Discussion > Climate Change Refuters
Here's the thing with climate models: they MUST fail because they can't succeed. They can't succeed because they are not up to the task, they do not even attempt to model many pivotal features of the climate known to exist, nor can they be provided with sufficient data to prime with realistic initial conditions.
After so much money invested in climate model ensembles, it remains true today that there are too many components of the climate which are incalculably chaotic.
What devout climate modellers (and their protagonists) would have you believe is that they have, or are well on the way to figuring out "the system". The truth is that they can't. They can't because chaos gets in the way.
Being overly wedded to the idea that a future climate model will be capable of accurately computing the climate is akin to a gambler who's working towards figuring out "the system". Rather than the chaos of the climate, a Vegas gambling addict is dealing with a pack of cards which has been shuffled. What is true of the gambler is also true of the climate modeller: You CAN NOT figure out the system until you can solve the influencing equations governing chaos. Period.
If it is true to say that recent observed temperatures are within the confidence bounds of models, and that therefore models are skilful, it is also fair to say that a gambler was not entirely wrong when he predicted the correct suit of a winning card and thus may be on the way to figuring out "the system". Obviously this is an untenable view. Until the gambler can predict a winning card specifically because he knows the precise order of cards in the pack, he has NOT got "skill". Until a climate model knows the precise distribution of every molecular influence on the climate, it is not "skilful". If a gambler successfully predicts a single card out of a pack (around 1.9% probability) this says nothing about his skill, only about his luck.
Doesn't mean a climate model is useless, but it sure doesn't know what some people want you to think it does.
Mine is not an argument against investing in climate modelling, or interventions on gambling addicts in Las Vegas for that matter, but I do think there is an argument for some much-needed rationality, pragmatism, a healthy dose of fallibilism and some much-needed honesty in the climate modelling field. We cannot model the climate because our capabilities in relation to its complexities are infinitesimal. This is the honest truth.
Simon Hopkinson
...the projections are still within error bounds and so by your definition the models have not yet failed.
Yes we are agreed that, if that's correct, they have not yet failed.
A pity the Met Office et al were quite definite in stating in 2007, "2014 we are predicting will be 0.3 degrees warmer than 2004". And then to make that sound very alarming by going on to state "just to put that into context, the warming over the past century and a half has only been 0.7 degrees".
Something failed somewhere for the Met Office to make statements like that. If it was not the models that failed, then it was something else.