Confirmation Bias

Recently at the inappropriately named Open Mind, Tamino produced a ‘two box’ solution set of equations representing the atmosphere’s response to forcings from the Nasa sanctioned dataset. He opened his comments with an incredibly pompous and in my opinion foolish paragraph on computer models which I’ll be happy to reproduce here.

Denialists love to denigrate computer models of earth’s climate. In my opinion they only do this because they’re in denial of the result, not because of any valid evidence. They also love to make the false claim that without computer models there’s no reason to believe that global warming is real, and is going to get worse.

The term “computer model” refers to an actual simulation of earth’s climate, often in remarkable detail. Such models are (of course!) not able to predict, or even post-dict, the chaotic aspects of the sytem (the weather), but they do an outstanding job of post-dicting the global statistical characterization of the system (the climate).

Besides the fact that Tamino is deliberately ignoring the known uncertainties in computer models he’s accusing anyone who doesn’t believe in their accuracy a denier. Astounding considering the models don’t even agree with each other, perhaps the models are in denial?

Let me be clear about open mind which is impressively similar to the Soros funded “climate progress”, everyone who doesn’t salute and believe that the climate warming is a looming disaster and must be addressed through an immediate jump to socialist rule is Tamino’s enemy. His views are slightly left of Mao – I’m not kidding he’s left comments on other blogs which will send chills down the backs of those who believe in freedom. He again demonstrated his belief in thought censorship by responding to the always reasonable Lucia by clipping her comments, accusing her of falsifying her work and refusing to answer reasonable questions. It was a shocking display of his personality which if you haven’t seen it you can read the thread at the open mind link above.

Tamino presented his admittedly simple model as a confirmatoin of the basic results of computer models. In reality what he did was fit some values to a set of equations that matched the likely exaggerated GISS ground temperature curve almost perfectly. He then claimed that his fit was a real model of the atmosphere confirming the accuracy of computer models. Also, incredibly naive IMO. The models themselves can’t get their results without ocean circulation and atmospheric flow, so you know the eq’s aren’t perfect. Lucia made the mistake of asking if he had checked whether any physical laws were violated. Instead of replying to simple questions, Tammie stated she was trying to confuse the issue.

First, to the suggestion that the model was not really an accurate representation but rather an oversimplified and possibly non-physical curve fit.

[Response: Let’s be perfectly clear: the exact solution to the two-box model is of the form which is input to the regression in these analyses. So it’s a *real* two-box model.]

So Tamino believes he’s created a real model of Earth climate simply by back fitting two equations to forcing data with known accuracy problems. The question is the most basic possible for a thermal balance, does it violate the second law of thermodyamics? The second law simply states that heat flows from hot to cold–always.

Lucia asked every way she could until Tamino finally answered with this. Edit’s are his truncation of Lucia’s question: