First, Judy Curry has a lengthy post on climate models:
[T]he climate modeling enterprise is putting the cart before the horse in terms of attempting a broad range of applications that include prediction of regional climate change, largely driven by needs of policy makers. Before attempting such applications, we need a much more thorough exploration of how we should configure climate models and test their fitness for purpose. An equally important issue is how we should design climate model experiments in the context of using climate models to test hypotheses about how the climate system works, which is a nontrivial issue particularly given the ontic uncertainties. Until we have achieved such an improved understanding, the other applications are premature and are detracting resources (computer and personnel) from focusing on these more fundamental issues.Second, Fred Pearce (who seems willfully blind to the IPCC treatment of disasters, but I digress) tells us to get ready for more uncertainties in the next IPCC:
We are all — authors and readers of IPCC reports alike — going to have to get used to greater caution in IPCC reports and greater uncertainty in imagining exactly how climate change will play out. This is probably healthy. It is certainly more honest.
1 comments:
Who do we believe, a world class scientist like Freeman Dyson or an ultra conservative political extremist like James Hansen? Dyson worked on the early computer models and came to the conclusion that there is insufficient data / understanding of the physical mechanisms on which to build credible predictive models.
To me, that was obvious, and I would be fascinated to hear anyone credible challenge that point of view.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTSxubKfTBU&feature=player_embedded
See also
http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen#Charges_of_censorship
James Lovelock in the Guardian
on computer models
I remember when the Americans sent up a satellite to measure ozone and it started saying that a hole was developing over the South Pole. But the damn fool scientists were so mad on the models that they said the satellite must have a fault. We tend to now get carried away by our giant computer models. But they're not complete models. They're based more or less entirely on geophysics. They don't take into account the climate of the oceans to any great extent, or the responses of the living stuff on the planet. So I don't see how they can accurately predict the climate.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock
Dyson and Lovelock are too old to be troubled by corporate thugs like Revkin, Romm and Monbiot, or the thugs embedded within the science community. That also applies to Nobel Prize winners Ivar Giaever and Robert Laughlin.
Laughlin, Giaever and others were recently savaged by Andrew Revkin. Revkin lies that these super intelligent physicists are following cultural predispositions because he found a laureate who is an energy revolution enthusiast. It's not the same thing. Revkin was bullied by embedded scientist Michael Tobis* into changing his description of Laughlin's posituion
20 Sept 2010
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/the-nobel-divide-and-the-climate-divide/
Jeffrey Marque, editor of Physics & Society, published by the American Physical Society
There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution
http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/editor.cfm
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