REGAN: A Convenient Lie

By Brent Regan

Will 2026 be the year AGI reveals the truth about “Climate Change”?

Twenty years ago Al Gore’s Power Point presentation turned film “An Inconvenient Truth” opened the door to massive societal and economic commitments to battle the existential threat of global warming. Anyone who dared to question the climate model predictions was labeled a heretic who didn’t believe in “science.” Funny, since “science” is a process, not a conclusion.

The earth’s climate is a chaotic system with an astronomical number of variables. Solar fluctuations, orbital oscillations, earth’s reflectivity (albedo) variations due to cloud and vegetation coverage, oceanic currents, geothermal events, volcanic activity, and yes, C02 emissions. Computer models are hugely dependent on assumptions where hard data is not available. As a result, the accuracy of computer climate models over decades, or even years, is near zero. If it were possible for computers to accurately model a chaotic system then we wouldn’t have a Stock Market because the market is millions of times simpler than the earth’s climate so, given the huge financial incentives, if it were possible to accurately model and predict the performance of stocks, it would have been done by now and the market would have collapsed.

One of the fear statistics often cited is that sea levels have risen at the alarming rate of 8 inches in the last century. Is that unusual? I was on a Scuba Diving expedition to the Great Blue Hole off the coast of Belize. The Blue Hole is actually a limestone cave where the roof has collapsed and filled with seawater since the end of the last ice age 15,000 years ago. Inside are stalactites and stalagmites that formed inside when the cave was above sea level. The bottom of the Blue Hole is about 400 feet so we have proof that sea level has risen at least 400 feet in the last 150 centuries. Divide 400 feet by 150 centuries and you get 32 inches per century. Does 8 inches per century still sound alarming?

Is it even possible to accurately measure the earth’s average temperature? No, not with our current technology. The earth’s surface is about 200 million square miles and there are about 30,000 temperature measuring sources providing daily temperature readings so on average there is one measuring station per 6,700 square miles or thirteen measuring stations for an area the size of Idaho.

The oceans cover 71% of the earth so there are no fixed measuring stations for the oceans other than a few hundred costal buoys and ships that are never in the same place twice. Land based temperature stations are mostly in North America and Europe. Africa, Central Asia and the poles are sparsely monitored.

When is the temperature taken? Day or night? Some stations report once a day, some just the highs or lows, some hourly. Only a small fraction of the stations have historical measurement records longer than a few decades. The accuracy of the readings are plus or minus 1 degree Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit). Bottom line, the computer models predict a 2.5 degree Celsius temperature rise by 2100. The uncertainty on that prediction is also 2.5 degrees and the portion of that due to natural phenomena is unknown.

97% agree that humans do have some effect on the earth but the degree of that effect is unknowable. Humans are really good at dealing with slow moving catastrophes so perhaps rather than taxing carbon, building windmills and replacing gasoline burning cars with coal burning Teslas we should focus on building a strong economy using zero carbon nuclear energy so we can deal with the problems as they occur. Wasting resources on things that sound good but don’t work seems unwise.

It’s just common sense.