Dec07
Climate Models
on December 7, 2012 at 10:03 amI will be entirely unsurprised if climate turns out to ultimately be unmodelable. It’s a very complex phenomenon, and anyone who claims to have confidence in current models is just fooling themselves.
I still boggles me how people can assure me that the models are very very good and we should trust them for decisions with trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of costs… and yet they’ve never had any predictive power.
The only significant test of a model is its predictivity, and these ones keep failing.
I’d be less annoyed if they didn’t claim the model’s predictions (that are always wrong, so far) were pure science beyond any question; if they called them Ouija-board predictions I’d have no quarrel… because we’d know to discount them by their own labels.
Just thought I’d offer an amendment.
I have to disagree. I noticed that in the last few years, they’ve dialed a few of them up to 11, which works quite well for the AGW propaganda.
Is it incorrect to suggest that it is unmodelable for the same reason that econonmies are? I.e. Hayek’s “Knowledge Problem”?
Well, insofar as both are very complex with poorly understood interactions, yes, but Hayek’s Knowledge Problem dealt specifically with the issues of human behavior, which vastly increases the problem. In theory, assuming we understand the physics sufficiently, we should be able to model climate, though I’m not sure it will ever happen predictably in practice, particularly because it’s a chaotic system. The human element makes modeling economies exponentially harder.
Predictions can be made even about chaotic systems in a statistical sense. The knowledge problem is economics is essentially a statement regarding observability. Actually, detectability, as the unobserved modes are not all stable in general. Given that the climate has meandered in a relatively narrow range for quite some time, it is most likely at least locally detectable in the most important states.
The big problem in modeling climate is technical inadequacy in the researchers, combined in a toxic brew with overarching hubris characteristic of intellects which have only developed to the mezzanine level.