The curious incident

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Arthur Conan Doyle - Silver Blaze (1892)

This is another non-technical post on climate change. Previous posts are here and here.

As so often in politics we should be aware of what the narrative does not say as well as what it does. There is an obvious hole in the climate narrative which is rarely spoken of because it has been made to seem naive even though it is not. This hole concerns what has been demonstrated and what has not. What unambiguous decades-long predictive skills have catastrophic climate change proponents actually demonstrated?

The obvious answer is – nothing. Arm-waving, propaganda, demonstrations, public displays of anguish and tame celebrities don’t count. Nothing has actually been demonstrated. Otherwise the whole climate debate would revolve around what would have been a scientifically stunning achievement. But it didn’t turn out that way and we know it didn’t turn out that way. Everyone knows it.

The missing demonstration is an unambiguous ability to predict a genuinely useful estimate of a key climate parameter such as global temperature up to 2050 and even beyond. Such an astounding achievement would have a globally recognised name and its leading figures would be at least as famous and highly regarded as Einstein, Darwin or Galileo. We would see references to it everywhere but we don’t because it isn’t there. The missing demonstration is still missing.

An obvious clue is provided by parallel work on weather forecasting. This is supposedly the naive comparison – naive because it absolutely has to be squelched. Suppose we ignore the squelching and ask the obvious question - for how many days into the future are weather forecasts reasonably accurate? Five days? Ten days? In which case how are climate forecasts even modestly accurate over decades?

This is not a technical question. It is a question about a public performance of predictive skill by catastrophic climate change proponents. What climate-related predictive skill has been publicly demonstrated? That’s the question and the obvious answer is – nothing has been publicly demonstrated. No predictive skill has been publicly demonstrated apart from the closely related activity of weather forecasting. That’s all there is.