trysail
Catch Me Who Can
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2005
- Posts
- 25,593
" ...only the terminally gullible could believe that human beings could ever program a computer that would accurately simulate the climate system’s response to a change in a single variable, on any time scale.
We can’t conduct a controlled experiment on the Earth to measure the response to CO2. We don’t have multiple Earth’s in alternate realities with varying CO2 emissions, to do something akin to an epidemiological study. All of the known scientific techniques of actually measuring the response of the climate to CO2 changes aren’t available. Since scientists’ expertise is only in the scientific procedure, or method, there is no reason to believe that any scientist, no matter how intelligent, has any innate ability to somehow predict or offer judgments as to values that can’t be measured or observed scientifically. (The phrase “scientific opinion” is an oxymoron – there’s nothing scientific about a person’s opinion, and if it was reasonable for a scientist to just offer an expert judgment on the amount by which a change in X changes the output Y of a system, then what is the purpose of a double blind study where researchers are kept in the dark so as to avoid the possibility of confirmation bias?)
Climate scientists now say that climate changes can only be observed over multi-decadal scales. We’ve put our satellites in orbit in the late 1970’s. We have no reliable measurements of ocean temperatures, except maybe at a few defined depths in recent years, or even surface temperatures outside of a relative small sample of populated areas that haven’t been torn apart by war or famine or other things that distract scientists from diligently collecting data. Instead we seem to be relying solely on proxy data to reconstruct the historical data needed as input for climate models, proxy data for which its reliability can’t possibly be confirmed or measured, but only inferred. (Who has a time machine to send an army of graduate assistants back 500 years to take readings?) Outside of temperature, I’m not sure we have any reliable measurements of any climate variable that go back more than a couple decades. Cloud cover? Precipitation amounts? How do we know whether or to what extent the patterns of the jet stream or ocean currents flowed prior to say 1960? I can’t imagine that fluid systems like air or water preserve that information and its hard to imagine trusting any indirect proxies to give us precise measurements in changes to either of these patterns.
In short, we haven’t been observing the Earth’s climate system, in the sufficient detail that would be required, and for long enough, to ever believe that any mathematical model of the climate would be remotely accurate. If I hypothesize a relationship between the length of a bear’s hibernation and the amount of berries it eats in the fall, then watch a single bear eat a bunch of berries from September to November, and go to sleep in December, I can’t possibly be ready to model the hypothesized response the following February while the bear is still sleeping. No one would trust my results even after one, or two, or even 10 years – the number of samples are too small."
-"Kurt"
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/05/25/climate-models-dont-work/