The following is an excerpt from an article by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
If this column has ever plagiarized itself, it’s by repeating the phrase “evidence of warming is not evidence of what causes warming.” A paper published by the Norwegian government’s statistical agency, written by two of its retired experts, touching on this very subject has called forth so many shrieked accusations of climate apostasy that you know it must be interesting.
The authors ask a simple question: Are computerized climate simulations a sufficient basis for attributing observed warming to human CO2? After all, the Earth’s climate has been subject to substantial warming and cooling trends for millennia that remain unexplained and can’t be attributed to fossil fuels. As statisticians, their conclusion: “With the current level of knowledge, it seems impossible to determine how much of the temperature increase is due to emissions of CO2.”
Wow. For all the abuse dumped on them for this modest observation, and even some apologetic hemming and hawing from the government-run Statistics Norway, the authors don’t say climate models don’t make useful predictions. Their predictions are useful precisely for testing the validity of climate models. What’s more, many who are concerned about climate change have no trouble seeing the problem as a matter of risks rather than certainties. This includes co-author John Dagsvik, who told Norway’s Aftenposten newspaper he favors emissions curbs for precautionary reasons.
The correlation-to-causation puzzle is hardly the authors’ invention, having bedeviled the oracular Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its founding in 1988. But unrestrained name-calling is required, the critics say, because anything that undermines confidence in climate models undermines progress against climate change. Which is laughable. What progress? If any proposition has been demonstrated beyond doubt, equating skepticism with Holocaust denial etc. is the most failed salesmanship strategy in the history of public policy, as readily shown in the emissions data.
What really upsets the critics, though they are petrified to say so, is the paper’s ever so gently brushing its sleeve against the measurement problem.
CONTINUE READING at the Wall Street Journal…
Lawrence Molnar says
Regarding the science (leaving aside the politics and psychology of climate change), all one can ask of a scientific model is whether it is consistent with past data and whether it makes a prediction for the future. The anthropogenic CO2 model did this when Wally Broecker’s 1975 published model accurately predicted the following 40 years of warming. Of course this success is not proof of causation. For there to be a real scientific debate, though, there must be an alternative published model (that accounts for past warming without CO2 change and makes a future prediction). I am not aware of one. Am I missing something?