Rick Monteverde wrote:
My information that the computer models can't accurately track reality? Chaos theory, mostly, and practical experience and observation too, validated by numerous people who know and use these systems and are honest about how they work. You can't expect a recursive computer model to accurately predict for you the outcomes of a planetary weather/ocean system.
That's preposterous. If that were true, weather forecasting computer programs would not work. In fact, they work amazingly well.
As I have said before, opinions such as this remind me very much of the assertions made by anti-cold fusion skeptics, and also assertions made by people who think that the New York fire Department experts cannot recognize arson when they see it.
On one side we have careful research over decades by thousands of experts. People who have worked with the instruments and data every day for decades. On the other side we have opinions of people who know little or nothing about the subject and yet who assert that they know better than the experts. In cold fusion there are dozens of self-appointed instant experts including Nobel laureates who imagine that they know much more about electrochemistry and calorimetry than Fleischmann or Bockris. And in climate studies everyone thinks he is an expert!
One other parallel trend strikes me. Anti-global warming instant experts often ascribe these views to Al Gore as if he made up the data. They ignore the fact that he is merely repeating what genuine experts say. In exactly the same fashion, countless anti-cold fusion instant experts have attacked me, instead of trying to critique the actual papers written by experts. Some have even accused me of inventing the data and writing the papers at LENR-CANR myself. I take that as a compliment. If I could write ~500 papers covering such a broad range of topics I would be a scientific genius. If Al Gore could come up with all of the information he presents he would deserve two more Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry.
It is at least conceivable that the climate experts are wrong. I suppose that is somewhat more likely than the possibility that 2000 researchers have done calorimetry, tritium detection and mass spectroscopy wrong. Climate studies or more nebulous than electrochemistry after all, and the results are not as clear-cut. But I do not think it is plausible that people outside the field who know practically nothing about the basics will find problems that the real experts have overlooked. McKubre said that the self-appointed experts have criticized his experiment have NEVER pointed out to him a single aspect of the experiment that he was not already well aware of.
And I am quite sure that Steve Jones -- who is so far removed from reality that he imagines McKubre's closed cell may be producing false excess heat from recombination -- is incapable of recognizing or characterizing arson. I am sure he knows less about that subject than I do, just as he knows much less about calorimetry than I do. (Or if he knows more than he lets on, he lies about it.) Frankly, I am sick to death of such people.
- Jed
