I read the literature. That is why I know that what you state is wrong. And for two reasons:
1 - Insurance companies and epidemiologists have good, reliable data. Climatologists don't. It is not their fault, is it just impossible to have good data on the large periods of time required to study planets climates. You see, just a few decades of reliable data isn't enough when we know that the climate changes in scale of thousands of years. 2 - When an insurance company gathers all information, they can test their hypothesis with what happens in the real world and see if it works. That is how you know that smoking makes a difference in people's lifespans, but other things don't. Epidemiologists can test on actual living beings how diseases spread. Now, tell me, how do climatologists do this, bearing in mind that the results should take thousands of years to appear? They test their hypothesis in computer models, which are not quite the same thing as the reality yet. Large, complex phenomena are easier to study when it is based on the law of the large numbers. That is precisely what happens with insurance and epidemiology, but not with climate. There is no reality check in climate. Those predictions based on large number of (bad) data are tested on scenarios that are in a computer. I am an economist, and we have the same problem. We do have good prediction models, they are quite sophisticated, but not totally reliable. Otherwise, one would not see economic crisis, economic downturns nor unemployment. And I am pretty sure that economic data is far more accurate than climate ones. *Economists cannot test hypothesis in a lab. Neither can climatologists. * But that was not even my point. I believe that anthropic global warming is possible, even probable. I just don't care, because the alternative, poverty, is far worse. 2012/7/30 Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> > Bruno Santos <besantos1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Do we have a climatologist here? That would help the debate. > > > It would help if people would first read a credible, expert account of > global warming theory! > > >> >> However, I have to say that I have my doubts when it comes to predictions >> by these experts. You see, we do not have any credible scientific model for >> weather prediction that works for periods longer than a week . . . >> > > I do not like to be harsh, but that is a prime example of a mistake made > by an amateur critic who has not read the literature. You completely > misunderstand the technical issue. What you are saying is similar to this > assertion: > > "Life insurance companies have actuarial tables predicting how long a > person is likely to live, based on present age, sex, the person's weight, > whether he or she smokes and other factors. > > However, a life insurance agent cannot tell me whether I will live another > 20 years. I might be run over by a bus tomorrow. I might die of cancer next > year. > > Therefore, life insurance is a scam. They pretend they can predict the > future, but they cannot." > > Needless to say, that is nonsense. You can predict the remaining lifespan > of a large group of people, even though it is impossible to predict the > lifespan of any given individual. Large scale complex events involving many > elements are sometimes more predictable than individual events with fewer > causes and less complex causes. That is counter-intuitive but it happens > with many natural phenomena, including climate, epidemiology and so on. > > - Jed > >
