Climate Change

One of the more interesting - to me at least - current issues is the debate about climate change. I've expressed my concerns before about the uncertainty in the science, and here's a recent peer-reviewed article that illustrates some basis for the uncertainty: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2008JD011637.shtml

The basic conclusion is that the Southern Oscillation (a fancy phrase for the periodic temperature changes in the Pacific Ocean) can explain most the variability we have seen in climate for the last 50 years or so. The Climate change proponents (I almost said fanatics) have immediately raised a number of issues - some appear legitimate, some are more in the line of personal attacks and name-calling. Here are the 3 I found:

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/old-news/
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/is-our-whole-dissembly-appeared/
http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2009/07/surprising-conclusions-from.html

Note that none of these are peer reviewed - and I'm far from a climate scientist!

One point they make which may have some value is that the Southern Oscillation study did not include trend data. But I 'm not sure that was the point - the point seems to me that climate models have to include the effects of the southern oscillation if they are to represent the what the climate appears to work - and currently they don't.

So, this is another source of uncertainty in the models that make me skeptical on their scenarios (since even they don't call them predictions).