Oh, but that real life stuff, who cares? This is the entire summation of an article published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This guy turned back the clock on 22 climate models, plugged in the numbers as if the Industrial Revolution never happened, and concluded that only the addition of human-related fossil fuel pollution could raise ocean temperatures by one degree, which some other climate scientists have theorized instensify hurricane strength. So we take a what-if scenario inside a computer program, and we prove another what-if scenario, that average ocean temperatures have risen, increasing the number of strong hurricanes. And this warrants news coverage? The only thing you need to read in the article is the last sentence: "Santer and his colleagues did not address the historical hurricane intensity record." Santer's group also ignored reality because ocean temperatures have actually dropped in the last two years.
But that doesn't matter to the media, because some scientist, somewhere, said global warming is happening because people did all that icky polluting. That's what matters. What matters to me, and to good science, is that this study has no predictive value or even descriptive value. The study does not predict how many hurricanes of a certain strength will occur, and doesn't even match the historical record of hurricane intensity. All that work does nothing. It is a total waste of research funding.
This reminds me of an old SNL skit. It was a talking heads panel debating the qestion, "What if Eleanor Roosevelt could Fly?"
ReplyDeleteRabbit:
ReplyDeleteYes! And it's only the buzzwords Global Warming that made this thing news, otherwise it would have been an obscure article testing climate modeling software.