Covid-19 Model Failures Illustrate Climate Model Shortcomings

Climate and energy writer Norman Rogers has published an excellent article on the American Thinker website addressing the shortcomings of coronavirus models and climate models. Rogers points out that coronavirus models began predicting up to 2 million American deaths, only to be adjusted down to its current prediction of 60,000 deaths. The difference between 2 million deaths and 60,000 deaths is incredibly large, yet that is how much the coronavirus models have failed.

The political Left attempts to smear anybody who questions coronavirus models as attacking scientists and attacking science. However, scrutinizing models that are being employed as justifications to restrict Americans’ freedoms is not attacking scientists. It is, instead, performing science. And scrutinizing a scientist’s model is not the same as attacking the scientist. Most or all modelers are presumably creating their models in order to help policymakers make wise decisions. But noble motives do not convey scientific infallibility, especially on topics where we are making so many speculative assumptions. As Dr. Anthony Fauci says, “Models are only as good as the assumptions that you put into the models. And those assumptions that start off when you don’t have very much data at all, or the data you have is uncertain, then you put these assumptions in and you get these wide ranges of calculations of what might happen.”

Climate models are no different than coronavirus models in that they will only be as accurate as their underlying assumptions. As wildly off-base as the coronavirus models have been, climate models have even more uncertain underlying assumptions than the coronavirus models. Accordingly, climate models have been – and are likely to continue being – at least as off-base as the coronavirus models have been.

Urging caution before blindly accepting poorly performing climate models is not a conspiracy theory or an attack on scientists. True scientists, and true patriots, will always seek more information rather than less before restricting Americans’ freedoms.

You can read Norman Rogers’ full article here.

James Taylor
James Taylor
James Taylor is the President of the Heartland Institute. Taylor is also director of Heartland's Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy. Taylor is the former managing editor (2001-2014) of Environment & Climate News, a national monthly publication devoted to sound science and free-market environmentalism.

Related Articles

2 COMMENTS

  1. I think that the Model used by the British epidemiologists, who focus on emergent diseases primarily in Africa, led to their report that included an estimate that 2/3 of US population might die of the new corona virus. At time of their estimate there was essentially no data and the expert authors used the most pessimistic assumptions. That the model concluded that 2/3 of Americans might die should have caused the experts to realize that their model and/or assumption were wildly inadequate and they should not have published anything so wildly improbable.

    The IHME model also has demonstrated that its initial assumptions were wrong. I think to a large extent because they are subject to selection bias that rules out important data and leads to excessive estimates of the number of deaths. The Stanford University study if Santa Clara County indicates the estimated deaths might be too high by a factor of as much as 80.

    Climate models repeatedly over estimate CO2 impacts. Modelers use anomalous temperatures with tenths of degrees that imply a false precision and ignore accuracy.
    Stefan Boltzman radiation is a function of temperature to the fourth power so that errors in temperature are amplified. I think these laws are best applied using absolute temperatures.

    Modelers focus on about 150 years of temperature measurements ignoring about 800,000 years of data that mostly precedes life on earth. This data shows that peak to peak cycles are about 100,000 years with shorter intermediate cycles reported in the order of thousands and tens of thousands of years. The max to min range of temperature is in the range of about 50 degrees for the longest cycles and about 4 degrees for the shortest cycles. The world and life did n to come to an end at any of the extremes.

    About 20 years ago I looked at world wide Station data from about the time of the US Civil War to about 2,000. There was no indication of increasing temperatures. the data was biased to high temperatures because land based data was adjusted up to match the data from city based Stations. Sea water temperatures were adjusted upwards to data from ships. I have read a peer reviewed article in a respected Scientific Journal that stated that recent temperature data was unprecedented. After plowing through about 4 or 5 pages of tabulated data I found the identical run of data.

    I think President Obama invented the epithet “Climate Denier”. This is perpetuated by major media like the NY Times, the New Yorker, NBC and CNN. This is false statement of the issues. The question is: what controls changes in temperature and is there an immanent threat to the world. People who ignore 800,000 years of data, multiple Ice Ages and warm periods with farms on Greenland are ignoring true science

  2. Interesting comparison, I am currently polishing a final draft on and opinion piece for Online Opinion ( Australia ejournal) on the topic of risk assessments models (as used by Imperial College London) and our own NSW Health and comparing them to climate model inadequacies. I thik the demonstrable failure and over exaggeration of the COVID-19/96gg virus crisis may be the best way of getting thru to the populous the real errors of the ‘97% consensus’ GCMs. Will forward you a copy of link is you can send me an email that I can use to send it to. Best wishes, Charles

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Must Reads

Latest Publication