100 Reasons Not to Worry About Global Warming

SEE HERE I actually only follow one rule when I'm evaluating science claims. That rule is: "Show me the data!" Science is about observations and theories confirmed by observations and it is not about such things as concensus or agreement. It is also not about modeling. I've written my fair share of models in my time. Most of the models I've written have been performance models which compared human performance to machine performance. Models are always based on some data set and some theory, often the data is incomplete (this is especially true in the case of climate data) and often the theory contains large elements of guesswork and conjecture. There are two things you look for in a theory: 1) backward fit to the known data, and 2) forward prediction. Backward fit is actually fairly easy to achieve by weighting things so that the backward predictions "fit" the data. It's often called data fitting. Forward prediction is much more problematical because you don't know what is going to happen. You can't fake a forward fit. What the forward fits tend to show in the case of climate data is that they don't fit. That means that the predictive power of the models is not very good. This usually means that the fits contain a lot of "ad hoc" factor fudging to get the best fit possible.

I was pretty tickled today when I ran into a citation about Al Gore who had quoted some scientist about Arctic melting. There appears to be a lot of speculation about whether the Arctic ice cap will melt (BTW Gore accurately cited a climate scientist's claim that the Arctic ice would soon melt SEE HERE but this seems contradicted by records that show the Arctic warming hasn't changed since 1958 SEE HERE so once again — follow the data.) but the data doesn't seem to support all the hoopla. Back in October there was information published that the Arctic ice melt was the lowest on record. SEE HERE The bottom line is that there isn't much evidence that things have changed all that much. Any big piece of blue will get Chicken Littles running around saying that "The Sky is falling."