The Collapse of the Global-Warming Fraud?

The Times of India reports that the rising Asian powers have decided to reject the attempts by the United States and Europe to stifle the global economy in the name of the global-warming fraud:

In an unprecedented move, India on Saturday joined China and two other developing countries to prepare for a major offensive on rich nations at the Copenhagen conference on climate change next month.

The four countries, which include Brazil and South Africa, agreed to a strategy that involves jointly walking out of the conference if the developed nations try to force their own terms on the developing world, Jairam Ramesh, the Indian minister for environment and forests (independent charge), said.

“We will not exit in isolation. We will co-ordinate our exit if any of our non-negotiable terms is violated. Our entry and exit will be collective,” Ramesh told reporters in Beijing…
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The developing nations will also not accept any pressure from developed countries to establish legally binding emission targets at Copenhagen.

No “legally binding emission targets” means, of course, that they will wait and see if global warming turns out to be a real problem (and, yes, that is possible) or if it turns out to be of little consequence (and, yes, that too is possible) before agreeing to any action of any real substance.

Until there is real scientific evidence – all we have now are the results of deeply flawed computer models – that is the only sensible approach.

The times they are a’changin’ – who’d have thought, a few decades ago, that India and China would be teaching the West the virtues of common sense and the dangers of over-regulation of market economics?

I also recommend a wonderfully fair and balanced discussion of Climategate on the Freakonomics blog: Steve Dubner points out that, quite aside from all the sound and fury over the whistleblower's publishhing of the CRU e-mails, “the central scientific issue here” is:

that the most prominent climate scientists’ computerized models may be neither as robust nor as predictive as many people think…

He goes on to quote from my fellow physicists Nathan Myhrvold (of Microsoft fame) and Lowell Wood, explaining why the computer models should not be trusted.

At The Atlantic, Clive Crook explains why he is more outraged now that he has waded through the leaked CRU e-mails than he expected to be:

The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. And, as Christopher Booker argues, this scandal is not at the margins of the politicised IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] process. It is not tangential to the policy prescriptions emanating from what David Henderson called the environmental policy milieu [subscription required]. It goes to the core of that process.
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I'm also surprised by the IPCC's response. Amid the self-justification, I had hoped for a word of apology, or even of censure. (George Monbiot called for Phil Jones to resign, for crying out loud.) At any rate I had expected no more than ordinary evasion. The declaration from Rajendra Pachauri that the emails confirm all is as it should be is stunning. Science at its best. Science as it should be. Good lord. This is pure George Orwell. And these guys call the other side "deniers".

Perhaps what Crook had particularly in mind was CRU head Phil Jones' allegedly declaring:

The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone...

The “two MMs” are mathematician Steve McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have been trying to uncover the details of the global-warming fraud for the last several years

Now, reports indicate that the original raw data, absolutely vital to judging the scientific validity of CRU's global-climate work, have been either "lost' or, possibly, intentionally destroyed.

Obviously, the e-mail from Jones raises the possibility that he carried out his plan and actually did intentionally delete the vital information, perhaps to cover up scientific malfeasance.

If anyone ends up going to jail for all this, the destruction of data to illegally evade "freedom of information" requests may be the reason.

Anyone who wants to get their hands dirty actually digging through the leaked documents might start at the blog Shadow of the Olive Tree, which has kindly posted the infamous "Harry Read Me" file for everyone's enlightenment.

Let me emphasize once again that of course the CO₂ we have dumped into the atmosphere will almost certainly make the world at least a bit warmer than it otherwise would have been. And, yes, this might be a big problem.

But, it might not be a problem at all. It might even be beneficial if, perchance, we are entering a natural cooling period.

We just don’t know.

The fraud comes not from those who claim that global warming might happen and that it might be a problem. The fraud is from the handful of scientists, and the large number of scientific illiterates in the mass media, who keep saying that it is “settled science” that global warming will be huge and hugely damaging.

That is not settled science. The fraud of global warming consists of the false claim that global warming will be a major problem when neither the empirical data nor the deeply flawed computer models are yet able to indicate how large global warming will actually be.

In a way, the CRU gang have become the fall guys for a much larger scandal: yes, we know from the published e-mails that the CRU guys played nasty little unprofessional games to silence their critics, that they were more concerned with protecting their turf than with advancing science, and that they are incredibly poor computer programmers.

But the real scandal is the larger group of climate modelers around the world who have falsely claimed to know how big a problem global warming will be when they do not really know at all but are simply relying on very dicey computer models.

Over my career, I have been involved with numerous computer simulations, ranging from elementary-particle physics detectors to satellite-communication systems. No responsible scientist fully trusts such simulations until they have been well validated by experimental data.

The global-warming simulations are more speculative, less embedded in accepted science, than the simulations I have worked on. Yet, the global-warming simulations have not been validated by making detailed, unambiguous predictions and then rigorously checking those predictions against reality.

This is not science: it is pseudo-science.

The real fraud in the area of global warming is the covering up of this fact by the mass media, by the political establishment, and by so many climate scientists themselves.

(See also my September post, published before the current scandal broke, explaining why the global-warming scam is fraudulent, and my previous post on the Climategate scandal.)