Re: Nuclear Power Des NOT Need Gobal Warming Hoax!

[RuthWeiner@AOL.COM]

Any model is only as credible as its input and the assumptions made in putting it together. In other words, a model never "tells you" anything that you didn't tell it first.  Sometimes the data we put in are confirmed, and sometimes they are educated guesses.  There are really only two sources of modeling assumptions: historical trends and the basic equations of physics and chemistry.  For global climate change predictions, we depend heavily on the first of these.



Examples of modeled predictions that proved incorrect:



(1) In the years immediately after WWII, electric energy use in the United States increased about 7% per year, and the increase was pretty much linear, so utilities planned construction on that basis.  However, by 1968, the annual increase was a little less than 3%/year and has stayed there ever since.

(2) Weather is predicted with about 65% accuracy on the average, in spite of reams and reams of good data.

(3) When I was a professor at WWU (1974-1993), we were consistently unable to predict the size of the entering freshman class to better than +/- 25%, in spite of the fact that Western had been a university since 1964.



We can now measure partial pressure of CO2 in the air pretty accurately. We can also measure temperature from satellite data.  However, our models take past trends and project them into the future, with all the uncertainty that implies.



Ruth

-- 

Ruth F. Weiner

ruthweiner@aol.com

505-856-5011

(o)505-284-8406



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