Comment Re:The Science is settled! (Score 5, Insightful) 330
In the same way that one cannot expect a nice fit between observational studies and the CMIP5 models.
This is a point that is radically misunderstood by almost all sides of the political debate around anthropogenic climate change. Think about what it implies: climate models do not predict observational reality. That, and only that, is why one cannot and should not expect a nice fit between the model and the reality.
This is OK, mind: non-predictive modelling is extremely useful, and there is very little doubt that human activity is adding about 1.6 W/m**2 to the Earth's heat budget (somewhat less than 0.5% of the total, equivalent to an orbital perturbation of about half the distance to the Moon). But climate models do not tell us in any meaningful or useful sense how the ocean/atmosphere system will respond to that additional heating.
There will be a response, but estimating its type, distribution and magnitude well enough to be considered predictive is well beyond current model capabilities. I haven't looked at AR4 or 5 code, but AR2 had approximations that made me cringe, up to and including fixing up energy conservation at the end of each time-step by adjusting cell temperatures.
Climate skeptics--the sane ones at least--are aware of this and take the strong claims of predictive power in the models with a large grain of salt. They also tend to assume that "you can't prove there will be a disaster" means "there won't be a disaster", which is utterly unwarranted.
Climate believers also ignore the poor predictivity of the models, which is unfortunate, because the logical response to that poor predictivity is to invest in robustness and flexibility rather than specific solutions, because we don't know what the specific future conditions will be.
Climate believers also undermine their case by an excessive focus on "abstinence only" policies, and are for some reason unwilling to contemplate any response to climate change that involves things like nuclear power and geo-engineering research. It's almost as if they think the climate-driven destruction of civilization is such a huge issue that we must be willing to do anything to stop it... except change anyone's mind on the relative value of nuclear energy.