Back in January, a troop of deniers led by Monckton (and including Willie "$1m in dirty money" Soon) published a paper in a Chinese journal that made the claim that climate models overestimate warming. In this paper, Monckton's group came up with their own "simplified" model, saying it performed better than the models used by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The claim was soundly mocked, then described as "complete trash" and "a failure of their own skepticism."
Even so, the deniers did manage to get their paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, so it seems only fair that we should wait and read a peer-reviewed rebuttal to Monckton's paper before we actually throw it in the trash. Well, ready your shredders (or make sure there's room in your computer's recycling bin).
This new rebuttal does, in fact, demonstrate Monckton's work is as bad as the early reviews suggested. To get into the details, see a post at the Guardian by one of the co-authors, or this guest post at Real Sceptic or this blog post of Greg Laden's, where he describes the "irreducibly simple model" as "irreducibly useless."
To put it briefly: Monckton's model has a 350% bias that doesn't even match recorded temperature observations. Through comparison with temperatures of the past, the rebuttal proves just how badly the model performs when compared to the same IPCC models it purported to trash. Monckton's model ignores the role of the oceans, where 90% of heat added to the climate system gets stored; it pretends the Earth heats and cools instantly; and it relies on semantics instead of mathematics or physics.
Considering the model doesn't even match observations in the present, it's pretty safe to assume the model is useless for looking at the future. Unless, of course, your main goal is to produce something that can be useful for attacking climate science. Given that one of the authors is a man who describes his studies as "deliverables" to undisclosed fossil fuel funders, such an idea may not be so far-fetched.
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