How to Interpret Data

MIT has breathlessly announced that its "MIT Integrated Global Systems Model" has now doubled the threat of global warming. Alarms on! Man battle stations! The end is nigh!

The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees. The difference is caused by several factors rather than any single big change. Among these are improved economic modeling and newer economic data showing less chance of low emissions than had been projected in the earlier scenarios. Other changes include accounting for the past masking of underlying warming by the cooling induced by 20th century volcanoes, and for emissions of soot, which can add to the warming effect. In addition, measurements of deep ocean temperature rises, which enable estimates of how fast heat and carbon dioxide are removed from the atmosphere and transferred to the ocean depths, imply lower transfer rates than previously estimated.

I find this odd. Usually when you do an experiement and get a radically different results, you don't rush to the press and announce the end of the world. Instead, you scratch your head and worry about mismeasurements, procedural errors, fundamental misunderstandings. In short, you go back to basics and do the hard work to figure out if the measurement is real of fictitious. But I sure get the impression with the global warming crowd that any time they get a bad number it just ups the benchmark and sends them crowing about doom and gloom. I don't get the sense that they say "wait a sec! is there something funny going on here?". In short, I have very little faith in their "science". Especially since it is based on models that can't retrodict and for which we have precious little reason to believe that they can predict. They want the world to make drastic changes based on pretty shaky results.

I don't see the press questioning these proclamations by the global warming crowd. Isn't is awfully odd that a group could announce that things are twice as bad as earlier thought without somebody saying "whoa! do we really know that this new result is solid?"

For one, this new group is saying that they have put in "economic" factors. What? If you were predicting air pollution and health conditions in New York City in 1890 you would have extrapolated the number of horses and the poo they left behind and see disaster looming. But gosh-and-golly automobiles banished the horses. How many "models" in 1890 had this economic prediction built into it?

Who knows the future? I personally believe that the days of the gasoline fueled car are numbered. I expect alternative energy to displace a large part of the carbon-based energy market. If so, a lot of the gloom and doom is as silly as people in 1890 trying to estimate if the horse shit would be 1 foot deep in 1930 or 2 feet deep.

Who in 1929 was saying that the US economy would shrink by one-third? What "model" predicted that? What model in 2006 predicted the global catastrophe we have today? What model predicts the technological breakthroughs that are coming?

Models have a place, but it is as a tool to project what is known and give us incentive to look for alternative answers. They are not an answer in itself. The gloom-and-doom crowd with global warming want people to throw away two centuries of technology and go back to oxen-pulled plows and horse-and-buggy transportation. It isn't going to happen. Stopping energy consumption isn't the answer. Finding better energy solutions is the answer. No model will tell you anything about alternative futures!