The global climate is just too damned complicated to model and we don't know enough about how everything interrelates. The whole modeling effort is an exercise in futility.
Brumar,
don't be silly. Of course, it is complex. However, we have modeled complex processes before. Think about the complexity of sending a man to the moon and back. Think about the complexity of modeling scenarios to ensure our Mars Rovers worked properly. Think about the modeling of the human body and it's incredibly complex interactions of millions of variables.
Modeling doesn't have to account for every single variable to be useful. The fact is that in complex systems, we can sometimes model less than 1% of the variables and that will be enough to tell us very useful things about where that process is headed. It's kind of like a telescope. You only need the human eye to be able to track the moon's orbit around the earth. However, you may need a much better telescope, if you want to track it's movements in more detail and get to a much greater degree of precision.
Same goes for GW. The models we have today are telling us what we need to know. They will get better and better, the more knowledgeable scientists become. But we are already at the point where the models are telling us some very useful information.
Would you ignore your doctor because he doesn't know with certainty all the variables that impact heart health, when he tells you to cut down on cholesterol? Of course, you wouldn't, because he has enough info on cholesterol to know with a high degree of probability that it can lead to heart disease. Same thing goes for GW. We don't know everything, but we know enough to know it will have really bad impacts on humans and the earth we live on. |
