Negligence, Non-Science, and Consensus Climatology

Patrick Frank
Additional contact information
Patrick Frank: Palo Alto, CA, USA

Energy & Environment, 2015, vol. 26, issue 3, 391-415

Abstract: The purported consensus that human greenhouse gas emissions have causally dominated the recent climate warming depends decisively upon three lines of evidence: climate model projections, reconstructed paleo-temperatures, and the instrumental surface air temperature record. However, CMIP5 climate model simulations of global cloud fraction reveal theory-bias error. Propagation of this cloud forcing error uncovers a r.s.s.e. uncertainty 1σ ≈ ±15 C in centennially projected air temperature. Causal attribution of warming is therefore impossible. Climate models also fail to reproduce targeted climate observables. For their part, consensus paleo-temperature reconstructions deploy an improper ‘correlation = causation’ logic, suborn physical theory, and represent a descent into pseudo-science. Finally, the published global averaged surface air temperature record completely neglects systematic instrumental error. The average annual systematic measurement uncertainty, 1σ = ±0.5 C, completely vitiates centennial climate warming at the 95% confidence interval. The entire consensus position fails critical examination and evidences pervasive analytical negligence.

Keywords: Climate; systematic error; GCM; proxy; air temperature; pseudoscience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1260/0958-305X.26.3.391 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:engenv:v:26:y:2015:i:3:p:391-415

DOI: 10.1260/0958-305X.26.3.391

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Energy & Environment
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().