Looking at models

An interesting look at models in science from Patrick J. Michaels and David E. Wojick writing at Anthony's:

Climate science appears to be obsessively focused on modeling – Billions of research dollars are being spent in this single minded process
What we did
We found two pairs of surprising statistics. To do this we first searched the entire literature of science for the last ten years, using Google Scholar, looking for modeling. There are roughly 900,000 peer reviewed journal articles that use at least one of the words model, modeled or modeling. This shows that there is indeed a widespread use of models in science. No surprise in this.

However, when we filter these results to only include items that also use the term climate change, something strange happens. The number of articles is only reduced to roughly 55% of the total.

In other words it looks like climate change science accounts for fully 55% of the modeling done in all of science. This is a tremendous concentration, because climate change science is just a tiny fraction of the whole of science. In the U.S. Federal research budget climate science is just 4% of the whole and not all climate science is about climate change.

In short it looks like less than 4% of the science, the climate change part, is doing about 55% of the modeling done in the whole of science. Again, this is a tremendous concentration, unlike anything else in science.

We next find that when we search just on the term climate change, there are very few more articles than we found before. In fact the number of climate change articles that include one of the three modeling terms is 97% of those that just include climate change. This is further evidence that modeling completely dominates climate change research.

To summarize, it looks like something like 55% of the modeling done in all of science is done in climate change science, even though it is a tiny fraction of the whole of science. Moreover, within climate change science almost all the research (97%) refers to modeling in some way.

This simple analysis could be greatly refined, but given the hugely lopsided magnitude of the results it is unlikely that they would change much.

Much more at the site - all of the major claims about CO2, tipping points, increases in temperature, the disappearance of snow, the melting ice caps - all of these are just the output of some computer model. These models have zero bearing with real world observations and they cannot hindcast - give them 200 years of historical data, they have us living in a heat wave now - obviously not the case. The models used on Michael Mann's famous 'Hockey Stick' paper will give hockey sticks even when fed statistically random numbers.

A great writeup and more at the site. Here is an excellent 13 minute video on the subject: