In previous articles, we have seen there is no consensus among the world’s scientists on the premise of man-made global warming. The position statements of a number of the world’s leading research universities and academic societies demonstrate that AGW remains an unproven hypothesis.
If the world’s leading environmental scientists have not concluded that AWG is a scientific fact, who is pushing this unproven conclusion, and why are they doing it?
The driving force behind the AGW hypothesis has always been politics, not science. The primary political force has been the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (“IPCC”). The IPCC was established by the United Nations in 1988 to “provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts.”
In its first report issued in 1990, the IPCC concluded that AGW was a fait accompli. For the IPCC, the question has never been whether global warming is actually occurring and, if so, whether human activity is the cause. There has been no effort by the IPCC to report the current state of scientific knowledge regarding supposed climate change, listing the various theories and known facts.
The subterfuge of the IPCC from the beginning has been to “confirm” the AGW hypothesis by attempting to show the amount of global warming that would occur with man-made increases in CO2 concentration in the earth’s atmosphere over time. The IPCC has failed repeatedly in its predictive efforts.
The most fundamental problem is the enormous scale and complexity of the open system that characterizes the earth’s environment. This open system is impossible to replicate as a control environment in a laboratory. The AGW hypothesis cannot be tested by experimentation, as required by the scientific method.
The alternative to the above approach is to develop a computer model which attempts to simulate a control environment. To this end, the IPCC has developed computer models that are so complex that they require multiple Cray XC 40 supercomputers to run them. Even so, the IPCC models have never been able to accurately predict climatic changes based on simulated cause and effect. Complexity does not equal accuracy in science.
The IPCC’s real goal is to use the premise of man-made global warming to restructure world society and effect a transfer of wealth from developed nations to developing nations.
Computer modeling of climate change is fraught with difficulties. First of all, the earth’s climate is far too complex to be accurately reduced to a mathematical model. Second, in order to assess the accuracy of a model and further refine it, predictive results must be able to be confirmed by back-testing. This involves substituting actual recorded historical values for certain input climate variables, such as CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, to determine if the model output accurately matches the actual recorded environmental temperatures associated with these variables.
Back-testing the predictive output of the IPCC models has never been successful. The critical problem is that accurate measurement of global temperature data only became possible some 40 years ago, with the advent of NOAA’s polar orbiting satellites. It is impossible to accurately back-test models predicting changes in environmental temperatures over thousands of years when only 40 years of actual data exists for back-testing.
Reflecting these problems, the IPCC models have consistently failed to accurately predict past or future results. Since 1990 the IPCC has been predicting global temperature increases that are more than twice that which was actually measured later using satellite technology. Given such consistent failure, the dictates of the scientific method would normally (absent political intervention) require that the AGW hypothesis be declared falsified, and either be modified or abandoned.
Why would the IPCC continue to promote a falsified AGW hypothesis? Why would some world politicians continue to endorse it?
In its Sept. 3, 2016, report, the IPCC stated that it seeks to redress “world-wide socio-economic inequalities among nations and peoples” brought about by climate change. In other words, it seems clear that the IPCC’s real goal is to use the premise of man-made global warming to restructure world society and effect a transfer of wealth from developed nations to developing nations. And that supports the globalist agenda of certain world leaders and their political allies. The Paris Climate Accord is the vehicle intended to effect these changes.
In our next article we will examine the Paris Climate Accord and its principal mechanism for effecting wealth transfer: carbon credits.
This article is the fourth in a continuing series by Guy K. Mitchell, Jr. Mr. Mitchell is the founder and chairman of Mitchell Industries, a diversified manufacturing company based in Birmingham, Alabama.
