“I should trust the same guys who can’t predict whether it will rain on Friday to tell me whether the ice caps will melt in 300 years.”
It is initially appealing, though simple. It might, however, be wrong. While we cannot predict what Joe will buy when he goes to the market, we can say that the public will still want cars and will still need houses. Does the same apply to climate change?
Apart from the fact that the climate models could just be wrong regardless of the accuracy of the weather man’s predictions:
The prophecies of the warmist-propagandists are far more specific than saying that some people in the future will buy cars and houses.
People in the past have bought cars and houses. The catastrophes prophesied by the warmists have never ocurred in human history.
Even saying that the public will still want cars in the future is fallacious. Do people still need buggy whips? Remember that in 1898 there were dire predictions that all the cities of the West would be overrun by horse manure by the 1920s. Within a few years the automobile was being churned out by capitalists, and the horse and cart soon went out of fashion.
For anyone looking for a reference for point #3 above, here it is:
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-the-great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/
Without going into the q of whether the pediction is right or wrong, it seems to me to be a logical error to argue that becuse they cannot predict rain on Friday therefore they cannot predict melting ice caps in 300 years.
The forces that cause rain are not clearly understood, but the forces that cause ice caps to melt might be.
For example, we don’t know that it will rain on Friday, but we do know that at some future time the sun will stop shining, having expended all its energy.
I think it is a valid criticism because of the fact that the global climate model began as the local weather model. The local weather model is a pretty poor predictor, especially the further out in time they try to forecast. Starting with a broken model and modifying it to try and predict global climate seems like folly to me.
Beyond the model itself, I believe that the entire method of treying to use past data from a dynamic system to try and predict the future is futile. I would equate it to trying to use historical price data of stocks to try and predict the future price of a particular stock.
Projecting things like average global temperature into the future is different from predicting specific events like whether a thunderstorm will occur on Friday. However, even with the former, how does the climate scientist know that he’s taking every possible variable correctly into account? The projections are only as good as the models they’re based on.
Even worse, there’s the pesky issue of correlation vs. causation. Do climate scientists know what actually causes rises in global temperatures?
we do know that at some future time the sun will stop shining, having expended all its energy.
I do not think “we know” that. “Some people believe” that, not unlike ancient people who “knew” a lot of cosmology. Well, take any obsolete physics’ theory as an example of stuff people “knew”.
Government funds a ton of research. To damn climate research would be to damn a ton of other research.
My only beef with climate change is that they hype disaster scenarios and leave out the positives of a warmer climate. They only focus on the negatives. Secondly, science demands politcal interferance in the climate.
THat is the biggest issue. Have beef with the politcal solutions, not the science.