By J. Frank Bullitt | I & I Editorial
Board
Robert
A. Rohde
It wasn’t long ago, just in recent days, in fact, that we
were being told the coronavirus was going to kill more than 2 million
Americans. But some researchers are indicating the forecasts of doom were
driven by faulty models.
What then, are we supposed to make of the models that
have been fueling the global warming hysteria?The forecast used to predict 2.2
million U.S. deaths and 510,000 deaths in Great Britain was produced by Imperial
College in London. It is “the epidemiological modeling which has informed
policymaking in the United Kingdom and other countries in recent weeks.”
OK, but is the information reliable? Epidemiologist
Sunetra Gupta is doubtful.
“I am surprised that there has been such unqualified
acceptance of the Imperial model,” he said in the Financial Times.
Gupta’s team of researchers at Oxford believe both the
hospitalization and mortality rates are much lower than the worst estimates,
and immunity is more widespread than previously thought.
The Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed from
professors of medicine at Stanford who said “projections of the death toll”
reaching 2 million to 4 million “could plausibly be orders of magnitude too
high.” They believe “epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their
estimates to account for” a number of important factors.We can’t say for sure
which model has it right. Will deaths be in the millions? Or will coronavirus
be less lethal than the seasonal flu?
But we can say that at least one of the models is wrong.
So what does this tell us about the climate models that
officials keep telling us are evidence that man is overheating his only planet?
The lesson is that we shouldn’t put our full trust in the global warming
alarmists’ claims. But then independent thinkers have known for some time the
climate models are far from perfect:
Six years ago, Reason’s Ronald Bailey noted
that “most temperature records show that since 1998 the models and observed
average global temperatures have parted ways. The temperatures in the models
continue to rise, while the real climate has refused to warm up much during the
last 15 years.
In 2017, Bailey reported that, according to
a “fascinating new study” in Nature Geoscience, “climate computer model
projections of future man-made warming due to human emissions of carbon dioxide
are running too hot.”
Last year, John Christy, a professor of
atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the
University of Alabama in Hunstville, told the British Parliament “an early look
at some of the latest generation of climate models reveals they are predicting
even faster warming. This is simply not credible.”
Also last year, author Guy Sorman wrote in
City Journal the models used by United Nations scientists cannot “explain why
the climate suddenly cooled between 1950 and 1970, giving rise to widespread
warnings about the onset of a new ice age.”
Climatologist Judith Curry has also said
the models “seem to be running too hot.”
Christy’s university colleague Roy Spencer,
a former NASA climate scientist, says “global warming projections have a large
element of faith programmed into them” because “we have no idea how much
warming” is caused by carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas the political left has
chosen to vilify.
A little more than a year ago, climate
researcher Patrick J. Michaels noted the authors of a paper published in Nature
Climate Change “show that the aggregate models are making huge errors in three
of the places on earth that are critical to our understanding of climate.”
Despite the healthy skepticism from scientists who have
been studying the climate for decades and have held prominent academic
positions, the Democrat-media powered narrative never sleeps. But that’s what
we expect from those who are ever searching for a crisis to take advantage of.
