Global warming models could be ‘fundamentally wrong’ | The Daily Caller.
In an interview with the German news publication Der Spiegel, meteorologist Hans von Storch said that scientists are so puzzled by the 15-year standstill in global warming that if the trend continues their models could be “fundamentally wrong.”
“If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models,” Storch told Der Spiegel. “A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.”
Possible explanations…
“There are two conceivable explanations — and neither is very pleasant for us,” said Storch. “The first possibility is that less global warming is occurring than expected because greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have less of an effect than we have assumed. This wouldn’t mean that there is no man-made greenhouse effect, but simply that our effect on climate events is not as great as we have believed.”
“The other possibility is that, in our simulations, we have underestimated how much the climate fluctuates owing to natural causes,” Storch added.
If the models are based on theory, than the theory is wrong. Now if the models aren’t based on theory, what are they based on?
I’ve been pointing out that these models are fundamentally wrong for a while. Our understanding of computing is insufficient to produce accurate models of our climate system sufficient for predicting what it will do. That’s the bottom line. It’s the same story with economic models. My own computer science professors could’ve told people this over 20 years ago. Nothing inside of computer science has improved to the point of changing this situation.
I have a suspicion that a lot of people have been caught up in a hype machine, dazzled by “the shiny thing” of computing, and how it can produce results that look realistic. People need to learn that, like in a movie, just because something has a look of realism about it, even if it’s backed by mathematical formulas, does not mean it has any relationship to reality. Models need to be tested against real world phenomena, and if they fail, the theory behind them needs to be reevaluated. The testing methodology has been flawed for years.
Wow, I just replied and the reply went “out in space”. Very irritating. I wonder if I used a term that got caught by my comment spam filter? I’ll copy before submitting this time.
I agree with you 100%. It’s way to easy to get caught up in the intricacies of the model and let the real world pass you by. It’s the responsibility of the “modeler” to adjust his model to the real world. Of course, this brings in the bias of how the modeler interprets the real world. Also, if one is contantly “tweaking” the model, it’s time ot look at the foundation.
Here are two posts from some time back that you may find of interest:
#1 combines economics and (psuedo)science: Milton Friedman and Richard Feynman | Boulder is a Stoopid Place
#2: It takes an expert | Boulder is a Stoopid Place
I hope I got the html tags right.
It looks like I had my filters set to not accept comments with 2 or more links so I adjusted it to 3. Hopefully this gets through!
Hmm. I’ve been trying to respond, but the server keeps saying my request is denied, and that I may need to sign in. I’m wondering if I’m running into a length limitation on comments. I used to see this same thing on Blogger.com.
Alright. I don’t know what the heck is going on. I’ve tried a bunch of things to respond to your comment, but the server keeps telling me my “access is denied.” I’ve tried copying and pasting into a separate non-threaded comment, and I get the same problem.
Mark, I’ve turned off the “screen of death feature” and and set the spam plug-in to save blocked comments so I can determine what the issue is.
Re. your other post, “It takes an expert”
Even Carl Sagan got into this, very early in the game, in fact. He was saying there was a problem with AGW back in the 1980s. I don’t know if it was before James Hansen made his famous Senate testimony or not. Maybe it was for the same reason. IIRC, Hansen had written his Ph.D. thesis on CO2’s effect on temperature on Venus. Sagan might’ve taken the same POV, and worried that our own generation of CO2 would cause some “runaway greenhouse effect” that would make us like Venus. The thing is, Earth and Venus are polar opposites when it comes to this. Venus’s atmosphere is 98% CO2. Ours is now 0.04%. It was even less when Hansen and Sagan made their early statements about it.
My own theory about this is that there are some people who see our industrial civilization as a mistake. They think it’s ugly. The idea that it’s dangerous only validates that belief.
There’s a good article that was written about this a few years ago by Fred Siegel, called, Progressives Against Progress. He talked about a switch that occurred in the 1970s that’s been with us ever since. Older progressives used to believe in scientific and industrial progress as a good to humanity, but in the 1970s that all changed. They came to believe that both of these forces were dangerous, and they sounded a lot like 19th century Tory Radicals (ie. old-style British conservatives). Siegel described the Tory Radicals as elitists who wanted to preserve their palatial estates in their natural splendor, with their pheasant hunts. They despised the middle class and their values, with their “dirty” bourgeois industrialization. They wanted to preserve a romantic notion of a peasant class that worked for them, I guess under feudalism.
Anyway, I have an article on the topic of AGW as well. I don’t get into discussing the science, just criticizing the practice that’s been used to promulgate the theory as truth:
The dangerous brew of politics, religion, technology, and the good name of science
You got me thinking of this video by Bill Whittle, “The Train Set”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnEsI2fTaJo
Okay. This is bizarre. I tried quoting something you said in your last comment, and it looks like that’s what was tripping it up. Once I took your quote out, it posted fine.
Posting some more of what I was going to say…
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Re. computer models
My understanding of an appropriate model-forming practice is that the modeler needs to make their own observations, and form the model off of that. They shouldn’t be able to look at a long-run historical data set that is not their own. When the model is tested, it should be given to an independent body. When the results come back, the modeler should only be shown a description of the degree of success, not what it was tested against. The modeler can ask questions about the test, but they don’t get to see the real world data that was used. Otherwise they’d “know what the correct answer is before the test,” and be able to engage in curve fitting, which I’ve heard scientists understand is an illegitimate practice. The point is not the model getting the “correct answer.” The point is the modeler understanding the phenomena enough to create an accurate model. The “correct answer” is just a means for testing that understanding.
Looking at your first article on Friedman and Feynman, another speech by Feynman came to mind:
Cargo cult science
Feynman’s statement that science is a belief in the ignorance of experts is an interesting one. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but thinking about it, it sounds right. I’ve long believed that if scientists are going to make a claim, they need to show how it works in the real world. If they can’t do that, their claim is very questionable.
Okay. This is the last of it.
Looking at how your software responded to what I was trying to post, I’m thinking it may have been an anti-spam countermeasure. Like I said earlier, I run my own blog, and I have seen spambots try to use a word or two out of one of my blog posts to post a comment that tries to make itself look relevant, so I’ll approve it. Trying to tell what’s spam and what isn’t has gotten depressingly harder the more time has gone on. So often spam comments contain links to sites that at first glance look like normal blogs, but they’re just for show. They’re not real. Those sneaky buggers!