Net Zero has published a wonderful essay by William Briggs On Broken Science.  It is a joy to read with great clarity, depth and plain talk while being delightful.  The excerpt here is the segment describing how climate science is the epitome of the wider phenomenon of broken science.

We all agree that the planet needs saving. Everybody says so. From global cooling.

When climatology was becoming a new field, they really did say a new ice age was coming.
Newsweek in 1975 reported:
There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production.

Time in 1974 said:
Climatologist Kenneth Hare, a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society, believes that the continuing drought…gave the world a grim premonition of what might happen. Warns Hare: ‘I don’t believe the world’s present population is sustainable if [trends continue]’.

There are scores upon scores of these, the scientists and groups such as the UN warning of mass deaths by starvation and so on. Well, climatological science grew, and the temperature warmed, and then we got global warming. Caused, incidentally, by the same thing said to cause global cooling: oil.

Global warming in time became ‘climate change’: a brilliant name, because the earth’s climate changes unceasingly. Thus any change, which is inevitable, can be said to be because of ‘climate change.’ Correlation becomes causation with ease here.

‘Climate change’ was quickly married to scientism, where it came to be synonymous with ‘solutions’ to ‘climate change’. Because of this error, doubt expressed about the so-called solutions caused one to be called a ‘climate change denier’ – an asinine name, because no working scientist, not one, denies the earth’s climate changes or is unaffected by man.

US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen recently said that ‘Climate change is an existential threat’ and that the ‘world will become uninhabitable’ if – you know the rest – if we don’t act. Uninhabitable is a mighty word. Rode and Fischbeck in 2021 examined environmental apocalyptic predictions and discovered that the average time until The End, for those saying we ‘Must act now’, as Yellen did, is about nine years.

Predictions of ‘only nine years left’ started gradually, in the 1970s. They now happen regularly. Funny thing about these forecasts is that failure never counts against theory. Which is another strike against falsification.

That is a story unto itself. Let’s instead peek at the science of ‘climate change.’ Not at the thermodynamics or fluid physics, which is too much for us here, but at the things which are claimed will go bad because of ‘climate change.’

Which is everything. There is no ill that will not be exacerbated by ‘climate change’, and there is no good thing that will escape degradation. ‘Climate change’ will simultaneously cause every beast and bug and weed which is a menace to flourish, and it will corrupt or kill every furry, delicious, and photogenic animal.

There is a fellow in the UK who collects these things. His ‘warm list‘ total right now is about 900 science papers, an undercount. Academics have proved, to their satisfaction, that ‘climate change’ will cause or exacerbate (just reading the first few): AIDS, Afghan poppies destroyed, African holocaust, aged deaths, poppies more potent, Africa devastated, Africa in conflict, African aid threatened, aggressive weeds, Air France crash, air pockets, air pressure changes, airport farewells virtual, airport malaria, Agulhas current, Alaskan towns slowly destroyed, Al Qaeda and Taliban Being Helped, allergy increase, allergy season longer, [and my favourite] alligators in the Thames! And we haven’t even come close to getting out of the As.

There is not one study, that I know of, that remarks on how a slight increase in globally average temperature will lead to more warm, pleasant summer afternoons. That a small change in the earth’s climate, whether caused by man or not, can only be seen as wholly and entirely bad, and can in no way be good, is sufficient proof, I think, that science has gone horribly wrong. It’s not logically impossible, of course, but it cannot be believed.

Yet this doesn’t say how these beliefs are generated. They happen by some of the reasons we’ve already mentioned, but also by forgetting the multiplication of uncertainties.

Given knowledge of coins, the chance of a head on a flip is one half. Two heads in a row is one quarter: the uncertainties are multiplied. Three in a row is one eighth; four is one in sixteen. If the event of interest is that string of four heads, we must announce the small probability of about 6%. It would be an obvious error, and a silly mathematical blunder, to say the probability is ‘one half’ because the chance of the last head is one half. And it would be outrageous if a headline were to blare ‘Earth will see a Head on last throw.’ Agreed?

But that’s exactly how ‘climate change’ scare stories are produced. We first have a model of climate change, and how man might affect the climate. There is only a chance this model is correct. It is not certain. We next have a weather model, which rides on top of the climate model, which says how the weather will change when the climate does. This model is not certain, either. We then have a third model, about how some item of importance – the welfare of some animal or the size of coffee production or whatever – is affected by the weather. This third model is not certain. We finally, or eventually, have a fourth model, which shows how a solution will stop this bad thing from happening. This model is also uncertain.

In the end, it will be announced ‘We must do X to stop Y’. This is equivalent to ‘Earth will see a Head.’ Causal language. Which we agreed was an error. The chain of uncertainties must be multiplied. The greater the chain, the more uncertain the whole must be. This is never remembered, but must be, especially when the number of claims grows almost without bound.

The Deadly Sin Of Reification: Mistaking models for Reality

We are in rugged territory here, for the closer we get to the true nature of causation, which requires a clear understanding of metaphysics, the subtler the mistakes that are made, and the more difficult they are to describe. Plus, I have detained you long enough.

It would, I hope you agree, be an obvious fallacy to say that Y was not or cannot be observed, when Y was in fact observed, because some theory X says Y is not possible. Yes?

This error abounds. X is some cherished model or theory, and Y an observation which is scoffed at, dismissed, or ‘explained’ away, because it does not accord with theory.

This happens in the least sciences, like dowsing or astrology, where practitioners reflexively explain away their mistakes. But it also happens with great and persistent frequency in the greatest sciences, like physics.

It also leads to the current mini-panic over ‘AI’, or ‘artificial intelligence.’ Which it isn’t: intelligence, that is. All models only say what they are told to say – a philosophic truth that when forgotten leads to scientism – and AI is only a model. AI is nothing more than an abacus, which does its calculations at the direction of real intelligence in wooden beads, with the beads replaced with electric potential differences.

But because the allure and love of theory is too strong, it is believed that computer intelligence will somehow ‘emerge’ into real intelligence, just like the behaviour of large objects is said to ‘emerge’ from quantum interactions.

I will upset many when I say this is always a bluff, a great grand bluff. There is no causal proof of ‘emergence’: if there was, it would be given. Talk of emergence is always wishful thinking, reflecting a desire not to question the philosophy of what philosopher Robert Koons and others call ‘microphysicalism’, the ancient Democritian idea that everything is just particles bumping into things.

There are alternatives to this philosophy, such as the revival of Aristotelian metaphysics, which would do wonders for quantum mechanics if it were better known. Unfortunately, we haven’t the time to cover any of them.

The Deadly Sin Of Reification, the mistaking of models for Reality, is much worse than I have made it sound. It leads to strange and untestable creations, such as the multiverse and ‘many worlds’ in physics, and gender theory, and all that they have wrought.

See Also Chameleon Climate Models