Them That Can't Learn: Doctor Norman Page, PhD

Climate deniers have no shame.

At least, Dr. Norman Page has none. After a 2012 prediction that was disastrously wrong, the Doctor is back with yet another prediction of cooling. It's always just around the corner, you know.

He has apparently learned nothing.

Rule #1 of PhD's: Be wary -- very wary -- of people who include "Dr." in front of their name. Page's doctorate is in geology, but using "Dr" is just a cheap attempt to grasp a smidgen of legitimacy before he has earned it. So you got a doctorate Norman. Big deal.

Page's 2012 prediction was that "the earth is entering a cooling phase which is likely to last about 30 years and possibly longer." That was about as wrong as could possibly be:

Did the doctor learn anything at all from his disastrous prediction? Clearly not, because now he's back making essentially the same prediction again:

What is the basis for the doctor's new prediction? First there is this interlude:

The modelling approach is inherently of no value for predicting future temperature with any calculable certainty because of the difficulty of specifying the initial conditions of a sufficiently fine grained spatio-temporal grid of a large number of variables with sufficient precision prior to multiple iterations.

That's actually correct! Climate models, which solve partial differential equations that describe the physics of climate, aren't initialized to an exact, existing set of initial conditions -- because no one knows the inital conditions, which would require detailed information on atmospheric and deep ocean currents, which we do not have (especially the latter).

This is exactly why modelers say their models make projections (not predictions) for the equilibrium state, after all forcing and feedbacks have played out -- which takes centuries, at least. Trying to interpret their results after 10 or 20 years is meaningless, because these models were never built to make such predictions.

So Page has that part right, though naturally it goes right over the heads of WUWT readers. But this hardly means that we expect cooling by 2020, or 2050 pr 2100, or pick whatever future point you want. More atmospheric CO2 warms the planet, whether you know the initial conditions or not.

Page wants to rely on supposed long-term climate cycles of 60 years and 1000 years. But he doesn't realize that anthropogenic forcings have changed everything. 

60 years? OK, we have the PDO and AMO cycles, with something like this period for a full cycle. But these cycles don't create long-term warming -- just look at how much warming has happened since 60 years ago.

A thousand-year cycle? Based on what? Page doesn't say. Instead he is stuck in the past, not realizing that manmade forcings have changed everything.

But the climate forcings we're creating are far faster than any 1000-yr cycles, any Milankovitch cycles, or fuzzy millenium solar cycles.

This shouldn't be hard to understand, especially for a "Dr." But Page misses this completely. Perhaps he is angling for the vacant Bob Carter climate denial chair -- Carter was also a geologist. 

If so, he might fit right in -- and be just as wrong as Carter was. And just as wrong as he was last time.

  

There will never be an end to climate denial. Ever. There will always be contrarian kooks who think the moon landing was faked and Sandy Hook was a false flag and manmade global warming is a hoax. Even if we do serious mitigation and avoid the worst of it, these kooks will be whining that we wasted all that money on a phenomenon that didn't exist and couldn't based on their kooky interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics.

Norman Page didn't even fool us once. And already he's back trying to fool us again? Doctor, have a little pride, would you?