The Stern Review was released in electronic form the last part of October, just in time to have maximum impact on the November 2006 elections in the United States. It will be argued below that although the Review purports to be economic analysis based upon scientific climate forecasting it is in actuality merely propaganda for the creation of a system of global regulation.

The first issue is whether climate change modeling is in fact scientific. Computer models generate forecasts in whatever detail the model builders and their programmers choose. That model churn out forecasts does not mean that those forecast have any validity whatsoever. Consider the case of computer models for weather forecasting. These models are based upon the physical laws of fluid mechanics and thermodynamics. There have to be approximations made because the world is large and complex. The best of these models provide useful forecasts several days in advance. However forecasts beyond a few days are so inaccurate as to be utterly useless as weather forecasts. This is because the weather is the result of a chaotic system which is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Nevertheless these computer models can be run to give forecasts for January 1st of next year or for the year 2100. The correspondence between these forecasts and what happens on January 1st of 2007 or 2100 is likely to be zero. Weather forecasting models are useful for a few days in advance but useless, despite their apparent precision, for any times beyond that. There usefulness for short term forecasts has been established by a comparison between forecasts and what actally happens. In other words, the useful weather forecasting models have validated and the useless ones discarded.

Climate forecasting models are of a different species than weather forecasting models. There is much less provision for separating the valid models from the invalid models. The only validation procedure for climate models is to see how well they can replicate current and past climate conditions. It is not guaranteed that a model which accurately replicates such climate data will give accurate forecasts of future climate characteristics, but a model which does not past this test is not likely to be of any value for forecasts of future climates.

The Stern Review does not give us the results of the validation of the model or models which are the basis for its analysis. The Assessment Report of 2001 for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does gives information on this topic and it is not likely that the Stern Review would be based upon anything that was superior to what the IPCC used. Here are results of the 15 climate models which the IPCC considered the best of such models. The data is for the latitude profiles of temperature, precipitation, sea level pressure and cloudiness in the Northern Hemisphere winter (December, January and February).

The results for temperature look reasonably good but definitely not perfect. The models are not good at replicating Southern Hemisphere temperatures and polar temperatures. The results for precipitation are less impressive. The models generally overestimate precipitation and the proportional errors are quite large. Some models underestimate tropical precipitation but generall there is an overestimation. For Mean Sea Level (MSL) pressure there is considerable variation, but the proportional errors are small. The picture for cloudiness does not instill confidence in the models. None of the models replicates the observed data and there is wide variation among the models. The proportional errors are quite large.

It is also illuminating to compare the forecasts of the 15 models for a particular scenario of future pattern of CO₂ levels. These forecasts from IPCC's Climate Change 2001 are shown below.

The first is for temperature change and the second for precipitation change.

 

If climate modeling were truly a science there would be one curve in each of the above graphs. Instead the results for the 15 best climate models look like random noise. There is some correspondence of general trends but the magnitudes for the different models are widely different.

Even the wide scatter of model forecasts shown above is not the whole story. Several of the projection models involved what are called flux adjustments to make them look better. Here is what the IPCC has to say on this topic:

Given present day greenhouse gas concentrations, most coupled models at the time of the SAR (Second Assessment Report) had difficulty in obtaining a stable climate near the present day state. Therefore "flux adjustment" terms were often added to the surface fluxes of heat, water and (sometimes) momentum which were passes from the atmosphere t the ocean model. Flux adjustments are non-physical in that they cannot be related to any physical process in the climate system and do not a priori conserve heat and water across the atmosphere-ocean interface. The flux adjustments were specifically chosen to give a stable and realistic simulation of present surface climate (especially the sea surface temperature and sea-ice cover), and were often as large as the annual mean model fluxes themselves. The need to use such adjustments was clearly a source of uncertainty: the approach inherently disguises sources of systematic error in the models, and may distort their sensitivity to changed radiative forcing. Models which did not use flux adjustments produced unrealistic simulations of fundamental aspects of the climate system such as the strength of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation. Climate Change 2001 page 476.

The conclusion that should be drawn from the results is that there is some moderate success of the climate models to replicate the current climate but there are major failures. Intellectual integrity would demand that the IPCC and the climate modelers tell the public that the models are not yet ready for prime time; especially not for making one hundred year forecasts relevant to public policy analysis. The Stern Review on the other hand makes two hundred year forecasts and passes them off as pure, hard science.

There are so many short-comings to the Stern Review and they will be dealt with in time, but here are three comments.

• The Review attribute the high cost of Hurricane Katrina to its wind speed without apparently being aware that a major part of the damage came from the failure of a levee. The failure of the levee was more due to the ineptness of local government at looking after the safety of New Orleans.
• What the Review is trying to promote is U.S. support for an international program of economic regulation. The failure of the levee in New Orleans is a failure of the guardians of the public interest. What the world does not need is another set of mandarins, particularly mandarins with the power to execute central administration of the economies of the world.
• In the 19th century there were famines of devastating impact. In the 20th century there were two major famines, in the Ukraine about 1920-21 and in China about 1959-61. Both of those famines were caused by policy mistakes made by mandarins (in these cases called Communists) supposedly acting in the public interest. Thirty million Chinese died as a result of Mao Zedong's policies of the Great Leap Forward. The original mandarins in ancient China took an economy which was 2000 years ahead of the rest of the world in technology in 300 BCE and stagnated it to the point that it was abysimally backward by the 19th century.

  Mandarin-control of the world's economies is a far greater danger than global warming.

Part 1: The Science of Climate Change

• In its Key Messages the Review says

  Most climate models show that a doubling of pre-Industrial levels of greenhouse gases is very likely to commit the Earth to a rise of between 2 -- 5°C in global mean temperature.

  In contrast the IPCC says

  For the AOGCM (Atmospher-Ocean General Circulation Model) experiments the mean change and range in global average surface air temperature (SAT) for the 1961 to 1990 average to the mid-21st century (2021 to 2050) for IS92 is 1.3°C with a range of 0.8to 1.7°C fo greenhouse gases plus sulfates (GS) as opposed to 1.6°C with a range from 1.0 to 2.1°C for greenhouse gases only. For SRES A2 the mean is 1.1°C with a range from 0.5° to 1.4°C and for B2 the mean is 1.2°C with a range of from 0.5 to 1.7°C.

  IS92 and SRES (IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenarios) are realistic scenarios for increases in atmospheric CO₂.

• The Review attaches great significance to forecasts of increases in extreme events such as severe rainstorms or droughts. The climate models which do not do all that well at predicting global averages are not even evaluated on replicating extreme events. Seemingly models that have not been tested on current data are perfectly accurate at forecasting such matters two centuries into the future. The IPCC reports the errors on replicating regional climates characteristics such as have errors on the order of ±4°C and for precipitation to have errors on a subcontinent level from &minus40 percent to + 80 percent. (Climate Change 2001, page 585.)

  Nevertheless the Stern Review has no qualms about predicting increased droughts for regions two centuries ahead. The IPCC Reports are not flawless but the IPCC is an angel compared with where the Review treads in assessing what can be and what cannot be forecast.

• The Review computes a cost for increased wind intensity of hurricanes. It say that some studies indicate that global warming would intensify hurricane wind speeds. It does not say that some studies indicate no such effect or that the matter of higher ocean surface temperature and hurricane wind speed is a theoretical proposition not verified empirically.

(To be continued.)