New Scientist has an article on climate change and the Kyoto Accords.
ON 16 FEBRUARY, the Kyoto protocol comes into force. Whether you see this as a triumph of international cooperation or a case of too little, too late, there is no doubt that it was only made possible by decades of dedicated work by climate scientists. Yet as these same researchers celebrate their most notable achievement, their work is being denigrated as never before.
The earth is definitely warmer now than it was a century ago. How much of that warming is due to human factors is up in the air, as is how much warmer it will get in the future.
Various feedback effects, both positive and negative, have been postulated. The uncertainties in all of these mechanisms appear to be larger than the projected amount of warming.
I'd be curious to know how well any of the computer models have done at retrodicting – taking the data from a time period in the past and extrapolating it to a time period outside the range of that data. If a computer model can take existing data and use it to "predict" the climate as we know it was in the past, then we can have a lot more faith in its ability to predict future climate.
Let's run that test, why don't we?
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