[LINK] Re: Link Digest, Vol 173, Issue 16

[Danny Yee]

Stewart Fist wrote:
> This is aligned with other claims that I have:
 
[ long list of different claims, without any sources ]

> Frankly, just a comparison of these different claims to authority show
> just how dicey all this scientific certainty is ... and how little
> attention has been paid to building a basis of factual evidence upon
> which to base predictions.

I'm sorry, this is just wacko conspiracy talk.  Does anyone really
believe that climate scientists are paying no attention to "the
factual evidence", or not using factual evidence in their predictions?

It's true that the results aren't as precise as we'd like them to be.
But that's not because no "attention has been paid to building a basis
of factual evidence upon which to base predictions".  It's because
real science involves estimates, errors, and uncertainties, and the
historical climate data are limited in scope and accuracy.

As for your list of statements, you you don't give sources for any
of them, so it's entirely unclear how much "claim to authority" any
of them have: are they from recent publications in the scientific
literature, or random passages pulled from out of date secondary
sources?

Climate models *are* tested by application to historical data.
But it's trivially easy to build models that accurately predict past
data but which have no ability to predict the future -- there are
hundreds of programs, for example, that accurately predict every
single _previous_ stock market crash.

If we get away from blanket generalisations like "warm",
then there's a lot of fascinating data out there.  This paper
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Bradley.pdf
is a non-technical overview which includes some nice graphs showing
temperature records as well as some backwards modelling.

Danny.
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