... too criticize the work and conclusions of others than it is to actually back claims with evidence. As the weight of scientific evidence making the global warming reality clearer and clearer, the total void of scientific evidence on the part of the deniers gets bigger and bigger.

 

"Forest fires are non-linear and chaotic, too, but that doesn't mean we don't try to prevent them - or fight them when they are burning toward our town."

In your analogy, you forgot to mention one important fact. I live in an area which sees hundreds of forest fires every season. Sometimes the best thing to do is just let them burn. Forest fire prevention has over the last decades in many cases actually worsened the duration and intensity of what would have otherwise been natural occurences.

Who's to say that Global Warming policies pushed by people like you wouldn't have similar unintended consequences. Certainly, economies would be wrecked, with no measurable effect on the climate. Or is that actually an intended consequence?

From testimony by Dr. Richards S. Lindzen to the UK House of Lords in Janaury 2005 -- from the section entitled CLIMATE MODELS AND BASELESS ALARMISM -- Essential to alarm is the fact that most current climate models predict a response to a doubling of CO2 of about 4C. The reason for this is that in these models, the most important greenhouse substances, water vapour and clouds, act in such a way as to greatly amplify the response to anthropogenic greenhouse gases alone (ie, they act as what are called large positive feedbacks). However, as all assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have stated (at least in the text — though not in the Summaries for Policymakers), the models simply fail to get clouds and water vapour right. We know this because in official model intercomparisons, all models fail miserably to replicate observed distributions of cloud cover. Thus, the model predictions are critically dependent on features that we know must be wrong. If we nonetheless assume that these model predictions are correct (after all stopped watches are right twice a day), then man's greenhouse emissions have accounted for about six times the observed warming over the past century with some unknown processes cancelling the difference. This is distinctly less compelling than the statement that characterised the IPCC Second Assessment and served as the smoking gun for the Kyoto agreement: The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate. This is simply a short restatement of the basic agreement with the addition of a small measure of attribution. While one could question the use of the word "discernible", there is no question that human influence should exist, albeit at a level that may be so small as to actually be indiscernible. As we have already noted, however, even if all the change in global mean temperature over the past century were due to man, it would still imply low and relatively unimportant influence compared to the predictions of the models that are drawn on in IPCC reports.

Actually quite a bit, Richard. Here are examples I have come across of the poor predictability of some of the computer climate models: -- The models that served as the scientific background for the 1992 Rio Treaty implied that the world should have warmed 1.5 C since the late 19th century. In actuality, the world warmed only 0.5 C, so the models were off by a factor of 3. -- As computer simulations have become more sophisticated, projections of rising sea levels have become much smaller. A 25 foot increase predicted in 1980 fell to three feet by 1985 and then to one foot by 1995. -- Computers forecast a warming of the troposphere of 0.224 C per decade, when actual measurements showed a warming of only 0.034 C per decade. Predictions were off by almost a factor of 7. -- Atmospheric temperatures at the stratopause and mesopause regions (the atmospheric layers at about 30 and 50 miles altitude, respectively), at the Earth’s poles were found to be about 40-50 degrees F cooler than model predictions. -- Computers apparently treat large areas of the earth as if they are on one elevation. Even the best models end up representing Greenland as a gently rounded mound rather than as a steep walled mesa. Because Greenland melting takes place only at lower elevations, the area prone to melting gets exaggerated in the models. In reality the largest mass of polar ice in the Northern Hemisphere, has thickened by up to seven feet since 1980. Forest fires? Really. I think they are pretty predictable when you know wind direction and the amount of combustible fuel available.