Numbers Divorced from Reality
This article on Climate Audit really gets at an issue that bothers many skeptics about the state of climate science: the profession seems to spend so much time manipulating numbers in models and computer systems that they start to forget that those numbers are supposed to have physical meaning.
I discussed the phenomenon once before. Scientists are trying to reconstruct past climate variables like temperature and precipitation from proxies such as tree rings. They begin with a relationship they believe exists based on an understanding of a particular system - ie, for tree rings, trees grow faster when its warm so tree rings are wider in warm years. But as they manipulate the data over and over in their computers, they start to lose touch with this physical reality.....
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