[ RadSafe ] RE: The hot and cold of history & journalisticcredibility

[Syd H. Levine]

Many of us would be more impressed if predictions about next Saturday's
weather were more dependable than the local "wooly worm" prognosticators.

Syd H. Levine
AnaLog Services, Inc.
Phone:  (270) 276-5671
Telefax:  (270) 276-5588
E-mail:  analog at logwell.com
Web URL:  www.logwell.com
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Prestwich" <prestwic at mcmaster.ca>
To: "Gary Damschen" <gary at pageturners.com>
Cc: <radsafe at radlab.nl>
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 9:32 AM
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] RE: The hot and cold of history & 
journalisticcredibility


> The current models, when run back in time, reproduce the observations.
> Bill Prestwich
>
> Gary Damschen wrote:
>
>> If the science behind anthropomorphic contributions to Global Warming is 
>> so
>> settled, then could someone explain what seems to be a growing number of
>> articles similar to this one?
>>
>>
>>
>> http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm
>>
>>
>>
>> I also wonder why we are continuing to insist on taking drastic action to
>> forestall the doom and gloom scenarios predicted by computer models when 
>> the
>> models' predictions about the effects of warming apparently do not even 
>> come
>> close to approximating the effects contemporaneously recorded during 
>> earlier
>> known warming periods. Isn't this a bit like the old jokes/stories about
>> people getting million dollar phone bills and being told they had to pay,
>> even though they couldn't possibly have run up such a large bill by
>> themselves, "because the computer said so?" Since when does science 
>> discount
>> the observation of physical phenomena in favor of computer models when
>> checking hypotheses? It seems like almost anyone could postulate a
>> hypothesis, develop a computer simulation based on the hypothesis, then 
>> show
>> the results of the simulation as "proof" that the hypothesis is correct.
>>
>>
>>
>> As far as the "scientific consensus" argument goes, the above article's
>> author makes an excellent point about the "Global Cooling" consensus in 
>> the
>> 70's and 80's. Other great consensus views include the invalidity of 
>> plate
>> techtonics, the flatness of the Earth, the rotation of the Sun around the
>> Earth, the immutability of the atom, and the ferocity and magnitude of 
>> the
>> 2006 hurricane season predicted by.the computer models. If we had 
>> followed
>> the urgent advice during the cooling scare to melt/nuke the ice caps to
>> prevent a new Ice Age, where would we be now? The alarmists of that day
>> decried the immorality of inaction to halt the cooling much as the 
>> current
>> alarmists decry inaction to halt the warming. Perhaps we need to do real
>> observational science and work on refining our models so that they
>> reasonably approximate observed physical phenomena before we insist on
>> potentially ruinous actions that may well be counterproductive based on
>> predictions from those models. I mean, really, isn't this somewhat akin 
>> to
>> demanding immediate action to counter the "radiological threat" posed by 
>> the
>> increase of background counts from 40cpm to 60cpm over 2 seconds and
>> extrapolating that rise for the next 5 minutes? If the average background
>> over 30 minutes is 50cpm, might this be within the normal variance? Is it 
>> so
>> impossible that we might be seeing natural fluctuations? As with 
>> radiation,
>> I wonder if there is not a large difference between "detectable" and
>> "hazardous" in climatology.
>>
>>
>>
>> My $0.02,
>>
>> Gary Damschen
>>
>>
>>
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