Richard Lindzen

But it's used for weather forecasting and all sorts of things and so on.

At any rate, they do this.

I think many of the people doing it are doing it carefully or as carefully as they can.

And they get answers that will often be wrong.

But as best I can tell, none of these models predict catastrophes.

Koonin made the point, I think correctly, that even with the UN's models, you're talking about a 3% reduction in national product or gross domestic product by 2100.

That's not a great deal.

It's not the end of the earth.

You're already much richer than you are today.

So what's the panic?

It's true.

The models don't give you anything to be that panicked over.

The politicians and the environmentalists invent extreme descriptions that actually don't have much to do with the models, but they blame the models.

It's a confusing situation.

The models have a use.

They just shouldn't be used to predict exactly what the future is.

You can use them to see what interacts with what and then study it further.

Well, no.

Lorenz is credited with chaos theory, but basically it's a statement that these are not predictable.

Whether that's true or not is still an open question, but it has a lot of those characteristics and detail.