Originally posted by Leonhard
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You mention Anthony Watts at least three times in your response, when not a word in the OP had anything whatsoever to do with Anthony Watts. Perhaps you mistook the fact that the article was copied on Watt's blog to mean that Watts wrote the OP? I clearly noted the actual author at the beginning of the OP.
You asked if Dyson and Lindzen are climatologists, and then, apparently presuming that they are not, you present a lecture presumably besting their expertise, experience, and knowledge with your expertise, experience, and knowledge as a 27 year old student.
Did you overlook this section of the OP?:
Then in the late 1970s, he [Dyson -JR] got involved with early research on climate change at the Institute for Energy Analysis in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
That research, which involved scientists from many disciplines, was based on experimentation. The scientists studied such questions as how atmospheric carbon dioxide interacts with plant life and the role of clouds in warming.
That research, which involved scientists from many disciplines, was based on experimentation. The scientists studied such questions as how atmospheric carbon dioxide interacts with plant life and the role of clouds in warming.
With regard to Lindzen, the link I provided in the OP notes that he is an atmospheric physicist known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books. From 1983 until he retired in 2013, he was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of Chapter 7, 'Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks,' of the IPCC Third Assessment Report on climate change.
Just to show that Dyson's point about fudge factors in not a product of what you suggest to be senility and incompetence on his part, consider the following:
New paper explains why a new approach to climate modeling is necessary
A new paper by an international team of climate scientists explains why conventional climate models will continue to be unable to simulate the most essential aspects of climate such as convection, clouds, gravity waves, atmospheric circulation, ocean oscillations, etc. "for the foreseeable future" and "the fact that according to the last two assessment reports of the IPCC the uncertainty in climate predictions and projections has not decreased may be a sign that we might be reaching the limit of climate predictability, which is the result of the intrinsically nonlinear character of the climate system (as first suggested by Lorenz [father of chaos theory])."
The authors note that to properly simulate these features with the current crop of numerical climate models requires "extremely high resolutions" of 16 kilometers or less, in comparison to state-of-the-art climate models which use much lower grid resolutions of 50 to 100 to up to 10,000 kilometers in size. For example, prior work has demonstrated that proper simulation of convection requires model resolutions of 1-2 km, up to 2 orders of magnitude [100X] higher resolution than today's fastest supercomputer models are capable of attaining. The same is true for proper simulation of clouds, the Earth's sunshade.
To try to get around this limitation, climate models consist almost entirely of "parameterizations," which is a fancy word for fudge factors. As climate scientist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. pointed out in a recent comment, and contrary to popular belief, climate models are not based on "basic physics" and are almost entirely comprised of parameterizations/fudge factors:
A new paper by an international team of climate scientists explains why conventional climate models will continue to be unable to simulate the most essential aspects of climate such as convection, clouds, gravity waves, atmospheric circulation, ocean oscillations, etc. "for the foreseeable future" and "the fact that according to the last two assessment reports of the IPCC the uncertainty in climate predictions and projections has not decreased may be a sign that we might be reaching the limit of climate predictability, which is the result of the intrinsically nonlinear character of the climate system (as first suggested by Lorenz [father of chaos theory])."
The authors note that to properly simulate these features with the current crop of numerical climate models requires "extremely high resolutions" of 16 kilometers or less, in comparison to state-of-the-art climate models which use much lower grid resolutions of 50 to 100 to up to 10,000 kilometers in size. For example, prior work has demonstrated that proper simulation of convection requires model resolutions of 1-2 km, up to 2 orders of magnitude [100X] higher resolution than today's fastest supercomputer models are capable of attaining. The same is true for proper simulation of clouds, the Earth's sunshade.
To try to get around this limitation, climate models consist almost entirely of "parameterizations," which is a fancy word for fudge factors. As climate scientist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. pointed out in a recent comment, and contrary to popular belief, climate models are not based on "basic physics" and are almost entirely comprised of parameterizations/fudge factors:
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