I think this will be my last post, as there isn’t much more new to add.
Well, I think Ben Franklin summed up the practical points very well. Sorry, I like to speak in generalizations. I feel that this “cite me a source” business is a “gotcha”. If you do cite a source, then the next post rips the source apart. Also I don’t bookmark too much of the stuff I read, and then it takes too long to find it again. My posts are not intended to be research papers, but rather my informed opinion. What I say is substantiated throughout the internet, and can be googled if it bothers you than much to verify it. I’d rather plant the idea in your head and let you do your own research.
I’m a manufacturing engineer. I can tell you that no matter how good a new machine design looks on CAD (computer aided design). No matter how good the electrical and mechanical system looks in planning. No matter how valid the heat and refrigeration theory seems in design. No matter how many times we go over the numbers looking for calculation errors. If my company ran a new machine down the production line and shipped it out to our customers without any physical testing, I’d be fired in two weeks when the customer complaints came rolling in.
Any engineer will tell you, what you see on paper (computer) does not always reflect the real world. There are always unforeseen variables that creep into production and other factors may have higher impact than were anticipated. You should thank God that engineers have more humility about their work than climatologists next time you drive over a bridge or get in an elevator.
The comparison to econmics or psychology is a good one. I don’t think there is any millionaire out there willing to invest outrageous amounts of money based on an 50 year economic model, even if it were produced by the best economist in the world.
Right now, the AGW camp and their political cohorts are demanding that we risk $40 TRILLION on just that sort of prediction. I might as well lay the deed on my house on the Trifecta at the racetrack, because my bookie tells me he has a sure thing (he is an expert you know).
Sadly, I DON’T have a lot of respect for climatologists. I can appreciate that they are intelligent, hard-working, and sincerely think they are on to something. But ANY scientist who refuses to see the limitations of his science is just plain arrogant (or ignorant). As for phrenologists, in their day, they too were respected scientists. Like eugenicists, after the science is debunked, later scientists disown them.
Science is and always has been faddish and filled with dead ends. It is a myth that science has progressed as this seemless building of knowledge. Science DOES cover its ass, precisely because it doesn’t want to answer questions like, “If they were so wrong in the past, how can you be so sure now?”. We should be skeptical. We shouldn’t take science ALWAYS at face value. That’s why we use the scienctific method, predication and verification, and peer review and challenge – not consensus, politics, popularity, and cult of personality.
I wonder what we’ll think of present day climatologists in a generation or two?
