re: #461 Shr_Nfr

I would like to see climate models that reproduce the past from the historical data with reasonable accuracy. Alas, they do not. Until they do, I have a hard time betting the house on them.

I say this as somebody who has worked at one point in their life on the problem of remote sensing of temperature profiles, been a member of the AGU and the AMS. Is it possible that we can modify the climate? Well, maybe. Again, if you can give me a model that is something more than a thing that burns up cpu cycles doing your finite mesh differential equation solver that produces the wrong result for the K-27 grid, I’ll start to buy it.

They used to think there were witches. A lot of folks got hanged over that one. I just want more than a hand wave and a batch of dubious observations before I commit to bankrupting the country over stuff.

No problem with solar panels, wood stoves, high mileage cars and all the rest. But I want harder models before we ram everything down everyone’s throat.

You are correct in what you have said if you take an overly strict view of the use of modeling. I feel that you take things to far.

How close to the trends do you need to be before you start thinking there might be something to a model? There have been successes that reproduce events from historical data already. To be fair, if we could accurately reproduce all historical results from all intitial conditions we could reproduce the weather exactly. Given the non-liearity of the system, that would be required, not to mention computational techniques with infinite precision. Since both of those feats are impossible, perhaps that is too strict a standard. So I ask again, what is good enough?

Further, I am not saying that we need to bet the farm on anything. I’m opposed to politicization. However, even if AGW were not the issue, don’t you think it might be a good thing to reduce our dependence on oil anyway? I mean I acatually don’t like being dependant on the Saudis. Why is reducing our oil consumption a bad thing?