NASA releases detailed global climate change projections

Somewhere on the planet? Sure. Where I am? Nope.

I know this because of the high pressure area that's currently sitting here and will take time to move.

Last weekend, however, it would have been practically impossible to tell whether it would rain here or not. There was a low coming in off the Atlantic, and if it had gone a little further North or South, it would have rained there instead of here.

Forecasters are nearly 100% accurate with what the weather will be. It's just the time and location of that weather that are tricky!

One can be a critic of predictive climate models without being a Denialist. I am. I strongly support both technological (nuclear and solar/storage) and political (carbon tax/tariff) approaches to ACC, but as a computational physicist I can't deny that climate models being predictively accurate--especially at the scale of these predictions--would be close to miraculous.

This is not a political position, it is an expert's evaluation after having looked at the code and documentation for some of the better models. You simply can't parameterize away as much of the physics as they do, or impose conservation conditions by hand the way they do, and expect a long-term integration to produce anything but the crudest approximation to reality.

System-wide averages are likely accurate in terms of scale. That is, global heat content is increasing at the order of 1 W/m2, probably not 0.1E-2 W/m2 and certainly not 10 W/m2. This is important, because 1 W/m2 is consistent with observtions and likely problematic in terms of local climate. The global economy is heavily optimized to the current climate, and even relatively modest changes would turn trillions of dollars of investment into malinvestment. This is a bad thing, if you care about global capitalism.

Climate scientists are not computational physicists. They have not spent most of their careers modelling systems that are ultimately subject to laboratory testing, and as such they have not seen their best laid plans gang aft agley.

I have long wondered how much of the hubris in climate prediction was coming from the policy level and how much was coming from the scientists themselves. This release suggests that it really is coming from the scientists, and that's unfortunate. Twenty years from now most of these predictions will prove to be false. That falsity will be in all directions: some will have temperatures or rainfalls far too low, some far too high. And the enemies of science will use that to further attack us.

Unfortunately, when I stand up and say this, I get attacked as an enemy of science by people who think they love science, but who are actually drawn to it simply as a useful stick with which to beat their political opponents.

In your various comments you display such a startling misunderstanding and ignorance of how science itself works that it must be hard for anyone educated on these subjects to know where to begin.

The accusations you mention completely flopped and the "accused" were exonerated by half a dozen independent committees and investigations.

Climate scientists do not on the whole make a lot of money for their level of technical skill and training- if any climate scientist was "in it for grant money", they simply would switch to data analysis in the private industry or another field. Climate science is a diverse and huge field with many research areas that existed long before our awareness of climate change, and researchers' careers do not depend on the current climate change consensus- it's not like every university would simply fire their Earth Sciences department, or the NSF would stop funding Earth Science grants, if the climate was not warming. Additionally, you don't seem to understand how the grant process works- grants are awarded before results are obtained, chosen by committees of scientists, and a majority of climate science grants do not even write proposals concerned with future predictions. Finally, the irony is of course, the handful of denialist scientists are the only people who have been explicitly (and universally) linked to outside conflict of interest funding in their work.

Al Gore did not "help invent" any part of climate science, he merely brought popular attention to the issue.

Your failure boils down to the following: you have no perspective of the magnitude, operations, or workings of the scientific community. You have accused tens of thousands of scientists, safely employed at universities across the world, in countries with wildly different politics and governmental situations than the US, of conspiring together to produce dozens of scientific papers every week and an entire worldwide network of data collection, from satellites to buoys to promote a false theory, all of which gives them essentially nothing to gain.

Have you ever read a journal in the Earth Sciences? Can you even name one? If not: you haven't even begun to examine the scientific matters at hand. When you realize how wholly out of your field you are, it should become clear that your concerns are rooted in anti-intellectualism and rabid ideology, and nothing else.

> It's racist to only quote statistics that support one's racist point of view.

> And it is racist to be credulous of statistics that support one's racist point of view.

Note that these are kind of circular. You've judged that the speaker's point of view is racist, and therefore his use of statistics is racist.

Also note that, to a first approximation, everybody only quotes statistics that support their own point of view, and everyone is credulous of statistics that support their own point of view.

It's easy to think of reasons why statistics would be biased in favor of showing IQ differences between races. It's also easy to think of reasons why statistics would be biased against that. In a world where most people don't believe in IQ differences between races - or even a world where people don't want to look like they believe in them - there's going to be publication bias against that direction. That's true even if there are no true IQ differences between races.

> Finally, the concept of race itself is socially constructed, and therefore not objective.

Imagine a world where there was a single gene which added ten IQ points to someone. (Which is definitely not the world we live in.) Imagine it was a mutation which arose in a single location a thousand years ago. It didn't become fixed in that population, and it's spread outside. But it's certainly more common in people who were born in that region, whose parents and grandparents were born there, than in people born on the other side of the world.

In this world, it seems to me that race would be just as much a social construct, and therefore not objective. But it would also be true that there would be a strong correlation between IQ and race.

You mean the one who recently published this: Curry JA, 2014: Climate science: Uncertain temperature trends. Nature Geoscience, 7, 83-84. (http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n2/full/ngeo2078.html)

Weird how a "quack" manages to get her work into top-tier peer-reviewed journals, isn't it.

When one side of an argument descends to ad hominem as their first move, it is a sure sign their side has lost the argument.

Unfortunately, ACC is likely real and deserves a strong policy response. People like you, who admit to having no actual argument for their position, are actively damaging the cause of science and good policy.