Well, while we're grovelling around pretending that the experts in their fields are beyond criticism, the experts in economics say that the cost to fix up the worst case scenario results from the global warming crowd are of the same order as the cost to prevent them. So do nothing is a sensible economics driven approach, given the uncertainity of the models.
Or are some experts more equal than others?
"There's uncertainty in the climactic models"
Understatement of the year, in the light of the scientific method, you know, the old hypothesis -test -result thing?
Hypothesis - the earth will get warmer if the CO2 rises
test - CO2 has steadily risen over the last 8 years
result - global temps fell slightly.
Conclusion? give us more money.
As I said, there is no harm, and there is presumably some good, in increasing our understanding of the climate, and ability to predict it in the future. But to waste any resources (that is, to do things that do not have a rational (if not necessarily economic) payback), at the moment on the basis of models that fail completely when tested in the real world, seems to me to be a non-rational act. Even more so when the economic costs of coping with the predicted changes is of the same order as the cost of preventing those changes in the first place.
This reliance on peer reviewed journals is a bit of window dressing.
Galileo tried to understand how the stresses in a cantilevered beam worked out. He was a bright bloke, and everybody knew it. If he had published a paper on it in a peer reviewed journal, it would have been accepted.
But he was wrong, completely, utterly, wrong. Luckily the builders and architects at the time didn't pay any attention to Galileo. Mathematicians did, and a couple of centuries later they were able to explain the stresses in beams and so produce a reliable predictive equation.
Or for another example, the Bohr (?) theory of atomic structure where the electrons are in neat little orbits around the nucleus. Absolutely and completely misleading. It fit the data at the time, yet as soon as it was tested in the real world as a predictive approach, it (almost literally) exploded. Yet that old red herring is precisely what I was taught in school. It's a Just-So story for physicists. You can bet that was in peer reviewed journals.
So, I'll leave the climatologists to get on with the real science, using the scientific method, hopefully in less than two centuries they'll come up with a useful model. But I'm damned if I am going to pay overmuch attention to their predictions at the moment.
Cheers
Greg Locock
SIG

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