John Theon was increasingly crank-like environmental alarmist James Hansen’s boss at NASA. He says this:

My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.

There are many lessons to be drawn from the sub-prime debacle and all the awful things that have flowed from it. One of them is not to believe computer models over common sense. In the land of sub-prime, the computer models the rating agencies used to rate garbage AAA were just nuts. But they had a superficially plausible narrative line, and people had a vested interest in believing they were true. This is also true of the global warming issue, as well as most bubbles throughout history.

In science it is known that data sometimes get bent and scientists get corrupted in pursuit of a dream. We should apply the same kind of skepticism to the global warming bubble as should have applied to the housing bubble or the oil bubble. There’s plenty of mitigating evidence after all. It would be a pity not to learn from our mistakes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 6:01 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Republicans, Science, business, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.