On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 11:36 PM, David Roberson <dlrober...@aol.com> wrote:
Eric, I have seen graphs of the predicted global temperatures from several > different models and they all show a rapid increase during the questionable > period. Not one of them indicate that a pause was conceivable. The second statement -- "Not one of them indicate that a pause was conceivable" -- this is a hard proposition to evaluate. There are no doubt many hundreds or thousands of climate models that have been proposed over the years. To evaluate whether none of them predicted the absence of a rapid increase, ultimately you will need to have intimate knowledge of statements made in the following publications (and probably others) over a period of decades: http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/journals.html You will need to be conversant with units that are very different than ones in other fields and will have to have a solid working knowledge of the relevant physics, chemistry and biology. If you have not personally made the effort to keep on top of the specific models proposed in these journals and the highly technical statements that have been made and debated ad infinitum, you will need to place trust in someone else to do this homework for you. You will be a babe in the woods and will need to call upon someone to get you out of the bind of knowing little about climate science, like all of the rest of us non-specialists. To get yourself out of this bind, you can choose the BBC, or the evening news, or infographics published on a Web site. Some will choose to put their trust in inveterate climate skeptics whose funding is murky and agenda unclear (this is a little like going to Huizenga or Taubes for information about LENR). Back of the envelope arguments about the inherent difficulty of predicting things with such a chaotic system are helpful for getting a zeroth order approximation, but they take us little further than that. You appear to want to defer to the experts a bit too much Eric. It is no doubt true that I have been guilty of putting too much trust in experts at times. I am grateful, though, to be far more skeptical than you or others here in this particular instance. I do not trust the BBC or the New York Times or Fox News to provide more than vague sense of where things are. Ultimately I will only put trust in people who have invested the time and effort to really understand everything that is being said and demonstrated a clear knowledge of the minutiae, whether they are climate scientists or investigative journalists. I am grateful that my position could not be easier to defend in this instance. Eric
