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from the climate-change-simply-happens dept.
Papas Fritas writes "Patrick Michaels writes in Forbes that atmospheric physicist Garth Paltridge has laid out several well-known uncertainties in climate forecasting including our inability to properly simulate clouds that are anything like what we see in the real world, the embarrassing lack of average surface warming now in its 17th year, and the fumbling (and contradictory) attempts to explain it away. According to Paltridge, an emeritus professor at the University of Tasmania and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, virtually all scientists directly involved in climate prediction are aware of the enormous uncertainties associated with their product. How then is it that those of them involved in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can put their hands on their hearts and maintain there is a 95 per cent probability that human emissions of carbon dioxide have caused most of the global warming that has occurred over the last several decades? In short, there is more than enough uncertainty about the forecasting of climate to allow normal human beings to be at least reasonably hopeful that global warming might not be nearly as bad as is currently touted.
Climate scientists, and indeed scientists in general, are not so lucky. They have a lot to lose if time should prove them wrong. "In the light of all this, we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem-or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem-in its effort to promote the cause," writes Paltridge. "It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society's respect for scientific endeavor.""
(Score: 5, Interesting) by lubricus on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:04AM
The summary confuses a couple different issues, so let's take them apart:
This is the certainty behind the associations between human emissions and global warming: what has happened.
This concerns the precise prediction of future climate.
Yes, of course there are uncertainties and assumptions in models, this is why the IPCC reports have several models of emissions, and error ranges around projections AR 4 [www.ipcc.ch].
We're geeks here, so we know the strengths and weakness of models, and how they can have assumptions and uncertainties and still be useful. We also know the difference between confidence in attributing past occurrences to causes, and predicting the future.
Paltridge (who believes anthropogenic climate change is real but thinks the impact will be minimal) is essentially worried (original article here) [quadrant.org.au] that the public won't understand there will be errors in specific predictions, and thus all of science will suffer a breach of trust, or something. (The linked article then goes about the standard arguments of how the structure of science funding makes scientists converge upon the standard school of thought yada yada).
Just wanted to be clear about the argument being presented: Paltridge believes in human caused global climate change. He simply thinks that the predictive models might be off on the degree of warming. From this he says science will be doomed because everyone will say "ug, science, remember how they overestimated that climate change thing".
... sorry about the typos