God and the arrogant species: Contrasting nature's intrinsic uncertainty with our climate simulating supercomputers

A. Christofides, and D. Koutsoyiannis, God and the arrogant species: Contrasting nature's intrinsic uncertainty with our climate simulating supercomputers, 104th Annual Conference & Exhibition, Orlando, Florida, Air & Waste Management Association, 2011.

[doc_id=1153]

[English]

Although the climate has always been in perpetual change, many scientists who support the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis claim that this time it's different, because their climate models show that the increase in carbon dioxide fits the current climate change better than any alternative explanation. This argument is circular, since the models reproduce the hypotheses of their programmers. What is most important, however, is that this way of reasoning is rooted in the fallacy that climate can, in principle, be described in deterministic terms; that if we could analyze the system with sufficient granularity and make sufficient measurements then we would be able to produce sufficiently good predictions; and that there must necessarily exist an identifiable causal agent behind every trend or shift. We explain that climate, like many natural systems, exhibits "Hurst-Kolmogorov behavior", which means it is intrinsically uncertain, with real limits to the potential for attribution and prediction.

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Remarks:

Discussions in blogs: Climate etc., EuroEconom.cz, Environmental trends.

Our works that reference this work:

1. D. Koutsoyiannis, Hydrology and Change, Hydrological Sciences Journal, 58 (6), 1177–1197, doi:10.1080/02626667.2013.804626, 2013.

Tagged under: Climate stochastics, Works discussed in weblogs