Should we STFU about Global Warming, Aretae asks, if we’re not qualified to have an opinion? Well, that raises the question of who’s qualified to have an opinion:
People qualified to have an opinion are anyone who has experience with the analysis of large hairy datasets or the software used to analyze them. I am suspicious of whether lab-scientists are qualified, because they may have the incorrect opinion that modeling in climate science is similar to their lab-science under controlled conditions. Software folks, quantitative science folks, statistics folks, and even some quantitative social scientists (particularly economists who run models like these) all have the necessary qualifications. Also, lab (or field) techs who take the measurements, or mess with the equipment.I can personally say, as a software guy, that just the comments in the software used at East Anglia show that the model isn’t worth as much as the 286 used to run it. If your software is trying to adjust data to get a result, as is obvious from the code comments, you are not doing analysis; you are doing what is popularly known in the software world as estimating. For the non-initiated, this means creating an initial value with some degree of rigor, and then changing the numbers until the boss likes them.
I can also say, as a dabbler in economics, that the type of modeling that is done in climate science is awfully similar to the kind of modeling done in macroeconomics. It doesn’t appear to predict for shit in either case.