junk science

[Charlie Bell]

On 22/04/2008, at 6:50 PM, Wayne Eddy wrote:
>
>
>> it may trigger glaciation, but no where near as fast as portrayed in
>> the movie, "the day after tomorrow".
>
> I didn't think it would & I didn't say it would.
> I'm not even saying that it is certain that the gulf stream will  
> shut off.

No, it's not. But it's happened before, and it's weakening now...
>
>
> I wouldn't recommend buying property in Vanautu, Bangladesh, New  
> Orleans or
> Venice, but the only thing I am really sure of is that nobody knows  
> exactly
> how human caused carbon dioxide emissions will effect the world.

No, not exactly. But climate scientists have a better idea than most,  
and the greenhouse properties of different C02 levels and other  
greenhouse gases (CH4, water vapour...) are well known. We know how  
much gas is absorbed in water, we know the carbon cycle, we know how  
much C02 we're emitting, we know how much C02 is used to build forests.

Worth listening to people that work in the field...
>
>
> Even the seven day weather forecast is never 100% percent accurate.

Completely different things. Climate and weather aren't the same at  
all. They're wrongly conflated. Melbourne is the same climate as  
Cyprus, where I used to live. But the weather is totally different.

There are very good reasons why it's hard to predict the weather  
accurately more than a few days ahead, and there are ways of working  
out how accurate those predictions are. But long term trends in  
climate are easier to understand. How those trends will affect local  
conditions is very hard to know or understand, but the global averages  
are moderately well understood, and climatology's predictions have  
been pretty good - I saw a comparison between the predictions made in  
Hansen's 1988 paper for the following twenty years and the actual data  
between 1988 and 2007... not bad at all.

http://opinion-nation.blogspot.com/2008/04/climate-science-predictive-power.html

So yes, there are uncertainties, but we have lower and upper ranges  
for our estimates.

Charlie
No Longer A Working Scientist, But I Do Play One On TV