“It is not hard to see what Maddox means. While all work questioning the extent of global warming tends to be dismissed by the global warming lobby as propaganda on behalf of the oil industry, wild theoretical predictions of global warming are allowed to stand without challenge. Last week, Nature carried the results of a project called climateprediction.net, which has harnessed the spare capacity of 90,000 personal computers to run and re-run simulations of climate change. An accompanying news story in Nature was headlined "Biggest-ever climate simulation warns temperatures may rise by 11 degrees C". Inevitably, the story was widely reported in these alarmist terms. Yet when read in detail, the Nature paper told a different story.
“The climate change simulations were run 2,000 times, each time with slightly different assumptions. Only the very highest estimate predicted a rise of 11C. Most simulations suggested a rise of around 3.4C, while several actually predicted a fall in global temperatures (though these were discarded by the researchers on "technical grounds"). Moreover, the simulations proposed no timescale for the predicted changes.â€Â
One might reasonably conclude, given the wide variation in results, that the computer simulations so far devised to predict global warming are of little use and should not be relied upon in order to make decisions affecting the global economy. All the research team would say is "there's lots and lots more to do".