Again, this is the type of predictive modeling that I do for a living. We try and figure out what possible extreme shocks might occur and how things will react but there is just no knowing. We do the best we can and if we get fairly accurate over the first couple years we pat ourselves on the back. Some big shocks might come that we listed as a possibility but to actually say they were thought to be anything more than one of a couple thousand possible paths would be completely inaccurate.
So I am left wondering why on earth anyone,
if such inaccurate models lack all credibility, would pay you to do this work? Obviously, someone believes that such models, while far from perfect, are reasonable enough to guide current practices as there is a reasonable confidence that the predictions will be close enough so long as an unexpected shock does not throw it for a loop. No one is saying we can predict the future, but we can make predictions of what is likely to happen if nothing else changes, and if the prediction is unfavourable, it stands to reason that we should purposefully act differently to avoid the unfavourable future, rather than counting on an unexpected shock to help get us out of it.
It doesn't matter that the climate models might be prone to shocks to the system. It is certainly possible that we could use all of our knowledge of the climate systems, inputs, etc and make a reasonable (reliable) prediction that the global climate is going to warm only to have an asteroid impact in northern Canada result in a nuclear winter and plunge us into a new glaciation period. Hey, global warming was all a lot of hog wash wasn't it! Just because something unexpected might come along and reverse or minimize the projected increases in anthropogenic radiative forcing, doesn't mean we should count on that happening. We didn't realize how big of an impact that the depletion of the stratospheric Ozone layer would have on atmospheric cooling, but does that mean we were wrong about the impact that fossil fuel burning would have on increasing global temperature? No, we were just wrong about the impact that aerosol use would have on global cooling. Does that mean we should just keep depleting the Ozone layer so we can keep burning fossil fuels? We can keep your oil and gas companies in business but we may have to wear extra sunscreen when we go fishing.
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Topic: Some Observations... What has everyone else seen? (Read 47805 times)