Re: Climate models are not infallible (Ryan Price, Times, August 31).
The great thing about science is it compensates for bias and corrects error. It is not a matter of choosing a scientist who says what you want to hear – that’s for high-earning lawyers who want to bamboozle a jury.
Consensus is not part of actually doing science, but it is the outcome if you do it right – a consequence of the scientific method: evidence, explanation, examination by other experts. Climate science is likely the most scrutinised science in history because it has been fighting a powerful enemy – the oil billionaires and the politicians in their pockets.
Ryan Price has fallen into a trap known as the “Appeal to Authority”. Rather than follow recognised experts, whose work is endorsed by every recognised scientific institution on the planet, including the Royal Society of London and the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, he has “trotted out” Ivar Gaiever, who won a Nobel for work on quantum tunnelling. This has no direct connection with atmospheric physics.
Regardless of how clever Gaiever is or isn’t, he admitted he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He began a lecture to Nobel laureates saying he had Googled global warming that morning and decided it was nonsense.
The world authority (IPCC) on the other hand studies hundreds of thousands of papers written in peer-reviewed scientific journals before making pronouncements.
And regardless of how good climate models are at “predicting” the future, we know for sure adding CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will cause Earth to retain more energy from the Sun.
As it happens, the models have been accurate in “hindcasting”, i.e. using data from the past to make projections for the present.
Models are therefore useful for telling us how much time we might have before the climate changes so much we cannot stop it worsening.
More energy in the climate system means worse weather, because weather is the climate system moving energy around. You don’t need training as a scientist to see that droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods are more frequent and severe. Also, our CO2 is acidifying the oceans, and melting ice could raise the sea level 2m in the lifetime of children born today.
This is all very frightening. No wonder some people cannot face it head on, and their selfishness motivates them to find all sorts of absurd excuses for continuing their lifestyle of indulgence and profligacy.
Dennis Horne
Howick
