///Rational or irrational?///

Friday, December 03, 2004

Well, the friggin' party is over for the climate doomsters. Someone had to say it. I knew they were in deep yogurt when I read Richard Muller's article in Technology Review:
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/03/12/wo_muller121703.asp?p=0
But now, even Dr. Dewpoint has climbed on the bandwagon:
http://www.intellicast.com/DrDewpoint/Library/1254/
Who is Dr. Dewpoint? Why none other than the official meteorologist for WSI (www.wsi.com). OK, so maybe Dr. Dewpoint is basically a TV weatherman. The global warming controversy is being brought to the masses. Besides, he is no slouch: a Fellow of the AMS.

It is time for people to get used to the idea that the climate has fluctuations, lasting for years, decades, centuries, or millennia. The temperature record might even be fractal. Beyond that it is time for people to get used to the idea that science has uncertainties, and complicated things like the Earth's climate are not going to yield their mysteries to the kinds of numerical tools that we have at our disposal. Given that a CFD model of an airplane wing is a challenge for the most powerful computers in the world, it is hard to imagine that we have the capacity to model the entire planet with anything approaching certainty.

This reminds me of something a colleague working on climate science wrote to me a while back:
"Climate models are in miserable shape, as demonstrated by comparison of any of a number of erudite government committee evaluations. Arrhenius (or however he spelled his name) in 1870, or 1930, whenever, wrote a paper predicting global climate change as a consequence of the industrial revolution adding CO2 and other crap to the atmosphere. Using the equivalent of an envelope and a pencil stub, he predicted a global average temperature increase of about 5-degrees C for a doubling of CO2. Today's committees estimate the corresponding change, based on beaucoup supercomputer calculations with beaucoup Global Circulation Models, to be between 1.4-degrees C and 7-or 8-degrees C."
I am not going to give his name because I did not secure his permission to post this. If and when I do, you'll find out who it is.

More Dr. Dewpoint articles on global warming here:
http://www.intellicast.com/Local/GetDrDewCategory.asp?Category=Global%20Warming
Gabriel 1:34 PM