User talk:JG17

Modelling climate change

Hi JG17. Interesting mission statement you have there. I'm a believer in (trying) to consider things as objectively as possible. I have however been fairly convinced by the (amateur) research I've done into climate change that CO2 is a significant contributor. It's actually rather hard to find a scientist who disagrees with that, although they may disagree about how much of a contributor, or what should be done about it. It's interesting that your area of expertise is modelling. I don't particularly doubt that the current climate models are unreliable; logically I would expect them to be far less reliable in precise predictions than weather forecasts, because of the extra order of complexity involved. However, surely you would accept that we should at least make the effort to try to understand? Do you think attempts to create models which accurately explain the broad sweeps of 20th century temperature change make sense? The assumption is presumably that if we can find a set of inputs which give a reasonable approximation of past behaviour, then we can at least make assumptions about the direction of future temperature changes; i.e. if CO2 (in combination with other known factors) can be shown to give a reasonably accurate graph of 20th century temperature change, then we are justified in assuming it will continue to have an effect on 21st century temperature change; especially in combination with the known properties of CO2 (we know the mechanism by which it would increase temperature). What's your view? --Merlinme 16:52, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Hello Merlinme: I'm a bit late responding but anyway... It is indeed a worthy effort to try to understand climate and to model it. However there are so many parameters involved in the current models which are almost pure guesswork that the current efforts clearly reflect the bias of the people who do it. That many such factors are included in the models is also misleading because all factors other than GHG's have been forced to cancel each other out. We can actually vary the parameters to favour any scenario at all. That is, if solar forcing were considered important and CO2 was not, then you can easily get the models to demonstrate it just by adjusting the parameters to suit (Hadley centre even published a paper demonstrating this which, of course, totally belies the IPCC/Hadley/Met office official position). It's not scientific and it's not honest but it is exactly what they are doing to favour GHG's. BTW I don't find it too difficult to find a scientist who is dubious with the theory that CO2 is driving climate change but it is difficult to get many to speak loudly about it and it is even more difficult to get opposing views published. Science has always been like this though: people spend years defending the mainstream view because they have a reputation and significant funding at stake. Climate science is by no means unusual - just look at cosmology (steady state vs big bang), or dietetics (how many pieces of fruit a day and how many glasses of water?) or medicine (phony shaken baby syndrome) or psychology (phony Munchausen by proxy) or social sciences (phony devil worshiping child abuse) or vets (BSE - phony prions). Having said that, I think the economic arguments of those who oppose AGW are often equally ludicrous. Yes we can have alternative fuels and it needn't be costly - in fact in many cases it will save money (JG17 16:27, 2 July 2007 (UTC)).

Accidental rollback on Talk:Soon and Baliunas controversy

Hi, if you look at the history of this talk page you will notice that I rolled back your latest comment, and then rolled back my own rollback a minute later.

This will obviously puzzle you so I just want to explain and apologise. I clicked the rollback link by accident and undid it when the page my browser fetched wasn't the diff listing I had expected. Obviously this in no way reflects on your comments. --TS 14:14, 5 January 2010 (UTC)