Just when you thought the world was about to end, the Global Warming scientists have decided to press the "Pause" button on the warming trend.  Not the "Stop/Eject" button, mind you, because Global Warming is still happening.  But hey, at least we can buy another 10 years or so before we're sweating in the wintertime.

The truth that global warming is a farce has been leaking out for some time, thus the move from “global warming” to “climate change” was necessitated. Not quite as specific as “global warming,” but just as ominous in it’s purported implications. This has gone so far that at the national planning conference I attended last month, nearly every session was beating the “climate change” drum, whereas at the last conference I attended (in 2006), I was subjected to not a single mention of it.

What astounds me isn’t the need for the enviro-nuts to insist on a problem du jour. They’ve always done that since they became an organized bunch finding an ear in the leaders of the ’60’s anti-war movement. They’ve trumpeted the warnings of mass extinctions, the advent of a new ice age due to man-made pollution of the atmosphere, the dangers of nuclear energy, the destruction of over 200,000 acres of rainforest each day, global warming due to man-made pollution of the atmosphere. Each of these alarms were sounded with the impending doom at least 30 to 50 years out. Enough time that, should they be shown to be wrong (as many of them are), either folks would have forgotten about these warnings or be dead. So I can’t be surprised about the continued insistence on a problem of catastrophic scale.

What I am surprised about is that so many of us, the “uneducated masses” who don’t hold the PhD’s and who have never taken part in a PETA protest, a peace march, a sit-in, or a 12-hour hunger strike, have gone from seeing these people as they should be seen (Chicken Little) to seeing them as unerring guardians of our well-being. I’m just blown away by this. From those “true believers” I know, I hear them proclaim that they have “read the science” behind climate change and that it’s sound. “The computer models just don’t lie.” Sounds good to a techno-geek like myself, but for that troublesome term GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Climate is essentially the “average” of weather over a long period of time. In order to quantify our knowledge of climate over the long term, we need to be able to quantify our knowledge of weather over periods of much shorter terms. At the present time, our ability to predict the weather more than about 30 days out is non-existent, even with the very best of computer modeling. Why? Because the systems which interact to create the weather are terribly complex and not fully understood. We can’t quantify them all at this point.

Climate is a tremendously more complex system, extremely chaotic and subject to major deviations due to changes in seemingly very small details. So the addition of previously unaccounted for data to climate models can have very huge effects on the output of those models, as was recently demonstrated when the recently quantified ocean circulation cycles were plugged in to the UN climate change model. Now, the model's output tells us that there is apparently no climate change problem, at least for the foreseeable future. I’ve no doubt that someone will come up with new data in the future and plug that in, only to find that the output shows us back on the warming trend. But that shouldn't put us back into our current frenzy, because we just don’t know what else is missing that will further affect the model when it is eventually entered. Remember: GIGO.

The fact that a given piece of data isn't the only relevant one doesn't make it garbage.  However, a model which doesn't include all relevant data can easily produce output which does qualify as garbage.  Missing data can function much like pesky algebraic variables.  Change the value of the variable and you change the value of the solution to the equation. 3x+7=10 if x=1, but 3x+7=28 if x=7. Perhaps an even more accurate analogy is found when you consider that if you know what you want the value of the solution to be, you can make the math give it to you. I don't know what x really is but I want the solution to be 46, so I'll just assign x a value of 13.  In a somewhat different approach, garbage can also be obtained by basing long term future predictions on recent past data trends. I'm assuming that the road I'm traveling on will eventually reach the top of Mount Everest simply because the last 2 miles have trended uphill.  Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Reacting extremely to facts which we know are inadequate, inconclusive, or incomplete is just plain stupid. Actually, it's irresponsible, but many of the climate change gurus have long ago stopped caring about responsibility, particularly their own (see Lear Jet Liberals, Al Gore, John Travolta, et al); so stupid seems to be appropriate here as well.  When our knowledge expands to the point when we can predict particular components of the weather (for instance, amount of rainfall) with a relative degree of accuracy for a year or more in the future, we’ll be in a much better place to stand and claim the ability to be able to predict where our climate is headed. Until then, I can’t see the climate change furor as anything more than just fear-mongering. Sorry Mr. Gore: You can keep your Oscar and your Nobel Prize, but I’ll keep my truck and my barbecue grill, thank you very much.

Credit for causing this outburst to be written goes to my good friend Mark, who has been a long-time critic of climate change alarmists.