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CANADIAN Politics And Investing ( F. TOITS)
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Book review: Confessions of a Climate Scientist — Global Warming is an unproven hypothesisDr. Mototaka Nakamura is a top-level scientist who worked on cloud dynamics, and on atmospheric and ocean flows for almost 25 years at world class institutions. He has a ScD in meteorology from MIT and has an impressive curriculum in the area of climate science and modelling: Georgia Institute of Technology, NASA (Goddard Space Flight Centre, Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Duke and Hawaii Universities and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. He published about 20 climate papers on fluid dynamics A few months ago he published a book in Japanese explaining the flaws of the current Climate Science Dr. Nakamura says: … my skepticism on the “global warming hypothesis” is targeted on the “catastrophic” part of the hypothesis and not on the “global warming” per se. That is, there is no doubt that increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere does have some warming effect on the lower troposphere (about 0. 5 degrees Kelvin for a doubling from the pre-industrial revolution era, according to true experts), although it has not been proven that the warming effect actually results in a rise in the global mean surface temperature, because of the extremely complex processes operating in the real climate system, many of which are represented in perfunctory manner at best or ignored altogether in climate simulation models. I also want to emphasize that I am not denying the possibility of a major climate change as a result of the human activity, either catastrophic global warming or a return of severe glacial period (the real climate system that has myriad of physical and biogeochemical processes is highly nonlinear, much more so than the toys used for climate predictions). I am simply pointing out the fact that it is impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy how the climate of this planet will change in the future. I want to emphasize here that climate simulation models are fine tools to study the climate system, so long as the users are aware of the limitations of the models and exercise caution in designing experiments and interpreting their output. In this sense, experiments to study the response of simplified climate systems, such as those generated by the “state-of-the-art” climate simulation models, to major increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases are also interesting and meaningful academic projects that are certainly worth pursuing. So long as the results of such projects are presented with disclaimers that unambiguously state the extent to which the results can be compared with the real world, I would not have any problem with such projects. The models just become useless pieces of junk or worse (worse, in a sense that they can produce gravely misleading output) only when they are used for climate forecasting. Dr. Nakamura focuses on “two serious flaws in climate simulation models used for climate change predictions” that he knows as an expert: 1. A fatally serious flaw in the oceanic component of the models. 2. Grossly oversimplified and problematic representations of the atmospheric water vapor. |
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