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[quote="Daniel"]Well it's not been confirmed that this has been the wettest summer because there are different ways of measuring. Rainfall is measured in more places now than ever before.
you're having a laugh, aren't you, by any standard it has officially been the wettest summer ever.
No that's not how science works :rolleyes: If a scientist says that oranges are a factor in global warming and you prove that apples are a factor in global warming it doesn't mean that oranges don't have an effect on global warming.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mikeall
I actually worked for a statistics company in Australia in a part time role and got to see the results of the project I was working on and told about the meanings and implications even though I wasn't involved in interpreting the data and conclusions that were drawn from the project in the first month weren't imediately held up as fact until the project had run for a good year or so and a full cycle of data had been gathered and studied. Do scientists have data gathered from weather balloons from the last ice age? Or the last period of warmth from ocean buoys? No they don't! We didn't just survey people from one part of the city on one weekend of the year and claim that this was accurate data and in a climate sense that's what scientists are doing at the moment.
You'd be wrong.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mikeall
No. The metoffice site said that they are currently trying to confirm against records at the moment :)Quote:
Originally Posted by jim mcglinchey
How about this: I acknowledge that scientists in the past have been wrong. I also acknowledge that scientist could be wrong with the present situation. However science of the past and science today are two different animals. Comparing scientist now to the scientist who thought that the world was flat or that Einstein was crazy are completely unfair and laughable.Quote:
Originally Posted by Daniel
And before you go on about CO2 not being the only factor in the warming of the planet, I completely agree with you. There are many other gases such as methane, cfc's, hfc's that are affecting AGW. CO2 is just the primary one. And it is a FACT that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere. In fact CO2 concentrations are higher n ow than in the last 30,000 years.
Well I don't know if AGW is the right term because we don't yet know whether it is caused by us or not. Yes you can reasonably draw the conclusion by drawing parallels between CO2 and temperature as the graphs seem to match but as I said it doesn't prove it because long term observations which means gathering data through the same methods to prove the thesis.Quote:
Originally Posted by rah
The original point of my thread was that scientific explanation seems to follow a strange bit of weather these days rather than preceding it. I understand that climate and weather are not going to track in exactly the same way but if scientists are going to claim that climate change is caused by CO2 and that this is going to have specific effects on the weather that we have then these events should to a certain extent be "easy" to predict and I'm not one of these people who blames the weatherman because I go somewhere for a weekend and it rains because he didn't get it right. I understand from doing meteorology for a year at university that it's a complex thing and not easy to predict.
I know the reason for the unseasonal weather was the movement south of the jet stream which is usually much further north. I just find it funny that IF this is caused by global warming then why didn't they know it was going to happen? The jet stream doesn't just go south on a whim. There are factors at work here and if I'm being told that the weather in the world is going to change in dramatic and scary ways because of global warming but they can't predict such behaviour in what is a relatively stable atmospheric current. I think people want it to rain a certain amount of days in a year and be warm for a certain amount of days and cold for a certain amount of days and if it doesn't fit into this then there's something wrong :)
This doesn't count in any way as a valid argument but I'm sitting in their 24hour computer room at the moment because the library just shut. I should be doing work really not discussing this...Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrewmcm
Everyone should read this skeptic or not:
http://www.earthlights.org/skeptical.html
I would presume that climate change predictions are not intended to be any use for forecasting a summer's weather in that way.Quote:
Originally Posted by Daniel
Is the use of my post in highlighting that article to do with the links I had provided and how they do not pass through the peer-review process, or are you suggesting that I do not understand scientific method?Quote:
Originally Posted by Mikeall
The academic peer-review system is not as well-balanced and as fair as some people may suggest. As I've posted elsewhere in this thread, attempting to publish ideas that contradict your reviewer's work does not go down very well. I know of a few academics who have established their own journals in order to get information out, as other journals would not touch it. Whether that was due to their work being garbage or innovative I don't know, but it has happened.
But if one of the keystones of the belief in global warming and it's effect is unseasonal weather then surely if global warming markers are there then it goes into long term forecasting..... I'm not talking day to day stuff like the fog I had this morning. I'm talking major weather events.Quote:
Originally Posted by BDunnell
Surely if they can in retrospect put it down to global warming then there were indicators before the event happened?