4 ms·

The models are secret... wait, seriously??

• Retric 15y ago
  Short answer is no, long answer is sort of. The way in which data / code is released is a complex issue. However, if your willing to wait a reasonable amount of time AND pay for the costs involved you can get just about everything produced. Still, in the larger context validating someone's data is basically worthless activity. It's far more important to go out and collect new data, build a new model, run a new simulation, and report those results than it is to try and shortcut the process. The data deluge is making it way to easy for people to validate bad science using the same bad data / model as someone else. Fundamental assumptions in statistics break down when you use the same 10 coin flips to substitute for the 10 million coin flips that cost more than your willing to pay for. PS: The failure to collect significant quantity's of new data is a hallmark of fringe / bad science. If you really think global warming is a joke or you can be more healthy by eating coco puffs then go collect that data and do your analysis and see if someone can poke holes in your process.
  • Tycho 15y ago
    Well the model is the thing that tells us what effect a rise in temperature/CO2 would actually have, no? Seems common sense to me that this should be open so that people can judge it. You could program a model to say anything regardless of the data.
    • Retric 15y ago
      When it comes to global worming you have two models one of which is what happens after a fraction of a second when you have various levels of CO2 in a column of air over in daylight or darkness. That's a well understood thermodynamics problem and rarely debated, but you will have little trouble finding out the specific details on this issue. The larger model is based around how that the extra heat maintained gets distributed around the world and everyone knows this is far less accurate. The people building this are well aware it's highly limited but by trying to balance the errors in both direction they hope to create a good estimate. The problem is when you start tweaking the heat distribution equations it's easy to find errors in every direction because they are greatly simplified so it's easy for someone to introduce systematic errors by only correcting issues in one direction. Which is why you provide a high level description but when you release your source code you open yourself up to a lot of fruitless debate. Sort of like someone saying based on your methodology the rocks are really 1/1,000,000th a year older which means your science is a joke and less valid than my consistent theory that god created the world 8 weeks ago. But, if you actually build a model from scratch under similar assumptions it's going to have similar outputs and error bars or look really biased.
• jfoutz 15y ago
  After about 20 million requests for their data and models by people who were motivated by god to disprove climate science, they got a little less open. I don't think they're "secret" i think they assume anyone they haven't heard of who is asking for the info is a troll.