Re: [asa] Creation Care

Thanks for a great post, Rich.
I'll probably wrap up this phase of my life and focus on other priorities for a bit. But indulge me for one more observation. We all state lots of opinions (which is what this is all about) and get lots of links to all types of claims and technical assertions. We're more technically educated than the general public so we love to dig deeper and spar with anything we hear. The question in general is "whom should we trust?" I would suggest that first and foremost, we must rely on the peer-reviewed, independently reproduced, corroborated technical publications in the most respected journal of the relevant field. That must be the reference point. Virtually all comments appearing on this forum (certainly all of mine) do not meet that criterion. So we must test our statements against the published work. Technical sounding papers like the Glassman article to which Janice provided a link haven't passed the scrutiny of being published through that criterion and can't be taken seriously until it is. All claims need to be tested.

This is not to say that all published papers are correct. Probably not. But the scientific process is a self-correcting one and in a rather reasonable time frame, fraudulent papers, hoaxes, and results biased by catering to the will of the funder get weeded out. Work that doesn't pass the scrutiny of publication in the respected journals are almost surely wrong, though there are exceptions.

It's very important to have such a reference point. We can't base anything on who shouts the loudest or who we think has the best argument or who is accusing whom of being sold out to the political process. I would suggest that we really don't have a reliable basis other than the technical publication method. Flawed as it may be, it has worked remarkably well in the last couple of hundred years and we need to work with it.

So that means we can weed out anything not published. The next huge question is how to communicate and interpret the status of what has been or is published to the broader audience. I would suggest that this needs to be the responsibility of the members of that group of relevant experts. Unfortunately they're not always good at it. I think we know from our own field of expertise that the relevant literature is vast and outsiders (even scientists in slightly different fields) aren't really familiar with the status of the literature. The experts, though, are often too busy to spend time dealing with translating all that work.

In most of our fields of expertise, the public has no interest and there's no need to communicate the latest results to anyone but graduate students. But in climate change the implications seem to be center stage of the public debate. Being in the middle of it the last few weeks really made me realize that most people don't have a good understanding of who to trust--who are the final arbiters of controversies in scientific debates? I think we need to educate the public about scientific methodology and the need to rely on the scientific publication process as part of authoritative opinion. Without that, there's no resolution.

Randy

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Rich Blinne
  To: Bill Hamilton ; Janice Matchett ; PvM
  Cc: Don Winterstein ; asa
  Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 11:34 AM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Creation Care

  On 1/24/07, Bill Hamilton <williamehamiltonjr@yahoo.com> wrote:
    Don makes some good points. I've been involved with engineering projects for
    the past 35 years, and seldom have I seen an engineering project correspond
    exactly to the frequently extensive modeling that was done in the design
    phases. When we could presumably control all aspects of the design, we still
    had to tweak and modify to account for circumstances that loomed larger in
    practice than in the models.

  Like you I have 25 years of experience in engineering modelling. In my case, it is semiconductor device simulation. One thing I have seen in either Don's or your post is how modelling has changed recently. 25 or 35 years ago we made numerous simpifying assumptions just because it would take FOREVER to simulate. Now we have machines that are 5-10 order of magnitude faster than when we started our careers. This means we can remove the heuristics -- a fancy scientific word for guess -- decrease our mesh size and time steps and get really good results. Why do I have confidence about this? Well, we are communicating through devices that have been extensively simulated where the measured results match extremely well with the modelled behavior. As time went on we modelled more and more effects, e.g. resistance, crosstalk, short channel effects, etc. None of these were a great surprise from a physics perspective but they required more iron to do the simulations. The same holds true with climate modelling. When I look at the climate models I see the same well-formed models. In fact, I would have killed to get such good correlations at so many corners as these models (and I would like access to their computers too :-) ).

  One item specific to climate modelling also gives me confidence. The satellite data was not meshing with the models in that the high altitude temperatures were not as predicted. An error in the data collection was fixed and then the models matched. This discrepency caused a literal act of Congress to determine why the models were not so good. Since then much has been done to make these models much, much better. There is still work to do in order to more accurately predict the small-scale implications of global warming because these are important for good public policy. But, the models are accurate enough now for the upcoming IPCC AR4 to have a 90% confidence that we are experiencing global warming and that it's primarily caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

  Models matching the current (and now extensive) climate data are a necessary condition for any alternative hypotheses now. None of Janice's skeptics have put forth their own computer model (you can check for this youself by doing a Google scholar search for the author) and show that matches either the current or paleoclimate data better. It's not that these individuals have presented research results that got poo-pooed by the mainstream they have offered literally NOTHING. If I was Pim I would call it vacuous. :-) From now on, Janice will need to reference papers that have these models in them. For example, she needs to show that a model that has solar forcing more than 5X smaller than GHG forcing fits the curve better than the current model. Climate science is now quantitative and a qualitative hand waving no longer cuts it.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Wed Jan 24 20:36:25 2007