Climate change models - right or wrong?

The trouble with modeling climate change is that there are so many models. It is important, of course, to do your best to see how the climate will change but that is so hard, so complex, that different models show different results. It is hard enough to predict next week’s weather accurately so we cannot expect too much from the climate change modelers, however powerful their computing power and however agile their brains.

Kiel University now predicts that although climate change is happening and the climate is warming up the next ten years will see temperatures stay on a plateau for the next ten to twenty years and thereafter they rise. They have reached this view after studying sea ossicilations  in the North Atlantic which appear to cool temperatures on a cyclical basis, so their cooling effect will be a steadying effect on what would otherwise be rising temperatures.

Of course climate modeling is all speculation;  but it is informed, high quality speculation founded on the best scientific guesses available.

This thought might give comfort because climate change may suddenly slow down or stop altogether and temperatures may stay in their present range. If we are optimists or if we love doing things that are said to bring on climate chnage w ecan disbelieve in it; if we are pessimists who can live without doing things that bring on climate change we can believe in it.

Of course, whther the climate is changing should not be a matter of belief, but a matter of opinion. The modelers of climate change could have got it all wrong and we might well have been frightening ourselves with fairy stories. If this happens we will wonder what all the fuss was about until we run out of fossil fuel.

The other side of the coin is that the modelers of climate change could be wrong by underestimating the scope speed and violence of climate change. Modeling climate change involves as great deal more than tossing a coin. The trouble is that the science of climate change modeling is still in its infancy and even if it were mature there might be too many vested interests that stand in the way of an accurate viable climate change model being accepted.

Kiel University used bouys floating in the North Atlantic Ocean to collect data about currents that provided information about ocean oscillations which in turn was fed into their computer programmed to model climate change. The measurements indicate that we might be in for a spell where temperatures stabilise for some uears before rising again.

 

The present philosophy of the world is to measure things and only to rely on what measurement can show. Governments found policies on measurements and having measured things argue that the statistics show that we are happier and better off,  while we feel in our bones that we are unhappier and worse off.

This happens (and we allow it to happen) because we can measure things with our machines that we would never dream of being able to measure in the pre-computer age. We should remember that it is easy to measure quantity and impossible to measure quality. And it is virtually imposible to predict what will happen in the future until the future becoimes uncomfortably close.