Comments warreno has made

You can bet

If you think you have a better grasp of where the climate is going than the consensus, you should be able to find good investments to make money on.  If you think hurricane risk is overrated, buy insurance stock, since the consensus will be driving down the price, and the companies may well be overcharging for a lesser risk. Florida has  a hurricane catastrophe bond, a bit over-priced in my book, but could be under-priced in your view. If you think global warming has its good points, invest in port expansions in Murmansk. Maybe there's some cheap, attractive sea-level island just waiting for a sharp investor.

My suggestion is that you could start up a mutual fund similar to VICEX (find a catchy name) which is based on AGW being wrong is some way.  To be creditable though, you will need a climate scientist who thinks they can make money on such a venture, which is a very tall order.   For those ready to buck consensus, who know what they're doing, there's money to be made.

On the other hand, many hurricane projects are readily supported by private capital, and it seems likely that climate change research is getting there.

Wrong headed

The single best model approach is just wrong headed. First off, this is just too  important to rely on one model, and not have consistency checks. Hurricane prediction very successfully uses several models.  Over the years each model had various strengths, and these could be used in other models contributing to improvement.  When a model disagrees now, forecasters have a better sense of how and why, and can make adjustments.On 'Chaotic systems are not predictable'--Sure, but who says climate is chaotic? posted 2 years, 4 months ago 13 Responses

Hurricane modeling and risk

First the snide answer: the engine processor in your car has numerous parameters that get tweaked to keep it running, but I don't hear any complaints.

Actually hurricane modeling works just this way. Many parameters have been tweaked, even algorithms have been redone, and finally after years of marginal utility, they worked well enough to give cause to evacuate whole cities, and folks think on balance that using the models are worth the false positives. It is worth noting that there is a suite of models which are weighted according to skill scores and put together to get temporal/spatial probability distributions. NWS endorses no single model, but uses several (redundant systems), as one would expect in any important risk assessment.

In fact these models are not being developed just as a jobs program; the economy and national interests need to long term plans and climatological risk assessment is essential in many areas, for example water supplies and agriculture.  LLNL is hosting model comparison data, which is essential step on the way to computing probabilities similar to hurricane predictions. This will give realistic expected values drought/heat damage/morbidity, revised habitat ranges, Siberian agricultural yields, Northwest Passage seasonal transit, etc. In short we will be able to expected costs of AGW and compare them to current costs of mitigation.

I think we have a pretty good idea various damage and casualty costs of various scenarios; now we need to come to better agreement on probabilities.  It is too risky not to be using climate models, even if they are imperfect.On 'Climate models are unproven'--Actually, GCM's have many confirmed successes under their belts posted 2 years, 4 months ago 13 Responses