Revising climate models and AGW
by Greg Krehbiel on 2 February 2013
Everybody knows that Europe has warmer winters than equivalent latitudes in North America because of the Gulf Stream, right? The Gulf Stream carries all that warm tropical water north and then north east towards Europe, making Ireland far more pleasant than Newfoundland — which is approximately across the Atlantic from Ireland.
That’s a pretty reasonable conjecture, and it’s been the received wisdom for a long time. It might even be true, but according to an article in the February issue of Scientific American, there are new studies that cast doubt on that theory.
If something so fundamental as that is still up in the air, why in the world would I trust climate models? — which have, just by the way, consistently performed poorly for about the last 20 years.
This is just a single example, but it’s illustrative of why I’m skeptical of anthropogenic global warming. It seems to be based on projections and patterns and graphs with a couple hundred years of data. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but in college I learned to look at time in much larger increments. Hundreds of years mean nothing.
We still really don’t know what causes ice ages and interglacial periods. We know a lot, but we still don’t really understand them. We don’t even understand our climate today.
The good thing about the global warming craze is that we’ve increased our knowledge substantially. We have so much more data now than we had 20 years ago, and we’re finding new things all the time. That’s all good, and maybe in a couple decades we’ll have an inkling how our climate really works.
-- 2013-02-02 » Greg Krehbiel
3 February 2013 @ 9:48 am
You’re right. Climate models have not been perfectly accurate. They have been too conservative.
Actual climate change has been consistently worse than predicted.
3 February 2013 @ 11:17 am
Some have been too high, some have been too low. The bottom line is there’s no reason to take them very seriously.