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russotto · 05-15-2003, 10:36 AM

The problem with modeling the climate is twofold

1) Extreme dependence on initial conditions and other nonlinear effects. Or, in other words, chaos. This means that tiny changes in the model's input lead to large and complex changes in the predicted output.

2) We don't know the initial conditions. I am a regular reader of _Science News_. Every few months, researchers discover a new significant source or sink for CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. Each time one of these is discovered, it renders all previously climatological predictions based on modeling _invalid_.

The case for the existence of global warming is pretty good. The case for anthropogenic origin of that warming is far weaker. Personally, I note that we're at the top of a ~110 year solar cycle. Further, apparently the Earth's orbit is entering a period historically associated with warming.

And if global warming is NOT anthropogenic and in fact there's not much humans can do about it, then extreme austerity measures like those demanded of the US by Kyoto are foolish. In fact, we might need to burn more fossil fuels in order to mitigate the effects of any warming.

And then there's the possibility that global warming might actually be beneficial...

05-15-2003, 10:36 AM	#16
russotto Professor Join Date: Jan 2001 Posts: 1,788	Computer models? Fuggetaboutem The problem with modeling the climate is twofold 1) Extreme dependence on initial conditions and other nonlinear effects. Or, in other words, chaos. This means that tiny changes in the model's input lead to large and complex changes in the predicted output. 2) We don't know the initial conditions. I am a regular reader of _Science News_. Every few months, researchers discover a new significant source or sink for CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. Each time one of these is discovered, it renders all previously climatological predictions based on modeling _invalid_. The case for the existence of global warming is pretty good. The case for anthropogenic origin of that warming is far weaker. Personally, I note that we're at the top of a ~110 year solar cycle. Further, apparently the Earth's orbit is entering a period historically associated with warming. And if global warming is NOT anthropogenic and in fact there's not much humans can do about it, then extreme austerity measures like those demanded of the US by Kyoto are foolish. In fact, we might need to burn more fossil fuels in order to mitigate the effects of any warming. And then there's the possibility that global warming might actually be beneficial...