When did the folks at 'Skeptic' flip on AGW?

[ruveyn1]

Personally, I don't think it even MATTERS if there is AGW or not, the only proper solution is to wait for the market to sort it out. Or, sort it out yourself and make gobs of money out of it.

Oh, and not buy beachfront property.

Markets are not a magic bullet.  Climate change is a physical problem and has to be addressed scientifically before it can be decided what steps (if any) are appropriate to take.  First, there is little doubt that we live in a warming era.  Since the end of the Little Ice Age (circa 1715 c.e.)  the weather has been warming.  Second, the next thing to determine is what are the major drivers of this warming trend.  As a related question it behooves us to work out what human activities (if any) are driving this trend and how do they compare with natural drivers (such as orbital variation,  variation of the tilt of the Earth's axis,  cloud formation moderated by tertiary cosmic radiation).  Are there countervailing trends due to natural drivers?  

 

Right now the biggest problem is that we do not have a real climate science.  What we have are climate models.  Unfortunately models have many adjustable parameters and with appropriate fiddling a model can be cooked up to fit any data.  We are lacking a rigorous climate science. Why?  Because climate is average weather and weather is a physical process based on chaotic dynamics,  which our mathematical methods are not all that good at handling. 

 

Here is a snippet from the Wiki article on turbulence:

 

Although it is possible to find some particular solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations governing fluid motion, all such solutions are unstable to finite perturbations at large Reynolds numbers. Sensitive dependence on the initial and boundary conditions makes fluid flow irregular both in time and in space so that a statistical description is needed. Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov proposed the first statistical theory of turbulence, based on the aforementioned notion of the energy cascade (an idea originally introduced by Richardson) and the concept of self-similarity. As a result, the Kolmogorov microscales were named after him. It is now known that the self-similarity is broken so the statistical description is presently modified.^[3] Still, a complete description of turbulence remains one of the unsolved problems in physics.

 

 

 

Until we have such a description,  we do not have a rigorous science of weather and climate

Edited February 25, 2013 by ruveyn1

[FeatherFall]

This isn't particularly relevant to the folks at Skeptic, but it is relevant to the discussion in general. Everybody's favorite anarchist, Stefan Molyneux, beleives the climate debate is primarily about feedback systems. That is a conclusion I came to independently, but he presents it much better than I could. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gDErDwXqhc.

[ruveyn1]

This isn't particularly relevant to the folks at Skeptic, but it is relevant to the discussion in general. Everybody's favorite anarchist, Stefan Molyneux, beleives the climate debate is primarily about feedback systems. That is a conclusion I came to independently, but he presents it much better than I could. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gDErDwXqhc.

There it is.  The models are wrong. If we had a scientific theory that produce such poor predictions it would have been busted and discarded by now.  But all we have are those damned models.

[FeatherFall]

Right, but when discussing the issue you would do well to make the point that the models are wrong because of the feedbacks. This gives anyone interested a specific point of research among a sea of literature. It also happens to be the most important point.

Edited February 26, 2013 by FeatherFall