(Playing of Ball of Fire spoof song.)
RUSH: There you have it. That’s Algore, Ball of Fire, one of our three rotating global warming update themes. An amazing story here from Reuters. This is so full of See, I Told You Sos. I mean, try the headline: ‘Scientists Try New Ways to Predict Climate Risks.’ Yes, you heard correctly. ‘Scientists are trying to improve predictions about the impact of global warming this century by pooling estimates about the risk of floods or desertification. ‘We feel certain about some of the aspects of future climate change, like that it is going to get warmer,’ said Matthew Collins of the British Met Office. ‘But on many of the details it’s very difficult to say.” What the hell does that mean? We feel certain about some of the aspects of the future, like it’s going to get warmer, but on many of the details, it’s very difficult to say, which means they don’t have a clue. Which means they don’t know. ‘The way that we can deal with this is a new technique of expressing the predictions in terms of probabilities,’ Collins told Reuters.
‘Scientists in the U.N. climate panel, for instance, rely on several complex computer models to forecast the impacts of warming this century, ranging from changing rainfall patterns over Africa to rising global sea levels. But these have flaws because of a lack of understanding about how clouds form, for instance, or how Antarctica’s ice will react to less cold. And reliable temperature records in most nations stretch back only about 150 years.’ It’s every argument I have made to not listen to these people. We don’t have the slightest idea how clouds are formed. Nobody can predict what the percentage of cloud cover is gonna be unless you have a big front coming through and you know you’re going to be overcast. On a day-to-day basis, they can’t do it. They know the process, but they don’t know how big they’re going to be, their altitude, they know nothing. ‘Under new techniques looking at probabilities, ‘predictions from different models are pooled to produces estimates,” meaning the flawed research we get from one model is going to be combined with the flawed research from another model. We’re going to come up with probabilities based on what both of these flawed models say.
‘The approach might help quantify risks for a construction firm building homes in a flood-prone valley..’ If a flood-prone valley is flood-prone, they already know the risk. It’s like people building homes on the beach. You know that it can happen; there’s going to be a hurricane. People still do it. They’re willing to take the risk. ‘Collins said uncertainties include how natural disasters out of human control affect the climate. A volcanic eruption, such of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, can temporarily cool the earth because the dust blocks sunlight.’ Another See, I Told You So. Now, here’s what’s interesting about that passage to me. They admit that a volcano is out of human control. Well, tell me, if a volcano is out of human control, then how the hell is anything else involved in the weather in human control? Somebody tell me this. ‘Man is destroying the planet, Mr. Limbaugh! There’s no question about this. There’s been a documented consensus of scientists.’ Then the pièce de résistance, David Stainforth of Oxford University in England: ‘Climate science is a very new science and we have only just begun to explore the uncertainties. We should expect the uncertainty to increase rather than decrease’ in coming years as scientists work to understand the climate. That would complicate the chances of assigning probabilities.’ Now, wait a minute. We’ve heard from a bunch of groups. There’s no question anymore, scientific consensus, it’s there. These guys say there is going to be even more uncertainty in the future, more and more uncertainty. The more they learn the more they realize they don’t know.