On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 10:52 PM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote:
Since the pause was 100% not predicted and instead should have been a more
> rapid rise, how much more in error could they be?
How confident are you of this assertion?
> How on earth could you or anybody else believe that they will be correct
> in their predictions over a 100 year period with this sort of track
> record? Are you confident that they now have all the correct variables
> under control?
Dave, I think you misunderstand my position. It's not that climate
scientists should be given a free pass. It's also not that they haven't
had a hard time predicting near- and medium-term trends in climate change;
I wouldn't be surprised if they have had difficulties in this regard. I'm
saying something more subtle than that:
1. I believe it would take a lot of reading of actual journal papers and
following of specific models to even be able to begin to evaluate the
success of the field. What if there are some climate scientists working
quietly off in a corner that are doing a very good job of accurately
characterizing things up to now within certain ranges? That kind of detail
would be all too easy to miss if one's only source of information about the
field is the evening news.
2. I strongly suspect that no climate skeptics here have made such an
effort.
3. Because there are surely some smart people in the field (as there are
in any field), I would be wary of betting *against* some accumulation of
real knowledge in the field. I'm sure there are people from Harvard,
Oxford, Cambridge, U. of Georgia, etc., that study climate science.
Perhaps the only statements the careful ones can make about long-term
climate change are vague ones that do not tell us much about specific
temperatures. I wouldn't know, because I haven't followed the journals and
the specific models (per point 1, above).
So no free pass is needed. Just more than a little wariness to pass
judgment on a field I haven't followed closely, given the great amount of
effort I've had to spend just to start to get up to speed on a different
field in the last couple of years (physics).
Eric
