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posted by Dopefish on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the climate-change-simply-happens dept.

Papas Fritas writes "Patrick Michaels writes in Forbes that atmospheric physicist Garth Paltridge has laid out several well-known uncertainties in climate forecasting including our inability to properly simulate clouds that are anything like what we see in the real world, the embarrassing lack of average surface warming now in its 17th year, and the fumbling (and contradictory) attempts to explain it away. According to Paltridge, an emeritus professor at the University of Tasmania and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, virtually all scientists directly involved in climate prediction are aware of the enormous uncertainties associated with their product. How then is it that those of them involved in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can put their hands on their hearts and maintain there is a 95 per cent probability that human emissions of carbon dioxide have caused most of the global warming that has occurred over the last several decades? In short, there is more than enough uncertainty about the forecasting of climate to allow normal human beings to be at least reasonably hopeful that global warming might not be nearly as bad as is currently touted.

Climate scientists, and indeed scientists in general, are not so lucky. They have a lot to lose if time should prove them wrong. "In the light of all this, we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem-or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem-in its effort to promote the cause," writes Paltridge. "It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society's respect for scientific endeavor.""

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Open4D on Thursday February 20 2014, @12:42PM

    by Open4D (371) on Thursday February 20 2014, @12:42PM (#3387) Journal

    Hmmm, that's a nice round number, 17 years. I wonder why they picked that; it must have some special relevance to the standard deviation of the mean of the variance over pi or something. But ... I could swear that a year ago they were talking about 16 years. Oh, never mind.

    Surely that choice wouldn't be motivated by an attempt to use the fact that 1998 & 2002 were particularly hot years as evidence against a decades-scale warming trend? I mean, I'm sure if they picked 18 years, or - even better - if they applied proper statistical analysis techniques to the whole data set, that would continue to support Mr Michaels's claim that "the scientific establishment has painted itself into a corner over global warming".

    Please inform the Cato Institute that using similarly innovative statistical techniques (a 17 minute period) I have provisionally calculated my defecation rate as 42kg per day.

    [/sarcasm]

    BTW, here's the Global Surface Temperatures graph [nasa.gov] from http://climate.nasa.gov/news/468 [nasa.gov]

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  • (Score: 1) by sar on Thursday February 20 2014, @04:56PM

    by sar (507) on Thursday February 20 2014, @04:56PM (#3563)

    Thank you mister, your excellent application of 17-something statistics made my day :)