| I agree that it is unlikely to be increasing precisely linearly, but do you have a more specific claim? It is my understanding that the GCMs in use have many “tunable” parameters some of which are strongly stochastic, the component of the models are coupled, there are feedback loops that are poorly understood—some positive some negative, these feedback loops operate over all possible time scale from minutes to centuries. The systems of differential equations describing the models will not be analytic and worse will have chaotic solutions. The dozens of existing GCMs don’t agree, but I’m not an expert so I can’t know which ones to trust. Furthermore, expert climate researchers very careers are at stake so there is no effort that I can detect to make all the data sets, source code, and design justifications open in ways to allow inspection by outsiders like myself. I have worked professionally on environmental models only twice (over 40 years ago). One had the worst code I ever had to review (and I’ve taught CS at the university level!) and the other made simplify assumptions so ridiculous that the results were meaningless. I used to be able to download pictures of hand written recorded weather station temperature data from 100 years ago. Now, I can no longer get to it from NOAA or NASA websites. What happened to it? (Perhaps, my Google-foo is failing me.) I think many would agree that climate research is important or even existentially important for humankind. We already fund the research with our tax dollars. Why can’t the research be performed as openly as free software foundation projects? If I’m curious about the kind of LRU algorithm used by the ZFS file system cache, I can just clone the repo and read it myself. If I don’t understand why an Emacs feature has been deprecated, I can peruse the emacs-dev mailing list archive. I want everyone (and especially those that are climate scientists) to have easy access to the data and climate models. |