Comment Re:Stop trying to win this politically (Score 1) 786
>If you want to talk about science, then show me a tested climate model that has been subjected to an empirical test of its validity. It isn't that hard guys. We have a lot of very accurate historical data. Feed in past climate data and see if your climate model can predict the past or the present accurately. The first model that can do that which isn't just a collection of plug variables is something worth taking seriously.
What? No.
You have it completely backwards. All serious models are trained on and tested using historical data. If they can't even predict the past, what use are they?
But - here's the key point - predicting the past is *worthless* other than as a sanity check. As Garrison Cottrell told me, predicting the past is easy (even trivial). It's predicting the future that is hard.
The only way to really know for sure if a model works is to test it moving forward. And the IPCC doesn't have a great track record at that.