They are running a petition to try and stop his column in Washington Post form appearing - too much of a heretic I guess. The reason for sharing is that he reminds me of the fundamental point made by Freeman Dyson, truly a great physicist, about how reliance on models has a seductive power over time (and with time invested into them). And the other key point which is that those models are pure fluid dynamics and do not apparently include the effect of vegetation and topsoil which is rather amazing when you think about it. They take Earth as is at one point in time and assume vegetation and topsoil are one time snapshot in time inputs into the model and the rest is then movement of various bits of that initial condition. To put it another way, if there is a massive forrest fire in the future that destroys 5 % of North American vegetation, the effect of that on predictive ability of 50 year models of climate could be dramatic and yet, in their models, there is no space for such mid-course alterations. You take one set of conditions and run it 50 years forward. Then take another and run it 50 years forward. And to make it scientific, take the average of all the results. Not worth the paper they are written on.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 06:12:38 +0000
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