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Originally Posted by mikey_the_redneck
The science is definately not complete, and there is no consenus among the science community
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There is a consensus.
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Originally Posted by Flame Of Liberty
If you want to know how much you can trust the predictive power of climate scientists, all you have to do is look back at the great Global cooling fiasco.
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There was no global cooling fiasco. The vast majority of the science in the 70's predicted warming, not cooling.
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Originally Posted by Flame Of Liberty
To say that current science has the ability to construct credible models (with understanding of all variables that come into play) with any kind of predictive power 50-100 years into the future is well...crazy.
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They can take historical data and run it through the models and see if it predicts the later past data. They can take events like volcano eruptions and make predictions based on their models about changes in temperature and then measure them to see if they are right. Predictions over the last decade of warming have come in low, it warmed more than projected.
Models aren't perfect of course, they're models. The only way to model something perfectly is to have that thing.
However to say that science can't construct predictive models is just wrong, because they have. You have to be able to to put someone on the moon.
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Originally Posted by Flame Of Liberty
Climate science is where the funding is. There's boatloads of money to be made in the save the planet hysteria, and climatologists want to eat as well. Simple as that.
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Climate science funding has been on the decline and is small compared to other areas of research. Climatologists don't make much. I had a great article on this "funding" fallacy but I can't find it. I'll keep looking.
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Originally Posted by Flame Of Liberty
As for clima-science, how exactly their experiments could be conducted under the same conditions? How do you recreate "state of the climate" 1000 years ago? 10 000 years ago? Climate is not static and any "scientific" models must be simplified because the reality is just too complex and variables are not fully understood.
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There's a big difference between not fully understood and not understood at all.
You don't need a lab experiment to do science, entire branches of science study things that you can't bring into a lab. Astronomy, cosmology, geology, anthropology, sociology, etc..
Not being able to recreate the life of a star in the lab does make it more difficult to isolate for variables or what have you, but that doesn't make the endeavor of science impossible.
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Originally Posted by Flame Of Liberty
The problem is that these simplified models simply do not have any predictive or explanatory power
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Except they do, because they use them to predict the past and the future.
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Originally Posted by Flame Of Liberty
so all the can do is hand pick random data from the past and draw random curves 100 years into the future. The trend is "up" so we'll keep drawing an upward curve until something happens that will dramatically change the trend but no one has any idea if and when and how will this something happen...
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Sure I could see how you would not think climate science had merit if that's how they did things, but it isn't. The research gives details as to what conditions are related to what changes, what the knowns are and what the unknowns are and what impact the unknowns might have.
The real science looks nothing like one reads in newspapers and on websites.