That latest IPCC Report:
THE APHENOMENAL MODEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE TRIES TO WRESTLE RATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT TO THE GROUND

Discussing the latest report by the International Panel on Climate Change at the BBC Online website --- one of the busiest in the world -- Dr Vicky Pope, head of the Climate Programme at the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, writes: "The only way to predict the day-to-day weather and changes to the climate over longer timescales is to use computer models".

If the underlying assumptions are in error, however, longer timescales may not help. If we "know" -- as educated Europeans did for about 2000 years, from 350 BCE to 1650 CE -- that heavier objects fall to the ground faster than lighter objects, computer models of falling objects over longer timescales would enable us to measure the differences in the precise rate at which objects of different weight reach the earth. Enough data would then have accumulated to enable us to predict various things more accurately. But the predictions would all be hogwash, even if this or that group of them turned out to correspond with physically-measured cases, because... differing weights of objects freely falling towards the earth in fact have no effect whatsoever on the rate at which they fall!

The problem with modelling climate change is that there is as yet no integrating hypothesis about what, if anything, actually changed for the long term in the atmosphere with the coming of the Industrial Revolution; what previous changes were redirected or distorted in their effects; and what new processes appeared that had not appeared before. There is neither baseline data nor an hypothesis supported by extensively collected observations to suggest either what fundamental change or shifts in climate took place if any, and what its dynamics were or still are. In this area, we remain as lost as physicists and students of motion were before Galileo and Newton figured gravity out. Solving equations systems that produce answers consistent with observed data isn't going to get us out of this one... but this needs to be demonstrated with some actual systems of equations, preferably non-linear to begin with, and what happens with their solutions when certain fundamental assumptions are relaxed, esp. if the relaxation is in fact a linearisation.


• Link to the BBC's informed commentary by Dr Pope on the IPCC's 2007 update of their climate-change findings

• Link to the IPCC's 2007 paper