Garth W. Paltridge

The Climate Caper is a good book, but Paltridge is rather mild mannered in his criticism of the climate community. The book rambles in places and could have been better with a sharper summary of the major failings by the climate models and the climate modelers.

An important point he makes that climate science has a single funding source: the government. As such the funding tends to get skewed going to the politically active scientists who make their “research” appear policy relevant. The single source funding has two bad effects: 1) It makes the administrators very fierce in defending their funding, so any criticism of climate science gets shouted down or suppressed. The skeptical scientist is completely unwelcome in climate science. 2) This, in turn, leads to group-think, because now no one hears any criticisms. The group-think has now become so ingrained in the climate science that it is more akin to a religion than a scientific endeavor. At least, Paltridge calls it a religion, but his explanation of how it arose could have been better put. The net result is, as Paltridge puts it, “politicians ... are being deprived of ... access to a diversity of advice.” So too is the public.

Another important point that Paltridge makes is that the climate models have dozens of tunable parameters, but the modelers deny that it is so. Paltridge is correct in his assessment and the models can be tuned to match any previous climate record. Matching the past that way provides no evidence that the future can be predicted. He also points out that climate models are not independent of one another, since they usually share large sections of code. The agreement between models thus may be fortuitous.

One of the key quotes in the book is pointed out in Monckton’s well written preface: “Even accepting for the sake of argument that some significant degree of global warming may be observed in the future, it is certainly not the consensus of the majority of scientists that the actual impact on humans will be significant - or indeed it will be detrimental.”

The book contains many other criticisms including those of economic models. It would have been nice if Paltridge had discussed his work on maximum entropy production, but perhaps that topic is too complicated for the layman. All in all the book is well worth reading.… (mais)