their models.

In statistics, this is called the omitted variable problem, but since they do it on purpose, it is properly called omitted variable fraud. The consequence is that the warming due to solar-magnetic activity gets misattributed to any correlated variables that ARE included. In the 20th century (the period over which the GCM’s are calibrated), CO2 growth and solar-magnetic activity were both sky high, so omitting solar magnetic variables misattributes the warming effect of solar activity to CO2. Take that misattribution away, and CO2 becomes a big nothing.

So how do they justify leaving solar magnetic effects out of their models? They claim to be dis-satisfied with current theories of HOW solar magnetic activity drives climate. That is, they are doing exactly what Trenberth here says that they do: they are “exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded.” And they are explicit about the reasons: that they don’t trust current theory on this subject.

But this is not at all what real scientists do. In fact, it is an exact inversion of the very definition of science. The scientific method is defined by the priority of data over theory. Data, not theory, is supposed to be the decider. But these anti-scientists use theory (to be exact, their discomfort with current theories) as a justification for ignoring the data (literally omitting what is known statistically to be the dominant driver of global climate from their models).

This is PURE anti-science, making CO2 alarmism an irrational religion. Not all religions are irrational or anti-scientific, but AGW alarmism is, and AGW policies are an unconstitutional state establishment of religion.

How about an answer to the Alec Rawls comment above, Jo?