[While the old sandbox was getting full, the comment thread on the externalities post kind of petered out and segued into looking at the externalities implied by AGW, and then it started circling the old climate change barn again. A request was made to continue it here – fair enough.
But before diving in one more time, I’d like to point out some strongly orthogonal aspects of discussing climate change cum AGW. Having ignored or not understood them in the past has led to the predictable Nowhere. Here’s a partial list –
- Verity of paleo climate records, - Verity of recent – last 50K years – climate measurements,
- Definitions of earth’s atmospheric temperature,
- Definitions of sea levels,
- Data handling methods to create a usable sets of inputs to models,
- Knowledge of climate physics – terrestrial and extra-terrestrial – viz sub-processes and their large scale integration (e.g. the earth’s carbon cycle, cosmic rays impact on cloud cover),
- General Circulation Models (GCMs) – their design, programming, and testing,
- Validating GCMs – data sets used, performance criteria, selection/tuning of model constants, sub-model transfer functions and stabilities (bifurcations to chaos), sensitivity to inputs, …
- Interpretation of GCM outputs – obtaining reliable variance measures, accept/reject criteria, …
– Understanding the impact of human interventions on climate (let alonge AGW).
In a reasonable world (not the one we live in), debating climate change between people who understand the science, math, and modeling (of complex, stochastic, dynamic systems), and those who don’t is not possible. One side can cite and interpret the technical literature, and other side can only appeal to ‘consensus science’ or my scientist(s) are smarter than your scientist(s). Nevertheless, in today’s world such debates are exciting, important, and even fun – each side viewing the other as unredeemable troglodytes. When the participants are tired of finally insulting the quality of their opponents’ double helixes, and the debate “is heard no more: it (was again) a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, nevertheless but advising public policies penned by grossly ignorant and hubristic central planners. Have at it. gjr]
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