2008-12-26 17:40:48 by abowman in Ravings of a Lunatic (no comments) permalink
I’ve been following a web site called Climate Audit for a while. The site is a highly technical look at climate data and the assumptions that go into processing it and the assumptions that come out of the processing. It’s an interesting read even though I’m far behind on the jargon and technical skillz. Still, I can pick up most of the meaning from the context. The author has a sense of humor too.
It’s interesting to see how loosely the science around the data seems to be. That leads me to the issue of consensus science. A friend of mine once told me that you have to evaluate all of the data, even the data that doesn’t fit your hypothesis and find a hypothesis that fits it all. If you don’t look at all of the data, you can easily draw whatever conclusion you want from only the data that supports it.
After I read Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, I started thinking about computer models and how the base assumptions of the model maker can influence the output of the model. My thoughts were clarified later when I saw a map on one of the weather sites that showed the predicted paths for the hurricane based on several models. Some of the models varied by a few degrees but others varied wildly. I’d be interested in seeing all of the model and their base assumptions compared side-by-side. I would also like to see whose three, four and five day predictions were better than flipping a coin.
When I look at the models and I look at the quality of the climate data and the analysis being performed, I wonder how most everyone can say with authority that Global Warming is the only explanation of the data. Frankly, the reaction I see to people who go against the consensus and either doubt or deny it seems more religious than scientific.
Here’s what I’d like to see from the Global Warming Crowd: I’d like to see consensus prediction, a two year prediction by region for temperature increases that is accurate to within 0.05 degree Fahrenheit. I really don’t see what good their theory is unless is has some predictive value. Once we have the prediction and the data, we can compare them and see if their predictions are any better than random guessing.