Unverified and Unvalidated
23 hours ago Willis Eschenbach
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach (@WEschenbach on X, my personal blog is here)
Dear friends, pull up a chair and pour a good strong coffee.
Because today’s topic is a real treat: yet another “Indicators of Global Climate Change” paper, this time the 2025 update, in which a team of the usual suspects announce—for the thirty’leventh time—that the planet is warming, that evil humans did it, and they can now put single decimal numbers on “human induced warming” and the remaining carbon budget as though the climate system were a well debugged spreadsheet rather than a barely observed, non linear, chaotic, multiscale nightmare.
People misunderestimate the complexity of the climate. It has no less than six major subsystems: atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, and electrosphere. Each of these systems has its own internal cycles, forcings, responses, and resonances. And all of them are constantly interacting at spatial scales from the molecular to the planetary, and temporal scales from nanoseconds to millennia. Willis’s First Rule of Climate states, “In the climate, everything is connected to everything else, which in turn is connected to everything else … except when it’s not”. It’s the most complex system we’ve ever tried to model, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve written lots of computer models. I like indicators. I like data. I like having regular snapshots of where we are.
But what I don’t like is pretending that running the same assumptions through a slightly updated sausage machine counts as validation of anything. These folks are not testing the system. They’re just doing annual bookkeeping within an untested framework and then declaring victory. That’s not science; that’s climate accounting with a side of unwarranted confidence.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/06/13/unverified-and-unvalidated/
