Spot on

Below appeared as a comment from one "Jeff Kirk" at Climate Scientist to Revkin: "we can no longer trust you" to carry water for us.

I don't have any idea who Jeff Kirk is, but he's exactly right about this, and he states it very, very well. There is simply no question that existing climate models are very poorly specified -- that is, that they do not contain all the relevant factors, let alone in proper relation to each other. In addition, there are significant errors of measurement in the variables that are included. And these models are also recursive (contain feedback loops), which means that even very small inaccuracies of specification and measurement will be quickly amplified. Taking these models seriously as anything more than possibly suggestive cannot be justified. To compute future temperature changes to the tenth of a degree is the height of fantasy. To make claims about "settled science" and consensus is charlatanism of the worst kind. The people who do the modeling know this absolutely, and so what's been going on can only be an attempt to leave the public blinded by science, and to do that for reasons that have nothing to do with science other than to cause it harm.

Jeff Kirk:

I for one have always been skeptical of climate modeling, especially because it's so speculative. We can't accurately model the weather more than a few days out. We don't know all the inputs to climate and we surely don't know how they interrelate to each other.

All we do know is that climate, like weather, is a chaotic, complex system that feeds back on itself. Weather is described in complexity theory as being "sensitive to initial conditions". Small inputs can be amplified or squelched in a way that's inherently impossible to predict.

You can simulate complex systems but only to get a general sense of the range of possible behaviors, not to make specific predictions about how they WILL behave. The uncertainty in the models grows with each iteration until it's too great to be of any predictive value whatever.

I think if this were more widely known, the funding for climate modeling would dry up in a hurry, and that the CRU idiots know it. They've made unsupportable and very specific predictions about the climate, and the real world has refused to cooperate by obligingly growing warmer in a nice, steady fashion. This caused them to panic, trying everything they could to explain away the results, rather than to acknowledge that making such specific predictions based on computerized climate models is FUNDAMENTALLY UNSOUND. And now the chickens have come home to roost.

Amen.

Byron