The supporters of policies intended to curb the production of CO₂ often display signs or posters that read SCIENCE MATTERS. When one investigates what they mean by this one finds that they deem the global temperature models as scientific because people who are scientists, but not necessarily climatologists, say they are based upon accepted science. They see that the models are based upon such things as thermodynamics and fluid dynamics which are verified elements of science. What they don't see is what is left out. The models are in error because of what is left out.

Here are some of the elements that model-builders who are not trained climatologists leave out.

• The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
  This is an irregular cycle of about seven to nine years. Waters of the South Pacific are blown west to region east of Indonesia where they are warmed. After several years of this warming the accumulated higher waters in the western Pacific start flowing eastward and bring notably higher temperatures to the west coast of South America and moderately higher temperatures to other places around the world.
• The Mid-Pacific Thermal Vent.
  When the surface temperature of the Pacific Ocean reaches a critical level clouds stop forming above the region. This opens up a thermal vent where Earth's infrared radiation radiates energy away into space. It is effectively a thermostat for the Earth.
• The Multidecadal Pacific Oscillation (MDPO).
  This is an irregular cycle of about sixty years. There are about thirty years of increasing temperature and about thirty years of decreasing temperature. Here is a graph of the Average Global Temperature (AGT) from NOAA which demonstrates the effect of the MDPO on global temperature.
  
• Cycles in Solar Activity
  These include a cycle in the number of sunspots on the surface of Sun which affect the intensity of the radiation reaching the Earth. The length of this cycle is 22 years.

But scientific theory does not depend upon its acceptance or nonacceptance by any particular group. Science is fundamentally a process. This process involves the formulation of a theory, the generation of predictions from it and the comparison of those predictions with empirical facts. If the predictions are not confirmed the appropriate thing to do is to reformulate the theory.

When the predicted continual increase in AGT due to increased CO₂ in the atmosphere did not occur after the year 2000 the proponents of the models did not reformulate them. Instead they resorted to linguistic subterfuges. The term Global Warming was replaced by the more nebulous yet more ominous term Climate Change. The failure of global temperature to continue to rise was labeled a Pause, an insignificant temporary development. Ironically if the Global Warming Alarmists had accepted the existence of the Multidecadal Pacific Oscillation the so-called Pause would have had a different significance.

The models were touted to still be valid and true despite the failure of their predictions. Those who disagreed about the validity of the models were labeled deniers (of the truth) instead of skeptics.

The proponents of the models then set about trying to eliminate the Pause by revising the data. This was relatively simple to do because the temperatures for the oceans covering seventy percent of the Earth's surface were based upon a relative paucity of temperature measurements from passing ships. So, instead of modifying the theory to fit the data, the data is being modified to fit the theory.

Had the Global Warming Alarmists accepted the existence of the Multidecadal Pacific Oscillation (MDPO) the so-called Pause would have been no problem for them. Because of the MDPO the Average Global Temperature reached a peak about 2005 after a thirty year upswing from 1975. AGT was basicall flat for the period 2005±5. By 2015 the AGT should have started downward. The fact that it didn't means that the human-caused noncyclic component of AGT had increased.

Thus the models of global warming are more in the nature of unalterable religious dogma rather than science.

Fortunately Science has the measurements of atmospheric temperatures recorded at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. They are based upon thermal radiation measurements from about 15 satellites and cover the Earth. Unfortunately they only go back to 1979.

The years 1998, 2010 and 2016-17 were El Niño years, having nothing to do with global warming due to human activities. Although the upward trend in AGT appeared to have stopped because of the MDPO there has been global warming. It has been a noncatastrophic 0.5 °C per century.

In general however one cannot guarantee that theories which were tested and confirmed under the controlled conditions of a laboratory are adequate to explain phenomena occurring in nature. Consider how far off would be the predictions of the trajectories of leaves falling in a laboratory compared what occurs ‌ in nature under windy conditions.

The Testing of the Climate Models

The climate models do make short term projections but the emphasis made by their proponents is on their long term, thirty to forty year, projections. The failures of the short term projections are ignored. The long term projections are treated as being yet-to-be-tested. But the validity of the models for long term projections can be tested without waiting for thirty or forty years. The models can be run backwards to estimate the conditions of thirty to forty years ago based on current conditions. These are called backcasts.

They must be run properly. No information from the past should be incorporated in the backcast just as no information about future conditions are incorporated in the forecast. The backcast information is converted into information about climate and this compared with the actual climate of the time.

When such backcasting has been done using specific climate models the correlations have been negligible. There have been some backcasts that utilize the past data to reproduce the time series of the past. This is not relevant for long term projections made entirely on the basis of current conditions.

What are the Climate Models Really?

The climate models are merely metrological models being run for a long period of time. It is well known since the time of Edward Lorenz and the development of chaos theory that metrological models cannot predict the weather accurately more than about ten days in advance. This is partly due to the metrological models being based upon nonlinear partial differential equations. This makes the solutions infinitely sensitive to initial conditions. This means that if the model is started from initial conditions that differ only infinitesimally from actual conditions those deviations will grow exponentially and very soon the solution will differ so much from the actual that it is useless as an approximation of the actual.

There is no intellectual justification that the results from the projections from a metrological model that is good only for ten day forecasts will have any relevance for long term averages describing climate. Prominent climatologists such as Marcel Leroux, Richard Lindzen, Syukuro Manabe, Robert Balling and Patrick Michaels have been critical of the structure of the climate models created by nonclimatologists.

Some secular religions such as communism are based upon a dream of utopia, false but captivating. The secular religion of global warming alarmism seems to be based instead upon a nightmare of impending dystopia, also false but also captivating.

Conclusions

The notion that the models of global warming are confirmed science ignores the reality that science is the process of comparing the predictions of a theory with empirical observations. Theories whose predictions are not borne out cannot be considered science. The failures of the conventional models of global warming are not due to what is in them; the failures come from climatological phenomena which they leave out. Refusal to recognize this fact means those models are more in the nature of religious dogma rather than science. The laboratory analysis is not wrong it is just incomplete when dealing with the uncontrolled conditions in nature. It is science in the laboratory but not science in the uncontrolled settings of nature.

Global Warmig Alarmism pretends to be based upon science but in reality it is based upon models that only look like they are scientific. They fail the test of their predictions being confirmed. This stems from their being climatologically incomplete.