Climate change and climate models

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Here is an interesting TED talk by Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climatologist, on climate modelling. As an engineer and scientist that has modeled many systems over my career, I enjoyed the way Dr. Schmidt tries to elaborate on how models are built over time and what they are made up of. It spoke to me as I have noticed that many people have a misunderstanding what models are and what they are useful for. Models are not interpolation and extrapolation of existing data, they are instead a mathematical version of reality based on the physics that we know and understand. They are useful in making predictions of overall trends, even if they don’t get it exactly right.

Anyway, I will leave you with two quotes from the TED talk, one by the speaker and one by Frank Sherwood Rowland, the Nobel laureate who discovered the relationship between CFCs and ozone depletion (quoted in the talk):

[QUOTE=Gavin Schmidt]
Models are not right or wrong; they’re always wrong. They’re always approximations. The question you have to ask is whether a model tells you more information than you would have had otherwise.
[/QUOTE]

[Quote=Frank Sherwood Rowland]
What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?
[/quote]

2

I put it in MPSIMS for a reason as it is pretty mundane, but doesn’t anybody else like it or am I just a super geek?

3

There’s not much to talk about here, especially in MPSIMS. The GQ crowd could certainly discuss model accuracy in general and in specifics. The GD crowd could loudly assert that models are a good or conversely utterly useless guide to public policy.

I for one will almost never go watch a video linked to in a post, especially not an OP. Give me a transcript; I don’t waste time given the content-free nature of videos on even serious topics.

So bottom line you’ve not given me/us much to talk about, and you’ve asked the wrong group of folks to talk about that not-much.

I’m not trying to be a jerk; this is meant as constructive advice or at least informative comment.