[ChessExpert]

Thanks for the post. It is thought provoking. I agree with most, but disagree with some. There are many contributors. I agree with many of the contributions.

Vancouver-based author and mathematician David Orrell set out to explain why the mathematical models scientists use to predict the weather, the climate and the economy are not getting any better, just more refined in their uncertainty.
...
The track record of any kind of long-distance prediction is really bad, but everyone’s still really interested in it. It’s sort of a way of picturing the future. But we can’t make long-term predictions of the economy, and we can’t make long-term predictions of the climate.
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When models about the future climate are in agreement, “it says more about the self-regulating group psychology of the modeling community than it does about global warming and the economy.”

Bravo! I came to the same conclusion. My academic background is economics, but I’ve followed the global warming debate. Economists learned a little humility in the 70’s and 80’s. I remember a statement about one economist. “It’s a good thing he won his Nobel prize when he did in Forecasting. A year later, and he would have had to apply under Mythology.” Have climatologists learned anything from their seesawing predictions of global cooling, global warming, global cooling, global warming?

Dr. Orrell sketched the rise of “the gospel of deterministic science,” a faith system that was born with Isaac Newton and died with Albert Einstein.

Unfortunately, the gospel of deterministic science still reigns in many sciences, and science discussions. It seems that neural science takes the view that all is brain. Little, if anything, is mind. All is determined with all significant causation flowing one way from brain to mind. Implication - no free will. Newton would not agree, but his contribution in finding an orderly, clockwork universe has been misapplied.

Princeton history professor named LynnWhite wrote “By destroying pagan animism [the belief that natural objects have souls], Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects,”

Noted.

Joseph Brean (Journalist?) - Environmentalism even has its persecutors, embodied in the Bush White House attack dogs who have conducted no less than an Inquisition against climate scientists.

I think this story is basically backwards. Far more pressure has been brought to bear against “global warming deniers” than on those who go with the flow.

Joseph Brean (Journalist?) - It is in the schism that has arisen over whether to renew or replace Kyoto

Kyoto remains on the map. It is my understanding that the protocol was never adopted.

Joseph Brean (Journalist?) - This is not to say that fearing for the future of the planet is irrational in the way supernatural belief arguably is

Let me help you out Joe. Change it to: This is not to say that fearing for your soul is irrational in the way that fearing for the future of the planet arguably is.

All in all, not a bad article.

[qam1]

Have climatologists learned anything from their seesawing predictions of global cooling, global warming, global cooling, global warming?

Yes, they learned to do what's right out of The Charlatan's 101 Handbook, What every fake psychic and would be prophets have learned a long time ago.

Instead of one or two specific predictions that should occur in the near future, instead they

1) Make dozens to hundreds of predictions
2) Make them over a long period of time

You make a lot predictions because just by pure chance some of them are bound to come true, when they do you highlight your "hits" (even if you hit only last a year or 2) while downplaying your misses, but if you are called out on your misses that's why you make them over a long period of time because then you can just claim "Well, it just hasn't happened yet" and by the time your time frame is up you and everyone else is long dead and gone.