1. That was one of the poorest written articles I have ever read! Not talkin about the content, but the wording, rehashing, etc. I mean, wow.
Anyway, the point of the article may be correct. I've never been a global warming doubter, at least in what HAS happened and IS happening. But nobody should trust these future climate models. It is far too chaotic of a system, with far too incomplete an understanding, to model correctly.
I'm all for making the models and studying them, thats how we learn. But that doesn't they should be trusted and preached as the gospel, they're a learning tool, not a predictive tool.
Understand how they are made. Someone lists the variables we have some (often incomplete) understanding of, and puts them into complex differential equations, to make a base model. Then they take old data and use it to predict slightly less old results. For instance, take the climate data from the 60's and use it to predict the 70's and 80's. Tweak the variables and coefficients and add fudge factors, this is what you're after from a research perspective. Those tweaks tell you that you underestimated this, overestimated that, and those fudge factors tell you you're missing something here, and that teaches you something which is the goal. Repeat until your model does a decent job of predicting the past.
But it was probably a mistake to ever try to predict the future. Consider, so lets say you've actually done a decent job of "predicting the past", your variables are close to correct. But only for the given circumstances. To predict the future, you are extrapolating, and worse, you're doing it to all of the variables, which all interact with one another.
Chaotic system. Consider the concept of "tipping points", which certainly exist. It means that a push becomes a pull once certain conditions are met. For instance, shrinking snow cover leads to less heat reflected into space and more heat absorbed by the ground = a warming influence. But once enough melts, it could become a cooling influence, we dont' know. For instance, maybe enough fresh water enters the ocean to slow the salinity driven ocean conveyor, or maybe once ice caps melt off of volcanoes they erupt, both of which would be a cooling influence.
Now consider thousands of these tipping points, all interacting with one another. And the model missed em all. All it captured was that in the past, warming climate melted ice which was a further warming influence, and extrapolating that, it predicts that future melting ice will continue to be a warming influence into the future. We don't know that, or any of the other millions of extrapolations the model is doing.
Don't use a long-term model of a chaotic system for predictive purposes.
