Comments liftedlorax has made

paraphrase for the slow-witted

This is the first climate-change article I've read from this site. I'm hoping others aren't this self-congratulatory and empty of useful information? (sorry for poisoning the well, but I want to make sure I'm not identified as a global-warming apologist up front.)

Below is how the objection probably ought to actually be worded. And a paraphrase of what was said, without so many dodge-words ("temporal resolution for a ... full and nuanced explanation"? Please. We're frickin' clueless on sub-millenial timescales, especially when correlating different atmospheric chemicals to different regions of the globe, isn't that closer to the facts?)

Objection: Climate science can't even explain why the climate did what it did in the past. How can they claim to know what is going on tomorrow? (I removed the word "fully" and changed "today" to "tomorrow". No straw-man arguments for us!)

Answer: Well, it's true our record of the past is very incomplete and inadequate, especially on such a small time-scale as millenia (let alone decades). And, as the data continues to roll in every millisecond, and we intently stare at the entrails (oops, I meant analyze the data) to discern what will happen in the coming years and decades, we continue to see surprising things that could be used to confirm global warming, and tug at our heart-strings (baby polar bears starving), or could be used to indicate large error bars on our predictive models.
On Understanding what is happening right under our noses does not require paleoclimate perfection posted 1 year ago 1 Response