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If you're implying that most of climate science is statistical modeling, please be specific and say so. While there is plenty of statistics in the field[1], the
by stochtastic 6y ago
If you're implying that most of climate science is statistical modeling, please be specific and say so. While there is plenty of statistics in the field[1], the majority is basic physical science and dynamical modeling. Equivocation between statistical and dynamical models is surprisingly common on HN and leads me to suspect that a person hasn't taken much time to learn about climate science.
[1] Calling it a single field isn't really fair. It's the nexus of many specialized fields, most of which are purely physical sciences.
- yters 6y agoIt looks like the output is a statistic. I.e. a trend line with error bars based on fitting prior historical data. Additionally, the processing of said historical data also seems to be statistical in nature, since there is a lot of missing data once we go past a few decades, data is from a disparate variety of sources, most are proxies for temperature and CO2, etc. So, it isn't obvious to me they are 'purely physical' as in there is some kind of direct reading off of physical facts. Instead, it appears most are a lot of inferences derived by fitting models to bodies of data, which entails a certain amount of uncertainty and a statistical nature.