Thursday, March 30, 2006

The final word on models....


Science snark is a fine art. Seldom has there been a better example than this from Thomas Knutson

Michaels et al. (2005, hereafter MKL) recall the question of Ellsaesser: “Should we trust models or observations?” In reply we note that if we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, but unfortunately observations of the future are not available at this time.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting this, Eli. I'll remember to keep an eye on Knutson's web site in future. I like a good science snark as well as the next person, but what I thought was especially interesting about the comment to which Knutson and Tuleya were responding is that it was authored by none other than the NHC's own Chris Landsea working hand-in-hand with the coal dust-drenched Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger. I'll bet that raised a few eyebrows!

The fact that I missed this means that now I'm going to have to cough up for a JClim sub, which will run about $100 including the AMS associate membership. What with my Science, Nature and AGU subs, I'm starting to look at about $500/yr for my climate science fix. :( OTOH today's hurricane science-related events make it all seem worthwhile. :)