Global warming updat…

Global warming update:

“The old rule is garbage in, garbage out,” said David H. Douglass, a professor of physics and astronomy. “I don’t know what’s wrong (with the models), but it must be that the basic physics has not been put in properly.”

The first paper looks at temperature readings at various heights in the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 20 years against what the leading computer models predicted. According to the study, the computer models indicate that temperatures in the upper atmosphere should be rising; yet the opposite is happening.

The second study took various temperature readings from weather balloons and satellites — data provided by the National Center for Atmospheric Research — to try to rectify a longtime gap between temperatures recorded at ground level and temperatures recorded by other satellites. That gap amounts to about one degree.

According to the study, the new temperature readings seem to back up the other satellite readings and show an Earth about a degree cooler than ground-level readings had found. Both those sources indicate that the planet is getting warmer, but to a far less degree than noted by surface thermometers.

Douglass said the holes pointed to by his studies are fatal flaws in the notion that human activity — from industrial smokestacks to car exhaust — is causing global warming.

“There is a warming over the last 100 or so years,” he said. “(But) the change cannot be assigned to carbon dioxide. The stories you see about global warming all originate from predictions by models. If the models are wrong … then the conclusion is almost obvious. Why worry about global warming if it comes from a discredited theory?”

(Emphasis mine.) Yes, there are those that don’t think this fully discredits those models, but their credibility is dropping as fast as the temps in the upper atmosphere.

“Even imperfect models can help us project things,” [associate dean of earth sciences at SUNY Brockport Jose] Maliekal said.

“Absent something better, we have to do the best we can.”

“The best we can” is living with models that are predicting the opposite of what is happening, and then trying to set international policy based on it. Thanks, guys.

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