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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (25214)	9/10/2009 4:13:29 AM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36918

Vint, the thing about amazingly sophisticated and hugely complex models such as I have of the climate, geomorphology, volcanicity, plate tectonics and billion year geophysics is that they can't be written down for others to have a look at very well. Writing is a linear thing which is necessarily very broad brush. Think of Gary Kasparov's chess model in his head. You surely realize he couldn't write it down for you to read and decide whether it would be good enough to beat a computer model of how to play chess. He could write down general principles and give lots of examples. Climate models are like spherical cows: en.wikipedia.org I have written quite a bit about the ideas involved, such as the stripping of carbon from the ecosphere. That's something you can observe for yourself. Same for the other things I've written down. The reader has to get them in their head and see if they can falsify the ideas to show that the conclusions are wrong. So far, the best people have come up with is to call names which you can imagine isn't very convincing. As you are noticing with your medical procedure, what happens up close and personal today matters more to normal humans than what trivial thing might happen 100 years from now such as sea level rise of 10cm. While you fill in time before and after your procedure, you might like to think about the oscillations of desert, plants, snow, cloud and the heat pumping process of water around the oceans and through the atmosphere. The point about a climate model is that they have to predict the actual climate with ALL variables included. It's no use saying "Oh, but we didn't know a volcano would erupt, the sun would conk out and reglaciation happen now". Reality includes volcanoes, bolides, sun spots, gamma rays, clouds, plant coverage cycles and all the rest. Pretending that only one variable might change is not much use. It's interesting, but not much use to know that in 100 years we might get a 10cm sea level rise if all other variables than CO2 remain constant. Mqurice