Stop Basing Climate Policy on Invalid Models

It is time to stop basing national policy on climate models that have proven themselves wrong again and again, says Paul Ballonoff, an independent consultant in international energy development.

Our current climate policy is based on models that produce global warming forecasts. Unfortunately, those forecasts have been wildly incorrect from what we have actually observed. If those forecasts are not accurate, we need to reconsider the policies that were based on them.

– After 25 years of cooling after World War II, temperatures increased at a strong rate in the quarter century ending in 1997.
– That same year, the United Nations issued its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change analysis, on which most of our climate policy today is based, despite that it was the last year in which a global average temperature rise occurred.
– The Economist expressed their puzzlement on the absence of warming over the last 15 years. They observed that this flat period of global average temperature occurred despite that CO2 emissions from human sources continued at an increased rate.

Ballonoff does not dismiss the impact that climate can have on life, and he specifically says that the global climate “has had a profound effect on human viability.” However, he does not see the risk of severe cooling or human-induced warming to be imminent.

If humans can find ways to regulate the global temperature, he says, that would be quite advancement. But those in the climate change community have only created mistrust for the use of science in making policy determinations. Models, forecasts and predictions are only valuable or worthwhile if they actually work. Models alone are not science, and they are wildly deceptive foundations on which to base energy policy.

By failing to compare their forecasts to subsequent actual events, the climate science community has simply produced false predictions and abused “science” for political purposes.

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