Posts by Zippo

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

About these new Auzzie firewall rules .....

Washout 2012 summer, melty Greenland 'nothing to do with Arctic ice or warm oceans'

Re: What do "deniers" actually believe?

Most of what you say is thoughtful and thought-provoking, but you may want to revisit your last paragraph. A 30% increase in H+ ion concentration over the past 250 years is not well correlated with the growth fossil fuel use by humans in the last 100 years or so and mostly in last 50 years .....

Re: Climate model theory

Smart ? Not me.

I was just observing that a good proportion of the brightest people follow the money (we are talking about Science and Maths PhD's from the best universities on the planet), and that those super smart brains couldn't reliably predict the outcome a relatively simple equation (a dozen or two factors), over a very short period of time (12 months).

Yet there are others, perhaps equally brilliant, who fervently believe that they can predict the outcome of a far more complicated set of equations (perhaps 100's or 1000's of of factors) over decades.

I suspect that the majority of both groups were pre-disposed to a particular outcome, but perhaps I am just a bit of a cynic.

Re: Climate model theory

Of course there could - or - there could not - I suspect that they do not have the models to demonstrate it either way.

Climate model theory

Just testing the waters with a theory here ....

I know a lot of very smart mathematicians. Back in the years up to 2008 they devoted a massive amount of time and energy (and a lot of CPU power) to modelling financial risk. Their calculations showed that there was an acceptable level of risk, and so the institutions they worked for continued to pile on more of the same kind of risk.

We now know that their assumptions were wrong, and there was plenty of unacceptable risk in what a lot of them were doing, and there was a systemic meltdown.

The calculations they were doing are really not that complicated, especially compared to the massive complexity of the entire planet's climate system.

So, if some of the smartest and best paid mathematicians in the world in every major country, were unable to understand a relatively simple system, what is the likelihood that climate scientists have the remotest handle on how the massively more complex climate of the planet really works ?